Many of the obituaries of Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby, have glossed over the work that dominated the last 20 years of his life. This was warning of the dangers and unrealistic costs of removing fossil fuel and the dire economic and social consequences of what has come to be known as Net Zero. The Daily Telegraph spent a page detailing the significant events in his life, but three brief mentions of his Net Zero and climate science concerns didn’t even coalesce into a single sentence. Of course, the Guardian didn’t go out of its way to discuss his concerns, but it did provide a short obituary paragraph that gave a summary of the work that dominated his later years (presumably to discredit him).
His main interest, however, was a campaign to counter the case for global warming. He set up a think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, designed to challenge international attempts to mitigate the impacts of global heating. Lawson claimed that economic growth should not be slowed down to prevent a possible eventuality, but that policy should be made pragmatically in response to what had already happened.
Lawson came to politics relatively late in life after a successful career as a financial and political journalist. After the near-collapse of a Britain dominated by hard Left statism in the late 1970s, the Thatcher governments of the following decade helped boost free markets, entrepreneurship and living standards. Lawson was the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983-1989, and is credited with introducing many of the successful tax and economic reforms that transformed the British economy at the time. His success is often attributed to a combination of careful planning, thinking the unthinkable (whoever thought telephones shouldn’t be run as a state monopoly by the Post Office?) and a practical approach to the art of possible politics.
His later work on climate science and the gathering moves towards Net Zero undoubtedly appealed to his considerable intellectual abilities. The Guardian correctly noted that he didn’t wish economic growth to be slowed for a possible eventuality. Writing an essay for a climate compilation book in 2015, he noted that hundreds of millions of people suffered in dire poverty in the developing world. Asking these countries to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is, at the very least, he said, asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease and to increase the numbers of premature deaths. “Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked,” he added.
Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour warmed the planet, accepted Lawson, but he raised serious scientific questions about any danger this posed. In particular, he noted that scientists had not agreed on the sensitivity of the atmosphere to a doubling of CO2 and how much temperature would rise. In fact, since Lawson wrote his essay, these estimates have been generally lowered in most scientific circles. He stated that temperatures had been much higher in the past, without any human involvement. And he queried whether any rise in temperature would actually be a bad thing. “It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster,” he suggested.
Lawson had an elegant riposte to the so-called precautionary principle which is often used to justify the expenditure of vast amounts of money just in case there is some dramatic change in the climate. To him the most important use of the precautionary principle was against the precautionary principle. There are only so many things one can take precautions against, particularly since there are many scientists who fear the Earth is heading for a new ice age. “It would be difficult, to say the least, to devote unlimited sums to both cooling and warming the planet at the same time,” he dryly observed.
On the balance of probabilities, noting all the suggested advantages and disadvantages, Lawson concluded that in a nutshell, “global warming is good for you”. Short shrift was given to what a few years ago was the burgeoning pseudoscientific practice of claiming bad or ‘extreme’ weather was “consistent with what we would expect from climate change”. Noting these “weasel words”, he asked, so what? “It is also consistent with the theory that it is a punishment from the Almighty for our sins – the prevailing explanation of extreme weather events throughout most of human history.”
The fact remains, reported Lawson, that empirical studies show there has been no perceptible increase, globally, in either the number or the severity of extreme weather events. To this day, similar studies confirm this view.
It seems this last analysis led to his cancellation in most mainstream media, particularly at the BBC. In a recent World Weather Attribution (WWA) guide for journalists titled ‘Reporting extreme weather and climate change’, the former BBC Today Editor Sarah Sands bemoaned the time when Lawson managed to suggest there had been no increase in extreme weather. I wish we had this guide to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim, wrote Sands. These days, she said, attribution studies have given us significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse. We have evidence and we have facts, and they are a secure foundation for news, she added.
Imperial College-led World Weather Attribution specialises in near-instant weather attributions. It does this by modelling two imaginary climates, one without and one with humans producing CO2. Any weather event supposedly magnified in the latter is said to be due to human-caused climate change. Roger Pielke, a noted science writer and a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is unimpressed: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits.”
If the Telegraph obituary writer failed to pick up the importance of Lawson’s climate work, no such error was made by the newspaper’s columnist Allison Pearson. Commenting on his founding of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009, she said it pushed back against the complacent, settled wisdom on climate change. “Amid growing alarm about the cost to the U.K. of a Gadarene rush towards Net Zero, his scepticism feels more vindicated by the day,” she added.
Nigel Lawson was an old school, inquiring journalist, and a great, game-changing politician. Your own correspondent owes him a debt of gratitude since the reforms of the Thatcher Government opened up the City of London with greater opportunities in financial journalism, broke the sclerotic power of print unions to control the manufacturing process, and provided genuine tax incentives for entrepreneurship – in my own case, the publishing business.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. He is the former owner of Evandale Publishing Ltd.
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Only 44 hop farms left in the country???!!!
This news is just heartbreaking, when I think of all the beautiful old hops growing in the summer sunshine of Kent, “The Garden of England”, years and years ago, and the old oast houses there.
“While Dad worked at the docks in London, mum would take us kids up to Kent over the summer. We’d be up at 7am, and mum would make us sandwiches for the three-mile walk to the hop fields. I was only a babe in arms but as soon as I could walk properly, I would scrape hops off the floor and collect them in an umbrella. We all had to pick, it didn’t matter about our age.”
“Sixty-seven year old Colin Felton’s memories of journeying from the East End for his hop picking “holiday” in the Kent countryside are not unique. Until the 1960s, some 10,000 people – often, whole streets of families – would leave the stench of the city for the sweet aroma of Kent’s ‘hop gardens’ each September.”
“Kent became the focus of the hop industry thanks to Protestant refugees from Flanders who came to the area and began growing hops. “Having the right field structure – rich soils and a microclimate with cold winds from the North Sea – it was perfect for hops, so they stayed,” says hop breeder and researcher Dr Peter Darby.”
from British hop growing in Kent and fond memories | Local Food Britain
“When these migratory families reached the hop farms, conditions were far from what you’d expect from a “holiday”.”
“The huts were 9ft square, and we had two beds, one for the three girls and mum and then one for me and my three brothers,” says Colin, whose family would pick for up to five weeks at a stretch. “At 5pm we’d come back from the fields and have a cold wash. It was harder to get warm water because you’d have to light a fire.”
“Indeed, despite the stories of primitive conditions, and the hard work involved, many pickers look back on this time with fondness.”
“Dad would come up at weekends and mum and him would go to the pub, while us kids would go fishing, scrumping or walking,” says Colin. “We didn’t get up to mischief because we didn’t want the farmer to ban us from coming again – it was our holiday after all. Sometimes we’d miss school, but no one said much about it because we were earning money and people understood.”
[***Dear Third World, what was that you were saying about “White Privilege”?]
Starmer is like an incubus sucking the lifeblood and all that is good out of the country. There’s just never any good news where he’s concerned, is there?
Meanwhile, does this sound like a reasonable forecast for what lies in store for British farming, do you think?
”Watch out British Farmers, This is how @Keir_Starmer ‘s new best buddies at BlackRock are going to screw you over in 7 steps …
1. They will start buying up small plots of agricultural land at double the normal price. They will issue a directive to all of their energy companies simultaneously to aggressively acquire plots for carbon capture. These third parties will start bidding against each other and force the value of agricultural land up.
2. Initially farmers won’t believe their luck – “these city folks are mad! if they want to buy an acre for £50K, who am I to say no to these fools” is what you’ll hear down the pub.
3. These crazy prices will set record high comparisons for agricultural land. When a farmer dies, their farm will be valued using these new metrics and the next generation will discover the farm they thought was worth £3M is worth £9M and they don’t have anything close to the money needed to cover the tax.
4. In swoops a BlackRock subsidiary with a “Agri Debt Finance Tax Relief” product to lend them 20% the “value” of their farm so they can pay the taxes.
5. The debt will come with conditions (a covenant) that the farm has to adopt and maintain certain practices. It has to use certain BlackRock owned fertilisers, software, machinery and labour solutions that get the farm ready to interface with a larger conglomerate.
6. When a farm cannot make its debt payments, it is sold at auction. BlackRock subsidiaries are instructed NOT to buy these farms at auction. They have a special arrangement to buy the unsold farms at a rate that covers the unpaid debt plus outstanding fees and taxes to government… basically what the farm was originally worth.
7. A BlackRock subsidiary then takes over the farm, consolidates it with a massive group of farms and uses illegal immigrant labour to staff the farm (which will be another government program they institute to deal with the immigration crisis). The government will literally pay for the labour costs as part of this plan making the farms wildly profitable and making small family farms unable to compete.”
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/blackrock.418740/
Plus, once the farms are all consolidated in to mega farms there will be hundreds of unused farm buildings dotted all over the country’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. All in prime locations and just waiting to be converted into £million second homes for the filthy rich. They will be salivating about that prospect right now, just got to get the peasants out first.
Or given to the Millions of Fake Asylum Seekers as free housing, to make the British countryside “less racist”.
Then this will get even worse:
Moment huge brawl erupts at Dovedale stepping stones beauty spot as people hurl large sticks at each other | Daily Mail Online
That seems like a plan to me. The likelihood of silly prices for farmland was a given as soon as the IHT hit was announced.
This country and all its productive components like farming, manufacturing are rapidly being destroyed so that the likes of Blackrock can pick over the carcasses. Farming in particular is all about ‘whomever controls the food controls the people.’ Of course the intention is to destroy traditional farming because the people are the backbone of the country, a society within society who represent independence, graft and honesty. No wonder this class has to be destroyed.
To quote Chris Rea…
“We’re on the road to hell.”
Or Talking Heads…
“Road to nowhere.”
I was actually wondering about how the value of the land of a farm will be determined. Without actually selling it, this must necessarily be someone’s estimate and that’s wide open to gaming by interested parties.
Agree. And if it becomes a fire sale… that could then maybe be used to lower the value of the farm…going in circles here😂
Why is it commentators suggest these disfunctional policies are a mistake. Commentators used to say much the same throiughoiut the 14 years of Tory mess-ups.
Instead we should assume the outcomes are just what the government wants. This government hates SMEbusinesses. The previous one like Labour preferred globalist businesses to native British ones.
Closing down small hop growers and small brwewers would be exactly in line with their joint globalist hopes.
“Closing down small hop growers and small brwewers would be exactly in line with their joint globalist hopes.”
Furthermore, there is something quintessentially English about our hops. Again an industry with hundreds of years of history.
English / British history ? It has to be destroyed just like farming, manufacturing and so on.
Acting on the orders they have been given – destroy Great Britain – I would suggest that Kneel’s mob will be considered moderately successful. We are being extremely naïve in thinking that the economic destruction being heaped upon this country is down to piss poor management. It’s not. It’s deliberate and everything is co-ordinated and timetabled.
And the economic climate will become so desperate that eventually and to all intents and purposes we will be sold lock, stock and barrel to the likes of Blackrock or derivatives thereof.
Don’t worry. Starmer will outsource our hop growing to Mauritius
Good point! Or Rwanda…funded by British Taxpayers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje050wz22qo
Billingsgate and Smithfields to close after 850 years.
As I keep posting, it’s all about destroying the country and taking our history with it.
Umm, interesting, shame the frost has been and the Liberty caps are gone.. Maybe next year..
https://youtu.be/0hS3eT5fhTM?si=jyeBF74mIUadAZPU
Partly caused by our young people not drinking beer and instead drinking European larger. Traitors. MEGA – Make England Great Again!
Some brewers actually use hops from across the pond, e.g. Oregon, or Washington states. I’ve come across those on various brewery visits recently.
Yes. Citra hop is particularly common. Horrible stuff.
Will anyone make a bet with me? Ms reeves and her crew will back down from the inheritance tax on farmers plan. We are witnessing, the backtracking on every single net zero goal. The same will happen with the newest gov’ts other “initiatives”. That is my bet.