James Delingpole

“There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague of boils and deluge of frogs that suggested a deep and constant inclination enacted over the centuries to believe that one was always living at the End of Days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made more sense or was just a little less irrelevant.”
Yes! Great! Tick in the margin! Here is a great novelist at the height of his powers summing up perfectly the atavistic impulse which leads generation after generation to believe it is the chosen one: the generation so special that it and it alone will be the one privileged to experience the end of the world; and the generation so egotistical that it imagines itself largely responsible for that imminent destruction.

The Aztecs thought it; Medieval peasants thought it; green doom-mongers think it today…. Read More

So it’s true: as some of us have suspected all along, Greens really are much more insidiously evil than the rest of the human race. All that eco-righteousness, all that ostentatious recycling and non-disposable-nappy-washing, all that more-healthily-flatulent-than-thou pulse-scoffing, all that “ooh-get-me-I-never-fly-unless-I-have-to-because-I-read-somewhere-that-Carbon-Footprints-are-like-really-bad-for-Mother-Gaia” (Yes that means YOU, Hannan) – it’s all just a cloak of sanctimony used to hide the rancid mass of pullulating vileness beneath.

Greens steal more than non-Greens; they are more likely to cheat and lie. And it’s not me making this up here. We’re talking hard scientific fact. Way harder than anything you’d find in, say, the Fourth IPCC Assessment report. See for yourself. It’s in The Guardian.
Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are… Read More

“Let’s be honest….” says Sir John Houghton, formerly chief of the Met Office and leading climate doom-monger, in a fascinating article in today’s Times. Fascinating, that is, for what it is says about our supine MSM’s apparently boundless appetite for allowing itself to be used as the climate fear promotion lobby’s uncritical propaganda mouthpiece.

Can you imagine the leader of Hamas being given freedom to explain in a national British newspaper column how his party had always been an ardent supporter of Israel and a great lover of the Jewish people and how to suggest otherwise was an outrageous slur on his good name?

Or Jose Manuel Baroso running an article saying that one of the great things about the EU was the way it had lowered taxes and regulation, enhanced liberty and made everything more democratically accountable?

Or Jeffrey Archer being given a thousand words to explain how Tolstoy had learned… Read More

What marvellous news to learn that the UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon is to launch a thorough investigation into the science behind climate change! It’s the equivalent of Kenneth Lay promising to organise a full and frank investigation into the accounts at Enron, or Herod ordering an urgent inquiry into the appalling and mysterious slaughter of infants in Judaea: all it will do is end up confirming the prejudices of the person who commissioned the report.

And as Ban Ki Moon himself says, keeping a studiedly neutral position on the issue:
“I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of that [Fourth IPCC Assessment] report. The threat posed by climate change is real.”
Make no mistake, we are accelerating at breakneck speed towards hell. There are now so many political entities dedicated to creating a regulatory system predicated on the existence on AGW – besides the UN these… Read More

Today’s blog is brought to you from Dubai, courtesy of Emirates Airlines, which is sponsoring the city’s annual Festival of Literature. As always when I’m in the Middle East, I’m instantly reminded why it is that Britons from TE Lawrence to the Prince of Wales to pretty much anyone who has ever worked in our Foreign Office tends to go weak at the knees over Arab culture: because when you’re on the receiving end of its hospitality, there are few finer experiences in the world.

This Literature Festival is a case in point. All morning I’ve been watching authors like Martin Amis, Conn Iggulden, Francis Wheen, Roger McGough, Alexander McCall Smith and the world’s goriest children’s author Darren Shan wandering round in a daze, some of it maybe due to the time zone shift (we had to get up for the opening at the equivalent at 4.30 am UK time) but… Read More

News has just reached me that the great Professor Ian Plimer, scourge of climate-fear-promoters everywhere, has been suddenly disinvited by the Royal Society of Artists (RSA) from a lecture he was due to give in May before an audience including the Duke of Edinburgh.

Here’s part of the embarrassed kiss-off Prof Plimer received from the RSA’s chief executive:
I am afraid I am writing to you with some disappointing news regarding
the Prince Philip Annual Lecture on 5 May.

As you well know, the debate around climate change has recently become
highly politically charged, both globally and especially in your home
country. Equally, as I am sure you are aware, members of the Royal
Family need to be scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of advocating or
supporting a particular political stance. The RSA’s charitable status
also requires us to maintain absolute political independence in our
programme of events and research events.

After discussion with Buckingham Palace, it is therefore with great
regret… Read More

Question Time: celebrating the cosy consensus

Watching another dismal episode of the BBC’s Question Time last week, I realised why British politics is in such a dire state. It’s because the language of debate has been hijacked so comprehensively by the liberal left that not even conservatives dare speak up for right-wing views any more for fear of being dismissed as extremist.

By “right wing” I don’t mean anti-semitic, xenophobic, “racist”, “sexist” or any of the other glib caricatures routinely imposed on us by the left. I simply mean believing, as I do, that a society is at its most fruitful, happy and successful when individuals are left free to live their lives unburdened by all but the bare minimum of taxation or regulation, where time-honoured traditions and institutions (be they the family, or the church… Read More

A Texas reader, Robert Birch, wishes to draw your attention to a magnificent artistic creation he is selling on Ebay, which he lovingly constructed from 100 per cent recycled materials (not all of them organic, unfortunately, but still…). Clearly he believes as passionately in the virtues of recycling as I do. Unfortunately I can’t seem to reproduce the picture here.

But I urge you, go to his Ebay page, think of all the world’s children who are being drowned, starved or bored to death thanks to Man Made Global Warming, and bid, bid, bid!

Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy.

We also know that alternative energy is a fraud – only viable through enormous government (ie taxpayer subsidy) and utterly incapable of answering anything more than a fraction of our energy needs. As Shannon Love puts it here:
Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:

There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.
And if you’ve time, do… Read More

A sharp-eyed viewer has noticed that when I was debating George Monbiot on TV yesterday and I mentioned that his cherished “peer-reviewed science” had been discredited by Climategate he bared his teeth like a cornered cur. Says my body language expert John Lish:
“It was a quite aggressive and defensive gesture which was noticeable when he was attempting to dismiss you (talking about peer review). A definite body-language sign of being rattled. He’s definitely uncomfortable about what’s occurring and others will have spotted that as well.”
Monbiot isn’t the only one. Consider the paranoid tone of this email from climate-fear-promoter Paul Ehrlich, during an exchange with fellow members at the National Academy of Scientists on how best to deal with the Denier threat: (Hat tip: Marc Morano)
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemie… Read More