Famed Norfolk explorer Richard Meek (recently placed an astonishing but well-deserved sixth in a list of people having the most influence on life in Nelson’s County) has brought a moment of great significance to my attention.

According to an item in the usually reliable Eastern Daily Press, he points out, Hingham’s disused Scout Hut is to be converted into a house.

This may not strike many people as a noteworthy phenomenon, but this is no ordinary Scout Hut. It is the very hut that provoked the launch of what became known as Hingham Democracy into an unsuspecting world.

Some years ago now, in the last century, there was a dispute over whether the hut should be sold or not. It was decided to take a poll of residents and to abide by the result – as long as 300 votes were cast. The result went the wrong way, but as luck would have it, only 299 votes were cast – once it was established that the 300th was a spoiled paper (I believe it was hanging chads, or something like that). So the referendum was set aside.

So impressed were New Labour by this pioneering new form of democracy that they adopted it wholemeal, which is why today everything is put out to consultation and the result of the consultation is ignored. It is not just New Labour who have benefited, of course. Most local councils fell in line, so did the health service and so did the Post Office. I think it is safe to say that Hingham Democracy is now the generally accepted way of proceeding when you know that your policy is unpopular or just downright silly. Which, it seems, is more and more of the time.

It would be nice if converting the hut into a house might signal a return to honest and fair-dealing in politics, but research shows that this is unlikely. Prospective owners should be warned what they are getting into. Some experts, including Professor V A R Scheinlich, believe that the wormholes and time-space distortion with which the Autonomous Republic of Hingham has been afflicted over the last decade are a punishment from God for the horror that Hingham has introduced into the world, but the Rev Nick Reppscumbastwick, a radical cleric tipped to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has gone on record as doubting this. Norfolk legend Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago blames great crested newts, which is consistent of him.

I personally feel it is significant in this context that a coypu has been sighted on Beeston Common, according to local correspondent and walker “Badger” Crusoe, who prefers to remain anonymous.

It is known that coypu always occur at times of great social change, especially in the Beeston area. But since the only previous coypu sighting in the last few years was in the Hingham republic, time-space distortion could be at the root of it.

Len “Kissme” Hardy, a consultant and comet-chaser now working in Beijing for the Olympics commentary team, believes the coypu sighting is a publicity stunt to promote the relaunch of the outstanding Norfolk martial arts film, Crouching Badger, Hidden Coypu. He is often correct, if a little tiresome.

You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Al Gore’s full-of-holes science film An Inconvenient Truth wins him a Peace Prize, but Channel 4’s counter to it, The Great Global Warming Swindle, “did not fulfil obligations to be impartial”.

Well, Mr Gore is certainly not impartial, and nor are the one-sided environmental lobby who have shamelessly manipulated the media and the public into believing that human-influenced global warming is a fact.

So successful have they been that regulator Ofcom decided that people were not misled by the Channel 4 documentary because “the link between human activity and global warming … became settled before the film was broadcast”.

The science is far from settled, of course. It is becoming less and less settled, with more and more embarrassing evidence coming to light – demonstrated by Lawrence Solomon’s iconoclastic book, The Deniers. Mr Solomon, a widely respected environmentalist, started out to discredit opposition to human-influenced global warming, but found so many distinguished experts in the relevant fields challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that he was forced to change his views.

Central planks of the global warming lobby have been blown out of the water, but mysteriously no-one takes any notice.

The famous Mann hockey-stick proof of unnatural warming? Shown to be misconceived. Drowning polar bears? They can swim, and they’re multiplying. Melting Antarctic? Most of it is cooling. Hurricanes? Nothing whatsoever to do with warming air. And to cap it all, the earth is actually cooling and will be for at least another seven years – maybe more, since solar physicists say the earth has entered a 30-year period of global cooling.

All the most recent evidence is against human-influenced climate change, but the green lobby have a stranglehold that they relish, because it gives them power. They must be delighted, and a little surprised, that we still believe. We have been brainwashed, and most of us love it.

Typical of the media desire to avoid challenging the green consensus is an article in the respected Eastern Daily Press last week, on the subject of economist Sir Nicholas Stern and his report, The Economics of Climate Change. It admits there was a nasty smell at the UEA while he was there, but this turned out to be some unidentified gas – and not carbon dioxide, for a change.

Still, possibly symbolic, thought the EDP does not explore this. Instead it headlines the piece “Together we can save the planet” – manifestly untrue – and concludes: “But if Lord Stern (as he is now, so it obviously hasn’t done him any harm) can see the chance to make the difference, then surely we must too.”

Hardly objective reporting, but it’s a signed piece by the environment correspondent, so I suppose that’s all right. Presumably no obligation to be impartial here, despite Lord Stern’s report being pretty much demolished shortly after its publication by distinguished environmental economists such as Dr Richard Tol. He details a number of major failings in the report, saying that the conclusions reached are twisted and absurd. He concludes: “The Stern Review can be dismissed as alarmist and incompetent.” Very strong words from an authority on the subject, so why are they ignored by the media? For those who are interested in both sides of the argument, there is much more in Mr Solomon’s book.

I am not saying that book – or the documentary – should be taken as gospel. There are mistakes in most things. No-one’s perfect. What I object to (when I’m not laughing) is the assumption that climate change orthodoxy is gospel, and that no-one is allowed to challenge it. Which is where we seem to be.

All the usual suspects welcomed Ofcom’s decision on The Great Global Warming Swindle and, quite typically, misrepresented it. To avoid wasting space here, details can be found at Climate Audit. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Except…except that top Russian scientists have now gone on the attack, saying: “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round.” Ice core results have always suggested this, though the figures have been typically twisted by green activists.

Russia’s signing up to Kyoto was purely political, says Oleg Sorokhtin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ocean Studies: “The Kyoto Protocol is a huge waste of money. The Earth’s atmosphere has built in regulatory mechanisms that moderate climate changes.”
In America influential physicists are suggesting that the IPCC has ignored the key question of climate sensitivity – how much the climate is influenced by levels of carbon dioxide. Not much publicity is given to the fact that this is likely to be “harmlessly low”, since the effect is logarithmic and not cumulative.

A paper published by the American Physical Society’s Physics and Society Forum plumps for natural variability of most of the earth’s recent warming and points out: “In the past 70 years the sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon and Pluto warmed at the same time as the earth.”

Climate change research scientist Dr Roy Spencer has similar views on climate sensitivity, backed up by recent evidence. His comments can be found here.

In Australia, Dr David Evans, a scientist who devoted years to measuring the country’s compliance with Kyoto, has come to the conclusion that “since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”

Well if you’re on the global warming gravy train, it seems you either keep quiet or misrepresent the evidence. And as for those, including the media, who back the establishment without knowing very much about the details, the words of pre-global warming US journalist Walter Lippmann seem appropriate: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

Following publication in the Eastern Daily Press of the “Power 100” list of the most influential business people in Norfolk, I feel compelled to give publicity to some of those who were overlooked.

I have come up with a Top Ten who would possibly not be described as business people but who nevertheless have had a huge influence on the county in recent years.

Number 10 is Ian “Sam” Aufmerksam, of the School of Penguins, Chess and Road Surfacing at the University of East Anglia. Working in an environment that has shown itself to be particularly gullible, Prof Aufmerksam has maintained a sceptical approach to bandwagons of all kinds, As a result he has received almost no funding, but his work in many different areas has been ground-breaking. His discovery of carbon footprints in a field near East Rudham was particularly significant.

Number 9 is the Rev Nick Reppscumbastwick, a radical cleric who has introduced all kinds of new ideas, such as God, to the Church of England. He is also known for organising protests of various kinds; many people are loyal to him. His plan to build a big new church next to the proposed Olympic Stadium at Reepham was turned down by the National Secular Society, but he is continuing the fight.

Number 8 is Mrs Hicks, the mayor of Little London, near Corpusty. Her attempts to twin Little London with Norfolk new town Whynge, which was uncovered by a fall in sea level and is sometimes on the coast, have proved largely unsuccessful, despite a mutual interest in road humps. Mrs Hicks has never revealed her first name.

Number 7 is Len “Kissme” Hardy, a whole food chef and comet chaser from Hindolveston, whose adventures in the empty quarter south of Bungay overshadowed his many other interests, all of which had a lasting effect on parts of the county, especially Pondhenge.

Number 6 is Richard “Volcano” Meek, perhaps the most famous of Norfolk explorers and certainly the most talented. His fearless meanderings have uncovered the live extinct small hill at Thetford and the unknown mountains of West Norfolk, among many, many other things.

Number 5 is the Wymondham Duck.

Number 4 is Dorothea Goodchild, a well-known fiancee who disappeared mysteriously and is believed to be dead or at a secret hideaway known only to Len “Kissme” Hardy.

Number 3 is a consortium of great crested newts, whose enterprise in transforming newts from endangered species into beneficiaries of special planning concessions nationwide is believed to have had a “huge” influence on the building trade. The consortium’s drive to dehumanise society has resulted in its infiltrating most forms of central and local government. Excessive paperwork and targets were two of its most far-reaching innovations. A recent triumph was the introduction of targets for traffic police, who can only achieve outstanding success by arresting people who are not doing anything wrong. This is regarded as a breakthrough in newt circles.

Number 2 is the noted scientist Prof V A R Scheinlich, whose expert analysis of the precise nature of the Autonomous Republic of Hingham, a landlocked sub-division of Norfolk, revealed the time-space distortion and wormholes that control its existence. He also publicised its pioneering form of “Scout Hut” democracy, based on inviting widespread consultation and then ignoring it. This was adopted not only by New Labour and most government organisations, but also by the Post Office and local government generally, and has had a vast influence on the lives of ordinary people.

Number 1, and a foregone conclusion in the eyes of most right-thinking people, is Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, a Norfolk legend now well into his second century. As well as fighting hard against the incursion of great crested newts, he has also found time to invent the cutting-edge software Houseago 99, and through his company Houseago Inc has diversified so intensively that he cannot remember what exactly he is doing. Based in Erpingham, he was for many years fiance of Dorothea Goodchild and is still the nephew of Mrs Hicks. He has been linked with missing baggage from Terminal 5 and several reports that have exonerated whoever made the decision in the first place.

The debate about a 20mph speed limit for Norwich rages on through various humps, chicanes and diversions – though not too fast, of course, since that would be dangerous.

A really quite astonishing number of letters have been published by the Eastern Daily Press expressing opposition for a number of good reasons. I hope this might encourage two key Conservative county councillors, who inexplicably abstained when the decision was made, to do a bit of representation of the people and make sure the scheme is removed from the agenda.

The man behind the idea – Professor Rupert Read, a philosophy lecturer at UEA and a Green city councillor – has shifted his ground. After claiming that 20mph was the will of the people, and the proletariat should dictate (I paraphrase), he discovered that the people weren’t actually behind him and wrote to the EDP quoting hand-picked statistics and claiming 20mph was really necessary so that cycling and walking were more appealing.

I myself walk a lot and do the odd bit of cycling here and there. Slower-moving cars would certainly not make me do either activity more, especially as one of the irritations for pedestrians is waiting for crawling traffic to pass so that you can cross the road.

I’m not sure that Prof Read has ever driven a car, because he seems to be under the assumption that having a 30mph limit means you have to drive at that speed. No, professor, it’s a maximum. Drivers adjust their speed to the conditions, except idiots, who don’t take any notice of speed limits anyway.

He also seems to think – and he’s not alone in this – that a driver travelling at 30mph will hit a pedestrian at 30mph. No again: this only happens if the driver has his eyes shut or his feet are paralysed. Only an appalling driver would totally fail to anticipate a potentially dangerous situation. Even if a child runs into the road completely unexpectedly, a driver will have at least some time to brake or swerve. A well-taught or experienced driver would anticipate the possibility in advance and reduce speed anyway.

It seems clear that Prof Read advocates 20mph because of his blinkered Green agenda. He does not question man-made climate change at all, despite his lack of qualifications in that area, and uses that belief to fuel such schemes as this. In fact, of course, going at 20mph instead of 30mph will have no impact on climate whatsoever, even if you accept the unproved notion that people are to blame for warming the planet.

That idea is promoted widely at the University of East Anglia and must be hard to resist if you work there. In the words of the EDP’s environment correspondent, East Anglia is “the heart of climate change research”, and it is essential to keep it beating. Recently the Building Research Establishment opened a branch at the UEA, joining “other pioneering organisations, including the CRed carbon reduction campaign, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Carbon Connections”.

Clearly any radical reassessment of the causes and effects of climate change would have dramatic repercussions on jobs and funding at the UEA. Still, no worries yet. BRE’s associate director of manufacturing said part of the reason for the move was to “take advantage of the students from the school of environmental sciences”. Well, quite.

Elsewhere some churchmen are showing signs of trying to assimilate the new religion of climate change into Christianity. The Bishop of Stafford has been labelled a “modern-day demonologist” (whatever that means) for linking scepticism about today’s received wisdom on the climate with the crime of child abuse.

Not sure what the Bishop was thinking about in making that bizarre link, but not all bishops are on the bandwagon. The Bishop of Chester who, unlike Stafford, is a scientist, made a measured speech in the Lords in which he said: “Climate science is a notoriously imprecise and poorly understood area … The history of science is littered with scientific consensuses that have come to be overturned one way or another.”

Needless to say he came under immediate attack from the usual suspects, led by knee-jerk specialists Friends of the Earth.

Still confused about Christianity? Chinavasion, a Chinese electronics wholesaler, has recently launched an MP3 player just for you. It’s shaped like a crucifix and comes preloaded with the King James version of the Bible. According to the Cross MP3 Player website, it is “making a fashion statement” and, at the time of writing, “unavailable”.

It certainly takes confusion to a whole new level.

The Campaign to Make Unusual People Exactly The Same (MUPETS) scored another victory when its Everyone Drive More Slowly Regardless branch persuaded Norwich City Council that a blanket reduction of city speed limits to 20mph was a good idea.

The branch, which consists largely of cyclists, has infiltrated the Green Party in the Norwich area and, by masquerading as recyclers, managed to obtain sufficient council seats to influence policy. The result is that city drivers face the possibility of being routinely overtaken by cyclists who, although erratic and prone to ignore the Highway Code, are not subject to speed limits at all.

The cyclists say it will make the streets safer – but as Mandy Rice-Davies might say, they would, wouldn’t they? People struck by bored or inattentive drivers who are deluded into thinking they’re magically safe because they’re driving slowly might not agree. Any halfway decent driver would not be driving at more than 20mph in areas where there was a high risk anyway, but hey, let’s have everyone crawling along wide empty roads.

The Eastern Daily Press, which you might hope would have some perceptive comments on the move, had a total insight failure and went along with the MUPETS line that if it’s slower, it must be safer. One yearns for the deep thinking of past leader writers like Colin Chinery, said Brigadier D I S Gusted of Little Walsingham.

Meanwhile, how do you save money on fuel? You’ve guessed it: drive more slowly. So says the EDP in large headline, quoting the Automobile Association – or rather abbreviating the AA drastically, which of course is what headlines are for. I know – I’ve written thousands of them, and they’re quite tricky.

A reader writing to the paper had a couple of interesting comments. Well, actually they weren’t at all interesting, but someone must have thought they were, because the letter made it to the top of the page. They are revealing, though.

“Those of us who wish to obey the limits,” she began, adding perceptively that they are “presumably put there for a purpose”. Yes, they are. The mistake is to think the purpose is intelligent. Keen observers with driving experience are tempted to think that many of the limits are random, but they’re not. They’re just misguided and poorly thought out. The purpose may be to raise money in fines, but I prefer to think that in most cases it’s to save lives. This is a worthy purpose and might work if the limits were correctly set; but they are so poorly applied that the likely result is contempt for speed limits by drivers generally – and therefore reduced road safety. Intelligently set speed limits might indeed save lives, but we’re a long way from that. Blanket 20mph limits take us further away.

All this is what give rise to the antagonism between those who “wish to obey the limits” and those who realise how inappropriate they are. Unfortunately, some people will always want to obey any rule, however ludicrous. Others want them to make sense.

Sadly the police are at present encouraging this antagonism by providing volunteers in towns and villages with speed guns to “help beat the problem of speeding”. One such volunteer, in Reepham, is quoted as saying: “It’s not about catching your neighbour out; it’s about educating them to drive safely.”

Even disregarding the amazing arrogance of that statement, speed guns never educated anyone. Pointed – as they will be – at careful drivers driving quite safely but rather above the inappropriate limit, they are a recipe for conflict. It’s only a question of time before someone gets hurt as a result.

Offending items

Those who wish to keep or impose draconian and inappropriate rules are unfortunately too often in positions of power nowadays. A lot of them seem to be organising wheelie bin collections, and therefore encouraging fly-tipping.

In Norwich a pensioner got a red card from the wheelie bin mafia for putting a coffee jar and tomato ketchup bottle in the wrong bin. It would have been too simple to help him by removing the offending items: no, they thoughtfully left the bin unemptied, in an environmentally friendly sort of way.

I have not yet had a red card or been sent off, but I have had bin problems. My wife and I signed up to the ￡35-a-year garden waste wheelie bin service. The first fortnight, no-one turned up to empty it. The second fortnight, we rang them them, and someone eventually came along. The third fortnight we rang four times before the council got round to emptying it – eight days late – despite a personal guarantee from one officer that it would be emptied four days previously. (She went on leave the next day.)

In the meantime it had been standing out unprettily at the edge of the pavement. When a young mother in Bolton left her bin out the night before for a 7am collection, it cost her ￡265 in fines and costs; in Nottingham fines and costs of ￡845 were imposed for leaving a bin “consistently” on the pavement. Oddly, Norwich City Council seems to have got away with it.

Bad enough, but when in the last instance my bin was emptied while we were out, we came home to find it in the middle of the pavement – a clear and present hazard to pedestrians. At least this is normal for Norwich: our recycling box is always flung down haphazardly on the pavement after it’s emptied, separate from its lid, and may stay there a considerable time before we can retrieve it. Slow, but still dangerous.

Towards the end of last week a research paper published in the journal Nature suggested that global warming would stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate.

The fact that this was published in a prestige journal means it cannot be ignored, although much of the ostrich-like media made a brave attempt. So what are we to make of it? The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change already admits there has been no warming since 1998, so that will make almost two decades without warming.

One of the reasons that Nature may have published this paper is that its authors say that global warming will resume after the lull. A spokesman for the Hadley Centre said predictions for a decade ahead would always to some extent be uncertain, which makes you worry about the BBC, whose website states that the UK temperature will increase by 4C by 2080. Well, I guess the BBC knows everything.

Meanwhile global warming enthusiast Ken Livingstone has been defeated as mayor of London in what was described by the London Evening Standard as “the first election in British history to be decided largely on environmental issues”.

Victor Boris Johnson is known for not following the party line on climate change, which is one good reason for electing him – not because of the view he takes, but because he is unafraid to stand firm against all the unpleasant and irrational pressure that comes from green lobbyists.

What kind of pressure? Well, the Green Party attacks his “dinosaur views”, among other things; and Jeremy Leggett of Solarcentury calls him a climate change denier and fears for the “physical security of the city under the assault of unmitigated global warming”, whatever that means. More understandably, and extremely revealingly, Mr Leggett also fears for the jobs “of all the hundreds who work for us”. Solarcentury is a company specialising in things like solar panels, in case you were wondering. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Jonathan Porritt, of the Sustainable Development Commission, had called for “all the environmental NGOs to rally the troops in London in a pro-Ken campaign” describing any victory by Boris as a “massive setback”.

All heartening stuff, but what does Boris say? “The hypocrisy of the Europeans over Kyoto is staggering. They attack America in hysterical terms, and yet the 15 EU countries have never come close to meeting their own eight per cent target for cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. They have not even agreed which countries should cut the most. If America were to meet its Kyoto targets now, it would require a cut of 30 per cent in emissions, and how, exactly, is that supposed to work in the current economic downturn?”

Clearly a dangerous man.

Incidentally, while on the subject of BBC objectivity or lack of it, I understand that it recently featured on its website a video showing two cars crashing when braking heavily after spotting a Hertfordshire Police speed camera van. The video was first shown on BBC News 24 to illustrate the alleged dangers of speeding. It later appeared on the BBC News website, but by the next day it had mysteriously disappeared.
The BBC told an interested inquirer from the Association of British Drivers that the video was missing from their website “because of a technical problem”.
However, the BBC did do viewers a service by showing climate change evangelist Dr David Viner at his least convincing (which is saying something) when discussing the need to sacrifice miles of Norfolk to the sea. Asked what he would say to the people living in the affected area, Dr Viner – of the University of East Anglia and now, heaven help us, advising Natural England – backed hastily almost out of shot while saying: “I’m not going to answer that.”
Can’t seem to find that on the BBC website either.

When is it all right to break the law?

When you’re a burglar? Probably not. When you’re driving a car? Definitely not, if I am to believe angry correspondents denouncing my views on excessively slow speed limits.

When you’re a cyclist, then?

Ah, that may be a different matter. A writer to Local Transport Today, the UK’s leading publication for the transport planning professional, suggests that “instead of focusing on the lawbreaking aspects of cyclists who run red lights and ride the wrong way on one-way routes, we should be looking at legitimising these manoeuvres”.

I don’t know which is more worrying: that someone should see nothing odd about pleading for people like himself – and only people like himself – to be allowed to break the law; or that the gentleman in question is a senior transport planner.

He feels that a cyclist flouting “most” traffic regulations is taking the same calculated risk as a pedestrian crossing at a “red man”, and this seems reasonable at first glance. But a pedestrian flouting the law in that way puts primarily himself at risk: cyclists popping up all over the place doing illegal things are a hazard to every road user.

Special pleading for cyclists is nothing new. I seem to remember that an anti-car campaigner in East Anglia seemed to think it was fine for him as a cyclist to drink a “pint or four”. But perhaps this latest idea is not so bad and should be taken further. If we let cyclists ignore red lights and cycle the wrong way down one-way streets, why not let car drivers ignore red lights when the way is transparently clear, and why not let them drive over lights-controlled pedestrian crossings at red when there is no-one about? Why not allow them to ignore speed limits when it is obviously safe to do so?

I’m all in favour of treating road users as if they have brains and can use them, but in my experience cyclists are no more likely to fall into this category than anyone else. What they are likely to do is call for more draconian laws against motorists while wanting permission to ignore the law themselves. Hardly fair. Or reasonable. Or safe.

Fly-tipping: a rubbish idea

Fly-tipping is one of the obvious blights on our society, and I think most of us are already aware of it. Nevertheless an evangelistic Norwich City Council is running a Fly-Tipping Awareness Week this coming month.

The idea, presumably, is to stop people fly-tipping. One of the most obvious ways to do that is to make it easy for people to get rid of their rubbish at the proper place. How does Norwich City Council do this?

Well, for a start they won’t collect bins with the wrong rubbish in them. They won’t collect bins where the lids are not fully closed or that are too heavy. Nor will they collect rubbish left next to your bin or on top of it.

And just in case you thought they were getting soft, they are planning to reduce the amount of waste they collect by introducing alternate weekly collections.

There is no excuse for dumping rubbish at the side of the road or at beauty spots. But Norwich City Council is working hard to create reasons for it. If they really want to reduce fly-tipping, it is easily within their power to do so. They should collect more, and be more flexible. Most residents want to recycle, but they resent petty rules and regulations.

After all, if you wanted to stop people parking on the street, you wouldn’t make car parks ridiculously expensive, would you? Oh, hang on, maybe that’s not a good analogy. Or perhaps Norwich City Council thinks it is.

Some people think I am obsessed by climate change. Of course you can’t help what people think: one rather deluded soul wrote to say I was carrying on a vendetta against the Eastern Daily Press – a newspaper for which I have a great admiration on the whole, and which pays me both a pension and share dividends on a regular basis. Needless to say, there is no vendetta. But the EDP is my local paper, and in commenting on local and national issues, my material often comes from there.

At present it is doing an excellent job in fighting to keep local post offices and safeguard the vulnerable Norfolk coastline. And I was delighted to see the environment correspondent include the phrase “global warming, whether man-made or otherwise” in an article the other day, which has to be a step in the right direction.

But for one step in the right direction, there are still plenty going the other way. One of the political parties that thinks it will do rather well in the local elections in Norwich wants to have a city council Department for Climate Change, which would be amusing if it were not so frightening. Norwich City Council can have about as much influence on climate change as it can on the orbit of Pluto. So what could such a department be for?

But the chances of the electorate asking such a question are slim, because like most people in this guilt-ridden country they have been bamboozled by the sheer weight of the assumption that we are to blame for climate change and must pay for it in some way.

One of the main reasons for this is the way the media generally have refused to give space to any other view. The BBC is particularly guilty, and an amazing incident has just exposed this.

Readers of this commentary will probably probably know that there has been no increase in global warming over the last decade. This could of course be part of a general trend, or a blip in the trend. No prizes for guessing which option has been presented to the public.

Nevertheless, the BBC website did carry a story earlier this month which had the headline “Global temperatures ‘to decrease'”. This referred to the prediction that this year temperatures would be lower, attributable in part to La Nina. The article mentioned that some scientists linked this with doubts about global warming.

Within a very short time this was challenged in an e-mail from a climate change activist called Jo Abbess. Full details of the exchange are available here, and they are worth reading to discover what depths such activists will plumb to make sure that readers do not get the full story.

In brief, she began by saying the BBC was misleading people and claimed it was “incorrect” for the BBC to say that a minority of scientists question whether global warming has peaked. She said “networks” making this claim existed, but they did not contain many “actual scientists” and “no climate scientists”. This is not true. Both actual and climate scientists are looking at the issue.

Commendably, the BBC refused to budge at first, and said there were no mistakes in its story. But Ms Abbess persisted. She said it was “irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics” (so presumably truth is irrelevant as long as the message is right). Later she said climatology was an infant science, dealing with “emerging truth”, though why you would want to accept what an infant says, I’m not sure.

She went on to tell the BBC reporter that “it would be better if you did not quote the sceptics” – so there goes free speech. If he did not comply with her wishes, she told him, “I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated”. As if this were not unpleasant enough, she concluded by psychologically manipulating him: “I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution unless you request I do not. They are like to want to post your comments on forums, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it would be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”

I find it hard to express how abhorrent this kind of pressure is. It would be nice to report that the BBC stood firm, but it didn’t. It caved in. The headline of the piece was changed, and so was the key sentence about the view of a minority of scientists. The reporter e-mailed Ms Abbess: “Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.”

Not only did they change “headline and more”, they did not change the dateline on the page to indicate that a change had been made. In other words, they were trying to avoid drawing attention to what they had done.

Happily, some of the original was later reinstated, including the headline, but this does reveal what lengths people who are really obsessed about climate change will go to to disguise the truth from the public. And when I say the truth, I do not mean the truth that is necessarily the complete opposite to what Ms Abbess believes: I mean the truth that there is a debate, real climate scientists are involved, and not all the evidence supports man-made, ongoing global warming.

See here for another devious BBC approach to a similar subject.

An exciting front-page headline in the Eastern Daily Press yesterday – We Can’t Hold Back Mother Nature. Has the penny dropped at last? Is the UK going to abandon all the petty little carbon reduction measures that are making not an iota of difference to the climate but costing taxpayers thousands and raising nice little sums for astute businessmen?

Sadly not. This is a story about abandoning some 25 square miles of coastal land in Norfolk to the sea – one of Natural England’s more cuddly ideas, and one which the Government, based in London and with little support in coastal Norfolk, is happy to go along with. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn is quoted as saying: “Nature is more powerful than all of us.”

Mr Benn was born in London, lives in London and represents Leeds, so he probably doesn’t have to worry too much about eroding shorelines, and it’s not surprising if he’s under misapprehensions about the effect of failing to defend the coast. But he’s also under a misapprehension about what causes loss of land to the sea, linking it to climate change and sea level rise. Or maybe, like so many other people, he’s using those two bogeymen as an excuse for feeble policy-making.

We know that in the last few years global warming has stopped. Or do I mean paused? Last year was noticeably cooler. Naturally this is written off as a blip, and we are told to look at the big picture – the overall trend. The blip argument was not used much when we had what were alleged to be the hottest years on record, but of course that’s different.

Years vary, for various reasons – few of them understood. Rising sea levels, as the IPCC admits, are not likely to be significant this century and for centuries to come, but we should not be surprised at changes. Look at a map of Roman Britain, and you will see much greater incursion by the sea. This was unlikely to have been caused by gas-guzzling chariots or coal-fired power stations on the Appian Way.

Yes, Hilary, nature is more powerful than all of us. But why do we choose to spend money on things we can do nothing about – changes in the global climate – but refuse to spend far less on something we can actually affect? Coastal defences may be expensive, but they are not prohibitively expensive. And they do work, unlike futile measures to reduce carbon emissions.

A letter from one of the EDP’s more alert readers, published the same day as the Benn article, suggests that for the Government to take action, we need to discover that the threatened coast is home to protected species like great crested newts, rare orchids and endangered butterflies. So go out searching, guys, and let me give you some encouragement. I’m told that while the north Norfolk village of Paston is obviously expendable as far as people are concerned, no sea incursion will be allowed there – because the Great Barn by the church is home to a rare colony of barbastelle bats.

Alarming the punters has always been a lucrative source of income for newspapers. There’s no news like bad news.

So it is no surprise to see the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press – the biggest selling English regional paper – going to town on the threat to local post offices and to Norfolk villages abandoned to the sea. These are worthy subjects for a local newspaper, and both post offices and villages have my unconditional support. The EDP is doing a fine job in exposing their plight.

The post offices are in what might be described as a unique position, in that their probable demise is not being attributed to global warming. Possibly the connection has been overlooked. The cliff-edge villages of course are a different matter, though they share with the post offices a quite different and common cause: idiotic government policies. It might be amusing to speculate how the Government might top these two dunderheaded plans – perhaps they have a secret scheme to abolish villages altogether and pile everyone into a few massive metropolises where they can be carefully monitored.

If so, the EDP will tell us in due course. But at the moment they are just telling us that the villages are threatened because the sea level is rising. Those of you fortunate enough to visit Great Yarmouth on a regular basis will no doubt have noticed this. Others may suspect that erosion is an ongoing natural process that has nothing to do with rising sea levels.

But what about the Antarctic? The EDP thinks we should be concerned about this – so much so that it devoted pages two and three to the collapse of an ice shelf not long ago, together with a huge picture of what appeared to be ice of some kind. This is not the kind of thing one sees too much around Norfolk, but of course it could be heading this way. And it’s all to do with climate change, isn’t it?

Well, no, actually it isn’t. Ice does this sort of thing all the time. The ice shelf involved is one of many surrounding the Antarctic Peninsula, which itself represents just two per cent of the Antarctic land mass, and a still smaller proportion of its ice mass. I am told that “the seven ice shelves that have already disintegrated on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a combined area 1/55 the size of Texas”.

In the last 50 years the Antarctic as a whole has been cooling. This is not mentioned much by the media, which also rarely points out that melting ice shelves do not add an inch to sea level, because the ice is already floating. If sea level rises this century it is unlikely to be by more than the eight inches observed in the 20th century. Even the IPCC says says sea level will rise by 20ft only after several millennia.

So let’s get protecting those threatened villages (and their post offices). And while we’re at it, let’s note another couple of significant pieces of news that don’t seem to have reached the pages of the EDP – or many other parts of the media.

First, the earth is no longer warming. From 1998 it has actually cooled. From 2002, it has plateaued. This is not in dispute: the IPCC admits it. Since carbon dioxide levels are still increasing this is a bit puzzling – but only if you blame CO2 for warming.

Second, data from NASA’s Aqua satellite, launched in 2002, has supplied data that contradicts computer climate models and reveals that the climate has actually been compensating for the increased carbon dioxide and limiting the greenhouse effect.

Some might think this is worth bringing to people’s attention. But of course if global warming is not what has been suggested, a lot of people are going to look pretty silly. Some might even lose their jobs or businesses. The highly dubious practice of carbon trading would be rendered pointless, and environmental correspondents would have a few things to explain.

Headlines like “Switch off to save the earth” and pointless gimmicks like Earth Hour, in which gullible people switched off their power for an hour as some kind of symbol, would be exposed. Needless to say, Norwich was one of the first UK cities to sign up for this ludicrous event, though when I looked out of the window during the critical hour I didn’t see an awful lot of darkness. Maybe people have more sense than they are sometimes credited with. I suspect they do.