The climate change debate is not over

Global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon and its effects can even be beneficial, according to two leading researchers.

Recent climate change is not caused by man-made pollution, but is instead part of a 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling that has happened for the last million years, say the authors of a controversial study.

Dennis Avery, an environmental economist, and Professor Fred Singer, a physicist, have looked at the work of more than 500 scientists and concluded that it is very doubtful that man-made global warming exists.

Since I am not a scientist, and, indeed, have little interest in most areas of science, I do not tend to write about climate change a great deal, nor do I tend to espouse any particular position on the issue. However, I am interested in seeing that impartial debate takes place, and desire that the public in general, and schoolchildren in particular, are not brainwashed into accepting as absolute fact a theory which is, in truth, not generally accepted as true by those who do know about these things.
As it is, the government and the MSM has unquestioningly accepted the claim that man-made global warming is a proven fact, and treat those who oppose it as dangerous heretics. Some readers may recall that in February it was announced that every secondary school in England was to be sent a copy of Al Gore's propaganda film, "An Inconvenient Truth". The then Environment Secretary David Miliband claimed then that "the debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over". When I recently had occasion to visit a primary school, I found a vast wall display at the centre of the school telling children that they were killing the Earth. Meanwhile Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and former Greenpeace activist who is sceptical of the existence of man-made climate change, was physically assaulted by an environmental activist, for daring to suggest that, actually, we aren't all doomed. And last week, Greenpeace released a video which came rather close to threatening similar (or worse) action against those who oppose its ends.

The existence of man-made global warming is increasingly treated as an article of faith by those on the left, and those who, like Mr Avery and Professor Singer, dissent from it, are increasingly regarded as, not just wrong, but actually evil. And this is what our schools brainwash the nation's children into believing. After all, since Al Gore is in no way a scientist, and since his film can in no way be said to represent a balanced assessment of the subject, it is simply brainwashing to show it as representing some form of scientific truth universally acknowledged. Contra Miliband, the debate appears to be far from over, and adults and schoolchildren alike deserve rather rather better than to have politicians and the media attempt to brainwash them: we deserve a continued debate on this issue, and we deserve the real, rather than the politically-correct, truth.