Was anyone watching Nigel Lawson on Andrew Marr's Sunday am TV programme? He was ostensibly there to review the papers, but clearly a deal had been done between his agent and the studio production team. Just before the end, up popped Marr with a bit of blatant product placement: "and you've got a new book coming out haven't you?" and up it popped into frame.
The former Chancelleor fancies himself as an alter ego to Al Gore and has become a lone voice of climate scepticism. "An Appeal to Reason" will tell us that science is still divided and that the planet really isn't warming at all. Lawson asserted that "the planet hasn't warmed at all since 2000" and that we have only seen "half a degree rise since 1900." Actually the precise figure is 0.76 degrees and with that we already have the evidence of melting glaciers, background extinction rates and disturned migration patterns. Tellingly, Lawson conceded that he had had to go begging at the door of an American publisher as "nobody over here would touch it."
I have ordered the book off Amazon: "know thine enemy" and all that. The few remaining contrarians are making much of the fact that 2005 and 1998 tied with each other as the warmest year on record and that we would have expected much bigger rises since 1998 if the theory were true. What he ignores is the TREND...the fact that since 1990 fourteen of the hottest years on record have occurred...he mistakes snapshots (weather) with climate (the longer term picture.)
More when I have read this book. But what do we make of his assertion that "some people have an almost religious passion for this subject"? I plead guilty, like many of us. If you cannot get passionate, in a religious sense about wrecking the greatest gift given to us, then what is the point?
