Global warming? Hot air

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By Gerard O'Donovan 

Margaret Thatcher has been accused of being behind many a modern scourge but even she would, one imagines, be surprised at having the responsibility for global warming laid at her door. 

But that, in effect, was one of the madder ideas put forward by The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4), a gloriously Canute-like stand against the unstoppable tide of global warming propaganda washing over our over-heating planet. 

Thatcher’s alleged role was not, as one might suspect, the production of excessive political hot air. Rather it was confined to fostering, through funding, one of the first major studies to make a link between man-made carbon dioxide and global temperature rises. That study and others like it, we were told, went on to breed a multi-billion dollar global scientific industry that, now, has a self-perpetuating vested interest in keeping us all in an ever-increasing state of climate-change terror. Because without the fear, there would be no more funding for research. 

As conspiracy theories go, it’s a beauty. The suggestion being that the defining moral and political cause of our age is a big fat fraud being perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists hungry for grants. And journalists even hungrier for scare stories. The odd thing is, stripped of the more melodramatic elements, many of the programme’s claims were genuinely intriguing, even convincing. Such as that the sun, and not mankind, is always going to be the chief driver of climate change. And that many of the alternative theories attacked as “heresies” actually fill many of the gaping holes in mainstream global warming theory. 

Of course, it’s impossible to know who’s right and who’s wrong. In the end, faced with two opposing sets of squabbling scientists, it is the lot of the ordinary mortal to sit confused on the sidelines until they’ve punched themselves into some form of agreement. But what was most compelling here was the extraordinary story of how an environmental theory has become a major international political force. Suddenly, the world – or at least the world of the comfortable, educated, middle classes – is full of conversations about food miles, energy conservation and carbon footprints. Which has to be a good thing, you’d think. But no, according to The Great Global Warming Swindle, all we’re doing is stifling development in the Third World. Clearly, no matter what we do, we can never win.