Already a subscriber? Log in
After two weeks of acrimonious haggling the talks collapsed, for reasons which had already become apparent 12 years earlier at Kyoto. There was no way the fast-growing economies of the developing world, led by China and India, were going to accept any restriction on their drive to catch up with the richer countries which, if there really was a problem, they saw as having been responsible for it in the first place. Thus did all those years of negotiations designed to reach a world-changing agreement peter out in fiasco.
It is an astonishing story, and Rupert Darwall, a former City analyst, rightly makes the debacle of Copenhagen the climax of his account of it. Indeed, considering its importance, it might seem strange that this is only the second book which has tried to reconstruct that story, the first being my own, The Real Global Warming Disaster, published just before Copenhagen in 2009. Because public interest was so high at that time, my version became one of the three top sellers on the subject of the past decade, alongside those by Al Gore and James Lovelock (who later recanted much of what he had said earlier).
Apart from Darwall being able to end his book on a gripping account of what actually happened at Copenhagen, our two books inevitably cover much of the same ground and I was naturally interested to see which bits of the story he has been able to tell more fully. In terms of explaining why in the 1980s the belief in man-made warming was ‘an idea whose time had come’, we both explore the crucial importance of that fundamental shift of consciousness, focused in such books as Silent Spring and The Limits to Growth, which heralded the rise of ‘environmentalism’; and the belief that mankind had become a cuckoo in the nest of creation, capable unless we mended our ways of destroying all life on the planet.
We both describe the extraordinarily important part in the story played by the left-wing Canadian businessman Maurice Strong, organiser of the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992, who primarily saw the new environmentalism as a means to divert huge resources from richer countries to the developing world. But Darwall also brings to light the remarkable influence behind the scenes of the British economist Barbara Ward, author of that nebulous phrase ‘sustainable development’, made famous through the 1987 Brundtland Report (in which Strong was also a participant).
Darwall rightly singles out 1988 as the year when global warming took centre stage, through James Hansen’s theatrical tour de force in front of a US Senate Committee and the setting up in Geneva of the IPCC. But here he gives insufficient background to the fact that the little group of men behind the IPCC, including John Houghton, the head of the UK Met Office, never intended that it should have any other purpose than to promote that belief in what they called ‘human-induced climate change’ to which they were already fanatically committed.
Darwall again identifies the importance of the role played by Margaret Thatcher who, as an early convert to the new orthodoxy, backed Houghton in making the Met Office’s new Hadley Centre one of its most influential champions. But, curiously, he does not mention how comprehensively in her last book in 2002 she recanted her earlier enthusiasm, in terms which made her one of the first of the latter-day ‘climate sceptics’.
One of the strengths of Darwall’s book is that he has interviewed some of the key players behind the scenes, thus teasing out many fascinating details which add to our understanding of the story, as in his devastating account of the utterly dotty but hugely influential Stern Review commissioned by Tony Blair in 2006. He gives fuller and more graphic accounts than have appeared before of various of the key UN gatherings designed to further the official agenda. But although he usefully discusses the release of those ‘Climategate’ emails just before Copenhagen, which revealed so much about the comparatively tiny group of scientists responsible for pushing the scare at the heart of the IPCC establishment, he surprisingly says almost nothing about the other scandals which erupted around the IPCC in the wake of Copenhagen, which did even more to expose the unscientific nature of that ruthlessly propagandist body than its earlier promotion of the notorious ‘hockey stick’ temperature graph.
Darwall’s book has been widely praised as a welcome addition to our understanding of this extraordinary story, which as he says reflects a historic shift in the global balance of power between the West and those fast-rising nations to the east led by China and India. But he barely touches on another aspect of the colossal price we in the West are still having to pay for it, nowhere more than here in Britain, in the profoundly damaging way the CO2 theory has been allowed to hijack our energy policy, The real irony of the greatest scare story the world has seen is that, although the science which drove it has come to seem ever more questionable, our politicians remain quite oblivious to this, locked into a policy which is now the biggest single question mark over our economic future. Herein lies the real battle which remains for us to fight and it is not going to be easy.
Also in Book Reviews
Also by Christopher Booker
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in