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.

And yet: it was a deeply moving film which effectively communicated the horror of the Holocaust and the hateful ideology which inspired the murder of six million Jews. All the more powerful because its main characters were children. Jan Romein described the diary of Anne Frank as “a ‘de profundis’ stammered out in a child’s voice”. Though it is fiction, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas shares that particular intensity. Despite its flaws, I recommend watching it.

The very next day, while the film continued to occupy my thoughts, I was reminded again that the Holocaust is not ancient history. An article by Professor Robert S Wistrich in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, voiced disapproval of Pope Benedict’s recent declaration of Pope Pius XII as Venerable. Prof Wistrich finds it deeply unsettling that Pope Benedict identifies with Pius XII’s “heroic virtues” given the controversy surrounding his alleged inaction during the Holocaust.

Sad though his concerns are, it would be foolish to dismiss them out of hand. While it is natural for Catholics to jump to defend Pius XII, the accusation that he was indirectly complicit in the destruction of the European Jews is a profoundly serious charge, and one which – if not properly answered – could reverse the work done by Pope John Paul II and others to improve relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. It has particular potency now, given the Williamson debacle last year.

John Cornwell’s view that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” has now been discredited. And there is no evidence to suggest that the wartime pontiff was anti-Semitic. Some, such as Rabbi David G Dalin, even argue that Pius XII should be considered a “Righteous Gentile” because of the work he did to save Jews during the war by placing diplomatic pressure on Nazi Germany.

But the truth is that some difficult questions remain. Yes, a large number of Jews were hidden by the Church in Rome during the Nazi occupation. Yet the total six million dead aside, 1,000 Roman Jews were deported directly to Auschwitz in 1943, never to return. Could the Pope, as the leader of the Catholic Church, have done more to save any of them?

The answer is perhaps in the million or so documents relating to Pius XII’s papacy, which will be released by the Vatican in 2014 at the earliest. Before then, care must be taken not to rush towards his beatification and to ensure that Catholic-Jewish dialogue remains a clear priority. Pope John Paul II described the Jews as “our elder brothers” – he was right, and a family row would be calamitous.

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.”

So, it’s a think tank rather than a reputable body of Russian scientists.The Global Development Network informs us that it’s an “independent, non-governmental, non-political and non-commercial organisation” founded in 1994. And it was founded, Stewart reports, by “a former adviser to Vladimir Putin”, a man called Andrey Illarionov.

Let’s hear a bit more about Andrey Illarionov, shall we? Well, according to his Wikipedia entry he’s a Russian libertarian economist and a former economic policy advisor to Putin. But he’s also one of Russia’s leading climate change sceptics: he was a highly critical of the Kyoto Protocol and even submitted a paper to the 2003 World Climate Change Conference entitled “Anthropogenic Factors in Global Warming: Some Questions” (all ten questions were answered by climatologists). In a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman in 2004, he said: “No link has been established between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change”.

It’s overwhelmingly clear, then: the Russian “experts” are no such thing. They represent a think tank founded by a former adviser to Putin who is a libertarian and a well  known manmade global warming sceptic. All of this is fine, of course, unless you’re trying to present his views as particularly ground-breaking (Climategate “goes SERIAL”, “just got much, much bigger” etc etc).

2. But what about the claims?

The Daily Express reports: “The Meteorological Office was last night facing accusations it cherry-picked climate change figures in a bid to increase evidence of global warming”… “experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis say the British dossier used statistics from weather stations that fit its theory of global warming, while ignoring those that do not”…”They accuse the Met Office’s Hadley Centre of relying on just 25 per cent of Russia’s weather stations and over-estimating warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.”

Sounds dodgy, doesn’t it? But the Hadley Centre doesn’t choose which weather stations to gather data from. The answer is in the story:

…Last night a spokesman for the Hadley Centre said its scientists did not choose which weather stations to collect its data from. “The World Meteorological Organisation chooses a set of stations evenly distributed across the globe and provides a fair representation of changes in mean temperature on a global scale over land. We don’t pick them so we can’t be accused of fixing the data. We are confident in the accuracy of our report.”

3. And the dodgy CRU email?

Well here’s Delingpole’s version of the email (from Phil Jones to Michael Mann):

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Cheers

Phil

And here’s the email in its entirety (you see, James, I do click those links of yours):

From: Phil Jones

To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Re: have you seen this?
Date: Wed Mar 31 09:09:04 2004

Mike,

Yes, but not had a chance to read it yet. Too much else going on. Ed has a paper reworking Esper et al. as you’ll know. If you’re going to Tucson, I suggest you talk to Keith about it then – don’t email him as he’s too busy preparing to go and marking essays.

Jan is in one of our EU projects. Seems that Keith thinks Jan is reinventing a lot of Keith’s work, renamed the RCS method and much more. Jan doesn’t always take in what is in the literature even though he purports to read it. He’s now looking at homogenization techniques for temperature to check the Siberian temperature data. We keep telling him the decline is also in N. Europe, N. America (where we use all the recently homogenized Canadian data). The decline may be slightly larger in Siberia, but it is elsewhere as
well. Also Siberia is one of the worst places to look at homogeneity, as the stations aren’t that close together (as they are in Fennoscandia and most of Canada) and also the temperature varies an awful lot from year to year.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Cheers

Phil

How can any non-scientist  purport to know what that email is about? “If either appears I will be very surprised” could refer to Phil Jones’s reviews or the papers he is rejecting (rejecting on what grounds we cannot know). “Siberia is one of the worst places to look at homogeneity” – if you’re a sceptic, this might sound like a cover-up. But it could also be a scientist complaining about useless data resulting from too many variable factors (an argument which would perhaps be supported by the fact that “the stations aren’t that close together…and also the temperature varies an awful lot from year to year). The email says what you want it to say – or, if you approach it impartially, absolutely nothing at all. Which is why we need a full, independent investigation into Climategate.

Verdict

So, Putin’s old colleague reckons global warming isn’t manmade – but he’s always thought this, most likely for fairly predictable reasons i.e. it was his job to safeguard Russia’s oil and gas-dependent economy. His think tank issues a statement saying as much, based on a misunderstanding of how the Hadley Centre selects its data. The release is translated from Russian into English and is leapt upon by a few bloggers and two newspapers, all of whom have given a classically biased account of the story.

No, Russian economists loyal to Vladimir Putin don’t have our best interests at heart. And no, this doesn’t disprove the fact that manmade greenhouse gases are causing global warming. Next?

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).

Aside from covering very familiar ground, however, Mr Strangelove did make one amusing point. “Global warming sceptics have so many more arguments that you,” he said. And he’s right, they do. But has anyone else noticed that they contradict each other?

“Don’t call us deniers,” they yell, “global warming is happening, but we just don’t believe it’s caused by manmade greenhouse gases”. Then on other occasions: “Global warming stopped in 1998, and everyone knows it’s the world is now cooling.” Then another one: “So what if we’re pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Levels have been much higher in the past.” And: “Even if the world is heating up because of levels of carbon dioxide, it will actually increase global crop yield.”

The list goes on, and each denier seems to have their own “scientific theory”. Here’s one I received by email last week, word for word:

My Theory. The Core of this Planet is Molten Lava, Heat like the surface of the Sun. What keeps it from getting out and roasting the surface? Melting the ice? Boiling the Ocean?. OIL! Yes. 6 Million years ago The Planet Earth was erupting all over the place, to stop this Nature filled the skies with Ash from Volcano’s  which in turn blocked the suns natural rays getting through, so plant life including trees, and a lot of wild life also perished. The trees and plant life that fell to the ground slowing buried it’s self, slowly over Millions of Years turning into Coal and OIL, which Nature used to form heat insulation, stopping the Earth from Exploding. Then 100 or so years ago Man started removing this Insulation and by the 1980’s we were drawing more and more. The Heat from the core has now found away out again and unless we stop removing it, nature will look after it’s self again, never forget Nature Will Always Look After It’s self.

Most of them, perhaps bar that last one which I’ve never heard before, are what the excellent Ben Goldacre describes as “zombie arguments”. That is, arguments which won’t die no matter how many times they are convincingly refuted. There are zombie arguments, of course, behind most conspiracy theories – those which support the efficacy of homeopathy, those which dispute the link between HIV and AIDS, and those which say smoking doesn’t lead to lung cancer. Sadly, it just doesn’t make any of them true.

But I realised yesterday evening that science is easily ignored by, well, the purposefully ignorant. So it can be far more effective to simply point out the short-sighted lunacy of the sceptics’ position, as Hugo Rifkind did brilliantly in last week’s Spectator:

[So...] You’re a freedom-loving libertarian. You’ve an inherent dislike of the the state coming along and stopping you from doing stuff, particularly when the state claims to have a moral case. If man-made climate change did exist, then, you’d be in a pickle, because that would mean this moral, preaching, overbearing state was actually in the right. That would be tough, eh? But what a remarkable stroke of luck! It’s all nonsense! So everything is fine.

Gosh, that sounds strangely familiar.

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.

Low carbon emissions remain the priority in Copenhagen, however, so the Chancellor must hope his promise of £160m for public and private investment in low carbon projects will slip nicely into the inside pages of tomorrow’s newspapers – along with the £90 million promised for European green infrastructure projects.

But these green measures look suspiciously like camouflage. As Benedict Brogan notes, most of the PBR was designed to stuff the Tories at every turn. The Chancellor’s environmental agenda is no different – if the Cameroons try to match it, they’ll risk losing backbench support. If they choose not to, climate change lobbyists (who will no doubt return from Denmark with renewed vigour) will pounce on the decision as evidence of Conservative anti-green thinking.

So how can the Tories respond? Well, there’s really only one option: in this economic climate, any green counter-attack will have to focus on measures that guarantee immediate financial reward to British families. The boiler replacement scheme – more than any of Darling’s other proposals – is good for the environment and good for bill-payers, some of whom waste £200 a year inefficiently heating their houses. Cameron must top it.

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.

But The Media Blog draws attention to the fact that, when using Twitter via an internet browser, you can’t post a tweet by pressing ‘Send’. You have to move the mouse to the “update” option, and click. Could young Fraser Brown really have achieved this feat? Seems unlikely, doesn’t it.

Is Sarah Brown’s Twitter account anything more than a PR exercise for Number 10?

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.”

And guess what? It’s already happening. As Met Office data presented in Copenhagen today shows, the past decade has been the warmest on record. Even miserable 2009 will be the fifth warmest year since the 1850s, the figures show.

This is how climate change occurs. Not in days, weeks or months – but over years, decades and centuries. The relatively stable global temperature patterns since 1998 are just part of the natural cycle, in other words, but the overall trends are far more frightening. As Pearce cautions, “once natural cycles move back to a warming phase global warming will go into overdrive.”

Unsurprisingly, there are those who doubt the reliability of the Met Office’s data. I don’t entirely blame them – the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) helped to put them together, andClimategate has undoubtedly damaged that outfit’s reputation.

As with almost all the science supporting climate change, however, it corresponds to other, independent research. Specifically, in this case, to that of the USA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Will any of that help to silence the pub bore? Judging by my email inbox, not in a million years – and certainly not in fifty.

Originally published on my Telegraph blog:

Just half of Britain believes in man-made climate change, a Sunday Telegraph poll has revealed. The figure didn’t surprise me in the least. Over the past week I’ve been deluged by climate change misinformation on this blog and by readers’ emails: “facts” which are based on hearsay, bullshit which is repeated until it is thought true, and crank opinion disguised as expert analysis. The public is understandably confused.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, Right-wing climate change deniers are not entirely to blame for this. Yes, the Mr Strangeloves of this world have attempted to warp the bad science to suit their politics. But it’s the Left’s alarmism which has also helped to undermine the most important issue of our time: Al Gore, among others, has proven that climate porn only damages the debate.

And yet: as I write this, ten thousand people have come together in Copenhagen to debate the future of the planet. That’s right, delegates from 193 countries – scientific experts, politicians, representatives from NGOs, climate journalists, not to mention the President of the United States - will decide the best approach to combat man-made global warming. It seems fair to ask, then, whether the “flat-earthers” - as our Prime Minister referred to them on Friday – really pose any sort of threat?

Tragically, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. As we’ve seen recently in Australia, attitudes towards global warming can seriously impact domestic (and potentially international) politics. Just imagine if David Davis had won his 2005 bid to lead the Conservative party – our political landscape would look dangerously different too.

So, what needs to happen? Well, first the investigation into theClimategate emails must be carried out thoroughly and efficiently. If data was spun, then results should be corrected – if the scientific process was damaged, it should be quickly repaired.

More importantly, the world’s best climate scientists need to take the campaign of misinformation head on. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. Obviously, this means free access to climate data for everyone. But it also requires a platform for climate scientists to argue with the myths (the IPCC website fails badly in that respect). None of this is difficult, either: I had dozens of emails last week telling me that 30,000 scientists were suing Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth. I had to spend a while on Google to find out it was utter balls, but clearly there should be an easier way.

Ultimately, it comes down to the basics. As the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean explains quite simply in his latest column, “since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has dug, squeezed and pumped half a trillion tons of carbon in coal, gas and oil from beneath the surface of the Earth, burnt it, and released it as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is inconceivable that this would not increase the warming effect and, indeed, it has done so.” Lean continues: “Despite all the lurid claims that a handful of present-day scientists have contrived to hoax the world and all its governments this basic science has not been successfully challenged in nearly 200 years.”

It’s time to hammer that home.

Global warming is the new EU. It’s an extremely contentious issue for Tories, in other words, and they need watch out that Labour don’t use it to divide the party. Just listen to Ed Miliband’s comments on the eve of the Copenhagen climate conference:

I think it is profoundly irresponsible for people who have held positions of high office such as Nigel Lawson [the Tory former chancellor of the exchequer] and David Davis [shadow home secretary] to be doing what they are doing.

The problem is that it is very dangerous because here is someone who is not a scientist saying somehow there is doubt about this and that the world is not getting warmer.

Politicans across the spectrum have a responsibility on this. The Tory party’s difficulties are a matter for them but we should not be casting doubt on this when there is no need for doubt.”

As Benedict Brogan noted yesterday, the Cameroons’ response to David Davis was characteristically robust. Tim Yeo (chairman of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee) said, “The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about [there being] a man-made contribution to climate change.” He’s right of course, but it’s surely a bad move to strangle the debate.

Part of the problem for David Davis and his fellow sceptics, is that for the Left and the Centre, global warming is more than an urgent problem. It’s also seen as an entirely altruistic cause – which is why, if I can be cynical for a moment, it has played such a key part in Cameron’s re-branding of the Conservative Party. Remember that “Vote Blue, Go Green” slogan? And the implementation of the green logo?

All this is very worrying for us climate rationalists. Because – even though the world’s best climatologists unanimously agree that man is causing global warming – it should not be taboo to debate what to do about it. Even James Hansen said yesterday that he hoped Copenhagen would fail. So we shouldn’t condemn David Davis and Nigel Lawson for questioning policy – science informs, but it doesn’t decide.

Guido Fawkes is being enigmatic this evening – either that or he’s fluffed a blog post, which declares without any explanation that “Ed Balls Went to Eton for a Term”. Could this be the embryo of a seriously damaging scoop for the Schools Secretary?

Here’s what we know already: back in June 2008, The Sunday Times revealed that Ed Balls’s father had taught at Eton in the early 1970s, and that young Ed had lived at the school for term. But he insisted that he was educated elsewhere:

“While my father was at the University of East Anglia he did a swap with a teacher at Eton,” said Balls, 41, as he queued for fish and chips at an event he was attending with his father in Norfolk on Friday. “For one term a master went to Norwich and we went to Eton – I didn’t go to the school itself but another local [primary] one just for that term.”

So, let me start a conspiracy (you know how much I like those): what if Balls’s father had taught there later on, and Ed had attended Eton aged 13 on a generous teacher’s bursary? Having been born in February ‘67, he would even have been in the same year as David Cameron (born October ‘66). Nah. It’s just too good to be true.

But Guido’s post has got me thinking, anyway, because the first barrage of fire in Gordon Brown’s pre-election class war arrived yesterday – the Tories’ policy on inheritance tax was “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”, he said, to loud Labour applause.

It’s a bit off, is it not, ribbing Cameron for a decision made by his parents probably before he was born? So why don’t the Conservatives point out that Balls, the (anti-Grammar) Schools Secretary, probably spent large chunks of his boyhood exploring Eton’s playing fields, too? And that if his family were class warfare types, his father seems to have switched sides.

As a consequence, Dr Katherine Rake said, children are no longer brought up by Mum and Dad, but by the family as a whole – grandparents, uncles and aunts, and whoever else is around to lend a hand. She calls it “communal parenting”.

But here’s where I disagree with Dr Rake. She says it’s wrong for governments to try to preserve the traditional family through state initiatives: “What policy-makers must not do is fall into the trap of investing large sums of money trying to reverse the tide of trends by trying to encourage more traditional families.” Traditional family life is over, in other words, and we should accept that there’s no turning the clock back.

Why should this have to be the case? All my instincts tell me that it is right to encourage families and traditional family life. My experience as one of four children in a happy marriage supports the idea, too. Why shouldn’t the state and the Catholic Church do everything they can to promote the family?

Since Dr Rake’s report is scientific, though, I’ll have to do better than that. So let’s take a quick look at figures which contradict her. According to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), for instance, young people are five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment if they grew up in a lone parent family, compared with children in “two-birthparent” families.

The think-tank Civitas has published research which says that single mothers are twice as likely to live in poverty, that divorced women are more likely to suffer psychological distress, that divorced fathers are more likely to drink and turn to drug abuse.

Their research also suggests: that single parent families are also more likely to live in poverty; that their children are more likely than others to end up dependent on state welfare; that their children are more likely to commit crimes; that they will struggle to make friends at school; that they will have low self-esteem and be unhappier than children from traditional families. Civitas concludes that fatherless families suffer from poverty, emotional heartache, ill health, lost opportunities and a lack of stability.

So don’t tell me that it’s wrong to “reverse the tide of trends” towards this. The traditional family is best for mothers, best for fathers and, most of all, best for children. And the Government is right to encourage it – tax breaks for married couples, and social welfare programmes which don’t force mothers to dodge marriage in favour of benefits.

Since my last Notebook on the fun of Halloween, there has been yet another sense of humour failure from a senior Church official. Mgr Perazzolo condemned The Twilight Saga: New Moon as “an explosive mix” of good-looking young actors involved in supernatural activities and said that the film’s occult imagery demonstrated a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message”. It is, in case you haven’t seen it, a teen vampire romantic film.

Again, I’m sure the monsignor had the right intentions, but he fails to see that his message is potentially far more damaging than the film. Children are not going to turn to vampirism after watching it. But, after hearing his verdict, would you blame them for thinking the Church silly and out of touch?

Blimey, I’ve just seen the Telegraph’s blog figures for the last week. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that James Delingpole is on the fringes of the global warming debate. He’s bloody not. In fact, as the (top secret) figures show, he’s amassing a vast army of climate change sceptics behind him, who think that anthropogenic global warming is a worldwide conspiracy between climatologists and politicians. Climategate – the furore surrounding some very dodgy emails exchanged by leading scientists at East Anglia’s CRU – has become their pièce de résistance.

The trouble is, when you loathe Al Gore and his climate porno buddies as much as I do, it’s easy to shrug it off. It’s just old Delingpole being his usual self, you think, no harm in that. Let him bash the Lefties as much as he likes. Maybe it’ll even stem the flow of climate change alarmism,stinking protest camps and weird polar bear adverts.

But what with the remarkable response to my post on Sunday and Delingpole’s weekly figures, it’s beginning to dawn on me quite how serious this all is: unbelievable numbers of Right-wing Brits and, yes, Right-wing Americans truly believe that global warming is a Left-wing conspiracy; that it was concocted by scientists with a hidden global agenda, corrupted by the skewed will of their puppeteering political masters. It sounds bonkers because it is.

Of course, it’s natural to distrust politicians. And there’s no reason to fear policy debate either: Are carbon credits a good idea? Should we cut methane before we cut carbon dioxide emissions? Should we erect unsightly windfarms which scar beautiful British landscapes? All these are valid questions which should be answered properly by those who decide national and international climate policy.

But to question the science behind manmade global warming? That’s a very different – and far more risky – game. So how on earth are people like Delingpole getting away with it?

The answer is sadly because myths are so easily spread online. (A favourite book of mine is about all of this.) Cranks and conspiracy theorists herd together, unchallenged by the mainstream who don’t view them as a threat. Well, it’s time to stop pretending the conspiracists don’t exist, and to take their bad science head on.

So, myth Number One: “Global Warming stopped in 1998.”

This is a classic cherry pick. Although the global mean surface temperature has consistently risen for the last century, coinciding with the rapid growth of manmade greenhouse gases, 1998 (as you can see from the helpful scienceblogs.com graph below) was an anomaly caused by “the strongest El Niño of the past century“. That’s NASA I’m quoting by the way – you know, that crazy lot who landed men on the moon, and who collate data on global warming entirely independently from East Anglia’s CRU.

Take the anomalous El Niño out of the equation, then, and the trend continues. Even more interestingly, the 1998 record is matched, anyway, by NASA’s records for 2005. The 1998 “record” does not disprove global warming.

But I’m not a scientist, as I’ve said before. I’m just an English graduate who recognises that the broad consensus among the world’s best climatologists is as follows: recent global warming is mostly caused by mankind’s emission of greenhouse gases. Delingpole, on the other hand, is slowly turning into a rather scary Dr Strangelove figure, whose bad science could help to usher the end of the world as we know it.

Except he, too, is an English graduate. So the Climategate crowd is lining up behind Mr Strangelove (BA). Does this worry no one else?

It was also slightly altered to include the word “truffles”, as one American tourist noted with great amusement. I reached for my ageing blackberry to get a picture, but the damn thing was too slow (yet another reason to get an iphone).

What do you reckon, have our MPs learned much in 2009?

This year saw the passing of Britain’s last World War I veterans, Harry Patch (aged 111) and Henry Allingham (aged 113). They were rightly honoured – praised for the courage they showed in their youth, and for what they represented: hundred of thousands of their generation, slaughtered on muddy battlefields almost a hundred years ago. Of course, we will remember them.

There’s a lesson to be taken from that remembrance, particularly for the people who find the pictures from the trial of the 89-year-old war crime suspect, John Demjajuk, disturbing. He entered the court in Munich today looking old, and frail and in some pain. He then lay on a stretcher, moaning and making faces as his trial began, as if to evoke sympathy from the court and from those witnessing the proceedings.

But truth is this: just as we honour the heroes of war so many years later, so we ought to punish and censure those who committed terrible crimes during them. I’m not assuming the man is guilty, but there is much evidence against him. And the prosecution will detail his suppsed involvement at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, where almost 30,000 Dutch Jews were murdered. His trial, therefore, could become a symbol of justice for victims of the Holocaust and its survivors.

There is nothing wrong with that symbolism, and there is nothing wrong with prosecuting the smallest cog in the Nazi machine. Even if John Demjanjuk was 112, it would be the just and right thing to do.

Imagine a Premier League of cranks and conspiracy theorists. Who do you reckon would top it? It’s a tough call. I think Holocaust deniers would lift the cup, with 9/11 truthers not far behind. But there’s a new lot on the rise, recently promoted from Division One: global warming sceptics. Fuelled by the hype surrounding Climategate, those who believe that climate change has nothing to do with mankind’s release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere have had a storming week – led, in case you hadn’t noticed, by our very own James Delingpole.

Well, brilliant though he is, Delingpole’s about as much of a scientist as he is the captain of the England rugby team. So I was delighted to readHugo Rifkind expertly ribbing him in this week’s Spectator:

Where has it come from, this sudden consensus among Britain’s right-wing punditry that there’s some kind of scam going on here? Yes, Delingpole, I mean you, and plenty of others, too. What gives you the right? It’s like your hairdresser diagnosing multiple sclerosis… I’ve watched it develop and spread over the past couple of years, first with amusement, then with alarm, and now with a sort of horrified panic. Guys, you’re not just fiddling while Rome burns. You’re actively going out and smashing up the fire engines. You’re terrifying me.

Rifkind is also spot on about Climategate: “So some of them are crooks. It’s like giving up on doctors because of Harold Shipman.” There’s no point, in other words, pretending the Climategate emails aren’t very dodgy. But that doesn’t completely nullify the science behind global warming, which overwhelmingly points the finger of blame at mankind. (It really, really does, by the way – and no British scientific body or international body of any standing disagrees. Forget East Anglia, we’re talking about Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale…)

It was something of a relief, then, to see David Cameron’s most recent email, which affirmed that the Tories haven’t been taken in by the rubbish spouted by sceptics: the Conservative Party rightly sees Copenhagen as a summit of “historic importance” and “an opportunity for the world to take bold action to deal with the real danger of climate change.”

But recent events – as well as the list of environmental best-sellers – show that the science hasn’t been successfully translated for the man on the street, and this is truly worrying. Even George Monbiot (Delingpole’s opposite number) admits that climate rationalists “are losing”, but he doesn’t recognise that the Delingpoles and Bookers of this world aren’t the only ones to blame.

We climate rationalists have to be honest: it’s also the Al Gore-style doom-laden depictions of climate change, the disingenous “climate models”, and the Left-wing myths which have helped to badly damage the climate change debate. It’s their nonsense that the sceptics and cranks feed off – climate porn, as Simon Retallack defined it in 2006, which unrealistically depicts climagte change as “an 18-rated horror film”.

So here’s what needs to happen. Lefties need to stop pretending that half of Florida is about to be submerged under rising sea levels, because no scientist really believes that to be the case. Righties, on the other hand, should stop ignoring the science, and should drop the conspiracy theories and the scientific pretence.

You know why this is so important? Because if we submit to the science, we can then properly start by far the most important debate: what we need to do about global warming. The Left is winning that one by a very long way indeed, and they’re laughing, because Delingpole and co. have led the Right to completely the wrong battleground.

The two latest scandals to hit the NHS have inspired me to make a confession: I was once an IT Installations Technician at a major NHS hospital. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? You’re right, it was. For two months (as a fairly broke student) it was my job to hunt down grimy, half-broken PCs and replace them with brand new ones. I had my trolley, my list, and I knew how to switch on a computer. That was that –  for £7.50 an hour.

In a way, it was an important job. Doctors and nurses were struggling with old equipment, and for the most part they needed the computer upgrades. But aside from being mind-numbingly tedious, those two months gave me an insight into why the NHS is such a drain on the public finances: it is without doubt the most inefficient and overmanaged organisation I have ever worked for.

It was on my first day that I encountered the NHS attitude towards work. I installed 8 new computers, and thought I should have done more. So when my boss asked, “How many?”, I stalled. “Erm…”, I said, trying to count them up. But she interrupted: “Well, as long as you’ve done five or six by the end of the day, that’s fine.” Crikey, I thought, is it always this easy? Chatting to my young colleagues proved that it really was.

In the warehouse, where I picked up the new machines, the work ethic was even worse. A friendly middle-aged man spent most of his mornings talking to random strangers in internet chat rooms. Although the phone rang constantly, I never once saw him pick it up. The management sometimes murmured about his laziness, but did they ever challenge him or check up on what he’d been doing? You must be joking.

I don’t know if the NHS has changed since my time as an Installations Technician. But recent findings would suggest not. There was no evidence of “poor nursing” or  “filthy wards” at the hospital where I worked, which The Care Quality Commission (CQC) found at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals, but I certinaly did see the other aspect they cited: lack of leadership.

The next government needs to sort this problem out. Hospitals fail without decent leadership, and the NHS must introduce a well-needed sense of competition. Cut out the form-filling and and bureaucracy: patients should be able to rate doctors and nurses for their quality of care verbally. Wards should be ranked according to cleanliness. And everyone – including IT installations technicians – should be set challenging targets and get held to account if they don’t work hard. If spending cuts and sackings are the only way of achieving it – and if that improves the care of patients – then so be it. Ring-fencing NHS spending, even if whiny NHS-lovers say it’s the right thing to do, isn’t going to fix our broken health service.

Catholics tend to ignore comic news stories about the Vatican, but they are becoming worryingly prevalent – and most of them are entirely the Church’s fault. The latest one reveals that Monsignor Franco Perazzolo of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture has condemned The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the second part of a teen vampire romantic fantasy series (I kid you not) which was released yesterday.

As Nick Squires reports, Monsignor Perazzolo said the film was an “an explosive mix” of good-looking young actors involved in supernatural activities. He also reckoned that the film’s occult imagery represented a “moral void more dangerous than any deviant message”.

Of course, the good Monsignor was no doubt serious and his message plainly filled with the right intentions. But really, how many teenagers who watch vampire fantasy films really turn towards the dark arts? Is his view that simplistic? The Vatican is actually self-harming when it censors childish fiction in this way. It makes the Church seem out of touch and lacking in any sense of humour, alienating far more young believers than made-up wizards or vampires ever would.

This isn’t the first time the Vatican has boobed on this front, either. Remember what Pope Benedict said about Harry Potter? As Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote that J.K. Rowling’s books involved “a subtle seduction, which has deeply unnoticed and direct effects in undermining the soul of Christianity before it can really grow properly.” As Damian Thompson noted later on, the Vatican did eventually recognise that the teenage wizard was not a threat to Christianity, and that the series of children’s novels and films was in fact about good triumphing over evil (a feat which the Church said “requires costs and sacrifice”). But the damage had already been done.

More recently, the Church continues to fret about Halloween, that “dangerous celebration of horror and the macabre” which could encourage “pitiless sects without scruples” as the Italian bishops’ newspaper, Avvenire, described it. The Vatican newspaper,L’Osservatore Romano, seemed to think along the same lines, this year quoting a liturgical expert who said that “Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

I’ve written in The Catholic Herald that this attitude is ridiculous. Sadly though, I’ve no doubt these stories will continue to crop up, damaging the Church’s reputation and turning off young Catholics even more than an ageing hippy strumming his guitar during Mass. It’s about time the Church saw films like The Twlight Saga: New Moon for what they are – tacky, but very harmless, art.

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

Here’s a story which didn’t last long on the front page of Guardian.co.uk: today’s Guardian/ICM poll shows that the Conservatives have a one per cent lead over Labour on the issue of lifting people out of poverty. It’s symbolic, reports Julian Glover: “Labour has lost its crown as the champion of the poor”.

This act of gross usurpation was finished off during David Cameron’s speech on the big society last week, when he claimed that the Conservatives where the “best placed” party to help the poor. But it began some weeks before at Tory Conference. Remember this?

“Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories… you, Labour: you’re the ones that did this to our society.

“So don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”

Voters appear to agree with Cameron’s first point that Labour is badly losing the fight against British poverty. But today’s poll seems to show that they also agree with the last one - that the Tories will fight the problem much harder. The key to understanding the change is surely in this Comment is Free article, where the Tory leader writes:

When the welfare state was created, there was an ethos, a culture to our country – of self-improvement, of mutuality, of responsibility. You could see it in the collective culture of respect for work, parenting and aspiration. But as the state continued to expand, it took away from people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, their families and their neighbours.

In other words, even though Labour is the party of the working man, the ideology behind the welfare state has been corrupted - so the working man often isn’t working at all. Millions of Britain’s poorest are now being chucked on the rubbish heap, where it is often more profitable, in purely monetary terms, for them to stay. The Tories have promised to overhaul the welfare system with Iain Duncan Smith in charge. This poll shows the beginning of a shift in public opinion towards his policies - the Cameroons will be delighted.

After watching a few England internationals at Twickenham, you can judge the mood of the crowd after about ten minutes of play. Sitting in the upper stands during yesterday’s match against Argentina, I quickly realised it was not one I would treasure – no thundering echoes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or Mexican waves, but loud boos as England sliced the ball into touch or, worse, simply dropped it. Any anomalous cheers heard by TV-viewers were because of Nike posters attached to every seat in the stadium: they became makeshift paper aeroplanes, and the best reached the pitch.

So, like mischievous schoolchildren, the crowd behaved badly because of boredom. The match was, as one commentator pointed out, “England’s most lacklustre performance in the last 5 years”. They won it, sure, but they certainly did not earn the victory.

Some of the back line deserved to be booed. Ugo Monye was a winger playing at full-back, but even so he struggled with the basics: three dropped high balls (under very little pressure) and a fluffed pass meant he had to be switched with Mark Cueto to play on the wing.

Once again, Lewis Moody and Jonny Wilkinson outclassed their team-mates. Wilkinson did miss some long-range kicks, but the posts were swaying in the strong wind and – as you would expect – he made up for it in tackles and expertly covering an often vacant full-back position. For his part, Moody set up England’s only try (scored by Banahan) with a very neat sidestep, and scrapped for possession like the “mad dog” fans know and love. He was key to the 16-9 result.

But I want to draw your attention to another 2003 World Cup winner: Martin Johnson. The former England captain looked deeply troubled during his post-match interviews. Even Austin Healey, who interviewed him for the BBC, didn’t get much out of his former colleague.

“It was difficult at times to watch,” Johnson said. “It was frustrating and we made lots of errors… At times the crowd had every right not to be happy. A lot of them kept with us and that was great. We will have to be a lot better than that next week against New Zealand.”

He’s right on all counts. But who did he think was to blame? “We were our own worst enemies. Guys don’t mean to make errors, but it’s the pressure and tension of Test rugby,” he told the BBC. Well, frankly that’s not good enough. Test rugby is pressurised, but England have to rise the challenge – their manager should be able to inspire them to play with confidence, even if emotional speeches aren’t his thing.

England spent too much of the first half kicking possession away. It’s the classic sign of a team who, lacking in self-belief, adopt a defensive mindset when instead they should be snatching at chances and holding onto the ball. Perhaps they had been briefed too cautiously against the wet conditions.

Whatever the root of England’s problems, one thing has become very clear indeed. England must revolutionise their game for the match against New Zealand on Saturday – because a repeat of yesterday’s performance would see them utterly thrashed. And Johnson would have to go.

David Dimbleby will not be chairing Question Time this week – the first he has missed in over 15 years – but he will return next week. John Humphrys will temporarily take the chair tonight.

David Dimbleby was injured yesterday in a minor farming accident. David was loading a bullock onto a trailer when the bullock reared resulting in David being briefly knocked out. He also received a cut to the head that required stitches.

David is recovering well. He attended hospital yesterday, but as he received a head injury, he is staying there for observation. This is just as a precaution, which is not unusual for a patient suffering concussion, and he should return home shortly.

David would like to thank the staff at the hospital and he looks forward to returning to Question Time next week. He said: “I haven’t missed a Question Time in over 15 years. Trust my wife’s bullock to take me out. I’ll be giving bullocks a wide berth in future.”

Ends.

Like some others, he criticises the lack of clear policy in what was essentially a speech about the philosophy of progressive Conservatism. But his conclusion about “Mr Audacious” is this:

This thinking needs to be taken much further, but it is a wonderfully bold beginning and Labour must rise to the challenge.

Labour’s normal stock response of trying to ridicule him simply will not do. Cameron’s aim is clear. It is to turn traditional party politics upside down. The time for jeering at Cameron is over. Labour’s survival will now entail outmatching his programme.

Could the government’s proposal of a “John Lewis ‘mutual’ system” for hospitals and schools be their first serious counter-attack?

Yesterday evening was, quite perversely, a reminder that David Cameron is not just a Prime Minster-in-waiting – he’s also Leader of the Opposition. His Hugo Young lecture on “The Big Society” set out the Conservative plan to reduce the size of the state. The Tories would foster social renewal in Britain by redistributing power and control “from the central state and its agencies to individuals and local communities” – this would, he argued, encourage stable families, allow for school reform, and end dependency on the welfare system.

As Easton was quick to point out, the Tory leader is indeed an Old Etonian. But if we must focus on Cameron’s class, it seems fair to say that his speech was more in the mode of Dr Arnold than anything else. Like the celebrated educationist, Cameron lauded the notion of individual responsibility – and how a small state should promote it. After commending this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, for her work on non- state collective action and community problems, he emphasised this idea:

I am confident that a major redistribution of power can really help us tackle our stubborn social problems and our three key approaches will be decentralisation, transparency and accountability. Our plans for decentralisation are based on a simple human insight: if you give people more responsibility, they behave more responsibly.

But Cameron also made it clear that a Conservative government would not expect social renewal to happen of its own accord. “Our alternative to big government is not no government”, he said, “some reheated version of ideological laissez-faire”. Instead, he argued that the state should “act as an instrument for helping to create a strong society.”

So, aside from the BBC, how did the Left respond to this  idea? Well, one answer is in today’s Guardian editorial. At first, the writer gives Cameron the benefit of the doubt: “…it is worth at least considering another possibility: that Mr Cameron means what he says. If so, does his case stack up?” The Guardian even acknowledges that “he has a point, surely, that the current government has been less successful than it hoped in increasing social mobility and lessening poverty.” But then the counter-argument arrives: “there was almost no discussion of money. It is as if Mr Cameron believes solving poverty is a spiritual mission that can be achieved through some sort of collective goodwill, and that it is mostly government that forces people to be poor.”

Polly Toynbee also entered the debate on Comment is Free. (The Hugo Young lecture was delivered at King’s Place, home to the Guardian – imagine the scurry back to the office after the speech was over!) Her argument was a slightly different one. She accused Cameron of being a “social policy butterfly”, saying that the Tory leader glided “intelligently across the difficult social questions while leaving not a footprint of policy behind him” and that the he relied on “Golden age-ism” and “a wishlist [sic] of social virtues to be magically instilled”.

It would be a cop-out to defend Cameron on the decidedly philosophical nature of the speech. (What did they expect, a never-ending Brownite list of policy announcements?). Instead, it’s time to recognise – in the words of one arch-Leftist – that Cameron is now “offering a fairly detailed prospectus”.

To promote marriage and stable families, a Conservative government would increase working tax credits for married couples. As Cameron pointed out, that would gain the poorest couples with children some £1500 a year, lifting 300,000 children out of poverty in an example of the Tories’ “aggressively pro-family, pro-commitment, pro-responsibility approach.” On schools, Michael Gove has announced the Swedish-style, non-selective New Academies – where parents will be able to set up state-funded, but not state-controlled, schools in their local areas. On welfare reform, a Cameron government would overhaul a system which presently pays people not to work.

It might sound magical to Polly Toynbee, and she might sniff at the notion collective goodwill. But to others the truth is becoming more apparent: Cameron’s Conservatives are serious about social justice – even if it won’t win them votes. They should be applauded for it.

Of course, it is far too early for justice. President Obama will today attend a quiet memorial service at Fort Hood, where the mourning continues (it should also be remembered that 16 of the injured remain in a serious condition in hospital). If he speaks publicly, however, the commander-in-chief will have to choose his words carefully: American law-enforcers believe that Hasan will be tried in a military court and that Obama will have to personally sign a death warrant – from a position of complete impartiality – if the Major is convicted and sentenced to execution.

This outcome would be disastrous. Not only for victims of the Fort Hood shooting and their families, but also for US justice and how it is perceived worldwide. If Nidal Malik Hasan is executed, he will become an Islamic martyr – he will be elevated by extremists to the level of Muslim sainthood.

There’s little point ignoring the evidence. Although it seems he acted alone, various facts point to Hasan being a Muslim extremist of some kind: witnesses say he shouted “Allahu akbar” – God is great – before opening fire; he was seen earlier in the evening in full Islamic dress (which his local shopkeeper noted was out of character); an Islamist rant by a man of the same name was found on an online message board; and as the Sunday Telegraph revealed, he had been in recent contact with a radical imam said to have been a “spiritual adviser” to two of the September 11 hijackers.

But in terms of his possible execution, it’s more important how Islamic extremists regard Hasan, rather than vice versa.  And the response so far from that quarter has been, as you might expect, abhorrent. From Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki – “the 9/11 Imam” – posted the following message on his website under the heading “Nidal Hasan Did The Right Thing”:

Nidal Hasan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.

As Nick Allen reports, al-Awlaki also stated that Hasan had carried out a “heroic and virtuous” act and that Muslims serving in the US Army should “follow in the footsteps of Nidal Hasan”.

It is an appalling fact that thousands of Muslim extremists across the world would agree with this sentiment. And it is for this reason that President Obama, if the opportunity arises, should waive the death penalty for Hasan, and ensure that he is instead sentenced to life imprisonment. It would be a difficult and a brave decision, but one that – even this early on – the President would be foolish to ignore.

Last week, Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposed reforms began to draw some closure to the affair. It’s true, some of his solutions were tough to MPs and their aged wives. But, given the seriousness of the scandal, none of them could be considered unjustified. So Sir Ian should have accepted the job in the spirit in which it was given to him – he should have agreed immediately to implement the reforms.

That is not his plan, however, as Rosa Prince reveals in today’s Daily Telegraph:

In a direct challenge to Sir Christopher, The Daily Telegraph can disclose that the new head of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority plans to launch his own rival consultation on the social networking website Facebook.

He is said to feel that using the internet and other mainstream media such as radio phone-in programmes would be more effective than the Committee’s more formal consultation, which involved a series of public hearings.

There was dismay last week when it emerged that Sir Ian had told Westminster insiders he would effectively tear up the Kelly reforms and formulate his own expenses regime.

Sir Christopher Kelly is said to be “flabbergasted” by this news, and it’s hardly surprising. As William Hague noted yesterday on The Andrew Marr show, “the public are pleased with what Sir Christopher Kelly has said and we have to accept it, not quibble about it, and we don’t really want somebody else to come in and quibble about it either.”

The Shadow Foreign Secretary is right. The public don’t want to quibble – and MPs, if they have any sense, shouldn’t want to either. So before Sir Ian organises a phone-in, perhaps he should ask the BBC for thatQuestion Time tape. He obviously needs to be reminded how the public feels.