Hilarious reading this week on the web and in our papers about the fiasco of the redrawn map of Greenland. The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World has been updated and in the brain-washing, never mind the facts here's the b***ocks style to which we've all become so accustomed in recent years on the subject of climate change, they decided to draw Greenland with much of the permanent ice sheet missing and claiming that this has now disappeared because of man made global warming. The publicity at the launch suggested that 15% of the Greenland ice sheet had become "green and ice free".
Proper scientists quickly pointed out the error of their assumptions and once the story broke - amazingly by the normally ultra pc, green broadcaster, the BBC - the blogosphere went ballastic again with people even suggesting the atlas compilers simply look at Google Earth! The Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University have pointed out that large tracts of land shown in the atlas to be ice free have been seen in recent satellite imagery as clearly ice covered - and let's not forget this is at the end of the Summer months when the ice coverage is always at its lowest point!
"Never let the truth get in the way of the message" seems to be the mantra. You'd have thought after the scandal in 2009, where the leaked emails showed how the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University was manipulating data to suit their political aims, that even the most ardent climate change fanatics would be more careful about how they try to get their message across. But no, it's clearly business as usual for these guys.
What worries me most though about this whole episode and the general green lobby method is the way the climate change message gets pushed continually into our sub-conscious. These fanatics have pervaded so many sections of society, particularly the public sector workforce, that you are still branded a heretic if you dare to question. The name "sceptic" has been used purely to try to brand anyone who doesn't believe in the public sector propaganda line. And it really is the whole public sector that's been tainted: Government at Westminster (right across the political spectrum - or at least what remains of the spectrum seeing as the spectrum of colours has become more of a hue!) pursues every green agenda with a religious zealotry, raising taxes directly and indirectly to make us pay for their beliefs; local Governments use the green arguments to justify cutting back on essential local services such as waste collection whilst increasing our council tax; BBC TV and Radio regularly trot out various people wanting to spout forth their green ideology without having anyone on air giving an alternate viewpoint - on the odd occasion when someone does give an alternate view they are invariably cut off or shouted down; schools teach our children opinion as if it were fact, resulting in those children growing up believing they were facts - nonsense of the sort that Al Gore shamefully propagated; the list is endless but this blog thankfully isn't!
Surely the green lobby has been so badly damaged again and again, whilst still not providing a shred of evidence of anthropogenic global warming, that our political classes must stop treating us like fools.
I believe absolutely and totally in climatic change. The evidence is clear that our planet has gone through a continuous cycle of climate change and that Earth looks very different from how it would have looked 50 or 150 million years ago. But ipso facto this surely points more and more towards climate change being a natural phenomena, not something we can control?