Alarmist goes cool on alarmism

Sir David King's hypocrisy here can only be described as breathtaking. But like a number in the alarmist camp, including some in the media, they have sniffed the breeze and noted a change in the wind direction, (I think that's a mixed metaphor, but never mind), and are starting to reposition themselves. This is from Andrew Bolt's blog: David King was once one of the most notorious of global warming alarmists: “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the (British) government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King said last week. He said the Earth was entering the ‘first hot period’ for 60 million years when there was no ice on the plane and “the rest of the globe could not sustain human life”. That was just five years ago, when alarmism was all the rage. (Certainly King didn’t feel any need to dispute then the accuracy of that report. Indeed, he even preached the falsehood that global warming was melting the snows of Kilimanjaro.) But since then, the planet has cooled and so has the public to such scaremongering. Now King worries that this kind of frantic exaggeration - by others, of course - is staining his credibility: Exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the threat from global warming risk undermining efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and contain climate change, senior scientists have told The Times. Environmental lobbyists, politicians, researchers and journalists who distort climate science to support an agenda erode public understanding and play into the hands of sceptics, according to experts including a former government chief scientist… “I worry a lot that NGOs [non-governmental organisations] are very much in the habit of doing exactly that,” said Professor Sir David King, director of the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and a former government chief scientific adviser. “...The danger is they can be accused of scaremongering. Also, we can all become described as kind of left-wing greens.” King seems to have tried to distance himself from the greens even more than he did last year, when he said: There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century. [Their argument is] ‘Let’s get away from all the technological gizmos and developments of the 20th century’,.. I think King is finally cooling, too. UPDATE Benny Peiser notes it was only a year ago that King was still up for some alarmism himself. Claiming: If all the ice on Greenland were to melt, sea level would rise by seven metres. Is that likely to happen? Well I was saying six years ago unlikely [but] I’m afraid that that’s having to be revised… 80 percent of our human population lives within less than a one metre rise of sea level so imagine the destabilisation of our geopolitical system with a sea level rise of the order of one or two metres. And that is on the cards I’m afraid.

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