Author Archives: Tim Lenton

We are coming close to a time when our entire civilised and relatively liberated way of life is threatened needlessly by people who feel themselves morally superior and therefore qualified to control us.

I have always tried to avoid criticism of individuals, because I am aware that we all have faults and make mistakes. But it is impossible to express the disquiet I feel effectively without personalising it. So let’s invent a man who has high principles, is academically in the top few per cent of the country, and who is by all accounts a pleasant and agreeable chap.

Let’s call him Rupert Read. He is a professor of philosophy, a Green Party councillor who failed to get elected as a Green MEP and is now standing for Parliament. By the time you read this he may have been elected, or he may not. (Not, in fact. He failed even to beat the UKIP candidate.) He is a vegan, a former hunt saboteur and, he tells us, a “frequent participant in (animal rights) demos over the years at places such as Huntingdon Life Sciences”.

What is there in Dr Read to object to?

Well, let’s start by observing that academic brilliance does not necessarily coincide with common sense and good judgement. It can do, but it is by no means the same thing, as those who head up university schools will quickly tell you.

What about high principles? On Dr Read’s website he quotes J K Galbraith, who says: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

He clearly intends this as a barb directed at his natural opponents, but it actually fits himself very well. He should perhaps listen to Oscar Wilde: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

This is precisely what Dr Read does. It is presumably why he got into politics. Although many electors may find his stance on hunt sabotage and animal rights demos morally dubious because it seems to put animals before people, he does not hesitate to promote his views, and he has done so on Norwich City Council as a “key mover”, in his own words.

I am not suggesting for a moment that Dr Read is a violent man. He is not. I am suggesting simply that he has very strong ideas which he would like everyone to adopt. There is nothing wrong with that, until he is in a position to make us adopt them, or to change our lives to suit him.

Many readers will still feel, I’m sure, that they have no problem with what Dr Read advocates – and they are glad that, thanks to him, Norwich is a “foie-gras-free city”. Saving animals from pain or even indignity is a laudable thing, as long as you fully understand the implications, and have discovered precisely what is going on, and what the alternative is.

Nothing wrong with being a vegan either, except of course that it is extremely uncompromising and makes little allowance for other views.

But Dr Read now has bigger fish to fry. He has climate change. He used to insist on calling it global warming, but now he has reverted to climate change, because the world has not warmed in the last decade – an uncomfortable fact, but one that has not affected Dr Read’s stance at all. Holy writ is, after all, holy writ.

According to him, and in line with Al Gore, the leader of his religion, the debate is over. He has taken up a fundamentalist view with regard to climate change, which is that we caused it, and we can put it right. I suspect both these statements are probably false, but of course Dr Read is entitled to believe them. What he is not entitled to do is say the debate is over, because it is not.

If you say the debate is over, that automatically disenfranchises everyone who disagrees with you. That is not democracy: it is dictatorship. It means that the Government can put seriously ineffective windfarms wherever they like – or in Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s worrying words, “persuade people to accept them” – and introduce all sorts of taxes and demands that nibble away at the freedom of the individual, and the individual’s castle, or the heating of it.

Dr Read, it seems, is not too concerned about the freedom of the individual in this area. In a letter to his local paper this week he writes: “I would persistently call for Britain’s economy to be placed ‘on a war footing’ now to create a million new jobs in the Green sector and to safeguard our kids’ futures. This would both help raise employment and stabilise and tackle dangerous climate change.” (Eastern Daily Press, July 14)

The phrase “war footing” is a worrying one. Could it mean creating a situation where the Government can do more or less anything it likes, regardless of the voters, to ensure the country’s survival and “our kids’ futures”? If so, it’s rather scary.

Dr Read has made a number of promises on his website, centred on his being politically “clean, positive and honest”. He promises not to “scaremonger in ways that may frighten the most vulnerable members of our society”. His motives may well be pure (he is a pleasant chap), but if so he is deceiving himself: in the eyes of many he is scaremongering about climate change, and he certainly frightens me (though not because I believe him).

Is he being strictly honest in saying that we can stabilise and tackle climate change? Whether such a feat is even possible is very much open to debate, but it suits Dr Read to say that it is possible – and for nobody else to be allowed to say that it isn’t.

Last month an expert on polar bears was prevented from contributing to a meeting designed to produce one of many orchestrated reports that are being prepared to stoke up public alarm in preparation for the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

He has been studying polar bears for 30 years and is an acknowledged expert, but unfortunately he has observed that polar bears numbers are not declining, but are much higher than they were 30 years ago. He was told that his views were “counter to human-induced climate change” and “extremely unhelpful”, and his presence was not required. The bear facts did not bear examination, you might say.

I wonder what Dr Read thinks about polar bears. One thing is certain: he would not eat them.

Scare stories and strange predictions like those seen in many areas last week will become “the norm” in the years ahead, an expert warned last night, as newspapers forecast once again that climate change will affect “every aspect of our lives”.

Parts of the country were hit last Tuesday by ferocious summer storms not unlike similar storms that have occurred over the past half century and, possibly, beyond. Tonnes of hailstorms fell from the sky, together with acres of newsprint and enough ink to cause the sea level to rise by an estimated “huge amount”.

The most comprehensive research yet into wild predictions made by local newspapers forecasts many more outbreaks of freak news stories, based on nothing more than computer models fed by a series of assumptions presented as fact.

Tim Lenton, who has lectured at the University of East Anglia and writes frequently on climate change, warned that summer rain could decrease by more than one fifth and winter rain increase by 16%. On the other hand, it might not. Equally, icebergs could be a hazard in parts of the Wensum, and there was a real risk of temperate periods leading to a catastrophic lack of interest in the weather as a whole. He added that more rain was likely to fall on the wettest days, and it would probably be dry when it was not raining, except in coastal areas.

“Climate change is going to transform the way we live,” he added. “We will be reading fewer newspapers, which is dangerous for those employed there. But we will continue to believe that freak weather is unique to the last 20 years, despite years of evidence to the contrary. Older people who point this out will continue to be accused of not caring about future generations, despite the fact that many of them have grandchildren who they care very much about.”

Meanwhile newspapers have revealed that there was a heatwave in 2003, and 2000 people died. Of course, 30,000 people die from exposure to cold each year in the UK, according to the BBC, but this is not a useful statistic. It is not caused by greenhouse gases, after all. Fears that roughly 0.1 per cent of people writing in local newspapers know anything about climate change are, if anything, likely to rise in the years ahead.

Readers may have seen that I wrote a letter to the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich on the subject of climate change. It read as follows: “Dear Sir: Councillor Rupert Read castigates Alan Dale for not engaging with UEA’s ‘expert climate scientists’. Mr Dale has to my knowledge spent a huge amount of time trying to get UEA’s well-funded climate scientists to respond to the evidence he presents them with, but has had no success at all. The debate about climate change is far from over. Thousands of experts worldwide dispute man-made climate change.”

Well, that’s what appeared in the paper. What I actually wrote was: “Cllr Rupert Read castigates Alan Dale for not engaging with UEA’s ‘expert climate scientists’. Mr Dale has to my knowledge spent a huge amount of time trying to get UEA’s well-funded climate scientists to respond to the evidence he presents them with, but has had no success at all. While I recognise that Cllr Read, who also works at the UEA when he is not engaged in politics, is likely to take his colleagues’ and friends’ word for it, if he were to look further afield he would find that the debate about climate change is far from over. Thousands of experts worldwide dispute man-made climate change. I am sure that this view would receive short shrift in some places, but people who say the debate is over, and those who do not respond to criticism, must be greeted with some suspicion. Just who is in denial here?”

Obviously not a good question.

There is a television series called Numbers, in which a mega-brained young professor of mathematics assists the FBI in solving crimes by using statistics, algorithms and formulae that predict what criminals are going to do.

Its appeal lies partly in the attractive characters, but also in the idea that life should be like that: there should a scientific answer to every problem. In real life, people with normal-sized brains use numbers differently – primarily to justify their own agendas.

For reasons that may not be unconnected with money, the road safety industry has over the last few years been anxious to attribute a very high percentage of accidents to excessive speed. Figures like 30% – sometimes even 50% – have been, and still are, bandied about, although the Government has admitted that speed is a contributory factor in only 6% of all accidents, and 13% of fatal ones.

Since these are government figures, we tend to distrust them, and the Government is not likely to be downplaying the role of speed, so maybe the true figure is even lower. Despite this, the drive towards lower speed limits continues, fuelled by the disproportionately loud voices of those who don’t like cars anyway and want you to walk, cycle or bus everywhere. A big advantage to driving is speed; so they naturally want to make driving slower.

Certain road safety groups also have an obsession with speed, and a more-than-willingness to be free with their use of figures. Brake, for instance, confuses driving speed with impact speed when it claims that a car travelling at 35mph is twice as likely to kill a child as one travelling at 30mph. The statistic actually refers to impact speed, which is quite different: a car travelling at 35mph is unlikely to hit anyone at 35mph unless the victim suddenly materialises in the road. There would be braking and an attempt to avoid collision. The impact speed is likely to be much lower.

It could be counter-argued that a driver travelling at 35mph would be that little bit more alert, and without aggressively policed speed limits (yes, I mean cameras, fines and points), he might not be looking at the speedometer instead of scanning the road and pavements ahead for possible hazards.

But no such arguments are admitted, and we have recently been told we live in the speed camera capital of Europe. The Department of Transport justifies itself by saying that its policies have cut deaths or serious injuries by 17,000 a year while making about £100 million in fines.

Why include serious injuries in these figures? Well, “serious” is pretty hard to define, and the actual figures for serious injuries depend on who has been collecting them. Also, it muddies the water, which can be useful.

The independent pressure group Transport Watch on the other hand blames speed cameras for increasing fatal accidents, to the tune of almost 10,000 deaths since their introduction in the 1990s. It argues: “Between 1980 and 1995 UK road deaths were falling 7.1% a year. But since speed cameras arrived, deaths have fallen just 2.8% annually.” The other thing that has fallen, of course, is police patrols. There are 4309 speed cameras in the UK, and just 1904 police traffic patrol cars.

Clearly at least some of these numbers contradict each other. The problem with numbers is that they deceive us into thinking they are magical: they can solve everything, or reveal everything. Arguments based on common sense take a back seat because the numbers are somehow mysteriously heavier: they carry more weight.

The real threat to road safety is not speed: it is bad driving. Police patrols are better able to deal with this – when they are there. But mostly they are not.

The average motorist does not drive recklessly, but nevertheless has his collar felt and is made to feel like a criminal. Meanwhile those who drive with their eyes glued to the speedometer survive, but are a much bigger risk to other road users. The very few dangerous speeders seem to carry on regardless.

And many drive dangerously slowly in the current climate, either through incompetence or fear, or not realising that road safety is improved by those who don’t dither when joining or leaving faster traffic; who don’t hold up queues of cars that clearly would like to progress a little more quickly; and who don’t move snail-like into the outside lane about three miles before they intend to turn right.

Yes, but what are the numbers? The fact is, they are just about anything you want them to be – as you can see by clicking here and here. Happy motoring.

Global temperatures have not increased in the last decade. But it takes more than that to stop the global warming bandwagon, which will probably keep on rolling until it hits a glacier somewhere in Kent.

The Prince of Wales is anxious that we should combat climate change before it’s too late. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says climate change kills 300,000 people a year, and it’s time to stop polluting.

Why should we not believe them? They are distinguished people. The problem is that their expertise is in other areas. I don’t really blame them: they are surrounded by insistent and loud advisers – the sort of people who tell MPs what they can claim on expenses.

The count of 300,000 victims of climate change has all the hallmarks of a figure plucked out of the air. If by some fluke it is roughly true (how on earth would you find out?), it has probably always been true. Climate change does affect people, and the climate always changes: as Heinrich Heine might have said, c’est son metier.

If we can do something practical to alleviate the negative effects of climate change, then we should. But to think we can stop it happening is a delusion, and a very expensive one.

Incidentally, you can be fairly sure that anyone who describes carbon dioxide as pollution cannot be relied upon. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas vital to our survival. What could be described as pollution is soot, and a recent study has shown that soot could be responsible for 18% of global warming when it actually occurs. Until now this had been overlooked. I wonder what else has been overlooked.

Still the bandwagon rolls on, and last week’s elections saw many candidates flaunting their green credentials, little realising (until they got the results, perhaps) how many people they put off voting for them. Our local Green Party candidate attacked UKIP for having MPs who were climate sceptics (whatever that means), only to find that they had polled many more votes than he had.

So there is hope. Sadly the churches have been told they should “push the climate change agenda” as one of the top moral issues of the day, showing how comprehensively they have lost touch with their own heritage, theology, people in general and Jesus in particular.

But scientists of various persuasions and specialties are not all pushovers. At a recent gathering in Cambridge, David Henderson – a former Treasury official, professor of economics and critic of the Stern Report – issued a strong warning about the way the global warming bandwagon is powered.

“I have come to believe that the widespread trust in the IPCC is unwarranted,” he said, listing a number of criticisms about the IPCC’s handling of data and evidence – and alleging that those who managed the IPCC process had a “pre-commitment to the urgency of the climate issue” that prevented them from assessing objectively. His impressive criticisms of the process, and other comments, are available here.

Today’s received opinion on climate change is not well founded, he says, highlighting three characteristics of it: overstatement, overconfidence and the blind acceptance of a flawed advisory process.

UK Government departments and funded institutions working on climate change are, he says, almost entirely staffed by what might be termed “believers”. No surprise there. “I doubt whether among them there is even a handful of professional staff members who could be identified as even mild dissenters.”

He added that the IPCC was “neither objective nor authoritative”, and an alternative framework was needed – “less presumptive, more inclusive, more professionally watertight and more attuned to the huge uncertainties that remain”.

The huge uncertainties that remain don’t seem to worry global warming enthusiasts too much. A paper contributed to the journal Climatic Change says that such uncertainties – that is, the possibility that predictions are quite wrong – should not prevent governments from acting. It concludes that “if robust strategies are in place, minor inaccuracies in climate change modelling and predictions will be of little concern”.

In other words, the facts don’t matter. Well, unfortunately, that’s exactly what we thought.

Andrew Motion, who until last month was the UK Poet Laureate, has drawn attention to the poor knowledge in schools of the contents of the Bible. Judging by some of the bizarre answers given in quiz shows such as The Weakest Link, or even University Challenge, he is right to do so. And his observation might go some way to explaining why almost no-one nowadays knows what Christianity is, beyond a vague notion that it’s to do with people being good. (In case you were wondering, it’s to do with people being generally bad, admitting it and being forgiven.)

Mr Motion is concerned primarily that children are missing out on the historical and literary aspects of Christianity – the same Christianity that has been the motivation for countless works of visual, verbal and musical art over many centuries. It continues to motivate artists, of course, though not politicians so much.

Militant atheists may abhor any mention of faith in schools, but most of us would think that depriving pupils of knowledge and telling them what to think is not the optimum educational solution.

Such atheists seem to think that teaching Christianity is the same as evangelism. It is not, of course, and if the only way atheists think they can “protect” children from Christianity is by promoting ignorance, then they can have little confidence in the strength of their position.

It is surely significant that Muslim parents on the whole would rather their children attend an overtly Christian school than a secular one. I leave you to work out exactly what the significance is, and whether Christian parents would be equally happy to see their children attending Muslim schools.

Certainly there is concern among many Christians at the increasing influence of Muslims in our society – with the BBC installing a Muslim as head of religion, and the Koran, so I am told, being placed on a higher shelf than the Bible in courtrooms. The BBC is “known” for being happy to broadcast attacks on Christianity, but treading softly, softly around Muslims. But is that the issue here? It might be worth asking whether the new head of religion is good at his job, and whether he is the best candidate available.

As far as our secular society is concerned, one of the current battlegrounds is homosexuality. Christians hold different views on this, and some of those views are quite forceful. But should they be able to put these views in public debate? The Coroners and Justice Bill, which is presently in the House of Lords and has received heavy criticism there, seems to allow the interpretation that they can’t, which is a disturbingly anti-democratic stance, however the phraseology seeks to disguise it.

The often-shrouded point is that to oppose something, you don’t have to hate its proponents, or encouraging others to hate them. The thinking behind the Coroners and Justice Bill seems to be that in certain areas, everyone has to think and say the same thing. In what way is this different from Orwell’s vision of 1984?

Of course if you happen to be homosexual or gay, or both, then it would be nice if everyone was like you. (It would also signal the end of the human race, of course, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.)

Canterbury, which might be regarded as the “home” of English Christianity, was recently accused of not being gay enough. Apparently, there are no gay bars there. But why should there be? Are there any heterosexual-only bars? Any white-only bars? I should hope not. The point of equality and diversity is that we should be equal and diverse, not pushed into exclusive ghettos, or bars.

Instead of logical thinking, there seem to be huge irrational leaps going on. The fact that it is wrong to express hatred of homosexuals does not mean that it is essential to promote homosexuality. I don’t hate crocodiles or hamsters, but that doesn’t mean I have to promote them. I may feel that the level of crocodile and hamster activity in the world is about right.

But whatever stance Christians take on controversial issues, Christianity has something special to offer, which is forgiveness, love and acceptance – even to those we find completely wrong-headed. No, I don’t mean homosexuals; I mean absolutely anyone we disagree with. So I was delighted to read the restrained response of the Rev Sally Theakston, a team rector in Norfolk, when British National Party representatives attended one of her churches and then launched an attack on the worship there and on the Church in general.

She did not use the opportunity to attack BNP policies or advise people not to vote for them, however much she may have been tempted to do so. Instead, she said: “I am sorry that members of the BNP do not find worship at St Faith’s helpful for their discipleship.”

Way to go, Sally!

A head teacher makes all the difference to a school. So much so that if you are checking a school out to see if it is up to your child’s exacting standards, you will do well to ask the head if he or she is thinking of moving on. Once a head goes, the school mysteriously changes. It could leap over a cliff, or it could suddenly come alive with the sound of learning.

The best heads are not those who adhere desperately to local or central government criteria in a bid to totter up the league tables. The best heads have minds of their own and are willing to circumvent all the newt-like centralised stipulations to make sure their children get the best teaching and the best environment to work in. They are inspired, and inspiring.

So why are the best heads paradoxically desperate to retire? Because of the rubbish heaped on them by whichever “education education education” government happens to be in power. All the form-filling, the budget-bending, the health-and-safety nitpicking, the equality and diversity demands, the constant government “initiatives” and above all, the social work. Bit of a clue when the education department of a county council suddenly becomes children’s services.

Anyone with any intelligence just wants to put the whole lot in a bin bag and throw it at the nearest politician. Or ignore it, of course. But it does wear you down – which is why, as I said, so many great heads are keen to retire. And why, incidentally, so many deputies who would make great heads take a look at what is lumped on their own head’s heaving desk and decide that discretion is the better part of valour, so “thanks, but no thanks”.

How has this ludicrous situation come about? Primarily a lack of trust for those with expertise. As in so many areas where the Government feels it has to intrude, we end up with people with no special knowledge at all telling the experts what to do. It is as if a journalist were to draw up a plan for building a nuclear reactor and then insist that his plan was followed by the engineers. Result: nothing, or extremely dangerous fallout. Just what has happened in schools across the country.

But Britons in positions of authority love telling the masses what to do. No-one follows those ridiculous European directives more closely than us. Where the French would laugh and the Italians would pass by on the other side, we slavishly try to follow it all to the letter.

Perhaps that is why the Government is so enthusiastic about measures to combat climate change. It is not that there is any way of affecting climate change (this planet is bigger than all of us); it is just a glorious opportunity to put into operation all kinds of directives, warnings, demands and taxes – and best of all, to tell people how to live their lives.

So the United Kingdom becomes the only country in the world to set legally binding carbon budgets, in a meaningless bid to slash carbon emissions by a third within 11 years.

Environmental expert Bjorn Lomberg, of Copenhagen University, described this as “pure wishful thinking”, adding: “No country in the world has ever managed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by a third in just 11 years.”

But it will be worth it, won’t it? Well, you tell me. Government advisors say it will cost each household £600 a year, and apparently the effect will be to reduce world temperatures by one-three thousandths of a degree by the end of the century. And that’s if carbon dioxide really causes warming, which is by no means certain.

The other problem in schools, apart from the tendency of great head teachers to retire, is the perceived failure of those who are not academically able. There is no real reason why academic expertise should be more highly prized than the ability to, say, build a house. But for some reason our entire schools system has been based on exactly that strange misjudgement.

In a bid to change this, it became fashionable in some areas to concentrate all efforts on the less academically able, to bring them up to speed on paperwork. But that didn’t work either. What happened was that those who were good at arithmetic, writing and reading were deprived of showing their true potential, and those who had no talent for paperwork made little progress either – and through league tables and assessment tests they were deprived of demonstrating what they really were good at. Everyone was a loser.

The same is true for people who are good at driving. They find that all the measures taken by those in authority are aimed at someone else: namely those who are not very good at driving but good at something else – it doesn’t matter what. A transport expert once told me he had never travelled with a highways engineer who was a good driver, so perhaps they’re aimed at highways engineers. On the other hand, maybe he was unlucky.

So those who enjoy driving and who do not cause accidents find that everything is against them – most obviously road humps and speed cameras. Exceeding the speed limit is such a tiny cause of road accidents that a visiting Martian might think that we had lost our minds. There are undoubtedly bad drivers who exceed a safe speed for the conditions: most of them are inexperienced or habitual law-breakers.

These problems could be tackled by better driving instruction and more police patrols. But no, we have speed limits set lower and lower, so that even the good drivers become bad drivers, losing concentration and constantly taking their eyes off the road to check the speedometer. With cameras deliberately set to catch offenders rather than improve safety, the bad drivers go on being bad, and the good ones get fined for driving at a perfectly safe speed.

Job done. We have the statistics to prove it. Of course we have. We always do.

The UK car industry is in trouble. According to the BBC, the number of new cars produced in the country fell by a record 59% in February this year, “as the motor industry continues to suffer from weak demand”.

Why anyone should be surprised at this is beyond me. The Government, encouraged by environmentalists, has gone out of its way in recent years to make motoring more and more unpleasant, and more and more expensive. Levying higher tax (and sometimes higher parking fees) on cars that do not meet certain pointless emission requirements has made those cars unsaleable. Drivers are forced to stick with what they’ve got, where in more enlightened times they would be looking for a new model.

But it is not just cash. What used to be called the pleasures of motoring have been reduced constantly by spurious road safety measures. In an attempt to curb those very few drivers who habitually drive too fast, highway authorities have resorted to the clumsiest of measures – road humps and speed cameras – frustrating and often fining untold thousands of good drivers while failing to do much about the really dangerous ones.

The latest bright idea from the Government – reducing all rural single carriageway speed limits to 50mph and enforcing them with average speed cameras – is another step along this foolish path. One hopes it may prove a step too far, and that public consultation will overturn it. But sadly the Government is dominated by environmentalists and others who believe that driving is anti-social at any speed. In 1995 the Friends of the Earth said “speed limits should be made very low and rigidly enforced to take all the glamour out of motoring”, and this miserable view seems to have prevailed.

What is repeatedly overlooked is that good driving is a skill, and that if you don’t enjoy it, you’re probably not doing it very well. To discouragement enjoyment of driving by sticking people in painfully slow queues is to produce a generation of drivers who have little idea what they’re doing – a fact that becomes painfully clear in an emergency.

The Sunday Times pointed out: “The principle of proportionality is increasingly going out of the window. The majority of people…are being asked to constrain their behaviour because of a tiny minority of wrongdoers and careless people. Universal punishment is a lazy, bad solution.”

The same paper points out that if you can cut accidents by reducing speed limits to 50mph, then presumably you can reduce them further by reducing all limits to 30mph, then 20mph… I suggest a man with a red flag may be the answer. Or maybe other factors are important?

Meanwhile the Government would like to introduce road pricing and fixed penalties for a range of driving offences, as well as unelected quangos to decide on transport policy. Oh, and of course that 20mph limit is already with us – in the residential streets of many towns and cities. On some streets it’s needed; on others it isn’t.

If drivers were taught to drive properly, the only speed limits necessary should be advisory ones. As it is, a mass raising of speed limits by 10mph in rural areas would see a vast improvement in the quality of driving.

I was glad to see that in one area – parking – the misguided efforts of environmentalists to make life difficult for motorists have been seen for the nonsense that they are. Essex County Council has decided to provide more parking on new developments. Earlier Government “attempts to reduce car ownership by limiting the amount of off-street parking spaces provided within residential developments” have resulted unsurprisingly in a mess of cars parked on unsuitable streets, with what are euphemistically termed safety issues as a consequence.

Hats off to Essex. But what was that about “Government attempts to reduce car ownership”? Couldn’t have anything to do with the UK car industry being in trouble, could it?

It’s hard to know who you can trust when it comes to transport. This week a Norfolk over-60 wrote to his local paper to complain that he had got rid of his car on the basis that he could use a free bus pass for all journeys, but the Government was now planning to reduce the times when he could do so. Perhaps the Government would like to buy him a new car and give the industry a bit of a boost.

*Could it be worse? Click here.

Don’t worry: Richard Dawkins probably doesn’t exist. I myself have never seen him in the flesh, and nor has anyone I know.

There is by all accounts a figure who claims to be Richard Dawkins, and who goes about proclaiming himself to be infallible, but there is no proof of his identity other than a few documents of doubtful authenticity.

Some people claim to have heard his voice, but it is likely that they have heard some other voice, or indeed a voice entirely within their own heads.

Books exist that some claim were written or directly inspired by him, but on investigation these are found to contain fanciful ideas about areas totally beyond anyone’s experience, such as the events of pre-historic times. It is likely that science will in due course discredit these ideas.

Those who find themselves worried by observations attributed to Richard Dawkins should consider putting an advertisement on the side of a bus, as this will undoubtedly make them feel much better.

I love my planet. Given the choice of which planet to be born on, this is almost certainly the one I’d have chosen. Mercury is too hot and Jupiter is, well, too gassy. Saturn runs rings around you, and Venus and Mars are close, but not close enough. Further out in the Solar System, it’s probably too cold even for the Green Party.

Having been allocated this planet, I am happy to do the best I can for it. This does not include turning all my electricity off for an hour because the World Wildlife Fund tells me to. Why not? Partly because it’s a complete waste of time – why not spend an hour picking up litter? – and partly because the WWF is a wrong-headed institution misusing its money and its membership for a political agenda which has little to do with wildlife.

One of the things I like about this planet is that wildlife survives. It will survive however the climate changes. Which particular animals and plants prosper will depend on which turns the climate takes, but wildlife will not vanish. It is, actually, amazing. I think we should interfere with it as little as possible.

The WWF’s stance on climate, however, is part of a worrying trend. In fact it has gone so far that it has ceased to be a trend and become something of an epidemic. A correspondent who has given over 40 years of service to environmental and conservationist causes wrote recently that in the past a balance was always struck between different interests. He adds: “However there was always potential for distortion, via the power of conservation organisations with large memberships. If they had wanted an activity stopped, their members could have been recruited to apply sufficient pressure to influence political decisions.

“While this never happened during my tenure, it would appear that these tactics have now been adopted.”

He was writing specifically about the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and their “breathtaking cynicism” over wind farms – urging the Government to build them everywhere except on RSPB reserves. But his remarks apply equally well to bodies like the World Wildlife Fund. And remarks by politicians like Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, reveal this for what is when he says it has become “socially unacceptable” to oppose wind farms. The idea that it is socially wrong to hold certain views on the environment smacks of a totalitarian outlook on life which certain organisations and people are enthusiastically fostering and which, if unopposed, will ultimately destroy our freedoms.

Certain charities are making climate change a big part of their agenda. Christian Aid, which laudably fights poverty and oppression, muddies the waters by trying to persuade its supporters to sign a pledge to reduce their carbon footprints. Tearfund, which also tackles poverty and injustice, urges us to take up a carbon fast. Friends of the Earth has abandoned all balance and majors on climate change scaremongering. Yes, we can withdraw our support from these charities, but we can’t avoid their influence on our lives. And of course they foster the kind of hatred that is seen in radical protest.

None of these organisations is scientific. They are at root political. They have taken a view on climate, under the influence of the kind of people whose talk outweighs both their experience and their qualifications – not to mention their judgement. And of course they get all the publicity, because that’s what they’re good at. We are more in danger of drowning in a sea of global warming guilt publicity than from any rise in sea levels.

But despite all that, and almost completely unreported, there is what has been described as an “explosion” of sceptical scientific voices. Over 700 scientists from all over the world are now signed up to the US Senate Minority Report of Dissenting Scientists (nearly 60 in the last three months), and in case you think this is not many, the number of scientists who authored the media-hyped 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change Summary for Policymakers was 52.

“I do not find the supposed scientific consensus among my colleagues,” said noted Earth Scientist Javier Cuadros last month.

“Unfortunately climate science has become political science,” said award-winning Princeton University physicist Dr Robert H Austin. “It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomenon which is statistically questionable at best.”

Meanwhile peer-reviewed studies are making it past the barrier set up by global warming enthusiasts. Dr Anastasis Tsonis in a recent article found that “the Earth is undergoing natural climate shift”. Dr George T Wolff, a top atmospheric scientist, says: “There is no observational evidence that the addition of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have caused any temperature perturbation in the atmosphere.” And chemist Dr Mark L Campbell writes: “The sky is not burning, and to claim that it is amounts to journalistic malpractice. The press only promotes the global warming alarmists and ignores or minimises those of us who are sceptical.”

At the very least, there is a serious possibility that human-generated carbon emissions do not cause global warming. The implications of that are staggering for many and should be investigated thoroughly. But the publicists, the marketing men, the politicians, the media and the activists have plumped for the scare story, created a high-speed, armour-plated bandwagon, and everyone is jumping on board, simply to avoid getting mown down. Is it too late for them to get off? They seem to think so.

Editorial staff at my local newspaper, the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press, are facing the loss of over 50* jobs. This will hit hard at a human level, with redundant journalists and ancillary staff losing their livelihood at a time when their skills will not be in huge demand elsewhere. Of course it is the jobs that are redundant, not the people, but such rationalising is not of much practical help, though it may patch up failing self-esteem.

There is still some hope, with prominent local personalities asked to step in and plead with management, a Downing Street petition started and a Facebook group also called into being. The call is to maintain quality journalism at a local level, and the fear is that a reduction in staff numbers will result in loss of quality.

This is a real danger. Managing director Stephan Phillips says he is keen to promote quality journalism and to give editors freedom, and I am sure he is sincere in that. Whether he will be able to deliver it with a much reduced staff remains to be seen. Many experienced journalists doubt it. *In response to public comments, the number of jobs threatened has now been reduced to 34.

The National Union of Journalists’ representative on the paper stresses the importance of “well researched newspapers put together by professionally trained journalists”, and as a previous editorial training manager and former chief sub-editor on the EDP, I would want to echo that. But the circulation of the paper has been falling steadily, and I can’t help wondering whether part of the reason for that is, first, a reluctance in recent years to carry out that research quite so rigorously and, second, a willingness to echo all too easily the establishment view on critical issues.

Because the EDP still has excellent journalists, it does many things very well. By most standards it is a first-class newspaper. But in the area of policy making it has failed to provide a forum for fair discussion on such things as climate change and road safety. At a time when it is impossible to find a political party that will voice doubts on the official lines, the press – and particularly the local press – should be a sounding board, and the EDP has not fulfilled that role. In fact it has sided with people who want to squash discussion. This is frustrating for readers, and readers can stand only so much frustration.

It is by no means alone in this attitude. I single it out purely because it is my local paper, and I know quite a lot about it. I have friends working there, and I would rather no-one lost their job. But I do think a bit more cut and thrust, lateral thinking, maverick outspokenness and rigorous research is more likely to get and retain a committed readership than a bland, lifestyle-centred approach.

Naturally I hold these views only because I have an antisocial, unthinking and unethical attitude to life in general. Or so some would have you believe. A Guardian writer on the environment equates people sceptical about the causes of climate change with Holocaust deniers. A new film designed to attack sceptics is called Age of Stupid. Is this reasoned argument? It is not. Does it raise suspicions that the global warmers’ arguments are not watertight? Yes it does. Yet the media is awash with uncriticised scaremongering from an assortment of scientists, economists, politicians and a Prince of the Realm. Not to mention the so-called environment correspondents who do little more than regurgitate green propaganda.

Over the past few years, we are told, emission of carbon dioxide has risen hugely. Melting of ice has increased enormously. So why has global temperature not risen at all for nigh on a decade, and why have Britain, Canada and many other parts of the world just experienced the coldest winter for many years? Why cannot we see any sign at all of sea levels rising and Norfolk sinking into the sea?

Today scientists yet again call on us to “act now or face climate catastrophe” (the Daily Telegraph’s words). And again politicians, surrounded by on-message advisers, will not question it for a moment. Television will proclaim it; teachers will teach it. But the fact is that if things are as bad as these scientists claim, no action will have any effect, and the only thing worth doing is planning for redistribution of populations.

Some say that even if predictions are wrong, it is worth taking precautions. But what if, as some scientists claim, the world is cooling? Then any precautions aimed at mitigating warming will leave us in a worse state when we experience cold. After all, as transport authorities this winter would have told you, if you expect milder winters, you don’t stockpile salt to grit roads. If you don’t heat houses effectively, old people die.

More and more, climate change takes on the look, not of science, but of a rather unpleasant fundamentalist religion. The Scientific Alliance suggests that “it seems more than coincidental that the rise of environmentalism has been at a time when there has been a big drop in religious adherence”, and if you want to read a well-argued analysis of that view, click on Newsletters here.

Perhaps we all need something to feel guilty about. Christianity, of course, is about forgiveness, but that’s never been popular with judgmental people like us. Guilt is the new black.