Christopher Booker on the real catastrophe hanging over us;
[T]he name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be “much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report”. Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, “much more than previously predicted”. The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting “much faster than predicted”. The number of people dying from heat could be “twice as many as previously predicted”.
None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.
What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by The Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.
