ENOUGH OF THIS GARBLED WARMER’S HYSTERIA

George Kerevan is an arse. It’s a bald statement I’ll give you that but one that needs little backing to sustain it’s credibility. A thousand heads nod throughout Scotland as readers ponder the innate wisdom of these five simple words.

Commenting on the latest storms to lash Scotland in the opinion pages of the execrable Scotsman newspaper, Kerevan confirms his status as such with a shocking article on global warming: “Enough of this 'global warming' hysteria”.

Now okay, this guy is a rent-a-gob designed precisely to enrage anyone with half a brain. He’s been in more parties than Paris Hilton and he’s changed his mind about all the big issues more often than Kinnock on coke. But this guy really is an arse.

Musing carefully on the big storms he writes that he is… “…highly suspicious of the fashionable view that extreme weather events are getting more numerous, or are worse than they used to be. Rather, it is a case of Mother Nature’s random (if savage) temper being recruited by some politically-motivated NGOs and some naive eco-warriors, to dramatise their ideological view that free-market, consumer economies are somehow evil.

Once capitalism was denounced for making everyone unemployed and poor. Now, with most folk in the West getting obese sitting in front of their television watching Big Brother, and former Chinese peasants building computers and motor cars, that story no longer rings true. So the intellectual malcontents have changed their line of attack and decided that capitalism is evil because it produces bad weather.”

Getting his head of steam up he continues: “Every passing rainstorm is presented as proof of the inherent evils of modern society. Thus (according to Friends of the Earth Scotland): "Global climate change is the single biggest environmental threat facing our world and extreme weather events like the severe flooding Scotland has faced in 2004 are a stark warning of what is to come."

Er, yeah George and it’s not just ‘extremists’ like FOE who say such things, it’s dangerous radicals like Tony Blair too you know!

His writing is like a template for bad writing, wonky science and generally tortured logic. Read the whole shebang if you like, but you get to the real nub of what he’s driving at by the end when he writes: “I accept that there has been a considerable build-up of carbon dioxide: that has been happening since humans started cutting down the primeval forests to farm. But I see no evidence for a runaway "greenhouse effect", certainly not enough to cripple the modern economy with needless taxes and regulations.”

Ah, I see Georgie Boy as long as nobody tampers with business eh?

Back to reality. As New Scientist says in its lastest issue: “Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves.”

Scientists now believe that the polar ice-belt may actually melt within the next fifty years causing a chain-reaction of further extremes. People like Kerevan will be exposed as a sad little half-wit. But by this time hucksters and business-whores like him will be of very little relevance as re-building a sustainable global society will be the urgent common task of humanity.

Who do you tink has more of agrasp of these issues – Georgie Boy or the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? Or take some of these (slightly) more credible views:


"The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be eliminated [within 50 years] unless much more substantial reductions in emissions are made than those envisaged [and will] probably be irreversible, this side of a new ice age." Jonathan Gregory, climatologist at the University of Reading, April 2004, commenting on the fact that upon melting, the world's second largest ice cap could raise sea levels by 7 metres, flooding most coastal regions.

"Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism." - David King, UK government chief scientific adviser, January 2004.

"The absolutely best case scenario - which in my opinion is unrealistic - with the minimum expected climate change... we end up with an estimate of 9% [of all species] facing extinction." - Chris Thomas, ecologist at the University of Leeds, January 2004, commenting on the effect of global warming on biodiversity.