Welcome Iain Dale readers

Just to add that if you don’t have time to go back to that early 2008 posting of mine, do take a couple of minutes to read Isaac Asimov’s peerless The Last Question.

Way back in 1956 it still says all that needs to be said on how to harness solar power – and takes to the very very End the central issue in all human policy-making.

Timescale.

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Back in the mists of time (early 2008) when this blog started and no-one read it, I posted this about Climate Change:

In my Civil Service entrance exams back in 1975 one of the questions asked what UK policy-makers should do as a new Ice Age raced in our direction at an unfeasibly speedy speed.

I forget my answer but remember being exasperated by the silliness of the question:

Draft a short position paper for managing the end of civilisation as we have known it.

(Note: Marks will be deducted for poor presentation, unless the candidate can show that noxious fumes emerging from the new volcanoes in Magdalen College gardens brought about by Global Colding were a contributory factor, in which case the normal appeal procedures will pertain.)

Yes, back in those days the papers were full of alarmist ravings about Global Cooling and all the terrors coming our way from it.

Someone else has remembered those scary days of global cooling, namely Gary Sutton who suggests that scientists just say what the grant-donors want to hear:

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants.

He points out the ebb and flow of climate over the past thousand years or so. And gives us this wonderful heresy:

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans…

… the longer term changes are no more compelling, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right.

Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we’d forestall the next ice age?

Shouldn’t we be told?