Is Sir David King completely barking mad?

James Delingpole clearly has is suspicions: Sir David King, the totally sane, not remotely hysterical, and non-aluminium-foil-hat-wearing  former advisor to much-loved and respected former Prime Minister Tony Blair, has spoken out on the Climategate emails. Apparently, he has told the Independent, they weren’t leaked (as pretty much every other person who has been following the story now thinks). They were hacked. Probably by US “anti-climate-change lobbyists” or, possibly, by evil foreign intelligence services. Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia’s involvement. “If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency,” he said. Sir David – who, like Osama Bin Laden, believes strongly in man-made global warming – has had a bit of a problem with the Russkies ever since they made him look ridiculous at an international climate seminar in Moscow in July 2004 chaired by Putin’s chief economic adviser Alexander Illarionov. According to Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster, Sir David was horrified to find so many sceptical scientists at the conference and tried, unsuccessfully to have them censored. The final straw came during a speech by Professor Paul Reiter, one of the first IPCC contributors to point up the flaws in the IPCC process: the 2001 report had utterly misrepresented his expert views on insect-borne diseases in order to make it seem as if the incidence of malaria would increase with “global warming.” As Booker recounts: “When King himself then put forward the now familiar claim that global warming was responsible for the melting of the ice on summit of Kilimanjaro, Reiter challenged him by referring to various studies showing that the melting had been taking place since the 1880s. It was due not to global warming, these had concluded, but to deforestation causing a sharp drop in local precipitation. Apparently unable to answer Reiter’s point, King broke off in mid-sentence and led his delegation out of the room.” Illarianov was appalled by the behaviour of Sir David and his delegation, he wrote afterwards: “It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government and the reputation of the title “Sir” has sustained heavy damage.” I’m touched that the Independent continues to do the charitable work of making Sir David feel better about himself by still taking him seriously. But I’m not sure I can promise to carry on this tradition when I take over as Environment Editor. Problem is, I’m with Illarionov. I believe, as he does, that the eco-fascist ideology and warped science underpinning the AGW scam are like something out of Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Illarionov wrote: That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the twentieth century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous