Global warming swindle – whatever next

Martin Durkin's film which was shown on Thursday night was the first real attempt by the UK mainstream media to put the other side of the debate. While it may not have proved what is causing the earth's temperature to recover to the levels last seen during the medieval period it did show that CO² is almost certainly not the cause.

It is interesting to observe the way that the two most ardent advocates of 'wicked westerners as the guilty culprits' have reacted to the programme. None have been more committed to this proposition than the Guardian and the Independent. Coming to terms with the possibility that you may have been in the wrong is always most difficult for those who shout the odds the loudest.

The choice is to stick to your beliefs come what may and ignore the evidence, commence equivocation, or embrace the new orthodoxy. As might be expected, the Guardian's ingrained belief that all the world's ills can be laid at the door of western market capitalism is hardly likely to predispose it to start doubting its own propaganda.

Hence we find Guardian writer David Adam, their environmental correspondent, yesterday boasting that he did not bother to watch the film as he knew what it would say. His profile states that he left the field of chemical engineering as he preferred to write about other's research rather than carry out his own. Probably a lucky escape for us all. With that attitude you wouldn't want him designing an oil refinery would you?

Actually, he seems to know quite a lot about Martin Durkin's film so probably did watch it. Perhaps he got his friends to lash him to the chair while he plugged his ears, put his hands over his eyes and peeped through his fingers. That may be why he seems to think that the programme denied that global warming was taking place. It didn't. Its point was that global warming is taking place, along with global cooling it has taken place in the past and the sun was a much more likely candidate as the causal factor.

His claim that the programme set out to prove that there was a conspiracy among journalists to proselytise the human as villains thesis was also wide of the mark. What the programme did do was show just how the conjunction of vested interests can result in the propagation of myth. A process of which historians are well aware.

The Independent I suspect is changing its stance from one of outright champion of the humans as villains theory to one of sitting on the fence just in case they got it wrong. Even before the programme was aired it carried a piece by Geoffrey Lean which rehearsed both points of view while reporting the revelation of Al Gore's electricity consumption.

Then on Friday, Dominic Lawson, whose dad featured in the programme, was given full rein to expound his agreement with virtually all of the programme's claims. Even more surprising, Deborah Orr has added her two pennyworth by expressing the hope that climate change will go away.

What I wonder will the politicians do if it is the sun and not man-made CO² ? Tony Blair of course probably won't have to worry as he'll be gone. It won't affect Gordon who will only need to find another excuse to put up taxes. While the programme's revelations about Margaret Thatcher's role in starting the greenhouse gas bandwagon give him a handy scapegoat.

Cameron on the other hand could be in great difficulty. What with cycling to work one day a week, putting up silly little windmills and toddling off to Norway to get sexy with the wildlife, his environmental colours are nailed pretty firmly to the Greenpeace mast. Plus there are some nasty folk among the Tory ranks who would welcome a good excuse to stick the knife in. I know how they feel.