http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-wa
s-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html


2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes
was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph


By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008

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The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski
resorts" ,
reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could
soon "grind to a
halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The
Alps have best
snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls
"look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence
suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning
point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when
politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and
damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed
menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly
unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main
drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the
world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the
whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse.
After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough
to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists,
cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10
years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole
would soon be
ice-free  as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to
drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and
hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit
that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have
failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this
cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend",
and that the
temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).


Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific
consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in
the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including
many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour
scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact,
based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to
produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst
recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those
self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician
in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000
politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's
"son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are
waking up to the
fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for
"combating climate change" with which they were so happy to
indulge themselves
in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of
dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of
carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions
trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more
useless wind
turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to
"biofuels",
are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures,
costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast
approaching from the fact that  unless we get on very soon with building enough
proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a
few years our
lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After
years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians
along with those of the EU and President Obama's US  were brought back with a
mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful
generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations
made it possible for the latest "metric martyr", the east London
market trader
Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council's vindictive decision to prosecute her
on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling
produce "by the bowl" (to avoid using weights her customers
dislike and don't
understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the
forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into
total disarray.

Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go
before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in
February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those
for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do
every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund
insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other
original "martyrs" who were found guilty in 2002  after a legal battle also
made possible by this column's readers  of breaking laws so ridiculous that the
EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute
book).

Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith,
whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their
contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action
she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling
it to account for needlessly risking soldiers' lives by sending them into
battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith's
determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006,
has at last become a national cause celebre.

May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008  so many
that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But
their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and
all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year.

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