Climate Change – It’s Not A Debate
April 22, 2012 | 
Author 8 months in the climate change repeal petition has <1500 votes
HM Government’s e-petitions site was created to be an easy way for ‘ordinary people’ to influence government policy in the UK. Respondents can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be eligible for debate in the House of Commons. The first e-petition to prompt a Parliamentary debate was signed by more than 240,000 people and called for those convicted of involvement in the summer riots to be stripped of their benefits.
A Roger Longstaff created the following petition in August last year:
Responsible department: Department for Energy and Climate Change
The Climate Change Act will cripple the UK economy (to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds) by imposing legally binding restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions that are more stringent than those of any other country on Earth. It is based on a totally false premise – the science of anthropogenic global warming was completely discredited by the “climategate” scandal – and the policy is being pursued solely for financial gain by academics (grants), government (“green” taxes) and vested interests such as investors in subsidised “green” technologies and “Enron-like” carbon trading scams. The Act must be repealed before it is too late.
What an opportunity for the climate change ‘sceptic’ movement to show the UK government how many people are sick of this climate change ‘scam’, eh?
Except that two thirds of the way into the 12 month period a pathetic 1,364 people have signed this petition. Here’s a few other ‘important’ petitions for comparison:
- Keep Formula 1 Free To Air in the UK: 42,658
- Recruit 5000 more NHS midwives in England : 38,558
- Grant a pardon to Alan Turing: 33,346
- Thatcher state funeral to be privatised: 32,054
- Stop the beer duty escalator: 29,351
Now, when you consider that this is the single most important Act of Parliament for climate change deniers you have to wonder how many of them there actually are in the UK. When you consider that this is an incredibly well organised, media savvy and manipulative group you really have to wonder.
Or do you? Perhaps not. I put it to you that there are less than 2,000 people in the whole of the UK who believe the Climate Change Act should be repealed. Over thte last three months I have posted this sad fact on climate denial blogs like Bishop Hill and Scottish Sceptic more than once in an attemptto warn the deniers that they are making fools of themselves with this petition, but in spite of my taunting the numbers have barely moved.
This is of course an extraordinarily small number when you consider the time and column inches the popular media give to reporting the so-called ‘debate’. What it shows is that there is no genuine ‘debate’ on the science of global warming. The self-styled ‘sceptics’ are a tiny number of people making a noise out of all proportion to their numbers and seeking to distort the public view of the issue.
This pathetic petition reveals the deniers as the tiny minority they really are. It is time that we all petitioned our media and their controllers demanding that they stop giving equal time and weight to an essentially non-existent point of view.
Posted in Denial
This reminds me ,some time back I asked the Campaign to repeal the CCA how they support one of their statements on their You Tube video. The comment never made it thru moderation, so I asked them on Twitter , again and again. But they have never answered me. The claim that they were making was “People are dying in this country because of the CCA.” You would think if there was a grain of truth in that they would be ready and willing to provide something approaching a fact to back up that statement. But no. It really is hard to take them seriously because the Campaign to Repeal the CCA wont engage in correspondence about their assertions, they just want their view to be taken on trust.
I have just seen this blog, and you are right – the response to the e-petition has been very poor.
However, these are the facts:
There is no empirical evidence at all to support the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis
The output of computer models is not evidence
Computer models of the climate are unverified, unvalidated and have demonstrated no predictive capability at all
Mr. Longstaff,
With all due respect those are not ‘the facts’, they are your opinion. The lack of signatures on the petition – the existence of which is widely known in the ‘sceptic’ community – suggests that it is very much a minority opinion.
Computer models of the climate are used in weather forecasting every day, so your claim that they are ‘unverified, unvalidated and have demonstrated no predictive capability whatsoever’ seems a little extreme.
Thank you for your reply.
With respect, I would suggest that weather forecasts are only accurate for a few days at best, and they are produced in the same way that they always have been, but in recent decades have been augmented by weather radar and satellite data. The Met Office seasonal predictions (the “April Drought”, mild winters and “barbeque summers”) have proved to be wildly inaccurate, and decadal forecasts failed to predict the last decade of flatlining temperatures. The ability of these models to predict climatic conditions decades in the future, and any influence that CO2 may have, seems unrealistically optimistic, at least to me.
This is certainly my opinion, and if nobody can contradict it, I hold it to be a fact.