EU Referendum

Warned by the invaluable Climate Depot, we learn of a Gallup Poll that tells us Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago.

Furthermore, on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has ever measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming.

Making for a fascinating snapshot, we see that, over time, Americans' concerns about environmental problems have generally declined. After this year's drop, for six of the eight items, the percentage who worry "a great deal" is at the lowest point Gallup has measured, which in some cases dates to 1989.

The two exceptions are global warming (low point was 24% in 1997) and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply for household needs (35% in 2001).


Gallup hazards that one major reason why Americans may be less worried about environmental problems is that they perceive environmental conditions in the United States to be improving. And if that is the case, it seems they are prepared to believe their own eyes, rather than listen to the hype.

It would be fascinating to learn whether the UK parallels this trend. Most likely it does – but even the US experience suggests that the green movement has failed to sustain its Armageddon agenda.

Another issue though, of special importance, is the degree of concern about tropical rain forests. Despite being a poster child of the warmists, the level here is at an absolute all-time low, down to 33 percent from 42 percent in 1989.

What makes this special, amongst other things, is that as public subscriptions to environmental groups such as WWF is actually going down, the proportion of their income from trusts and foundations, governments and corporate is actually going up, with a huge increase in spending on Amazon projects.

Thus, these figure – to a certain extent – measure not only public sentiment but the growing divide between us and our rulers and the corporate world. Never in the field of human history, perhaps, have so many been out of touch with the public.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

Delingpole is out in force today, picking up on the meanie greenies, commenting on research that shows greenies or more likely to lie, steal and cheat – and sell their grandmothers into slavery.

However, it could be the other way around. People who are disposed towards lying, stealing and cheating – and selling their grandmothers into slavery – could be the types who tend to gravitate towards greenery ... or politics, or both.

Anyhow, it is a fascinating thesis, and one that seems to stack up. The more you peel back the façade of greenery, the more you find the money agenda behind it – seriously big money.

And that is what I'll be doing today. The research project I've started is developing a life of its own, and time pressure is crowding in. Blogging, perforce, is going to be light, but it should be worth it, jacking up the campaign into a whole new dimension.

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"Two more bricks fall out of the IPCC wall of deceit – rainforests and polar bears," writes Gerald Warner.

The IPCC and the whole scam it promotes is now irreversibly on the slide. If you have no devastated rainforests and those pesky polar bears keep on doing what polar bears do on cold Arctic nights, you have lost the schoolchildren – and they were almost the last supporters of man-made global warming.

But, as we saw yesterday, it makes not a blind bit of difference to our "policy makers", as in the EU and national governments. They press on regardless, heedless of the controversy raging around them.

We are dealing with something very odd here – the almost complete detachment of the political classes. Something has to give, but there is no evidence yet that we have achieved any significant – or indeed any – change. You could say we are winning the battles and losing the war.

But then, when the Berlin wall finally went, it was very sudden, and predicted by very few. With Gerald's bricks knocked out, this one must be teetering. Please let it fall.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

This is The Washington Times in full flow, telling us that the greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.

Al Gore is the most visible beneficiary, it tells us, rehearsing familiar but nonetheless telling points, not least the fact that this "multimillionaire climate dilettante" has been given a free pass by reporters, who have refused to ask him hard questions about the degree to which he was profiting from the panic he was causing. The paper picks up on Pachauri as well, and his personal cash machine, The Energy and Resources Institute.

However, the greatest potential profits are in the ill-defined "carbon trading" industry, currently valued at $126 billion. Gore, of course, is heavily involved with his Generation Investment Management LLP, which he chairs. Pachauri, through the Chicago and now the Indian climate exchange also has his fingers in the till. Thus, says the paper, given the clear conflicts of interest of those who both promote and profit from climate-change alarmism, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded.

This, though, is only the half of it. Coming up fast are the NGOs, which have discovered for themselves the huge money-making potential of these schemes, and are now working to cut themselves into the deal. This is not entirely unrelated to the hype on the Amazon rainforest, where there are billions to be made. I am working up a story on this and hope to be able to roll it out this weekend, alongside Booker. Watch this space.

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Somehow, the French version: Un gradualisme insidieux et malhonnête sounds so much more sinister than the original. And it's all there.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

"Imagine an election campaign that actually talked about the things that really concern the British people rather than what the wives of the party leaders think about their husbands."

So writes the Lord Pearson in The Daily Express, who then asks what issues should be tackled and what the election should be about.

It will come as no surprise, of course, to find that the noble Lord, in answering his own question, notes that the election will not be about the issues that really concern us: mass immigration, massive waste in the public services, crime, the European Union and our very democracy. These things, he writes, will be avoided like the plague.

The simple reason is that the power over these and so many other issues no longer resides in Westminster, it has moved to Brussels. The promises of the establishment political parties melt away like the grin on the Cheshire cat once this stark reality shines upon them.

Predictably, the focus of much of the rest of the piece is on immigration, with Pearson asserting that 5,000 people a week are moving to this country to live, a city the size of Southampton every year. Yet, last week, he says, all three establishment parties sang in harmony: Turkey must join the European Union.

You heard that right, says Pearson. Not content with throwing our doors open to all European countries with the result that millions have moved here they want Turkey to join as well.

Sadly, with such emphasis on immigration, many other relevant issues are given short shrift. And there is no specific mention of climate change - only a passing nod at energy policy, with a reference to "the looming energy crisis". Environmental policy is dictated by Eurocrats, we are told.

Nevertheless, the conclusion is sound and one with which we could hardly disagree. This election should be about who governs Britain, Pearson asserts.

"Should it be politicians elected by the people of Britain? Politicians whom we can fire if they do not perform or prove themselves corrupt and dishonest? Or should it be run by ranks of foreign bureaucrats, unelected, unaccountable and immovable? Why shouldn’t it be the people themselves who have the power to govern?"

To ask the question is to answer it, declares the noble Lord. "To answer it is to vote UKIP." There are many who would agree.

COMMENT THREAD

Untouched by even a scintilla of doubt about global warming, the EU has abandoned all restraint and decided to table a proposal which will bind member states to cutting CO2 emissions by 30 percent on 1990 levels by 2020.

Hitherto, the target has been 20 percent, with an offer made at Copenhagen to go for the higher figure "if an international agreement on emissions reductions is secured". But, according to The Times, that agreement is no longer a pre-condition. By contrast, the US is debating whether to cut emissions by 4 percent on 1990 levels by 2020 but is unlikely to make a decision this year.

Needless to say, the British government is right in there, supporting the proposal, meanwhile refusing to publish research it has commissioned on the cost of achieving this target. The EU commission is also carrying out a study of the policies, working out the levels of tax increases that will be needed on fuel and flights in order to achieve the target.

Bizarrely, the new climate change commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, is claiming that EU member states could lose jobs to China unless it adopts the higher target. It is, the commission tells us, in the EU's self-interest because cutting emissions more quickly than anywhere else would help create low-carbon industries which could sell their technologies to other parts of the world.

How our rulers could be capable of subscribing to such a fantasy is beyond mortal comprehension. That we should saddle our economies with multi-billion costs to support industries such as wind farming, which actually contribute to making us less efficient, is simply the economics of the madhouse.

The only consolation, perhaps, is that the peoples of Europe are unlikely to rise up and throw off the yoke of their tormentors until their economies are well and truly wrecked, and they are looking at starvation. The dismal Ms Hedegaard has just brought that day closer.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

A run of articles over the last week, most notably from The Economist and The Financial Times, highlighted the transformation in the energy industry, as increasing amounts of shale gas reach the market.

That, with other unconventional sources of gas, seem set to banish the nightmare prospects of energy shortages for the foreseeable future, providing a substantial source of new fuel for electricity generation.

We are on the verge of moving to an era of shortage to one of plenty. The geo-political and economic ramifications of this are substantial, and the longer-term impact on our energy policy is, to say the very least, interesting.

We picked this up over 18 months ago in a piece written in August 2008, although I should have read my own work more carefully before writing this and this.

In an online briefing, however, energy expert Nick Grealy tells us that the very recent changes in natural gas extraction technologies must lead to an update of UK energy thinking. The only uncertainty lies in how up-to-date UK policy will be, he writes.

While the overall impact will be positive, it must be emphasised that there will be a period of disruption. Widely, strongly and long held opinions over key issues will be found to be no longer applicable in a world where accessible natural gas reserves have grown so rapidly. All current assumptions on UK energy policy, therefore, need to be revisited and updated according to new realities, not past dogma.

Not least, several assumptions underlying the 2007 Energy White Paper are no longer valid, simply because it was predicated on a natural gas shortage that no longer exists. Most energy experts, and the general public have been told for many years that UK natural gas is in terminal decline, prices will inevitably rise and that "security of supply" will be a continuing issue.

But, Grealy says, UK natural gas production levels will be increasingly irrelevant in an over-supplied globalised market. Over supply will lead to lower prices which in turn may make carbon taxes to tackle carbon production and use a more palatable alternative.

Natural gas is not a "low carbon alternative", we are told. But the public will be aware that it is a least carbon intense and more economical alternative to oil and coal. Who will make the case? None of the political parties and few energy or environment professionals appear to have the knowledge about the new gas paradigm and an up-to-date view.

The potential is for natural gas to be a bridge to a no carbon future, even as it provides a substantial reduction in carbon use in the short to medium term. This is a positive good news message that all should welcome. Any energy actors who act in an overly sceptical or obstructive manner will simply be swept away by events.

Not everyone shares Grealy's optimism, viz this piece in The Times at the end of last year. But Grealy is unrepentant. He is convinced that the good times are about to roll.

This is definitely one to watch. What price renewable energy when gas is plentiful and far cheaper?

COMMENT THREAD

This is Kumi Naidoo, described as the head of Greenpeace. He – or so we are told – argues that it is justifiable to break the law in order to alert people to the threat of climate change.

He is speaking in defence of his activists, 54 of whom have been charged with trespass after spending the night on the roof of the Houses of Parliament in October last year, and says his organisation has no intention of scaling back its tactics.

Actually, I have no problem with the idea of breaking (mad-made) laws. The concept of civil disobedience is honourable and well-established. Much of the progress in what passes for civilisation has been made by men and women of principle refusing to be bound by outdated or unjust laws. And I have personally broken too many such laws in my time to be able to sit on my high horse and condemn anyone else for doing what they believe to be right.

However, there is a distinct and unwholesome tinge to Mr Naidoo's brand of civil disobedience. In the general run of things, the tactic is normally employed by individuals or groups who believe their rights are being infringed or that they are being oppressed by the state. In Mr Naidoo's case, he is seeking to impose his belief system on the rest of humanity, enlisting the state in his cause, to impose expensive and oppressive measures on us all.

Thus, if Mr Naidoo believes that breaking the law is justifiable – as a matter of principle - in pursuit of his beliefs, he can have no reasonable objection if those who wholeheartedly disagree with him adopt exactly the same tactic, in opposition to him and his followers.

And if down that slippery slope we must all travel, he must not be surprised if civil disobedience then extends to refusing to obey any laws that are passed as a result of his activism. "It's only when decent men and women are willing to stand up, put their lives on the line and take strong, vibrant action that the agenda can move forward," he says.

Quite.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

Picking up in the news story yesterday that the government was considering such a move, George Pitcher in The Daily Telegraph thinks that lowering the drink-drive limit is an "absurd" idea.

In December, however, the same newspaper found it "puzzling" that Lord Adonis wanted to re-open the debate on the issue.

But, as we remarked at the time, it wasn't puzzling at all. This is part and parcel of a covert attempt at harmonising traffic laws in the EU, which made an appearance in May 2004, based on an agenda set out in 2002. The drink-drive limit is part of it - random testing is another.

What we are seeing is a graphic example of the way the system works. Knowing that an overt "in-your-face" harmonising directive would be hugely unpopular – and underline quite how much power we have given away – the EU works in the shadows, getting member states, apparently voluntarily, to bring their own laws closer into line with the European "ideal".

Each time this is done, it comes out without reference to the EU – presented, as is the case here, as if it was a UK initiative. Then, in the fullness of time, when our laws are so close to the rest of the other member states that it makes no difference, the EU brings out a directive to "regularise" the position. By that time, the differences are so slight that the EU law is entirely uncontentious.

This dynamic counters the popular myth that member state governments are somehow unwillingly forced into line by the EU. This is a process of active collusion between governments against their own peoples. It is sly, dishonest gradualism which recognises that, if it was done openly, it would be opposed.

In avoiding any mention of the EU, as do the newspapers today (and yesterday), the media also collude in the process. And so do the opposition parties. You will not hear from Boy Dave's merry little men that this is an EU-inspired measure. If there is any criticism, it will be because it is a "Labour" measure. The fact that road safety became an EU competence in the Maastricht treaty, under John Major, is neither here nor there.

Thus are our liberties and national distinctiveness eroded, all in the name of European political integration, and we are not even allowed to know why it is happening.

COMMENT THREAD

"No job unless you're Polish: Biggest Asda meat supplier excludes English speakers as 'all instructions are in Polish'", headlines The Mail on Sunday. Compare and contrast this with the headline: "Checks to see if foreign out-of-hours doctors can speak English 'go against EU rules'" - in The Daily Mail.

So, an English-speaking British worker can be refused a job in his own country because he does not speak a foreign language ... which is almost certainly against EU law, although it is not enforced. Yet a foreign doctor cannot be refused a job in England because he cannot speak English ... all because of EU rules, which are enforced.

And the reason we should not rise up and slaughter them all is?

COMMENT THREAD

A poster child of the warmist creed, the Amazon rainforest is back in the news today, with an article in a Sunday newspaper. It asserts that a new study, funded by NASA, "has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest's vegetation."

This is a reference to the Samanta paper which we reviewed yesterday, on which basis we are told today that the findings appear to disprove claims by the IPCC that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland.

Certainly, the IPCC claim is damaged by Samanta, but the findings cannot be taken to support assertions that the 2005 drought had little impact on the forest. Insofar as he can be relied upon at all, Nepstad demonstrated in a 2008 paper published by The Royal Society that significant damage did occur. This is reinforced by a later paper summarised here.

However, these findings can hardly be unexpected of an exceptional drought. Moreover, it was undoubtedly more damaging than it might otherwise have been as it occurred after a run of below average precipitation, not least in 2003 when the ground water was not fully recharged in large areas of the Amazon basin.

The Samanta paper, therefore, leaves open the wider debate on the fate of the Amazon. But, for reasons which will become apparent by the end of this week, it is becoming more and more important that it should be resolved. There are political issues here which have major ramifications for Western policy and potentially huge economic consequences. Thus, we are revisiting the issue, exploring wider aspects of this ongoing controversy.

If we start by distilling the warmist claims, their argument seems to be that the run of dry weather in the period 2002-2005, culminating in the exceptionally severe drought, is a harbinger, signalling a long-term change in the rainfall pattern as a result of "climate change".

Under the influence of hypothesised higher temperatures, the Met Office Hadley Centre coupled climate-carbon cycle model predicts severe drying in the Amazon region which initiates forest loss. As trees are lost, transpiration reduces, resulting in less rainfall. This "positive feedback", exacerbated by logging, clearance and fires, causes the loss of up to half the forest and its replacement with savannah-like grassland.

What is terribly suspicious about the current debate though is that history seems to stop in 2005, with the great drought. Numerous papers have been written about this event but we are now five years down the line and we hear very little about the intervening years.

One suspects that, if the drought of 2005 had continued – given the media bias favouring Armageddon scenarios – we would have been assailed by reports of deteriorating conditions. On the other hand – and especially with experience of weather conditions close to home – one also suspects that 2005 and the preceding years could have been part of natural climate variability, albeit an extreme example of it.

That latter suspicion is apparently well-founded as a paper published in August 2002 notes that "climatic variability strongly impacts the hydrology of the [Amazon] basin", with "short (∼3–4 years) and long (∼28 years) modes of precipitation variability". Further, a paper published in April 2006 had reported "major flooding" in the 1984-2001 period.

Likely as not, therefore, after a period of drought lasting 3-4 years – Hadley model notwithstanding - one might expect a period of normal or even above-average rainfall. But, needless to say, an exploration of scientific literature on this proved unhelpful. The international media, though, yielded considerable information.

In March 2006, for instance, - the year following the great drought - there were reports of severe flooding in Bolivia, The highlands and most of the rivers of the Amazon basin overflowed affecting 27,500 families, with 12,742 in need of humanitarian aid. Later, floods in Columbia were reported to have killed 32 people and injured 30 others in five provinces.

The following April brought reports of floods caused by "unusually heavy rains in Brazil's Amazon region" which had killed six people and forced tens of thousands more to flee their homes. Officials had declared a state of emergency in 15 municipalities where at least 21,000 people had evacuated to avoid Amazon River tributaries that had breached their banks.

The worst flooding had been in the city of Maraba, 1,250 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, where the Tocantins River had risen to 40 feet above its normal level.

With the rainy season over, Friends of the Earth were predicting more drought in the Amazon. The year 2007, however, brought more news of disastrous floods in Amazonian Peru, followed by news of Bolivia battered from the Andes to its Amazon lowlands by "devastating floods".

By mid January 2007, at least 50 people had been killed in southeastern Brazil, due to flooding and landslides brought on by torrential rains. The hardest hit areas had been the coastal state of Rio de Janeiro and mountainous Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro.

In February, "after weeks of disastrous flooding" in the eastern, tropical lowlands, 69,000 families were affected, roads were cut across the country and 35 people were dead. By the March, Bolivia was suffering its worst floods for 25 years. This, of course, did not stop the BBC reporting: "Amazon 'faces more deadly droughts'".

A month later, Pachauri was in full flow, with the publication of his IPCC report, telling the media that there was "high confidence" that eastern parts of the Amazon will gradually change to savannah from forest. Northern Brazil, by then, was suffering its worst flooding for decades. Heedless of this, by the end of the year, The Washington Post was retailing the views of Daniel Nepstad, author of a new WWF report, at the UN climate change conference in Bali. He was warning of the effects of drought in the Amazon.

Two months later, in February 2008, Peru was reporting that almost half a million people had been affected by rains and extensive flooding of their homes and crops. Bolivians in the city of Trinidad were terrified that floodwater would inundate them, while their president Evo Morales decreed a national disaster. Some 30,890 square miles in the Amazonian province of Beni were under water, an area roughly the size of Austria.

This coincided with news that climate models were increasingly forecasting a dire future for the Amazon rainforest. They were based on research linking drought in the Amazon to sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic. Higher temperatures and less rainfall were predicted. Meanwhile, Brando, Nepstad, et al were warning that multi-year severe drought "can substantially reduce Amazon forest carbon stocks."

In April, though, severe rainstorms were affecting Equador bringing the worst flooding in a decade, killing 47 people and damaging crops and infrastructure. That same month 33 people had died in two weeks of flooding in north-east Brazil. More than 77,000 people had been made homeless, with officials warning that the heavy rain would continue.

Only days later, The Daily Telegraph reported: "Amazon doomed by too much clean air", telling us that the rainforest was coming under threat from attempts to curb the pollution that causes acid rain.

The link was found by a team from the University of Exeter, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Met Office Hadley Centre and Brazilian National Institute for Space Studies. The team was estimating that by 2025 a drought on the 2005 scale could happen every other year and by 2060 such a drought could occur in nine out of every ten years. As for when the forests could disappear, "2060 isn't a bad guess," we were told.

By November, reports were coming in that flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rain that had been pounding southern Brazil for nearly two months. They had killed at least 84 people and forced more than 54,000 to flee. The weekend of the 22-23rd had brought as much rain as normally fell over several months.

More than 1.5 million people had been affected by the heavy rains. Eight cities in the state of Santa Catarina remained cut off by water and blocked roads. The region was under a state of emergency. The governor declared that the region faced, "the worst weather tragedy in history." A climatologist from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research warned that the floods could be "an early consequence of global warming."

In January 2009, the WWF was still worried about the rate of deforestation. In February though, some scientists were suggesting that parts of the Amazon rainforest might face less serious droughts than had been previously feared. They had compared 19 global climate models with actual rainfall measurements for the region. They all tended to underestimate current rainfall levels.

Many citizens of Peru would have agreed. By April 2009, the current rainfall levels had filled the Amazon to its highest level since records began. And, as the rain began to pour in Brazil, May saw people huddled in cow pens converted into emergency shelters as swollen rivers rose, the homeless number rising to over 300,000 and the death toll to 60.

A month later and the floods were being described as the worst for 56 years. In Manaus, a city deep in the jungle, the Negro river rose to 88.32 feet, just short of the 1953 record. Satellite pictures showed the extent of the flooding. Of course, it was "caused by climate change".

There was no let up in the "climate change". The states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo suffered torrential downpours through the December and into the New Year. Over 90 people died and more than 1,800 people were without shelter. Nearly 6,000 were displaced. Scores of people were killed by mudslides as well as the floods. Rio de Janeiro's vice governor observed: "People had never seen so much rain in this region."

Then, thousands of tourists were stranded at the historical site of Machu Picchu in Peru after torrential rain had flooded the area, setting off lethal mudslides that killed five people.



So persistent was the rain that, by February, it had made its way to the Huanaco region, burying streets and homes under up to five feet of water. Thousands had to abandon their homes in the city of Tingo Maria. Rising water affected more than 4,000 people, flooding their homes and cars and "sweeping just about everything in its path downstream." The downpour was Peru's heaviest in 15 years.

Of Peru's 25 regions, 17 were facing destruction from the rains that had started in December. By the end of February, the National Civil Defense Institute reported that more than 22,700 people had been left homeless and more than 108,000 had suffered damage to homes, crops or other assets.

This month, Bolivia was back in the news with 40,000 families in the Amazonian eastern provinces completely stranded by floods. The rainy season had been particularly intense and resulted in flooding in this area of Bolivia almost every year since 2005, said the news report.

However, not all of this could be blamed on heavier rain, much less "climate change". As early as 1980, researchers were noting increased runoff due to deforestation. The long-predicted regional climatic and hydrological changes that would be the expected result of Amazonian deforestation may already be beginning, they observed.

Similar observations were being made in 1987. But, it was remarked, one should not exclude the possibility that observed trends might be elucidated without invoking human intervention, even if "major inundations are likely to polarise concerns and dim the memory of moderate floods."

And therein lies some profound wisdom. The most recent weather events do tend to "polarise concerns". In 2005, after two years of depressed rainfall, against the background of "climate change" and models predicting more of the same, drought became the obsession of the climate community, polarising their concerns.

Although there have been localised droughts since, especially in the south, but also in Venezuela and several highland provinces of Ecuador, there has been nothing remotely approaching the scale of the 2005 event. While the climate community remains obsessed with drought, the actuality is of five continuous years of excess rainfall since 2005, effectively returning to the pattern observed during the 1984-2001 period.

A year after the 2005 drought, researchers were writing of their concerns that, while the rainforest had adapted to seasonal and short-term drought, it might be less resilient to longer term climate change. Given current weather patterns, that should be the least of their worries.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

It is a criminal offence to kill bats and golden eagles, writes Booker today in his column – unless of course you are a windmill owner.

The main objection to these bird choppers is, of course, their outrageous expense – machines for producing derisory amounts of electricity at colossal cost. That is why the government wants us to spend £100 billion on building thousands more of them which, even were it technically possible, would do virtually nothing to fill the fast-looming 40 percent gap in our electricity supply.

But, in all the time spent railing against these useless machines, Booker has never mentioned their devastating effect on wildlife, notably on large birds of prey, such as eagles and red kites. And particularly disturbing, he says, is the extent to which the disaster has been downplayed by professional bodies.

Two of those who are notably muted in their protests are the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain and the Audubon Society in the US. They should be at the forefront of exposing this outrage, but which have often been drawn into a conflict of interest by the large sums of money they derive from the wind industry itself.

Booker goes on to outline some of the evidence for the worldwide scale of this carnage. The world's largest and most carefully monitored wind farm, Altamont Pass in California, he says, is estimated to have killed between 2,000 and 3,000 golden eagles alone in the past 20 years.

Since turbines were erected on the isle of Smola, off Norway, home to an important population of white-tailed sea eagles, destruction is so great that last year only one chick survived. Thanks to wind farms in Tasmania, a unique sub-species of wedge-tailed eagles faces extinction.

And here in Britain, plans to build eight wind farms on the Hebridean islands, among Scotland’s largest concentration of golden eagles, now pose a major threat to the species' survival in the UK.

The real problem, we are told, is that birds of prey and wind developers are both drawn, for similar reasons, to the same sites – hills and ridges where the wind provides lift for soaring birds and heavily subsidised profits for developers.

Eagles may thus be drawn from hundreds of square miles to particular wind farms. And, as can be seen from the YouTube video of a vulture circling above a turbine in Crete, the vortices created by blade tips revolving at up to 200mph can destabilise such large birds, plunging them into a fatal collision with the blades.

What has been particularly helpful to Booker in detailing this problem is the emergence of Mark Duchamp, a retired French businessman and now campaigner living in Alicante. Through his website Iberica 2000, he has documented multiple episodes of bird-kill, including at Spanish sites where they may be killing up to a million birds a year.

Duchamp also focuses his campaign on what he sees as the disturbing failure to protect birds by the bodies whose job it is to do so, from the RSPB to the European Commission. The RSPB claims to keep a critical eye on those effects, but nevertheless urges a major expansion of wind farms, on the grounds that "climate change is the most significant threat to biodiversity on the planet".

As always, money talks – not least to the RSPB which receives £10 from the wind-farm builder Scottish & Southern Energy for every customer signing up for electricity under its "RSPB Energy" scheme. Ornithologists also derive a good income from developers for providing impact assessments for planning applications or for monitoring existing wind farms for bird collisions.

So it goes on. Conflict of interest, petty corruption and downright abrogation of responsibilities mean absolutely nothing when you can convince yourself that you are saving the planet – then anything goes. And when it comes to the EU commission, their Birds and Habitats Directives - which they are usually so zealous in ensuring are enforced throughout the member states – suddenly becomes rather inconvenient.

Just in case you ask, Booker does mention power lines. Large birds of prey are far from being the only victims of wind farms, and the thousands of miles of power lines needed to connect them to the grid. A study cited by Birdlife International shows that, each year, power lines can be responsible for up to 800 bird kills per mile. And wind farms, with their new grid, will ensure that the carnage increases.

The bizarre thing is that these "greenies" are supposed to be pro-nature. Yet, time and time again, it is they who are the ones supporting the degradation of the natural environment, then relying on convoluted arguments and deception to cover up their inconsistencies. In time, we could tie them to the blades of their windmills, as ad hoc bird scarers, at which point we will finally have found a use for them.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

When it was published in 2007, the paper in the journal Science by Saleska et al caused quite a stir. It suggested that, contrary to expectations, the Amazon rainforest had "greened-up" in response to a short, intense drought in 2005.

These findings, wrote the authors, "suggest that Amazon forests, though threatened by human-caused deforestation, fire, and possibly by more severe long-term droughts, may be more resilient to climate changes than ecosystem models assume."

The paper was widely reported, not least by Science Daily on 26 September 2007. Drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research, this magazine announced. It told us that the counterintuitive finding contradicts a prominent global climate model that predicts the Amazon forest would begin to "brown down" after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed.

Principal author of the paper, Scott R Saleska of the University of Arizona, was quoted, saying: "Instead of 'hunkering down' during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the short term. It's a very interesting and surprising response." Co-author Kamel Didan added, "The forest showed signs of being more productive. That's the big news."

Unfortunately, although by contemporary measures, the science was "sound" – i.e., peer-reviewed - it was also completely wrong. That, at least, is the finding of a paper in the current edition of Geophysical Research Letters by Samanta et al. The results of the earlier team, obtained from analysis of satellite-derived data, were "irreproducible" owing to inclusion of atmosphere-corrupted data.

Using a new and improved version of the satellite-derived data from which clouds and aerosols from biomass burning had been filtered, this team found approximately 11-12 percent of the drought-stricken forests display greening, while, 28-29 percent showed browning or no change. For the rest, the data were not of sufficient quality to characterise any changes. Such changes were also not unique - approximately similar changes were observed in non-drought years as well.

Furthermore, they also found that sunlight levels did not increase during the drought, contrary to speculation in earlier reports, and that there was no correlation between drought severity and greenness changes, contrary to the idea of drought-induced greening. Thus, they conclude that the Amazon forests did not green-up during the 2005 drought.

This conclusion is significant at several levels. At the most basic, it reinforces the general point that, just because a study has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, even one as prestigious as Science, it does not mean it is true.

At another level, on the face of it, this could be considered bad news for sceptics. When the Saleska paper was first published, it was widely hailed because it suggested that the forest was less sensitive to drought than many of the climate models were suggesting. Take Saleska out of the picture and, in theory at least, that returns us to the status quo.

However, where the Samanta paper helps is in describing a lack of variability in the forest canopy through a range of conditions, suggesting – in virgin rainforest, at least – a lack of sensitivity to drought, rather than a specific and anomalous response to drought conditions. In other words, this paper also "contradicts a prominent global climate model" - that predicts the Amazon forest would begin to "brown down" after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed – albeit in a different way.

That certainly seems to be the view of the paper authors, articulated by one of them, Sangram Ganguly from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, affiliated with NASA Ames Research Centre in California. He is cited as saying, "Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall."

Boston University Professor Ranga Myneni, senior author of the paper, notes that: "This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate."

That actually seems to be going too far. Too little, it seems, is known about the ecology of the Amazon to make such a bold assertion. Nothing in the study would suggest how the forest would fare under the pressure of continued logging and clearance for agriculture, which are demonstrably the greatest "threats" to the Amazon rainforest.

On the other hand, it would definitely seem to contradict the IPCC assertion that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically "to even a slight reduction in precipitation".

I am troubled, therefore, by the confident assertion of the IPCC that the underlying science behind this claim is secure. Having spent the best part of a day on a largely fruitless review of diverse papers on the subject, it has not proven possible to find anything which does not present the decline of the forest in terms of severe and continued drought, combined with logging and clearance, which has the effect of predisposing the forest to fire.

Reviewing several papers by Nepstad, who seems to be one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, what particularly stands out is one of his most recent – in February 2008 – published by The Royal Society. Headed, "Interactions among Amazon land use, forests and climate: prospects for a near-term forest tipping point", even there he is writing about "severe drought".

Even in his support of the IPCC statement on the Woods Hole Research Centre website, where he is described as a "senior scientist", Nepstad refers to "new evidence" of the full extent of severe drought in the Amazon. On the basis of that, he estimates that "half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998."

Intriguingly, in his 2008 paper, Nepstad writes: "little is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of drought in moist tropical forests, and the complex relationships between patterns of drought and forest fire regimes, tree mortality, and productivity." Going full circle, that then is echoed by the opening lines of the Samanta paper, which tells us: "The sensitivity of Amazon rainforests to dry‐season droughts is still poorly understood".

Trying to be as balanced as possible, one has to conclude that, either we have missed something pretty fundamental, or simply that the confidence of the IPCC in the science – its version of it - is unwarranted. Either way, the IPCC owes us an explanation, and a degree of clarity about precisely how it reached its conclusions on the possible fate of the Amazon rainforests.

Not least, also, we need to get past the unremitting negativity of the warmists, and their assumptions – seemingly based on modelling various scenarios which have not occurred and which do not ever seem to have been experienced. On the basis of what we know, far from the Armageddon picture painted, even totally cleared land seems to recover completely within 40 years.

With that in mind, we note the robust comments of Gerald Warner who makes the case that the IPCC's failure to set up a truly independent inquiry into this and related issues is "the AGW camp's biggest mistake yet."

He is not wrong. As the inconsistencies and anomalies pile up, "circling the wagons", as the IPCC appears to be trying to do, is not going to restore the trust in the science that the warmists claim to want yet are doing nothing to achieve.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

Cold kills! These idle, dangerous morons can draw their pretty graphs and make vacuous projections about what might be, but in the here and now, far more people die in cold weather than in hot – and the greenies want to increase the number as they price energy out of existence.

Watts up with that? has an excellent post on the subject. Extreme cold, it says, rather than heat, is the deadliest form of extreme weather event. In fact, from 1979-2002, extreme cold was responsible for 53 percent of deaths due to all these categories of extreme weather, while extreme heat contributes slightly more than half that (28%).

Repeat after me, you greenie morons ... cold kills, cold kills, cold kills ... greenies kill. You granny killers should be up for manslaughter.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

The heads of the Armed Forces cannot escape their share of the blame if soldiers do not have the right equipment, writes Vernon Bogdanor in today's edition of The Times. He is not popular for saying so if the limited number of comments are any guide, but he is right.

Nevertheless, it is about time somebody said it in a mainstream newspaper and, despite other calls on my time, I felt impelled to post an analysis.

Writing under the headline, "Generals must keep their noses out of politics", Bogdanor is responding to that "disingenuous" remark from Lord Guthrie on 6 March that sparked off a major row, culminating in the jibe from David Cameron last Wednesday during PMQs.

Full story on DEFENCE OF THE REALM.

It just gets better and better.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

Nearly half of Americans – 48 percent – now believe the threat of global warming has been exaggerated. This is the highest level since polling began 13 years ago says a recent Gallup poll.

That category does not seem comparable with a poll in February when 47 percent thought long-term planetary trends rather than human activity was the primary cause of global warming up from 34 percent in April 2008.

However, both polls show the same downward trend in the willingness to accept climate alarmism, a significant factor in the US where climate measures are still live political issues and need popular assent for legislation to be enacted.

Imperfect though the US system might be, there is at least some check on the madness, as opposed to the UK and most of the rest of Europe which is saddled with EU law.

One has to believe, though – almost as an article of faith – that the madness must be running its course, although there is no sign of that some time yet. Going through the system this week is a consultation document on planning guidance for local councils, aimed at increasing the amount energy produced from renewable sources.

This is the handmaiden to the feed-in tariff which will effectively prevent councils and local residents blocking a rash of solar panels and micro windmills installed by granny robbers keen to get their snouts in the renewable energy trough.

The Scottish government has also unveiled its plans for carbon capture in the region, announcing its intention to have quarter of Europe's CCS plants by 2020. On top of its ban on nuclear power plants and its rush to disfigure the countryside with giant bird choppers, Scotland seems to be in a race with England to see which can run out of electricity first.

And despite the great slaughter of birds done by these windmills, the alarmists are still out in force. In a conference in Houston, Texas, they are claiming that global warming threatens some migratory birds with extinction. Never mind the icy conditions and the deep snows that have been covering most of the northern hemisphere. It's global warming wots going to get 'em – and if that doesn't the windmills will.

Meanwhile, in Chicago the US Global Change Research Programme has it that heat-related deaths, the spread of infectious diseases and the threat of natural disasters in Chicago could skyrocket in the coming decades unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed.

The Daily Mash has had enough though. The March quota of global catastrophe warnings has been reached with almost two weeks to go, it was confirmed last night, it reports.

The monthly total now stands at 240 meaning scientists, politicians, clergyman and the Daily Mail will have to apply for an extension or face a reduction in the April quota of terrifyingly apocalyptic, certain death scenarios. The quota system was established last year so that frightened citizens do not lose track of what is going to kill them by 2030, we are told.

Through the gate before the quota kicked in was UK government science adviser professor John Beddington, warning that the sky shall be filled with Dragons "and they shall devour our crops, befoul our cattle and drink dry our lakes and ponds."

"They will hover above your house and just when you think they've gone, you'll open the curtains and there will be this great big eye staring back at you. Then the Dragon will rip the roof off your house and eat you like a Creme Egg and all because you didn't listen," he says.

Professor Beddington is calling for a multi-billion pound anti-dragon gun to be paid for by increased taxes on Range Rovers and patio heaters.

Frankly, that sounds a great deal more credible than some of the guff the warmists are trotting out, but there may come a time when there has to be a scare quota. However, as we are finding, there is no known means of putting a quota on stupidly. It is not only a renewable resource, this country seems blessed with an inexhaustible supply, especially amongst the political classes.

But when we now hear that environmental changes brought on by global warming may affect women more negatively than men, the end has to be nigh. All we now need is for global warming to be blamed on men and the cycle of lunacy is complete.

Meanwhile, up yours greenies! (See above left.)

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME

For anyone with any residual doubts about the wave of madness about to engulf us with the introduction of the feed-in tariff on 1 April, they need go no further than read a recent report from the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, entitled: "Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience".

Packed with detail and well-argued, its conclusions are unequivocal and coruscating. "Although Germany's promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a shining example in providing a harvest for the world," the authors write, "we would instead regard the country's experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits."

You really cannot get much clearer than that, the result of a failed experiment based on an aggressive policy of "generously subsidising and effectively mandating renewable electricity generation" in Germany that has led to a doubling of the renewable contribution to electricity generation in recent years.

In this narrative, taken directly from the executive summary, we are told that the preference for renewables came primarily in the form of a subsidy policy based on feed-in tariffs, established in 1991 by the Electricity Feed-in Law.

A subsequent law passed in 2000 guaranteed continued support for 20 years. This required utilities to accept the delivery of power from independent producers of renewable electricity into their own grid, paying technology-specific feed-in tariffs far above their production cost of 2 to 7 euro-cents per kilowatt hour (kWh).

With a feed-in tariff of 43 euro-cents per kWh in 2009, solar electricity generated from photovoltaics (PV) is guaranteed by far the largest financial support among all renewable energy technologies. Currently, the feed-in tariff for PV is more than eight times higher than the wholesale electricity price at the power exchange and more than four times the feed-in tariff paid for electricity produced by on-shore wind turbines.

Even on-shore wind, widely regarded as a mature technology, requires feed-in
tariffs that exceed the per-kWh cost of conventional electricity by up to 300 percent to remain competitive. By 2008 this had led to Germany having the second-largest installed wind capacity in the world, behind the United States, and the largest installed PV capacity in the world, ahead of Spain. This explains the claims that Germany's feed-in tariff is a great success.

However, installed capacity is not the same as production or contribution. By 2008, the estimated share of wind power in Germany's electricity production was 6.3 percent, followed by biomass-based electricity generation (3.6 percent) and water power (3.1 percent). The amount of electricity produced through solar photovoltaics was a negligible 0.6 percent despite being the most subsidised renewable energy, with a net cost of about €8.4 billion for 2008.

The total net cost of subsidising electricity production by PV modules is estimated to reach €53.3 billion for those modules installed between 2000 and 2010. While the promotion rules for wind power are more subtle than those for PV, the authors estimate that the wind power subsidies may total €20.5 billion for wind converters installed between 2000 and 2010.

As in the UK, consumers ultimately bear the cost of renewable energy promotion. In 2008, the price mark-up due to the subsidisation of green electricity was about 1.5 cents per kWh, meaning the subsidy accounted for about 7.5 percent of average household electricity prices.

Yet, given the net cost of 41.82 cents/kWh for PV modules installed in 2008, and assuming that PV displaces conventional electricity generated from a mixture of gas and hard coal, "carbon" abatement costs are as high as €716 per ton.

Using the same assumptions and a net cost for wind of 3.10 cents/kWh, the abatement cost is approximately €54. While cheaper than PV, this cost is still nearly double the ceiling of the cost of a per-ton permit under the EU's cap-and trade scheme. Renewable energies are thus amongst the most expensive GHG reduction measures.

There are much cheaper ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than subsidising renewable energies. For instance, the authors say, the current price of emissions certificates in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is only €13.4 per ton (October 2009). Hence, the cost from emission reductions as determined by the market is about 53 times cheaper than employing PV and four times cheaper than using wind power.

Moreover, the prevailing coexistence of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and the ETS means that the increased use of renewable energy technologies generally attains no additional emission reductions beyond those achieved by ETS alone. In fact, since the establishment of the ETS in 2005, the EEG's net climate effect has been nil.

Turning to employment, while projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any account of off-setting impacts.

These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers' overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

In the end, Germany's PV promotion has become a subsidisation regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per worker subsidies as high as €175,000. It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany's export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US.

Due to their backup energy requirements, it turns out that any increased energy security possibly afforded by installing large PV and wind capacity is undermined by reliance on fuel sources – principally gas – that must be imported to meet domestic demand. That much of this gas is imported from unreliable suppliers calls energy security claims further into question.

Claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany's first-actor status are also unsupportable. In fact, the regime appears to be counterproductive, stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies. In conclusion, government policy has failed to harness the market incentives needed to ensure a viable and cost-effective introduction of renewable energies into Germany's energy portfolio.

On the contrary, Germany's principal mechanism of supporting renewable technologies through feed-in tariffs imposes high costs without any of the alleged positive impacts on emissions reductions, employment, energy security, or technological innovation.


Yet, this is the scheme that is to come into force in the UK on 1 April. Predictably, organisations such as the National Trust are leaping on the bandwagon, having already fitted PV to their Dunster Castle in Somerset (pictured, above). They are adding insult to injury by attracting funding from Barclays, the "Big Lottery Fund Bio-Energy Capital Grants Scheme" and the Rural Development Programme. Equally predictably, they do not tell us how much this is going to cost other electricity consumers, concentrating instead on the illusory "carbon" savings.

Delingpole, of course, gets the point (as well as making a ribald comment about the "independent" inquiry of the IPCC), picking up on the point that the British scheme, when fully developed, will cost the equivalent of four aircraft carriers each year.

Anyone with even a fragment of a brain can see the utter madness of the scheme, and the German experience simply reinforces the blindingly obvious. Yet, it seems that our current government's brain cell is flying solo.

But, if you despair that sentient creatures can be so utterly stupid, until we hear otherwise we have to continue to note that the Conservatives want a much larger scheme, set to cost £60 billion a year. That, in case you are interested, is 30 aircraft carriers a year. (Pick your own comparator if you prefer – it would, for instance, buy 50 billion bacon butties, thereby abolishing world hunger except in the Moslem world).

Forgive me for harping on, but this is so staggeringly stupid – in a land beset with stupidity – that it is difficult to take on board. One can only surmise that they really cannot be that stupid, and it is all a joke. After all, the scheme is set to start on 1 April. Sadly, though, they are serious. We are going to have to do something equally serious.

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The short answer to this seemingly off-the-wall question is yes. British political and diplomatic efforts on the region are not focused on brokering the political deal necessary to secure peace. Instead, they are being subsumed by the seemingly more important need to secure an international climate change treaty.

To explore this in more detail, a good starting point is to visit a commentary in The Guardian by Seumas Milne on the war in Afghanistan. His headline is: "Voters are far ahead of the elite – so they'll get no say", with a fairly descriptive strap line which declares: "Afghanistan should be at the heart of the election campaign. But it won't be because the main parties all support the war."

Particularly intriguing, though is his observation that, "in the coming general election, this ever more bloody conflict is unlikely to intrude into the heart of the campaign, except in well-rehearsed spats about equipment and funding."

Milne then argues that, "For all the promise of a great national debate, don't expect one about the life-and-death struggle on the plains of Helmand. The reason is that, unlike in the case of Iraq, all three main parties are signed up to carrying on with a war the public has decisively rejected."

You can take that latter comment with a pinch of salt – Milne is quite clearly "anti war" and that obviously colours his argument. But the overarching point made is sound. Political arguments – as yesterday at PMQs – are corralled into the narrow confines of "well-rehearsed spats about equipment and funding."

Almost certainly by design, the parties have decided not to debate the "big issues", amongst them being whether we should be there or not. But, between the narrow focus on equipment and funding, and the question of whether we should be in Afghanistan at all, there is another level of debate – our strategy in the region. That too is not being debated.

Thus, as with so many issues, there is that leaden, unspoken consensus, where a wide range of issues which could help voters distinguish between parties are simply not aired, reinforcing the impression that they are "all the same", except in that tiny, claustrophobic patch they have chosen for their battlegrounds.

As far as Afghanistan goes, this leaves us with the bizarre situation where the leader of the opposition rails against the prime minister over things for which he is not directly responsible – or, at least, culpable – while ignoring the bigger issues, such as strategy, for which he is.

However, even that might be a fond hope. The UK line appears to be to adopting the US strategy, while pretending all along that it is one we thought of as well – if not first – and are perfectly content to follow. Forging an independent strategy could well be above Brown's pay grade, as indeed it would be for Cameron if he ever got into No 10. Hence, it is perhaps best not to talk about it.

If that really is the case, then it is a complete dereliction of duty – to the British nation and the troops who are fighting in our name. The United States is relatively new to the south Asia region, has little feel for the subtleties and has no in-depth experience of the politics.

By contrast, as an ex-colonial power, in theory at least, the British have a wealth of experience and an institutional memory which goes back centuries. The policy lead, if it is to come from anywhere, should be provided by the British.

Where this is particularly appropriate and necessary is in our relationship with and understanding of India, the great elephant in the room of Afghan politics. Already, Indian officials are prepared to admit privately that which is obvious to informed observers – there is a proxy war being played out between India and Pakistan on the canvass of Afghanistan.

Some will aver that this is the main driver of the present conflict and it is certainly the case that there will be no long-term (and therefore any) resolution to the instability in Afghanistan until relations between India and Pakistan are normalised.

With that, one might expect British diplomatic activity to be intensively focused on regional conflict resolution. But what is very evident in the Brown administration is the relatively light footprint and that the emphasis is elsewhere.

Informed observers in the region note that the primary policy objective of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – and that of its partner in crime, the Department for International Development (DFID) - seems to be climate change. Far more resource, in terms of manpower and aid, is going into India to address that issue than is being devoted on Afghanistan, even to the FCO having an official on permanent detachment to Dr Pachauri's TERI in New Delhi.

That this should be the case is hardly surprising. While the resolution of the Afghan conflict is important, it is mostly seen in terms of an expression of support for the US, and thus an extension of Anglo-US relations. Thus, the foreign policy objective is to do enough to maintain credibility with the US. Winning is not an imperative.

On the other hand, the achievement of an international agreement on climate change is a major foreign policy objective of the UK, both on its own account and through the prism of EU policy - where the EU would probably be quite content to see the US-led venture in Afghanistan fail. Furthermore, it has a vital economic dimension. Unless other countries can be prevailed upon to follow the same suicidal course as the EU in the aggregation of damaging climate mitigation policies, the economic consequences could be dire.

In this, India is a key player, not only because Dr Pachauri is chair of the IPCC but because the goodwill of the Indian government is essential if a global deal is to be brokered. And, insofar as any nation can claim such a role, India is also key to that other major player, China.

The confounding factor here is Afghanistan, and more particularly, Indo-Pak relations. Fraught at best, India is extraordinarily sensitive about these (as indeed is Pakistan), to the point of institutional paranoia. It resents anything that looks like external interference – especially from an ex-colonial power such as Britain, of which there is still great suspicion and some resentment.

The upshot of this is that Indian involvement in Afghanistan is a no-go area for British diplomats and the government. It is simply not discussed at any meaningful level. The climate deal takes precedence and the risk of souring relations over Afghanistan is too great to be taken.

We thus end up in a bizarre situation where our troops are committed to fighting in Afghanistan in a conflict which by general accord cannot be won by military means and which requires an overarching political solution. In any such solution, India has to play a major part or it simply will not work. Yet, to protect its climate change agenda, the British government is not prepared to address the Indian government on this pressing issue.

Coming full circle, this could explain the reluctance of Brown to entertain a public debate about strategic options for Afghanistan, preferring instead to conserve political capital and follow the US strategy. Flawed though it may be, it avoids any confrontation with India.

This would certainly explain the Conservatives' reluctance to engage as they also hold climate change policy in a pre-eminent position. Although they would never admit it publically, this is far more important to Cameron than sorting out Afghanistan, especially if the real objective of that adventure is maintaining "face" with the Americans.

Putting this all together, there is a case to be made that British troops in Afghanistan are dying not for peace but for the greater cause of an international deal on climate change. In such a cause, of course, troops are expendable – a small sacrifice to make in the titanic battle to save the planet.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME