Beware The Climate Change Con Men

As our nations recover from the Big Freeze, only last week the Met Office predicted 2009 would be one of ''the five warmest years on record''. The threat of man-made global warming is being exposed as a global con to prop up the Met Office money-making machine and fuel carbon trading greed. 

The Met Office issued severe weather warnings as temperatures plunged as low as -11C overnight. Reassuringly the BBC tells us temperatures didn't "plunge", they just "dipped" and the "current cold period is expected to ease later in the week". Until of course the next big Arctic chill.

The fact that the earth is warming up, whatever,  is not an issue here. The question which amuses scientists is how much of that warming is man-made and how much is just the natural cycle as the earth whizzes around its sun. 

At the heart is the UK Met Office. Its swanky £25m PPI-funded Hadley Centre, is one of the four official sources which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bases all those heavily biased and scientifically dubious projections of global warming. 

The Met Office, which played a key part in setting up the IPCC, goes to great lengths to promote its favourite cause of man-made climate change.

Now the Met Office appears to be brainwashing people in collusion with eco-fundementalists at the BBC as this once respected organisation gears up for a government sell-off . 

As the Met Office's website boasts, its ''world-leading expertise'' enables it to provide ''an understanding of the future through risk analysis and long-range forecasting''. 

It stages seminars to equip ''professionals in Government and the public sector'' to ''dispel scepticism about climate change in your organisation''. There's a lot of money to be made out of Met Office "consultation".

Man-made global warming is popular and politicians will go along with the flow. The Orange Party is not prepared to be bullied by eco fundamentalists.

All we can say for certain is that we are responsible for only a tiny part of what's happening. Climatologists in the US reckon us that humans are responsible for only 4 - 8% of the global warming shift, with the rest of it happening naturally. 

We are fed a daily diet of gloom and doom. Climate change fuels the climate of fear and is the new weapon in a politician arsenal for Brown and his New Labour government. As he drones on about global warming, it seems people are willing to pay more in taxes to save the planet.

More insidious is carbon trading now a multi billion dollar industry. It's a red herring that won't work but when has a little thing like that got in the way of turning a fast buck. 

Carbon emissions trading has been steadily increasing in recent years. The World Bank has estimated that the size of the carbon market was $11 billion in 2005, $30 billion in 2006, and $64 billion in 2007. 

The process of buying and selling carbon credits. has spawned a huge financial and consultation industry. 

The idea that large companies or organisations are assigned a quota of carbon that they are allowed to emit create a muddle. If a company's emissions are less than its quota then it can sell credits. If emissions are more then it will need to buy carbon credits and that leaves much room for unverifiable manipulation.

According to the World Bank's Carbon Finance Unit, 374 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent were exchanged through projects in 2005, a 240% increase relative to 2004 which was itself a 41% increase relative to 2003.

Spending billions on trying to reduce carbon emissions is one giant con that is depriving third world countries of vital funds to tackle famine, HIV and other diseases. There's a fortune to be made from spreading the man-made global warming myth, while more serious issues that directly affect people are left untackled as they are no longer favour of the year.

Meanwhile, the climate-change con-men are still rushing about looking for thin and miserable polar bears to 'prove' their case and keep the public money flowing into their pockets. But polar bears are not diminishing due to global warming. They are being wiped out because of pollution, over fishing and a reckless rush for oil destroying the natural habitat. 

And the picture of the poor old bears running out of habitat on a melting iceberg? 

That was taken in the middle of the summer of 2004 by a marine biologist who thought the wind-eroded ice of the bears' perch made a dramatic picture. The bears were within an easy swim of the Alaskan coast and not, as Al Gore later spun the image, being literally forced off the planet because their world is melting.