What a very odd situation we find ourselves in, due to the extraordinary transformation in recent years of the so-called debate over global warming. Last week, The Sunday Telegraph reported that, as part of Britain’s overseas aid budget, the Department for International Development is well on the way to spending £1.5 billion on a mass of climate-related projects across the world. These range from helping Indian farmers to irrigate their fields with foot-powered pumps rather than diesel-fuelled ones, to preventing the authority of Kenyan “rainmakers” from being undermined by the onset of “extreme weather events”.
This is bizarre enough – and it might be added that, according to the World Resources Institute, Britain is now spending far more on this kind of nonsense, under the UN’s $28 billion Fast Start Climate Change programme, than any country in the world apart from Japan. But even this is only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions Britain is hoping to spend, as a consequence of our Government’s unique obsession with global warming, on everything from climate-related research in our universities to building the 32,000 useless windmills that Chris Huhne was babbling about, before he ignominiously left office. We cannot recall often enough that our Climate Change Act commits us to spending more than £700 billion between now and 2050 – far more than any other country in the world.
Yet while successive British governments have plunged headlong into this madness, the “science” supposedly used to justify it has been falling apart in all directions. Global temperatures have signally failed to rise as the computer models, upon which the whole scare was based, said they should. And an endless succession of scandals has engulfed the senior scientists who did more than anyone else to promote the scare. These began with the exposure of the notorious “hockey stick” graph and then the Climategate emails which showed how they fiddled their data and stopped at nothing to discredit anyone who challenged what they called “the Cause”. The scandals continued with the revelations that much of the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the supreme champion of the Cause – had not been based on science at all but on scare stories dreamed up by environmental activists.
All this has left the debate over climate change in a depressingly fetid state, as supporters of the orthodoxy lash out with increasing desperation, forlornly trying to defend their crumbling faith. A further example of this was the strange little scandal that erupted last week, with the release on the internet of various documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank long vilified by the warmists for organising conferences attended by hundreds of distinguished scientists from across the world who dare to be sceptical of the orthodoxy.
Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva has called for a congressional investigation of Indur Goklany, demanding an inquiry is to whether Goklany broke Interior Department ethics rules.
http://grijalva.house.gov/uploads/Grijalva%20Letter%20to%20Hastings%20and%20Markey%20on%20Indur%20Goklany%20Feb%2022.pdf
The reason stated in the letter is that Heartland “lists Dr. Goklany as receiving $1,000 per month to write a chapter on “Economics and Policy” for a Heartland-funded book on climate science.
Rep. Grijalva has been silent and apparently unconcerned that global warming activist James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has “received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.” (Source)
$1,000/month VS $26,666/month
Is this what lefties mean by ”situational ethics?”
Jesus said it was straining the gnat but swallowing the camel.