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Climate Change Bill [Lords]

Until a couple of months ago, I was happily riding this consensus and basically accepted the received wisdom. I thought that it was probably being exaggerated a bit, but then people usually do that in making a case. However, I then made the mistake of reading a few books and quite a lot of analysis, particularly of the Stern report. That has led me to a couple of conclusions that trouble me a lot. I do not believe that the science is anything like as settled as the proponents of the Bill are making out. In fact, the scientists hedge their predictions with an awful lot of qualifications and maybes that those who invoke them often omit. The science is a bit like medicine in the 1850s. The scientists are scratching the surface of something that they do not really understand, but no doubt will. They are probably on to something, but nothing like the whole story. What they say does not justify any of the apocalyptic visions that we have heard set out. The record shows that the climate warmed from 1920 to 1940, cooled from 1940 to 1975, rose again from 1975 to 2000, and since 2000, according to the Hadley centre, has not risen at all. In the past seven years, global temperatures have not increased. All the predictions that we work from, whether from the IPCC or anybody else, are based on models, none of which can account for the cooling between 1940 and 1975.