We must have something to fight!

In the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, we were told that there was concern about an impending mini ice age. Strangely, that has been forgotten and temperature graphs now show no fall in temperature in that period, although they did at the time. I remember vividly the warnings about the imminent arrival of plunging temperatures.

In the late 1970s and in to the 1980s, the warning was about acid rain, and the UK was criticised for all the smoke blowing across the North Sea and killing the trees in Scandinavia. Continental Europeans were labeling us, and the Poles and Czechs, as the dirty men of Europe. I don't recall us doing anything, but the trees have stopped dying.

Now, of course, the problem is global warming, although some observers who haven't seen the supposedly more accurate adjusted figures are reporting no rise in temperatures for well over a decade.

What makes a self-righteous movement become shrill, on the basis of graphs produced from recorded data which we are not allowed to see?

Those of us who are not sceptical by nature, and merely wish to see data with an explanation of why it was adjusted, could be forgiven for being a little concerned at the impoverishment which we are about to heap on our children and grandchildren.

When I first studied statistics I was shown a graph of electricity consumption in the UK up to mid 1925s. It was possible to fit various trend lines, one of which, I remember, suggested that by the mid 1980s there would not be enough energy in the solar system to cater for the UK's energy demand. Which plotted trend line should have they adopted?

There is guilt,- the white man has ruined the environment and kept the underdeveloped countries in poverty. There is arrogance and pride - we understand the very complicated climate system so well that we can predict with exactness and confidence what will happen in the future. There is ambition, - we have the means and the calculations to control such a massive system to produce an outcome which is entirely predictable.

Which one explains the insistence of the AGW industry that anyone who dissents is either mad or bad, and should be denied air-time, publication facilities, data and debate?