Sir John Houghton: AGW is real because I’ve got a knighthood, I’m a scientist and I say so
March 15, 2010 @ 12:48 pm
James Delingpole
London Telegraph
March 15, 2010
“Let’s be honest….” says Sir John Houghton, formerly chief of the Met Office and leading climate doom-monger, in a fascinating article in today’s Times. Fascinating, that is, for what it is says about our supine MSM’s apparently boundless appetite for allowing itself to be used as the climate fear promotion lobby’s uncritical propaganda mouthpiece.
Can you imagine the leader of Hamas being given freedom to explain in a national British newspaper column how his party had always been an ardent supporter of Israel and a great lover of the Jewish people and how to suggest otherwise was an outrageous slur on his good name?
Or Jose Manuel Baroso running an article saying that one of the great things about the EU was the way it had lowered taxes and regulation, enhanced liberty and made everything more democratically accountable?
Or Jeffrey Archer being given a thousand words to explain how Tolstoy had learned everything he knew from reading Kane And Abel?
Though I’d very much like to read the last one – and the first two come to think of it – I doubt they’d ever be allowed to run. The comment editor would take one look at them and go: “But this is just nonsense! It contradicts all reason; it completely ignores pretty much everything this person has ever done. It’s a pack of unsupported assertions and ‘facts’ which bear no connection whatsoever with observed reality.”
So why aren’t the same standards of objectivity, balance, verifiability and reason applied to members of the global climate fear promotion lobby? I’m thinking, for example, of that hideous eructation of unutterable bilge that the New York Times generously allowed Al Gore to spew into its pages the other day; or the number of solemn AGW-promoting articles you see being run by the likes of the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt; or the Royal Society’s Lord Rees; or dreary but dangerous Lord Stern.
