Roger Helmer MEP: A different view on climate change

Nick Hurd MP has previously written for this site to warn against 'climate change scepticism'.  Today Roger Helmer MEP writes about his Counter-Consensual Climate Conference due to take place in the European Parliament with Lord Lawson next Wednesday, 18th April.  PDF flyer here.

Is the earth getting warmer? Slightly.

Is there good evidence that the rate of warming is increasing and becoming catastrophic? No.

Is it caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions? Probably not.

Do proposed policy responses like Kyoto make sense? Definitely not.

Climate change hysteria has become an industry, with scientists, lobbyists and journalists making a good living from it. Many politicians are happy to connive, seeing opportunities both for higher "green" taxes, and for the global governance initiatives close to their hearts. David Milliband suggests re-branding the EU as "The Environmental Union", and adds for good measure that you can't be both green and eurosceptic (see Neil O'Brien's rebuttal of that notion here).

Worse yet, there are all sorts of pressures being put on the scientific community to fall in line behind the alarmist consensus. Counter-consensual papers aren't published. Their authors lose funding. Even work with only a tangential relevance to climate change can increase its chance of funding with the addition of the phrase "in the context of global warming".

I believe that the case for man-made climate change has not been made. The evidence over very long periods shows that while CO2 levels are correlated with average temperatures, the CO2 levels lag behind the temperature. The inescapable conclusion is that temperature drives CO2, not vice versa.

Even if we accept the alarmist science, the measures proposed will do little to change matters. The effect of Kyoto, even if fully implemented, would be to reduce average global temperatures by 0.2'C by 2100 -- and less in the shorter term. We are being asked to decimate energy use, roll back the industrial revolution, and make heroic economic sacrifices, to achieve changes almost too small to measure. The resources that will consumed by these endeavours could much more usefully be invested in a wide range of life-saving humanitarian efforts as recommended by the Copenhagen Consensus.

Any CO2 reduction programme which fails to engage China and India is doomed to failure in global terms, which is why America's environmental initiatives are likely to be more effective than the EU's. Incidentally, over recent years the USA's emissions trend has actually been better than the EU's, despite the latter's moral posturing.

I have accordingly organised a conference in the European parliament in Brussels to give a platform to scientists, economists, industrialists and politicians who broadly share these views. The Key-Note speaker is former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson (Lord Lawson of Blaby). The Conference will be followed at 5:00 p.m. by a screening of the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

I have been asked how this plan sits with David Cameron's new green agenda. But the Conservative Party is a broad church, and it is right that these issues should be thoroughly discussed within a party context. I believe my conference can be seen as contributing to the party's new focus on green issues.

I also believe that there are profound reasons why we should nevertheless seek to achieve major reductions in the use of fossil fuels, but those reasons relate to long-term resource management, and to energy security, not to mis-placed global climate alarmism. In this context, and while renewables have their place, there is no substitute for major new investment in nuclear capacity.

Further details of the Conference are available from my office via [email protected], and all interested parties are welcome.

Related video link: Lord Lawson Iain Dale that the Stern Report on climate change is fraudulent