MORE CONVINCING NEEDED - 18 November 2009

Any agreements about advancing together as Nations appear to be blown out of the water at the forthcoming conference in Copenhagen on climate change. Politicians are busily rushing around to salvage as much of the outcome of the event as they can. Not only are the public not convinced that Climate Change is due to human activity, but now that political reality is having to take over from political rhetoric many of the politicians are having to back peddle as the costs of some of the measures are much closer to loosing them votes.

Initially this was a topic where politicians were keen to promote themselves as knights in shining armour coming to the rescue of a doomed world because there was such little opposition to their proposals. We have however already seen that many of their have baked ideas are starting to come back to bite them. Light bulbs is a classic example. Not until laws had been passed across the EU was it realised that the new energy saving bulbs we now are forced to use are less environmentally friendly than those they replace because they contain mercury. Think of the cost and investment that has gone into the development of electric cars Only last week it was announced by The Environmental Transport Association, a green lobby group, that Electric cars may not be as green as we think because of the amount of electricity from carbon emission sources needed to charge them has not been fully taken into account. All electric cars are doing in reality is to move emissions from exhaust pipes to power station chimneys the report says. However the government has allocated £250m to the promotion of such cars.

Gordon Brown is off to Copenhagen with a promise to give £1 billion a year to poor countries to help them cope with climate change. How does he intend to police this given the amount of aid that ends up in the back pockets of some African dictators? Other leaders will see the money being put to more effective use for the immediate relief of their people. We have already been told that many of the so called green measures proposed by the government are going to see our energy bills soar, this at a time when so many households are facing fuel poverty.

Whilst we are told that the vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is as a result of human activity, there are a significant number of scientists who do not agree. We must not loose sight that the majority of scientists once thought that the earth was flat. The majority are not always right. It is noticeable that words such as "may" and "might" and "could be" litter much of any evidence presented.

A recent poll conducted for the Times indicates that the public still need to be persuaded. Although 41% of those polled accept that a link has been established between human activity global warming, 32% deny any such link. 8% believe that the link is environmentalist propaganda and 15% deny that the world is warming.

So what are we to make of it all. Whatever our point of view I am sure that we would all agree that making the world a greener and more pleasant place to live is a great goal. Making it a safe and sustainable place to live is essential. We do however need to be clear that the costly measures we are being asked to undertake are going to be effective and achieve their goals. At the moment that this would appear to be far from the case. Politicians need take stock before rushing in with solutions to problems they have yet to fully understand and which will cause more harm than good. Frightening us and even worse frightening our children through a misguided television advertising campaign is not the way to win us round. Environmentalists who in a book entitled Time to eat the dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living suggested that we start to eat our pets because of their carbon footprint, clearly will have much more difficulty in convincing us that they are right.