If any of your idiot friends still believe in AGW, make them read this letter

James Delingpole
If any of your idiot friends still believe in AGW, make them read this letter

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: January 4th, 2010

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Lord Monckton has written a letter about AGW to Kevin Rudd, offering to give the Aussie premier a private briefing to correct a few misconceptions he may have on the subject.

It’s a corker. (You can read it in full at Watts Up With That.)

On the “conspiracy theory” that the AGW apparatus is really about creating world “government”.

Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.

On the lessons we ought to have learned from the Europe

The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.

On the economic illiteracy of ocean-going knobs like Lord Stern

Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money as the trillions which today’s scientifically-illiterate governments propose to spend on attempting – with all the plausibility of King Canute – to stop the tide from coming in.

On the crime against humanity that are biofuels

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million.

On the 114 Aussie governmental junketeers who flew to Copenhagen

Are you, personally, and your advisers, personally, and your administration’s officials, personally, willing to make the heroically pointless sacrifices that you so insouciantly demand of others in the name of Saving The Planet For Future Generations? I beg leave to think not. At Flag 1 I have attached what I have reason to believe is a generally accurate list of the names and titles of the delegation that you led to Copenhagen to bring back the non-result whose paltriness, pointlessness and futility we have now rigorously demonstrated. There are 114 names on the list. One hundred and fourteen. Enough to fill a mid-sized passenger jet. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary – and perhaps one from each State in Australia. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts when a tempting foreign junket at taxpayers’ expense is in prospect, why, pray, should the taxpayers tighten theirs?

and – most damningly of all, I think – on just how little effect the Copenhagen Accord would have on “climate”, even in the impossible event that everyone bothered complying:

We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv –

Business as usual: ΔT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C°

– Copenhagen Accord: ΔT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C°

= “Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020: 0.02 C°


One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars.

Yes, that’s right. If every country in the world went to the vast trouble and expense of implementing every last detail of the Copenhagen Accord, it would put off the rise in global warming over the course of one decade by one fiftieth of a degree.