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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It seems that Mrs. T. did change her mind, (remember “The lady’s not for turning”?)but I feel that the comments here have become slightly political.
Enough.
Ironically, as Mac above would attest, the NE pits (here) were closed by her for so-called “environmental” reasons. The recent Redcar (Tees steel plant) moth-balling had a new twist, however, with carbon subsidies in the billions (£) going to the TATA corp. for the pleasure of providing mass regional unemployment (700 Tees jobs directly, probably thousands more indirectly). Obviously, this is not a party-line problem, as the recent (3 mos. ago) voting down of a much-needed coal-fired plant by the Scottish Parliament shows. Cheap energy and jobs for regular people are not a priority with governments these days (USA incl.).
From the Telegraph article:
She mocked Al Gore and the futility of “costly and economically damaging” schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.
A trick of the right which became a dreadful trick of the left. The gallant ship of old UK sinking, due to an unintended “trick”.
It is interesting when you look back at it.
At the time Thatcher used AGW as an argument to shut down coal-plants.
But her real agenda was to get rid of the Marxist Unions crippling the U.K.
Hidden agendas are never nice. Especially if you have to lie.
What is the hidden agenda today?
For Norway? Such a big producer of fossil fuels?
In fact I think you can call the Norwegian system “Fossil Fueled Socialism”.
So why do the “Goose Liver Socialists” in Norway try to remove the economic base of their system? They are not.
They want other countries to move over to natural gas.
Because we have a lot of that too. And oil is dwindling, they believe.
(Despite everyones belief in that NOW we will soon reach peak oil, the
reserves seem to increase, and increase, and increase….)
And, we can use oil-money to build windfarms (and other installations) for the UK and other countries, they imagine. (and doing it, right now)
And if you are rewarded with a top-job in the UN, who cares?
Pure egoism, in other words. Which is as it should be.
But the dishonesty, and the hypocracy makes me sick.
There was nothing ever saintly about Margaret Thatcher. This was a person who didn’t believe in ‘society’.
She stole peoples’ jobs, she stole peoples’ futures, she even stole milk from children.
She gave us the Little Englander mentality, she gave us the Benefit Culture, she gave us the Poll Tax, she gaves us New Labour.
We had socialism for the rich, unfettered capitalism for the rest of us.
Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?
No.
Global Warming: How It All Began
by Richard Courtney
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Germany makes things. France makes things, Italy makes things, Ireland makes things, even little Andorra make things – the UK, the place that gave the world industrialism, makes nowt.
Vincent says:
June 14, 2010 at 5:14 am
“….Let this be an example of how actions that are brilliant tactically, can become strategic catastrophe’s.”
Sorry, but that is a catastrophic apostrophe…
Robert Morris says:
June 14, 2010 at 6:21 am
“Note to the mod team, you might find it better to snip the political re-hashes that are likely to appear”
AGW is all about politics
John Daly’s book was entitled:
The Greenhouse Trap— Why the greenhouse effect will not end life on earth. published in 1989 – Bantam Books
ISBN-10: 0947189777
ISBN-13: 978-0947189778
http://www.amazon.com/greenhouse-trap-effect-will-earth/dp/0947189777
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/708193
I was there and it was horrible.
Then along came Mrs T who saved Britain from a Marxist catastrophe.
She would have been briefed on GW by trusted underlings and got on with politics.
However I doubt she would have tolerated the continuance of this farce after Climategate.
Given the political and scientific environment of the era, I certainly don’t blame PM Thatcher for encouraging research into AGW, or ACC, or whatever it is today.
In fact, I think it was completely correct. We had just gone from a decade of “next ice age” drum beating to a new belief in “warming”. To completely ignore it would have been wrong (It’s sad that science-oriented people can’t recognize a simple sine wave when they see one).
Back in the day, we had Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney. To this day we have people doing their best to smear and destroy the memories and achievements of all three. Together they helped orchestrate the fall of the Soviet Union, and dragged the first world back into a fleeting recognition of leadership. Then, as now, anything in a positive direction is fought bitterly by socialist and otherwise misguided forces.
Regarding the Iron Lady, a verse from Pink Floyd’s hate filled screed against her:
“Stephen Wilde says:
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.”
She also enabled several car mfgs, like Honda and Nissan, to open plants at taxpayers expense (To keep them in the UK, and taxpayers are STILL paying that “debt”). Nothing like balance, eh? Arthur Scargill would be proud!
The article does not quote from Thatcher’s book Statecraft, so I have no idea if the Telegraph is representing her accurately. However, the point in citing Thatcher’s U.N. speech is not that people should believe AGW is real because Thatcher does, but to underscore that the climate science behind AGw is not a left wing conspiracy.
The Iron Lady
“Cassandra King says:
June 14, 2010 at 7:34 am ”
BL and Lucas, “Great” British motoring icons. I recall driving past a “Triumph” plant, with car bodies out in the open rusting, and they were used in production. I’ve been to the Ford Transit plant at Eastleigh, Southampton, and they are pretty good. All mfgs these days use Japanese mfgs techniques anyway.
Thatcher’s 1989 U.N. speech can be found here:
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107346
But I also found this from a 1991 speech she gave in Japan:
It is only in recent years that we have begun to understand how seriously we have together upset the balance of nature. Acid rain, the threat to the ozone layer, global warming—these are problems which have to be overcome by international cooperation. And never has the international community worked together more closely than in meeting the threat to our global environment.
But the point I would most like to make to you today is that sound science, not sentimentality, must be the basis of our approach. And the system best able to develop that science, most willing to apply it and best able to generate the wealth required to pay for it is free enterprise. Green socialism is no more an answer to the world’s environmental needs than was the smoke-stack socialism of Eastern Europe which poisoned our rivers, disfigured our buildings and rotted our forests.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108279
Mrs Thatcher also employed Nigel Lawson as her Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was a good Chancellor and has since become a rational thinker on things climatic. His book “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming” is well worth reading.
“XmetUK says:
June 14, 2010 at 10:42 am
Mrs Thatcher also employed Nigel Lawson as her Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was a good Chancellor and has since become a rational thinker on things climatic. His book “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming” is well worth reading.”
Recall the “spitting image” images of the time? He was a idiot!
Mac says:
June 14, 2010 at 4:43 am
Her son is a convicted gun runner.
And all round village idiot.
What evidence is there that Maggie Thatcher ever “believed” in AGW?
Thirty years ago, when Maggie Thatcher came to power and (probably coincidentally) the theory of AGW took over from the Coming Ice Age theory, AGW could be seen for a short time as a genuine scientific hypothesis; on examination, though, it was quickly disproved (the computer models were GIGO, failing even to retrodict the climate for the previous century, and producing predictions that rapidly deviated from actuality; over the previous century industrial production of CO2 did not correlate with temperature as the theory required, and if anything the correlation was in the opposite direction, with temperatures falling when production boomed and rising when production stagnated; over longer periods CO2 lagged temperature; and calculations of the basic physics and planetary science showed that the greenhouse forcing could not possibly be anything like as large as claimed) . It ceased to be science and became a left-wing environmentalist ideology. That was my scientific judgement then as now. But for the most part I was an ardent supporter of Maggie Thatcher’s policies. So had she made a point of publicly promoting this ideology I think I would have noticed – and been rather upset by it.
I’ve read some of the speeches that are alleged to show her support for AGW. They do nothing of the sort. They show her making the sort of wishy-washy nod to environmentalism that even the greatest statesmen seem unable to resist (let alone the run of the mill politician); and she acknowledges that some people have claimed that anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases might cause substantial global temperature rises ; but she is very carefulnot to say that she “believes” it, or to refer to it as anything other than a theory or possibility to be checked out. She strongly promotes scientific research to find out more. She most definitely does not promote action in advance of (or defiance of) scientific evidence.
So, unless someone can point to other speeches in which she says something else, or other hard evidence, I remain unconvinced that Maggie Thatcher was ever an AGW believer. Remember that “politics makes strange bedfellows”. Sometimes one will find oneself in alliance with factions and causes with which one has little common ground, and for which one has little true sympathy. I suspect that this is the case with Maggie Thatcher and AGW.
What does Lord Monckton have to say about this, having been science adviser to The Iron Lady?
I too, like many who have little time to dig deeper than the national press trash fed to us every day, fell for the AGW scam in its early days. I too, like Maggie, am a scientist. When I finally started to read into the real science, I was shocked and embarrassed into doing a U-turn (this makes me laugh as Maggie once famously said – “…the Lady’s not for turning…”). Fellow-PhD scientists, like myself have poured scorn on me, claiming that AGW is the “consensus” of 2,500 “scientists”. It was these type of comments that made me look into the truth – and now I am firmly of the view that anyone still believing in the scam of anthropogenic global warming has gone from gullible to just plain stupid – and there are unfortunately many PhD’s in this category. There is probably a long list of folk with science training that have been initially taken in by the scam, until they find the time to seek the truth behind the myth – the only thing man-made about climate change is the hoax itself. I join the ranks of David Bellamy, Maggie et al in hopefully having saved my face when the wheels finally come off this scam.
As noted previously, Margaret Thatcher saw in AGW a way to garner international support for her purely UK plans to diversify energy production (it was going to be expensive to switch from coal-fired power stations, so she wanted other countries to “buy” into the same approach so Britain would not suffer economically). The fact that this tactic was enthusiastically taken up by the left to promote supra-national regulation and global governance was the unanticipated outcome.
The AGW meme was also taken up by a much broader group who simply believed that humans were over-using resources. Once again, a promising tactic (to encourage efficient use of these resources) has instead become a major weapon for, essentially, Malthusians who go much further and actively promote fewer people on the planet. There is a whole field now of “de-development economics” which has sprung up to give legitimacy to groups such as the Optimum Polulation Trust as this field tries to get away from the stigma of the first half the 20th century.
I don’t often link to piece here, but a report from Brendan O’Neil at Spiked is worth a read:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9000/
My journey as supporter of AGW began as seeing the need for increased investment in efficiency, but as a natural skeptic as well as an observer of human ingenuity I quickly moved on to an understanding that humans can – and will – deal with everything the planet and solar system can throw at us, providing we don’t cripple oursleves financially.
Nigel Lawson, one of the more astute Chancellors of the Exchequor (finance ministers) of the 20th century and the architect of much of the financial improvements seen under Thatcher, has shown this quite clearly. Even the absurdly inflated potential costs of climate change calculated in the Stern Review are actually less than the costs of the proposed mechanisms to prevent them. Even without debating potential human causes to climate change, mitigation as an approach is a complete non-starter.
Human beings have done a fabulous job over the last hundred or so years in providing a comfortable life for quite a few billion people. That we still have much to do for the other one or two billion still living in poverty is not to be denied, but to do that we need to move forward, not back.
Thatcher is a hate figure to the large section of Britain’s population whose model of the state is a giant mother pig lying on its side, and for whom citizens are millions of piglets fighting for a nipple to suck.
Beats working.