Climate Breakdown Denial Lobby In Full Cry In UK - Guardian

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"Climate change sceptics now have cause to worry about what is happening in Britain. Blair, despite failing to reduce carbon emissions at home, has placed the problems of climate change at the top of the agenda during his presidency of the G8. He is also putting diplomatic pressure on Bush to improve America's environmental performance. Robert May, president of the Royal Society, has warned that the UK will be the next ideological battleground for the doomsayers and the gainsayers. Connections have already been established between some British sceptical organisations and their US cousins. The UK-based Scientific Alliance, which organised the meeting of sceptics in London last month, recently published a joint report with America's George C Marshall Institute, a think-tank which has received donations from Exxon.

The report claimed to undermine the ories of climate change. Exxon has also contributed $50,000 to the International Policy Network (IPN), headquartered in London. Key personnel at the IPN have connections with the Institute of Economic Affairs, Britain's leading conservative think-tank, as well as the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, whose global warming expert is Myron Ebell, President Bush's climate adviser. The IPN gets much of its funding from America. Last year, it released a report claiming that climate change was 'a myth'. All the think-tanks strongly deny that their research findings are influenced by corporate donors.

The sceptics' message is a reassuring one, and they have had no problem putting their case in the media. That should not, however, give the impression that they repre sent a sizable body of scientific opinion. They include a handful of professors at major universities in the US and Europe, but are still a tiny minority. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, highly respected and using research from 2,000 climate experts, has predicted rising sea levels and threats to human health. Most of the world's other major scientific bodies broadly agree about the dangers of global warming. David King, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, has called it a bigger threat than terrorism.

Yet as well as raising the limits on CO2 emissions, the government declined to tighten energy efficiency requirements for new buildings, and commissioned new runways to help the airline industry, a major polluter. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, UK plc seems to have argued its case rather well."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1431395,00.html

The skeptics will keep on until Holland and New Orleans have fresh kelp forests growing out of their highways.

Blair will have done zero to arrest that outcome. Like his boss, he has NO credibility.