Another blow for the climate change lobby: Prince Charles
Friday, 5th February 2010
This has been an appalling couple of months for the climate change lobby and now there’s been another, sickening, blow – which some of you, undecided in the debate, may well feel is the clincher. Prince Charles has waded into the issue, eviscerating climate change sceptics. “Please be in no doubt that the evidence of long term and potentially irreversible changes  to our world is utterly overwhelming,” he said. Hell, you could almost see them, at the IPCC and UEA, cringing, banging their heads against their computers upon which they were, at that very moment, making things up. Just what you need, the support of Prince Charles. It came on the same day that he said he didn’t agree with The Enlightenment.

The debate has changed, enormously so, since last Autumn. The BBC, for example, is slightly less likely to dismiss climate change deniers out of hand as being whacko right-wing headcases – even when they sometimes are whacko right-wing headcases. Admissions of error from the IPCC and the UEA have effectively re-opened a debate, which is a good thing.

It still seems to me rather more likely than not that man-made climate change is taking place and that even if it were not, the procedures demanded of us are necessary anyway for a whole host of other reasons. But the world is beginning to grip hold of the fact that science cannot be divorced from the personal or political imperatives which impel (or fund) its inquiries. Nothing is quite so simple as a “fact”. The less trident and cocksure the pronouncements from the climate change lobbyists, the more agreeable the rest of us may be to their demands.