READERS of the Daily Telegraph are familiar with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s regular rants on the topic of Net Zero, specifically against anybody who has the temerity to criticise the UK suicidal pursuit of the impossible.
The Telegraph’s international business editor’s latest tirade warns: ‘If you have stopped paying attention to global warming, you may soon be in for a nasty surprise. A paper by Columbia University predicts that we will have our first taste of a 1.7C world as soon as next year – a shock big enough to intrude on everybody’s consciousness.’
The idea that we can know the average temperature of the Earth is, of course, absurd and unscientific. That does not stop politicians and climate grifters regularly talking of 1.5C or 2C of ‘global warming’. What is less well known is that these temperatures are in comparison with those of the mid-19th century, when we had even less idea of the world’s temperatures, for the good reason that there were no weather stations in most of it.
But here’s the real point. Assuming their numbers are correct, most of that warming occurred in the distant past. It has no relevance to our lives now.
What Evans-Pritchard, or AEP as he is known, means is that our world is perhaps a tenth of a degree or two warmer than a few decades ago – hardly scary!
There is no evidence either, as even the IPCC was forced to admit, that the world’s weather is getting worse or more extreme. So why should we be concerned about another tenth of a degree?
Comparing today’s temperatures with the Little Ice Age in Queen Victoria’s times is comparing chalk and cheese anyway. If scientists invented an instrument to reduce global temperatures back to those days when glaciers advanced down Alpine valleys, would any world leader press the button? Of course not.
It is not a hypothetical question. In the 1970s, after three decades of global cooling, world leaders were scared stiff that the world could be returning to just such a climate after a brief, welcome interlude of warmth in the early 20th century. There were genuine concerns that there would not be enough food to feed the world.
AEP even admits that much of the warming in recent decades has been the result of cleaner air, not carbon dioxide. Those old enough will remember the pollution of the past, which blocked a lot of the sun’s energy.
As is obligatory in all of AEP’s climate articles, he refers glowingly to the Chinese, who apparently are going to save the world with all their wind and solar power. He is obviously oblivious to the fact that China’s emissions of CO2 continue to rocket, as does their consumption of fossil fuels.
As for wind and solar power, it provided 18 per cent of China’s electricity in 2024, half of the 36 per cent figure for the UK. China has not the slightest intention of giving up coal or other fossil fuels; that is why it opened 78GW of coal power capacity last year, with another 83GW under construction. Together, this will increase total coal power capacity by 13 per cent.
AEP is throwing his toys out of the pram because Trump has turned his back on the climate scam. His policies have already had spectacular results with much lower petrol prices, GDP growing at 4.4 per cent pa and inflation down to 2.4 per cent, numbers that are unimaginable in Starmer’s Britain.
Worse still, in AEP’s mind, a Reform government is pledged to cancel Net Zero. As a consequence, the Tories have been forced to follow suit, though whether the Establishment Blob which controls the party will let Kemi Badenoch do that is another matter. AEP accuses both these parties of ‘climate negligence’, though quite what difference the UK’s emissions make to the world’s weather is a mystery.
And as is always the case with AEP, he never mentions how much we are all paying for Net Zero dogma. No mention of the £20billion we will be paying this year to subsidise renewable energy. No mention of the literally hundreds of billions which Net Zero electricity grid upgrades are going to cost us. Or the billions more which Ed Miliband wants to splurge on vanity projects, such as carbon capture and hydrogen.
Nor does he seem to care that drivers will be forced to buy electric cars that they don’t want and heat pumps that they can’t afford.
Far from the climate apocalypse he predicts, the world is indisputably a better place to live than at any time in human history. We have longer lives, we are healthier and wealthier. Food production hits record highs year in, year out, and deaths from weather disasters are a tiny fraction of what they were in the past.
All of this is thanks to fossil fuels, which AEP now wants to do away with. And he wonders why Telegraph readers regard him as a laughing stock.
