Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming – but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy.
A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to be a loyal Thatcherite.Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988, With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming, Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
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Eventually we’ll have the emails of those who did promote this science/policy teratosaur. It may be through dissection of the fossilized remains of it, though.
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Where I come from Margaret Thatcher is a HATE figure, despised by millions.
This woman destroyed large swathes of industry, individual people and whole communities.
The fact she bought into Global Warming is no surprise and should come as no surprise.
Her son is a convicted gun runner.
This is great to hear. I’ve wondered what her views were now on CAGW/CC. She really should apologize, though, for being a key player in unleashing the horror of the Warmist ideology on the world. It is not a good legacy to have.
Margaret Thatcher – a conviction politician willing to call it as she sees it. Whatever happened to those?
Thatcher was out to destroy the coal mining industry and replace coal fired power generation with nuclear. She was also looking to make her mark upon the world stage. Step forth Sir Crispen Tickle who came up with the cunning plan of using global warming as the issue for Thatcher to tout on the world stage whilst at the same time using it as the rationale to take the axe to the coal industry. Let this be an example of how actions that are brilliant tactically, can become strategic catastrophe’s.
“This woman destroyed large swathes of industry, individual people and whole communities.”
Er no. She saved the taxpayer from the tyranny of an overpowerful greedy and ruthless union juggernaught with openly Marxist political preferences.
Loss making state owned industries had to be reorganised to avoid national bankruptcy. No one was ‘destroyed’ but many were displaced in terms of their working environments.
Thatcher, Thatcher, school-milk snatcher.
Many years ago, I worked at the research facility of a firm called BX plastics. There were three lady scientists, two of whom were lots of fun, and the other, Margaret Roberts, was only interested in politics. This was about 60 years ago, and I cannot actually recall anything about Ms. Roberts; but she became Maggie Thatcher.
Brilliant woman,most likely one of the greatest politicians of the last 100 years. What a pity she did not a fully nuclear power industry going, that would have been a magnificent legacy
In the UK, Thatcher is seen as either a saint or a demon.
Personally, I think she was a saint, who saved Britain from socialism and economic collapse. In the latter half of the 1970s, before she came to power, Britain was an inefficient ugly place mostly populated by bolshie individuals and ruled by the unions.
15% of Britain’s heavy industry used plant and equipment built before the First World War, so it is not surprising it failed. Over-manning and restrictive work practices resulted in the demise of much of Britain’s industrial base, not Thatcher’s economic policies.
Britain, after ten years of Thatcher, was almost unrecognisable and a very much better place in which to live or visit.
So, even a saint can make a mistake – she did in believing in AGW; however she, like many of today’s readers of WUWT, eventually saw the light and correctly denounced her previous beliefs as being BS.
I was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher until I discovered her contribution to the Global Warming Scam and worked out her back scratching antics with the MET Office and Hadley Centre. Whilst I applauded her efforts to secure the industrial security of the country in putting the miners in their place and attempting to encourage the building of more nuclear capacity, it really was not necessary to have promoted the concept of global warming just in order to achieve her political goals against the miners as she was destined to achieve it with labour legislation anyway.
It comes as little benefit that she now seems to have reversed her opinions as detailed in her book as this is now only just coming to light. Far better that she would have announced it with a fanfare. In 2003 she would have been listened to. In 2010 she will be just dismissed as a silly old f**t.
At least her motives seemed honourable at the time, which you could not say for the new Tory encumbent of the office. David Cameron appears to have the intelligence to understand the principals and politics of climate science should he have chosen to and had a great opportunity to mitigate what Thatcher had done in promoting the cause by calling for a complete and unbiased review of the science, especially in light of the evidence of the Climategate emailes which emanated mainly from our shores. Just as Thatcher had needed an excuse to start the crisis, this was an opportunity for Cameron to end it, but what did he do? He gave the job of Energy & Climate Change Secretary to Chris Hune, the most overtly warmist member of the Cabinet who now wants to impose an electricity generating target of 40% renewables by 2020 and vehemently opposes nuclear power. Cameron could have gone down in history as the world leader who exposed the scam and helped save western industry from an even greater decline from crippling energy costs. Instead, he will be remembered as yet another corrupt politician who helped line his own pocket with spin offs from the climate change industry. Besides the usual after public office offers, such as board appointments for green energy companies or carbon traders, climate change advisors, paid lecture tours etc., both David Cameron and his coalition deputy Nick Clegg have a direct interest in the renewables industry. David Cameron’s father in law has a windfarm with eight giant turbines earning a nice little profit from the tax and electricity bill payer with applications in for two more sites. Nick Clegg’s wife is director of an energy company presently applying for permission to build another 23 turbines in a massive development in Wales. This is the sleeze that David Cameron and his unholy bed partners will be remembered for.
And as a last and favourable comment to our Margaret Thatcher, would she have allowed your Mr Obama to walk all over our last major global company BP with unreasonable and unhelpful condemnation and threats and interference in the company? No! She would have clouted Obama around his head with her handbag. Good on you Maggie. With all your faults, you are still worth at least ten of Cameron, Clegg, Brown Blair and Obama put together. But I still can’t forgive you for your contribution to climate science, no matter how honourable the reasons seemed at the time.
Thatcher, Thatcher, Dave can’t catch her –
Compared with that powerful, forceful woman, the current lot are a bunch of wimps and toadies. She didn’t kill the mining industry, the unions made a pretty good fist of that thmeselves. Home produced coal became so expensive, and the supplies to power stations so erratic depending on the whim of the unions, it wasn’t worth prolonging the death throes of the industry any further. Commie b*sta*ds like Scargill helped destroy the coal industry, and the unions also destroyed the docks. people have short memories. For me, Thatcher was the epitome of how a PM SHOULD be. I wouldn’t give you tuppence for the demi-mediocre bunch at the helm now. THEY are about to destroy the economy and hammer the final nails into the coffin of industry.
Note to the mod team, you might find it better to snip the political re-hashes that are likely to appear – retrospectives of the Thatcher Years tend to come in two distinct flavors that are irreconcilable. I believe that Anthony has a preference for not allowing overt political positions to dominate his blog, and believe me, two decades and more since her day, she’s still a very hot political subject for many in the UK.
“Mac says:
June 14, 2010 at 4:43 am
Where I come from Margaret Thatcher is a HATE figure, despised by millions.
This woman destroyed large swathes of industry, individual people and whole communities.
The fact she bought into Global Warming is no surprise and should come as no surprise.
Her son is a convicted gun runner.”
Where I come from in the UK she is not a hate figure. Far from it, I rather wish she still had all her marbles and could continue to run this country after the mess the last lot have left it in. She sorted that lunatic, Arthur Scargill, who was hell bent on destroying the Government and, as a result, he destroyed the coal industry with his far left policies.
I don’t see the relevence at all of the comment about Mrs T buying into Global Warming. As a scientist, I imagine she could see the benefit of researching into the suggestion to establish whether there was any “truth” in it. The fact that the “truth” has become distorted along the way can hardly be laid at her door. I am sure she would have handbagged the scientists by now if she’d still been around.
As for her son being a convicted gun-runner, get a life! We all have a black sheep in the family somewhere, don’t we? I know I do, but it doesn’t make me a bad person because of it.
But there we are, no-one is ever lukewarm about Thatcher; you either love her or hate her. I could never understand how the very left wing friends I had could hate her so much. I do now though, as I feel exactly the same way about Blair and Brown and the mess they got this country into, despite them blaming it all on starting in USA – is Obama getting his own back now, blaming everything on “British” Petroleum in the Gulf?
“Thatcher, Thatcher, school-milk snatcher.”
Whilst this is not relevant to the AGW discussion, it was the Labour (socialist) government that first abolished free school milk for secondary schools (age 11-16). Margaret Thatcher subsequently removed this for 7-10 year olds.
Hope this helps explain the comment to non-UK readers.
Ed
Funny how people view the same thing differently. The UK Unions are still rabid about the loss of their territory. The fact that after Thatcher, the UK was, for a short time, the EU powerhouse is forgotten.
The sad fact is that there are some who think the masses are disorganized and incompetent – the natural state of man in their eyes, while at the same time, they believe in the power of Government – run by a limited number of increasingly incompetent people. Of course they don’t think they’re incompetent, they can never see the forest for the trees.
Most of us were sceptics when it was first called global warming. No one is a climate sceptic that I have ever met. Some claim to be climate change sceptics.
Common sense is not very common.
Mac says:
June 14, 2010 at 4:43 am
Where I come from Margaret Thatcher is a HATE figure, despised by millions.
More tolerance from the left.
I thought she believed this would be a good argument for promotion of Nuclear Power.
Anthony/mods
you should be aware that in the UK Mrs Thatcher is very much like Marmite
http://www.marmite.com/
there is no (absolutely none) middle ground.
Mac said?
Er I think you labour under some pretty big misaprehensions. By 1980 UK industry was dead on its feet ruined and wholly uncompetitive under the choking boot of Marxist bully unions who actively sought the destruction of the companies they worked for.
While British Leyland was making the morris marina/allegro/maxi the Japanese were making cars that people actually wanted to buy and knew they wouldnt a)rust away/b)break down/c)have the build quality of a soviet toilet.
You see while the labour unions were busy over sleeping night shift workers losing thier sleep breaks and walking out on strike because the management asked them if they could possibly make products that didnt break down the Japanese were re tooling and using modern methods of working and manufacture to produce quality goods.
The biggest trick the left ever pulled is to blame their own destruction of UK industry onto Maggie Thatcher, all the sins of the union baron bullies heaped onto the one person who tried to piece together the wreckage of the 60s and 70s.
If it were not for the union bullies the UK would still have a massive industry base, please do some research on the union industrial sabotage of the decades before Thatcher took power and you find many union bosses taking orders from the USSR.
The union leader Jack Jones was prominent at the time and his close Soviet connections came to the fore recently but there has been surprisingly little said about it. He was not the only one.
I’m really glad to see someone finally setting the story straight. I don’t know about the rest of the people here, but every time I read or here about M. Thatcher, I can’t help but recall the “other side of the same coin”, R. Reagan. And then I wonder when are their replacements going to get here?
A couple of apt quotes from both……From Dutch, “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”—-Ronald Reagan (We are today subsidizing climate alarmism.)
And from the Iron Lady, “There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings,….” —— Margaret Thatcher (How much more would she loath consensus science?)
While the two still polarize, and they weren’t perfect by any means, if two existed today and in the recent past, with like qualities and were in office, I dare say there wouldn’t be a need for websites such as this. Those two would have made the alarmists, history revisionists and tricksters subject of ridicule and scorn.
Peter Miller says:
June 14, 2010 at 6:18 am
even a saint can make a mistake – she did in believing in AGW; however she, like many of today’s readers of WUWT, eventually saw the light and correctly denounced her previous beliefs as being BS.
You can’t really make the comparison between the leader of a nation and readers of a blog. She was in a position of power, and pushed something she should not have, for political reasons. Yes, she deserves credit for denouncing her previous position, but that doesn’t relieve her of her responsibility for the enormous damage she caused.
Many of us simply believed the MSM, as we weren’t even aware there was another side. It was only when I heard that “the debate is over” that I thought, “wait a minute, there was a debate?” “How’d I miss that?”
biddyb says: “As for her son being a convicted gun-runner, get a life!”
Yeh, but, that would have made her smile. “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”——Margaret Thatcher