A brave parent had taken the British government to court over its decision to distribute the Gore movie to every school in the country. No one thought he would win his case but he did. The judge found that far from being a normal documentary, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was a polemic, but a polemic with vital errors in it. Nine of them.

The reaction among British environmentalists was a joy to behold. They took the line that the errors didn’t really matter. Polemicists always overstate their case, they said. So that’s alright then. We’re happy to brainwash our children with wrong information, are we? Hmmmm. I suppose that always was the approach of the left.

I do not deny that climate change is taking place. It always has and always will. What I find difficult to judge is how much of the climate change is due to man made activity. I watched the Al Gore movie and then I watched the British TV documentary THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE. I was even more confused. So I am a confirmed climate change skeptic, yet to come off the fence.

Yet, because I haven’t signed up to the climate change religion – for that is what it has become – I am labeled a ‘climate change denier’. Not only is this grossly insulting, it is a ludicrous mis-characterization. What it implies is that I am the moral equivalent of a holocaust denier. There may even be people who might quite like to lock me up for my thought crime. To allow the left to continue to use this term and get away with it is dangerous.

Organizations like Greenpeace refuse to debate the issue of climate change with people like me. They say there is no point as the argument is already won. Er, how can it be, when there are thousands of people like me who are not yet persuaded by the evidence? The fact is, climate change has become the new religion of the left, in the same way that unilateral nuclear disarmament performed the same role in the 1980s.

Al Gore is a deeply flawed individual who has ‘got religion’. He has used his campaign to rehabilitate himself, while at the same time creating a bigger carbon footprint on his own than a village. Will he run for the Presidency? He must be tempted, but he will surely realize that his time has come – and gone. Let’s hope so anyway.

Perhaps even more worrying than giving the Nobel prize to Al Gore, was the decision to give it jointly to the IPCC. The GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE showed what a flawed report they produced. Many leading scientists withdrew from the IPCC report because they were fed up with being bullied into signing up to conclusions they disagreed with. It’s all very well to quote that 2,500 of the world’s scientists signed up to it. What about the ones that had the courage not to, or the ones within the 2,500 who signed up to it because they were bullied into it? No one talks about them.

So now you see why I am a sceptic, not a denier.

*****
Iain Dale writes Britain’s leading political blog at http://iaindale.blogspot.com [1]

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