RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Durban climate conference has been an abject failure. But that hasn’t stopped those who were there desperately trying – with all the plausibility of Monty Python’s Black Knight – to spin their disaster as though it represents some kind of massive triumph. Among them is a man named Michael Jacobs, formerly climate adviser to Gordon Brown.

In his Guardian column, Jacobs argues that “the conference that has ended in Durban, South Africa, amid considerable drama, should be regarded as very much a success.”

I disagree. And today we met on Sky News to discuss it.

By the time Jacobs left he was not a happy bunny. He left the set very quickly, apparently not a little discombobulated that I had just accused him (off camera, unfortunately) of talking “weapons-grade b***ocks”. But then, he had started it by turning to me immediately after we’d done our recording and saying: “You are entitled to your opinion. What you are not entitled to are your own facts.”

In other words, Jacobs was accusing me of having lied on TV. This was more revealing about the mindset of committed warmists than it was about the veracity of what I had actually said. If you can find a link to our encounter you can judge for yourself: I said Durban had been a flop (TRUE); I said if the 15,000 delegates really cared about Climate Change they would have done it by teleconferencing rather than hopping onto planes and creating an enormous carbon footprint (TRUE); I said global warming had stopped in 1998 (TRUE); I said that “green jobs” were a nonsense – quoting the Verso Economics statistic that for every “green job” created by government subsidy in the UK economy another 3.7 jobs are lost in the real economy (TRUE); and I said that if the former Climate Adviser to Gordon Brown was uncomfortable with any of this, well that was surely a sign that things must be going well (TRUE).

So what was the best response Michael Jacobs could muster? To call me a liar.

That opinion/facts phrase he used sounded familiar. And sure enough, up it crops in that rather embarrassing report that Steve Jones did for the BBC Trust – the one arguing that the BBC really ought to be more biased in its coverage of global warming because, er, well, it should.

“All of us involved in this debate need to remember that we are entitled to our own opinions but none of us are entitled to our own facts.”

Good phrase, that. (Though personally I’d prefer the more grammatical “none of us is“). Presumably it has been doing the rounds quite a bit in Warmist circles. As it would, I suppose: after all, when you’ve got so very few scientific facts on your side, you need all the handy slogans you can muster.

What really impresses me, though, is the bravura hypocrisy of such accusations. I mean if there’s one thing we’ve established with absolute, 100 per cent, cast iron certainty in the climate debate which has been raging these last few years it’s this: that climate scientists are a bunch of epic liars.

In the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 emails they’re shown time and again fudging data, breaching FOI requests, lying to outsiders who’ve requested to see the raw data on which they’ve based their dubious prognostications, grossly exaggerating their degree of certainty about the threat of AGW, tweaking their Assessment Reports to make them look more scary, pretending those Assessment Reports are the work of divers hands when really the people doing all the legwork and rewriting comprise a relatively small core of committed activists.

Yet for all this, Michael Jacobs has apparently never stopped to ask himself whether this might not suggest something ever so slightly dubious about the quality of the science underpinning his cherished theories. So certain is he of the unimpeachable virtuousness of his cause, it seems, that he has no need to respond to sceptics with facts or arguments. All he has to do is call them liars and the problem will go away.

Except it won’t.

James Delingpole is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who is (he says) right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome to Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future and it Doesn’t Work. His website is http://www.jamesdelingpole.com/ and he also has a blog at the Daily Telegraph.