Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-04-Speech-3-019"
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"en.20090204.3.3-019"2
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"Mr President, 500 years ago there was a consensus amongst learned men that the world was flat. They were wrong. In the 1970s, after three decades of global cooling, there was a consensus amongst scientists that we were facing a new ice age. They were wrong. In 1999, everybody believed that the millennium bug would create a global disaster by closing down computer systems across the world. Weapon systems would fail, commerce would stop, aircraft would fall out of the sky. They were wrong. Nothing at all happened.
Today we are told there is a consensus around catastrophic man-made global warming. It, too, is wrong. Nor is it a consensus. The myth of consensus is a propaganda triumph for the alarmists, but repeated surveys both of the scientific literature and of working climate scientists show a wide range of views on both sides of the debate, with many believing that the jury is still out.
It is true that the world has warmed slightly, although slowly and intermittently, over the last 150 years, but this is entirely consistent with well-established long-term natural climate cycles that gave us the Roman Optimum, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. There is clear evidence that, while the world has warmed slightly, other bodies in the solar system have also warmed. Ice caps have shrunk on Mars, yet nobody imagines that industrial emissions or 4x4s are to blame.
We are now planning to spend unimaginable sums of money on mitigation measures which simply will not work and which, by damaging our economies, will deny us the funds we need to address real environmental problems. As a British journalist, Christopher Booker, has remarked, global warming alarmism is the greatest collective flight from reality in human history."@en1
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