MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: The professor’s amazing climate change retreat



Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.



Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.

Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.

You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.

But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Interviewed by the highly sympathetic BBC, which still insists on describing the leaked emails as ‘stolen’, Professor Jones has conceded that he ‘did not do a thorough job’ of keeping track of his own records.



His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.

Even more strikingly, he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.

He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.



This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.

It is quite reasonable to suggest that human activity may have had some effect on climate.



There is no doubt that careless and greedy exploitation has done much damage to the planet.



But in the light of the ‘Climategate’ revelations, it is time for governments, academics and their media cheerleaders to be more modest in their claims and to treat sceptics with far more courtesy.

The question is not settled.





'Supertaxes' always fail

The Treasury appears to have waved goodbye to large sums of money it could have collected in tax from the super-rich, thanks to a poorly designed attempt to help the film industry.



Compare and contrast this laxity with the inescapable tax burden on ordinary people whose income is taxed at source and who are pursued with severity for every penny.

This sort of inequality is the direct result of ever more ‘creative’ attempts to use the tax system for social engineering.



As HM Revenue and Customs will find when the new 50 pence tax rate is imposed in April, higher rates stimulate the rich into ever more ingenious efforts to avoid paying up.

Taxes should be simple, low and fair. Then everyone will pay them.