Rod Liddle

So, who was responsible for the illegal hacking of those Climategate emails? I’m a bit out of my depth here; in the cyberville school I’m in the special needs class, possessed of no understanding or ability. But it would be good to find out, wouldn’t it? Or do those ultra-sceptics among you not give a toss either way? Certainly the sceptical bloggers and newspaper columnists do not seem to have given the matter much thought; whilst impugning the motives of the climate-change lobby is not merely de-rigeur but central to the entire sceptical argument (perhaps rightly), there seems to be no intellectual curiosity as to the motives of some of those on their own side.

Does anyone remember the England cricket team? Roger Alton makes the very good point in his Spectator sport column this week, while flicking through the runners and riders for this year’s Sports Personality of the Year, that really the England captain Andrew Strauss should win: "...but it seems we’ve almost forgotten that we regained the Ashes this year – that shadow of 2005 stretches very long..." Well, quite. Last week the British sports journalists association did indeed vote for the England cricket team as their team of the year – but the women, not the men.

The first of an occasional series – those benefits of a multi-cultural Britain in full. Let me introduce you all to this human filth. It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks. UPDATE: A PCC adjudication relating to this blog-post can be found here.

How are you feeling this morning? Muddled and confused? Follow my rule, then: always wait until Thought for the Day has finished before you enjoy your first stiffener of the morning. Lord Stern thinks most of you are muddled and confused, and has said as much. Anyone who doubts man-made climate change is muddled and confused. Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. The Grantham Institute is of course named after Leslie Grantham who played Dirty Den in the popular soap opera “Eastenders” but who, in his spare time, made up a long list of figures which proved that the earth was getting hotter. It was his hobby, making up figures about climate change, and sometimes he would try to incorporate it into his on-screen dialogue.

There is a surfeit of arrogance and certitude on both sides, of course. My own position is that I have little doubt that the climate is changing and most of the evidence suggests that it is, in the medium to long term, heading upwards. I suspect, again from the stats, that it is possible we may have had something to do with this, although I am not convinced. More worrying than the arrogance and certitude, to my mind, is the terror of, or awe at, science – amply demonstrated by Hugo Rifkind’s article in the current edition of the magazine and which is one of the most magnificently stupid and anti-intellectual exercises I have encountered in many a year.

I find it genuinely difficult to debate with people who deny my right to debate; this is the case with the climate change lobby. The danger, if you don’t watch out, is that the arrogance and certitude of the AGW lobby pushes one towards an ever more antithetical position. This is a flawed, human, response – very similar to the flaws exhibited by those climate change monkeys sending dodgy emails to one another. If you work for, and are paid by, an institution which accepts climate change as a fact, then you will be disinclined to accept scientific evidence to the contrary. You hold climate change as an article of faith, and also a conduit for remuneration. This is how science becomes poisoned; but it happens in almost every scientific endeavour, and always has done.

I've been trawling through the emails hacked from the Hadley Centre's Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, and very boring most of them are too. It's a good story, though, if you leave aside the obvious illegality of the hacking. Certainly, three or four (out of 7,000) of the emails seem to imply that there was a certain amount of chicanery when compiling some statistics, a reluctance to allow the public to see raw data which had not been tampered with (on occasion) and a typically belligerant and arrogant attitude towards the people they have marked down as climate change deniers.