ALARMIST WHO-HAA

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SWINE FLU LOVERS will be bitterly disappointed this week in the wake of the distressing news that the alarmist hoo-haa surrounding these two momentous events in the life of the planet are nothing more than a little hot air and a cleverly-fabricated scam on the part of ailing medical giants Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, that loveable drugs producer founded in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand. When even the ineffectual Council of Europe sees its slumbering members awake from their dozing to produce a report questioning the veracity of the World Health Organization’s report on Swine Flu then we should see that the game is up, as policemen often say on television.


NOW WE KNOW THAT THE FIGURES underlying the statements made by Margaret Chan (see Sunday Morning, April 30th 2009) were “sexed up” in order to make governments panic and buy enormous quantities of useless medicines that no one is interested in having administered by injection into their fair and lily-white members. One wonders how Ban-ki “Slippery Eel” Moon feels after having stated that “at least a third” of the world would be suffering, if not dead – and thus no longer suffering, one presumes – by last October.


NOW WE HAVE THE NEWS that Nobel-winning statuesque politician Al Gore lied about the numbers and statistics behind his claims that the Arctic Circle would be as ice-free as the Mediterranean in five years. He stated yesterday, after having been “shopped” by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, that he had made “a mistake” over his predictions. Gore’s admission leaves only two “authorities” that still defend the alarming claims made in the nineties.


ONE OF THESE IS THE IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yesterday, however, we discovered that the Chairman of this august organ, Dr Rajendra “Big Thinker” Pachauri (pictured above), far from being a “climate change expert”, whatever that is, is a former railway engineer with no background in science whatsoever. And yesterday the IPCC itself admitted that it had “exaggerated” and “speculated on” available information. Science fiction, therefore. The worst exaggeration appears to have been the panel’s statement that all the hundreds of feet thick glaciers in the Himalayas would melt “within a few years” if the temperature increases by 1ºC. These people should come to my house and help me defrost my freezer sometime.


SO WE ARE BASICALLY LEFT WITH PRINCE CHARLES; and we know what that means. Personally, I am pleased to see that the world is coming round to my sensible point of view. Over the last few years there have been few people on my side. However, I would recommend one to read Joanne Nova, on www.joannenova.com.au She describes herself as a “professional skeptic”, but I have my doubts.