What a wonderful parable of our time has been the expedition to the North Pole led by the explorer Pen Hadow. With two companions, he is measuring the thickness of the ice to show how fast it is “declining”. His expedition is one of a series of events designed to “raise awareness of the dangers of climate change” before December’s conference in Copenhagen, where the warmists hope to get a new treaty imposing much more drastic cuts on CO2 emissions. Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Project has top-level backing from the likes of the BBC, the WWF (it could “make a lasting difference to policy-relevant science”) and Prince Charles (“for the sake of our children and grandchildren, I pray that we will heed the results of the Catlin Arctic Survey and I can only commend this remarkably important project”). With perfect timing, the setting out from Britain of the “Global Warming Three” last month was hampered by “an unusually heavy snowfall”. When they were airlifted to the start of their trek by a twin-engine Otter (one hopes a whole forest has been planted to offset its “carbon footprint”), they were startled to find how cold it was. The BBC dutifully reported how, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they were “battered by wind, bitten by frost and bruised by falls on the ice”. Thanks to the ice constantly shifting, it was “disheartening”, reported Hadow, to find that “when you’ve slogged for a day”, you can wake up next morning to find you have “drifted back to where you started’’. Last week, down to their last scraps of food, they were only saved in the nick of time by the faithful Otter. They were disconcerted to see one of those polar bears, threatened with extinction by global warming, wandering around, doubtless eyeing them for its dinner. But at least one of the intrepid trio was able to send a birthday message to his mum, via the BBC, and they were able to talk by telephone to “some of the world’s most influential climate change leaders”, including Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in front of 300 people at “a conference on world poverty”. The idea is that the expedition should take regular radar fixes on the ice thickness, to be fed into a computer model in California run by Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, whose team, according to the BBC, “is well known for producing results that show much faster ice-loss than other modelling teams”. The professor predicts that summer ice could be completely gone as early as next year. It took the Watts Up With That? science blog to point out that there is little point in measuring ice thickness unless you do it several years running, and that, anyway, Arctic ice is being constantly monitored by US Army buoys. The latest reading given by a typical sensor shows that since last March the ice has thickened by “at least half a metre”. “In most fields of science,” comments WUWT drily, “that is considered an 'increase’ rather than a 'decline’.” An unhealthy moral climate A London employment tribunal has ruled that Tim Nicholson, right, was wrongly dismissed as a property firm’s “head of sustainability” because of his fervent commitment to “climate change”. Mr Nicholson had fallen out with his colleagues over his attempts to reduce the company’s “carbon footprint”. The tribunal chairman David Neath found the company guilty of discriminating against Mr Nicholson under the 2006 Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, because his faith in global warming was a “philosophical belief”. Recalling how “eco-psychologists’’ at the University of the West of England are pressing for “climate denial” to be classified as a form of “mental disorder”, one doubts whether the same legal protection would be given to those who fail to share Mr Nicholson’s “philosophical belief”. As the June Euro-elections approach, David Cameron last week told his MPs that “Europe” doesn’t figure in the 10 issues that voters name as their top concerns. In other words, was his message, don’t mention the EU, because focus groups tell us that it doesn’t win votes (even though a poll last week showed 51 per cent of voters wanting to leave). Only hours earlier, as an example of the kind of thing Mr Cameron doesn’t want his party to talk about, a titanic battle was continuing in the European Parliament over what threatens to be by far the most costly law ever imposed on Britain: an end to the right of workers to work more than 48 hours a week if they want or need to. If this latest tightening of the screw on working time goes through, as a majority of MEPs wish, the Government estimates that it could drive up costs from the present £3.9 billion a year to as high as £11.9 billion. As the think tank Open Europe has been trying to highlight in an admirable analysis by Mats Persson (available online), making it a criminal offence for any of us to work more than 48 hours a week will cause havoc across British life. Cutting back on junior doctors’ hours, according to the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, will be “potentially disastrous” for patient care, leaving the NHS in effect short of thousands of surgeons and doctors. Firemen’s organisations give warning that Britain will be left short of tens of thousands of voluntary firemen, now on call from their normal occupations; likewise lifeboatmen. Specialist steel constructors say restricting their hours will make their jobs impossible. Countless others will find that they can no longer earn the overtime needed to support their families and meet mortgage commitments. The history of the EU’s attempts to control the hours the people of Britain are allowed to work has been a perfect illustration of the damage resulting from our loss of the right to make our own laws, ever since John Major foolishly thought he had opted out of it by refusing to sign the Social Chapter at Maastricht. His “colleagues” got round this by introducing the first Working Time Directive under health and safety powers. Tony Blair, even more foolishly, abandoned our resistance, rushing the necessary regulations through Parliament in August 1998 when MPs were on holiday. Since then, further directives and a series of rulings by the European Court of Justice (such as that decreeing that on-call doctors are “working” even when they are asleep) have chipped away at one after another of our attempts to retain any working time flexibility, damaging workers in many more industries, from taxi and lorry drivers to care homes and fishermen. But because our politicians can do nothing about it, they don’t want to talk about it. There was a time when a report such as that from Open Europe would have come from the Conservative Research Department. But now vast areas of how we are governed are ruled off-limits for discussion by our politicians, led by Mr Cameron, because to mention them might remind voters how much of the power to govern ourselves they have given away to a government beyond democratic control. It is hardly surprising that an unprecedented 51 per cent of the electorate now say they would like Britain to leave the EU. It is not that they don’t care about “Europe”. They just realise that our politicians have become virtually irrelevant to the way we are governed.The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice
The ony problem with a project to prove that Arctic ice is disappearing is the fact that it is actually getting thicker, says Christopher Booker.
Working hours scandal that no one will talk about
Where is the outrage that the EU working hours directive will cost British business £11.9 billion a year, asks Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 22 March 2009
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