“‘Global warming’ is sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics, and it could well go down with the sub-prime mortgage.” (Philip Stott, September 21)

[Photo: by SignatureBrendel, reproduced under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, Version 1.2 or any later version]

Despite all the undoubted political and economic gloom, the delightful thing about today’s Sunday newspapers is the virtual absence of the phrase ‘global warming’. ‘Global warming’ has been effectively buried, by collapsing banks and plunging markets, by rising energy costs, by internal battling within the Labour Party, by pitbulls and the American election, by real threats, like knife crime and terrorism in Islamabad, and by the fact that, on nearly every bit of current evidence, the world is likely to enter a cooling phase - the BBC please note.

Interestingly, the final part of BBC 2’s dire series, ‘Earth - The Climate Wars’, which is to be shown this evening, has also fallen out of the ratings, not even, for example, being suggested under ‘Choice’ in The Sunday Times television listings [see: ‘Culture’, The Sunday Times, September 21, pp. 60 - 61]. Mind you, as I have already pointed out, this seriously-unbalanced programme has been well and truly ‘flounced’, and rightly so, by BBC 1’s new four-part costume drama, ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ [see: ‘Tess Trumps Trumpery’, September 16]. The pretty Morris dancers have pranced all over it. And tonight, thank goodness, it doesn’t stand a chance, as Angel Clare carries the four milkmaids, one by one, across that famous swollen stream. Guess which programme I’ll be watching? Phwoar!

Double Whammy!

The only exception to all this is a double whammy against ‘global warming’ by Christopher Booker writing in The Sunday Telegraph [‘Financial crisis: Lehman misses out on carbon credit scam’, The Sunday Telegraph, September 21].

First, we should note that Booker is also scathing about ‘Earth - The Climate Wars’ [see the Section (scroll down): ‘BBC series stitches up sceptics in counter-attack over climate change’ - thank goodness I wasn’t interviewed!]:

“There was no hint that the ‘hockey stick’ is among the most completely discredited artefacts in the history of science, not least thanks to the devastating critique by Steve McIntyre, which showed that the graph’s creators had an algorithm in their programme which could produce a hockey-stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

There was scarcely a frame of this clever exercise which did not distort or obscure some vital fact. Yet the ‘impartial’ BBC is sending out this farrago of convenient untruths to schools, ensuring that the ‘march of the lie’ continues.”

Actually, I think that the BBC has made a somewhat more fundamental miscalculation. What strikes me about this programme is how old fashioned the whole concept now seems, how out-of-date the trope and the battle. It is as if world economics and politics have not changed dramatically over the last year.

The brutal truth is that the ‘global warming’ boom is bust. Fewer and fewer people are interested. Indeed, even I am bored to distraction by it , and as for Goodwife Stott ....

“The Economics Of The Madhouse”

“What is the connection between the bankrupt Lehman Brothers [see left: photo by David Shankbone, reproduced under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, Version 1.2 or any later version] and the likelihood that in four years’ time our electricity bills will jump another 25 per cent (on top of the rises likely from soaring coal and gas prices)?

The answer is that, before its collapse, Lehman was pitching to become the leader in the vast trade created by the new worldwide regulatory system to ‘fight climate change’ by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide.”

He goes on:

“Advised by some of the world’s leading global warming activists, such as Dr James Hansen and Al Gore (a close friend of the firm’s erstwhile managing director Theodore Roosevelt IV), Lehman bought their message wholesale. GIM, the company set up by Gore to sell ‘carbon offsets’ in return for planting trees, was a prized Lehman client.

The particular market that Lehman hoped to dominate is centred on the buying and selling of carbon permits, through the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) set up in 2005, the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the ‘cap and trade’ system proposed for the US by both McCain and Obama.

This may still seem abstract but it will affect all our lives, because ultimately we will all be paying for it, through the colossal costs it will impose on industry, not least electricity.”

And Booker’s overall conclusion is trenchant:

“Everything about this grandiose scheme betokens the economics of the madhouse ...

... What is certain is that it will pile astronomic costs onto everyone in the EU, inevitably impacting most severely on poorer householders that will face bills they cannot afford. The only other certainty - perhaps a consolation - is that those sharing in this bonanza will not include Lehman Brothers, now excluded from cashing in on what threatens to become the maddest scam the world has ever seen.”

Now, while I don’t know the ins and outs of all this, of one thing I am certain. With a world likely to cool during the next decade, with a world economy set in austere mode, and with the new politics of China, India, Brazil, and the rest, Big Global Warming’s boom days are surely coming to an end.

“‘Global warming’ is sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics, and it could well go down with the sub-prime mortgage.” {Journalists please feel free to quote.]

Coffee, and the crossword, in garden.