02/05/2009 | By Christopher Booker | comment There is a fierce conflict between the MoD, determined to conceal how far its strategy is failing in Afghanistan, and other Government players who realise our policy must be completely rethought, says Christopher Booker. 02/05/2009 | By Christopher Booker | comment I am sorry to have misread some of Lord Stern’s figures on CO2, says Christopher Booker, but I'm still concerned that our Government’s leading adviser on climate change has such a wildly optimistic view of the supposed benefits of wind power. In recent days, while the penny has been dropping as to what a tragic mess our politicians and senior generals made of our occupation of southern Iraq, there have been two remarkable twists to the story of our commitment in Afghanistan. One of these is highly alarming, the other possibly more hopeful. Almost wholly unreported until yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, there has been a dramatic change in Taliban tactics in Helmand, where some 8,500 British troops are stationed, with their headquarters in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. On four occasions since April 21, including three in the past week, US air power has had to be called in to take out heavy machine guns, ZPU-1s and ZPU-2s, that the Taliban were installing around the town. Their purpose, as the British in Lashkar Gah are painfully aware, was all too obvious – to bring down the Chinook helicopters on which the British rely for transport and re-supply. Since a Chinook can carry more than 40 men, just one successful hit would strike a devastating blow at our presence in Afghanistan, not least because of the fearful impact this would have on an unprepared British public. As I reported last week, the Ministry of Defence, using a strategy only too reminiscent of its record in southern Iraq, has gone out of its way to play down the parlous situation of our forces in Afghanistan, preferring to divert media attention with a succession of human interest stories such as that of the girl soldier toting a real live gun. On the Telegraph website, below my article last week, appeared two long comments from someone signing himself “Praetorian” and claiming to have been “Operations Officer 3 Commando Brigade”, just returned from Helmand after a six-month tour. My report, he claimed, was “ill informed and out of date”. During his tour “you could count the number of security incidents on the fingers of your hands”. Far from US forces having to be called in to retake the town of Now Zad, abandoned by the British, it was “peacefully” handed over to the Americans by the Estonians last November. The MoD confirmed to me that it supports these comments. But as my colleague Richard North recounts in exhaustive detail on his Defence of the Realm blog, drawing on daily US Air Reports and other sources, there were in fact 69 separate “security incidents” around Lashkar Gah alone – and some of them very serious – during 3 Commando Brigade’s tour. Only last month a strong US Marine force, with heavy air support, retook Now Zad – having earlier given heavy protection to a British convoy sent back to the town to collect 30 lorryloads of kit left behind when we retreated, The truth is that, as we also learned last week, a battle royal has been raging behind the scenes between the MoD, determined to conceal how far its strategy is failing in Afghanistan, and other senior Government players, centred in Number 10, who realise that if our policy is to succeed it must be completely rethought. The first fruit of this was last week’s lucid and thoughtful strategy paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan, tellingly published not by the MoD but by the Cabinet Office. It lays out the framework of a wholly new approach, calling for much greater effort to be given to building up the rural Afghan economy, through new roads and other infrastructure, to give local farmers a positive alternative to the present chaotic and murderous stalemate. Unless they can earn their living from crops other than opium, they will remain in terrified semi-thrall to the Taliban. This is very much the case I argued in my column on December 23, now reinforced by the views of the shrewd new US commander, General Petraeus. The new thinking from Number 10 is highly welcome as offering the only practical way forward from the dead-end strategy imposed on gallant British troops by those blinkered minds in the MoD. Summer gales of laughter We are “odds on for a barbecue summer”, says the Met Office: temperatures are “likely to be warmer than average”, with “near or below average rainfall”. Cue gales of mirth at the US Watts Up With That blog, which recalls that the Met Office predicted exactly the same last year, when our coolish summer was in fact one of the wettest on record. A year earlier the Met Office predicted that 2007 was “likely to be the warmest year on record globally”, just before temperatures plunged by 0.8 degrees C, one of the sharpest drops on record. Is it coincidental that the Met Office’s Hadley Centre boasts that it produces “world class guidance on the science of climate change”? Model madness Among those stoking up the swine flu hysteria last week was Professor Neil Ferguson of the World Health Organisation, whose computer model predicts that the killer virus could strike down “four in 10 Britons”. At the time of the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, it may be noted, Prof Ferguson was part of Prof Roy Anderson’s Imperial College team whose computer modelling was responsible for the “pre-emptive cull” that resulted in killing some eight million perfectly healthy animals not directly exposed to infection. As many lawyers pointed out, this mass slaughter was illegal. The loudest health warnings, it seems, should be reserved for any policy based on a computer model. I owe readers a correction of one or two points in my item last week criticising Lord Stern as one of our “scaremongers in chief” over global warming. When I claimed that Lord Stern was wrong in the figure he gave for the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, I was relying on a newspaper article which appeared to attribute to Lord Stern a claim that “carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are already at 430 parts per million (ppm)”; and also on an interview in which he said that “carbon” levels in the atmosphere are now “430ppm”. When I pointed out that the actual figure for CO2 is currently 388.79ppm, this provoked a storm of irate comments on the Telegraph website from Lord Stern’s defenders. He was not referring to CO2, they pointed out, but to “CO2 equivalent” (CO2e). From his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, it appears that he does indeed mean “430 ppm of CO2e” but this was not apparent in either of the articles I cited. It seems the pushers of the global warming scare now prefer to use “CO2 equivalent”, lumping in CO2 with other greenhouse gases, because it makes the figures look more alarming. Yet Stern himself admits in his book that “figures for CO2e are patchy”. May I also clarify a couple of points on Lord Stern’s comments on wind power. I quoted him as saying in his book that by next year “wind energy is set to account for 8 per cent of electricity generation in the UK”. What I missed was that he goes on to admit “the UK is currently falling behind its target, with wind accounting for around 3 percent of energy generation”. The latest official figures show the contribution from wind is actually only 1.3 per cent, so he has overestimated by well over 100 per cent. I also quoted Lord Stern as saying that “wind accounted for 35 per cent of total installed capacity in the US in 2007”. Elsewhere in his book, it appears that what he means is only that wind represented 35 per cent of all the new capacity installed in the US in that year. Official figures, meanwhile, show that electricity generated by wind in the US in 2007 averaged only 3.9 gigawatts – a mere 0.82 per cent of the total, and less than the output of a single large coal-fired plant. I am obviously sorry to have misread some of Lord Stern’s figures like this. But perhaps those readers so eager to point out my mistake over “CO2e” should be more concerned that our Government’s leading adviser on climate change should have such a wildly optimistic view of the supposed benefits of wind power.Battle rages over our tragic failure in Afghanistan
Greenhouse gases raise temperatures online
Battle rages over our tragic failure in Afghanistan
There is a fierce conflict between the MoD, determined to conceal how far its strategy is failing in Afghanistan, and other Government players who realise our policy must be completely rethought, says Christopher Booker.
Greenhouse gases raise temperatures online
I am sorry to have misread some of Lord Stern’s figures on CO2, says Christopher Booker, but I'm still concerned that our Government’s leading adviser on climate change has such a wildly optimistic view of the supposed benefits of wind power.
Sunday, 3 May 2009
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