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Pius XII and the Holocaust: Catholics must not provoke our ‘elder brothers’
Originally published in The Catholic Herald - 10th January, 2010 edition
Perhaps I should have carried on with the leftovers of Christmas television. Or hunted down a board game. But instead, with a few friends, I sat down last week to watch The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, a film (based on the book by John Boyne) about the family of a Nazi concentration camp commandant who, though the place is not explicitly named, has recently taken charge of Auschwitz.
The film centres on the friendship between two eight-year-old boys – one a Jewish inmate called Shmuel, and the other, Bruno, the son of the commandant. They meet secretly every day to talk through the mesh of the camp’s fence, confused by their circumstances, but beautifully loyal to each other to the end.
So its historical inaccuracy is stark: there were no eight-year-old boys alive in Auschwitz, because Jews who could not work (mostly women, children, the elderly and the ill) were gassed to death on arrival. The film’s other conceits – mainly that Bruno does not know what “a Jew” is and that his mother is oblivious to the genocide overseen by her husband – contradict what we know about Nazi Germany, and detract from its overall message.
Climategate: Why those Russian ‘experts’ might not have our best interests at heart
Originally published on my Telegraph blog:
The front page of today’s Daily Express carries a story which resonates strongly with global warming sceptics. According to a report by Anil Dawar and Will Stewart, “experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis” have said that leading British climatologists “probably tampered with Russian climate data” in order to produce a biased report submitted to world leaders at the Copenhagen summit. James Delingpole (aka Mr Strangelove) has his take on the story here, in a blog post which is currently the most viewed article on Telegraph.co.uk.
But before we get totally carried away, let’s take a moment to examine the facts.
1. Who are these Russian ‘experts’?
Will Stewart didn’t properly answer this question in his Daily Expressstory, but just read what his Daily Mail version of the article says. The headline is slightly different, for a start: “Met Office ‘manipulated climate change figures’ says Russian think tank linked to President Putin.”
Climategate: How Mr Strangelove ‘drowned a baby polar bear’
Originally published on my Telegraph blog
I had the great pleasure of meeting James Delingpole yesterday at a Christmas drinks party in London. I say ‘great pleasure’ because I was always taught to be polite. But to give you an idea of our lengthy and heated discussion, let’s just just say it included a lot of swearing and ended with me being imaginatively compared to a “drowned baby polar bear”. (Yes, I am aware this will please a large number of you.)
Anyway, I’ll give Mr Strangelove credit for one thing: he’s not just being aggressively contrarian for the sake of it, he really does believe that the Climategate emails undermine the basic science behind manmade global warming. Quite why, I’m yet to fathom – as I’ve said before, the emails are very dodgy and deserve a thorough investigation,but it’s absolutely crazy to think that they disprove that carbon dioxide is warming the planet (which was first discovered to be true some 200 hundred years ago).
Pre-Budget report: Darling’s green measures are pure camouflage
There’s an enormous hunger for green news this week. So it made sense that Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report at least sounded environmentally friendly, with an additional £200 million for energy efficiency promised from April.
The Chancellor said he will help “up to 125,000 homes” replace inefficient boilers, and he guaranteed more cash for wind turbine and solar panel users (at least for those plugged into the national grid). He will also try to boost the number of electric cars and vans by exempting the former from company car tax for 5 years, and allowing a “one hundred per cent first year capital allowance” for the latter.
Twittergate: Was Sarah Brown’s gibberish tweet faked?
Here’s something to briefly distract you from the Telegraph’s Pre-Budget report build-up: an online rumour claims that Sarah Brown’s recent gibberish tweet – “fvdfzsrsazxzzxcvbnmadgfhjjkqwrtyuuuiop” – was written not by her three-year-old son, Fraser, but very deliberately by her, so that the Prime Minister could include the anecdote in a speech this week.
Gordon Brown told an audience at an event to promote internet safety for children: “The people who follow Sarah, my wife, on Twitter received a message of gobbledegook which my younger son had bashed out on the keys and then pressed ’send’ while she was out of the room.” Mrs Brown joked afterwards on Twitter: “and in future I will turn my computer off when I am not using it – to save energy and avoid junior tweet interference”. Awwww, we all thought.
Copenhagen: Will the ‘warmest decade on record’ silence the pub bore?
It’s an old favourite for the pub bore. “Climate change?”, they scoff into a lukewarm pint. “The Met office can’t even get the weather forecast right, let alone predict fifty years in advance.” Similar things were said earlier this year, of course, when the British “barbecue summer” we’d all been hoping for failed to materialise.
But the truth about climate change, as New Scientist writer Fred Pearce observes in today’s Telegraph, is that predicting its future “is more like forecasting the seasons that the weather.” He emphasises (as does Geoffrey Lean) that “physicists have known for 200 years that gases like carbon dioxide trap heat” – and that “they will heat up the atmosphere just as certainly as the summer sun heats us.”