Climate change

When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I land in the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky, I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who did not like Trump at first, but would vote twice for his re-election if he could, because of the jobs boom and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired salesman who tutors kids from poor backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess that makes me a conservative,’ he says. I had to lecture in semi-darkness in Louisville, after a power cut plunged most of the university into darkness.

Phew! The dangers of global warming are receding. Admittedly that is not how most news sources are reporting the publication of the latest IPCC report this morning. But it is the logical conclusion of reading coverage of the issue over the past decade. According to today’s IPCC report we now have 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. That might not sound long, but it means we are a good deal further away from doom that we were in 2007, when the WWF said we had five years to save the world. The doomsday clock hadn’t moved in 2011 when the International Energy Agency warned us that we had five years to start slashing carbon emissions or lose the chance forever.

The Times reports this morning that Bournemouth business leaders are hugely annoyed with the BBC, whose weather app predicted thick cloud and thunderstorms for the recent bank holiday. In the event, it was sunny and warm, but the damage had already been done, and takings on the seafront were said to be down by nearly 40 percent as people decided to stay at home rather than risk a soaking. While weather forecasting is undoubtedly getting better, it seems fairly clear that ultra-local forecasts of the kind you find on weather apps can be very misleading: reducing the whole forecast to a single icon, as most apps do, removes all the nuance. The lesson seems to be that if you are going to make a decision based on a forecast, you should watch the TV weather and get it explained to you.

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: Matt Ridley on why wind turbines are not the answer to our energy needs: The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’. You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong.

When will the climate change lobby finally realise that it is undermining its own arguments through hyperbole? Yesterday, the Lancet published its latest climate change ‘indicators’, accompanied by a comment piece in the Guardian by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and now chair of the Lancet Countdown advisory board.  The piece, headed 'Climate change isn’t just hurting the planet – it’s a public health emergency' makes the assertion that climate change is affecting 'the health of you, your family, your neighbours – each and every one of us.

What is the point of the World Bank? You probably think of it, if at all, as a benign institution, a kind of giant, multilateral aid agency, whose job it is to bring liquidity to developing nations and help them grow out of poverty. Until not so long ago, that was indeed its function. Created alongside the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, the bank did sterling work in its early years helping countries like France recover from the war; and later, giving mostly third world countries the vital seed money needed to help attract investors to risky capital projects. Its multiplier effect on investment can be extraordinary. In 2013, the World Bank gave Kosovo $40 million towards building a lignite power station.

Funnily enough, you don’t come across too many pieces in the Guardian blaming black people for crime or women for bad driving. The newspaper would perhaps consider itself a pioneer in trying to drive out racial and gender stereotypes from daily life. It seems a different matter, though, when it comes to the inadequacies of white men, or, more specifically, elderly white men, to throw in a bit of ageism as well. An extraordinary piece in today’s Guardian tries to link what it calls 'climate denial' to race, gender and age.

Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston. No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they decreed. This is man’s fault, they insist. Our hubris caused this watery horror, they claim, sounding positively Biblical, like Old Testament patriarchs warning the sinful populace that God will punish it with floods. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us how backward environmentalist thinking is. They do it all the time.

Readers of The Spectator will be familiar with the argument that climate change, like Britpop, ended in 1998. Raised on a diet of Matt Ridley and James Delingpole, you may have convinced yourself that climate scientists, for their own selfish reasons, continue to peddle a theory that is unsupported by real-world evidence. You may also have picked up the idea that the ‘green blob’, as it has been called in these pages, is somehow suppressing the news that global warming is a dead parrot. That was the case made by Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Forum in a Spectator blog in February last year.

Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my niece appeared at the door, pale and serious. ‘There’s been another terrorist attack in London,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’ The veins of the men in my husband’s family run with a sort of event-activated coolant. No one asked what had happened or how many were dead. My father-in-law said: ‘Don’t be daft. What’s there to be scared of?’ His brother added: ‘You’re more likely to be killed by cows.’ This, though not strictly true, is less ludicrous than you might imagine. Some 90 Brits were killed by terrorist attacks in the 15 years from 2000, whereas 74 were killed by cows. The cows did the trick.