Bernard Ingham: The Earth won't be saved by a bunch of wide boys

TWENTY NINE years ago, almost to the month, I went to Cancun, the computer-selected resort on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, for what was described as a North-South summit.

The weather was poor and the event, for all its portentousness, a luxurious swan.

Willy Brandt's fashion for North-South dialogue has now been succeeded by the somewhat fading fashion for fighting that supposed man-made scourge called "climate change".

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Once again thousands will fetch up on the shores of the Caribbean to waste their time and our money and, in the process, knowingly manufacture tonnes of the dreaded carbon dioxide to get there. What is more, 29 years apart, they have exactly the same objective. It is to transfer resources from the rich, developed North to the poor developing South.

Every one of these great jamborees is marked by the developing – or some would say the dictator-repressed – world holding out its hand for our cash. We are invited – nay expected – to absolve our "guilt" for burning fossil fuels by handing out hefty cheques.

The professional poor are aided and abetted by NGOs – non governmental organisations – in this case representing environmental campaigners who, believe it or not, are often paid by governments such as the EU to lobby them for what they madly want to do in any case. It is, frankly, an incestuous racket. It would not be so bad if this movement to stop us flying had shown any results since it all started in Rio in 1992. Instead, carbon emissions have increased yet for the last 12 years at least there has been no observed global warming.

From all this you might imagine I do not believe the planet is in the slightest danger of overheating. You would be wrong. I don't know what to believe.

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The theory that CO2 acts as a duvet seems sound. Yet the consequences of the great belch since the onset of the Industrial Revolution seems so minimal as to make the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a bunch of unprincipalled scaremongers.

The Maldives Islands are still doing a roaring holiday trade above the "encroaching waves". Indeed, their cabinet was recently moved to hold a meeting under the sea. No doubt to try to extract more filthy lucre from the West.

At the same time, we have seen East Anglia University scientists accused of rigging the evidence and the IPCC accused of such astonishing slackness in the compilation of its reports that it can only be run by a bunch of propagandists.

The time has come to put a stop to this caper before they all go off to South Africa next year in renewed search of the holy grail – a legally binding treaty to combat a phenomenon they cannot quantify let alone conclusively prove.

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So what do we need instead of Cancun? Well, there is widespread concern that scientists have far from adequately answered worries about evidence rigging. Similarly, for all the attempts by bodies like our Royal Society to kill the debate about the science, far more scientists than is popularly imagined across the globe continue to dispute both the theory of global warming and the evidence.

In these circumstances what we need is a week, devoted by the UN general assembly, to open scientific debate so that the world can be presented with a State of the Earth report that objectively assesses theory, evidence and any consequent risk.

Simultaneously, the engineering profession should assemble a report, through similar open international debate, on the technology – wind, waves, tides, solar, geothermal, hydro, biomass, peat, coal, oil, gas and nuclear. They should tell us authoritatively their contribution to any problem that exists, their potential for reducing or eliminating it and the costs involved.

In the meantime all the horrendous subsidies for such things as wind turbines and solar panels and such scams as carbon trading should be stopped forthwith, if only to prevent the environmental movement falling into utter disrepute.

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The planet will not be saved by the Mafia and assorted wide boys.

Only then can the world properly assess what, if anything, it us up against.

Only then can we in the UK – in fact in most countries in the world – have a rational energy policy that does not take the consumer to the cleaners, exacerbating fuel poverty, and leaves the downtrodden developing masses still at the mercy of the money grabbing monsters who rule them.

Once again I can authoritatively state that Cancun will not listen to any of this. Fanatics never do. They know, ye know.

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