Saturday 2 January 2010

The Cost Of Climate Change

Richard North, EU Referendum, provides another link to data on Climate Change and a link to Defra randd which list programmes and costs.

There are 11 pages of programmes and having only totalled the first two pages, this comes to the staggering figure of £154,170,696.

It is worth noting that this site has not been updated since 30th September 2004, so God alone knows what the cost of all this 'scammery' has now reached.

Some of the programmes beggar belief, such as £516k being spent on development of a methodology for estimating methane emissions from abandoned coal mines in the UK and, best of all, £400k being spent on Climate Change impacts on Chinese Agriculture!

Now consider what £154,170,696 could have been spent on and which would have provided material benefits to our country!

12 comments:

subrosa said...

You are a brave man. I started reading this yesterday but could only cope with the first page. Like you I noticed it hadn't been updated for years.

Other than Richard, who in the MSM will take this up? More pressure needs to be applied.

Snowing here again. Even the children are fed up with it because underneath it's just hard packed ice. :(

Witterings from Witney said...

Spread it SR - you have a far greater readership than I. If bloggers like you, Captain R, Fausty and Goodnight Vienna pick it up, who knows where it will end.

Neale said...

@subrosa. What's the current weather got to do with anything? The current snow no less proves or disproves anything than the record rain in November did. That's weather. We're looking at climate.

£154m is less than the cost of widening the M1 for a mere 8 miles. Is that too much to ask to understand what we're doing to the future prospects of our soil, oceans and atmosphere?

While I personally think the climate science is beyond the moral case for urgent action. Even if CO2 concentrations had no effect on warming, the acidity of our oceans would be enough reason for us to have been looking long and hard at how to decarbonise our global economy.

Anonymous said...

Neale, frankly the M1 widening sounds like much better value.

Witterings from Witney said...

neale,

I have no objection to climate change being 'investigated' - what I object to is the humungeous amount of our money being spent on trying to change something that has NOT been definitely proven.

In that context adamcollyer is only too damn right!

Also if weather is not climate neale, methinks you need to have another go at basic o level geography - and see if you can pass it, this time?

JimK said...

This is straight from the Sarah Palin school of thinking: "I don't understand it, so we don't need it."

Global warming is fact beyond all reasonable scientific doubt. In order to fight it, we need to understand. That takes scientists, equipment and money to pay for it all.

Amazing that you'd rather widen a motorway, increase pollution, and worsen global warming rather than fix the root cause. That seems to happen a lot when you fixate on nothing other than immediate cost.

Witterings from Witney said...

JimK,
Oddly enough I do understand that it has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt! It is NOT fact, it is an idea that so-called scientists have, which they seem to be spending a lot of time and our money trying to make their theories prove

John Pickworth said...

JimK said...

"Global warming is fact beyond all reasonable scientific doubt. In order to fight it, we need to understand. That takes scientists, equipment and money to pay for it all."

And Black Holes too... we should definitely fight those and any other unexplained astronomical phenomena. We simply cannot be too careful. Dispatch the scientists I say. Once the threat has been understood we can tax it and sleep safely in our beds once again ;-)

James Delingpole said...

Yeah I'm with Adam Collyer. 8 miles is a hell of a lot of motorway.

Anonymous said...

JimK is yet another seemingly rational human being whose ineptitude to question "perceived wisdom" beggars belief.

I have coined the phrase Climate Scientologists to describe the various interest groups that would have us believe that driving to the shops is bad for the planet. They have just one thing on their minds: fleecing the gullible.

JimK, science is never settled. Science is about testing and retesting data sets, hypotheses and theories. Global Warming has not been proved beyond all reasonable doubt at all. I'm looking out of the window at eight inches of snow covering my back garden. Granted I live in the High Peak where snow is not unusual at this time of year, but we have had snow almost every day for the past two weeks. So where are the mild winters and Mediterranean summers we were promised?

As for acidic oceans, please tell me what is the natural pH balance of sea water? Sea water by it's very nature is an alkaline solution, a slight reduction in pH does not necessarily mean the oceans are becoming acid. Perhaps if you had paid attention in O-level chemistry, you would realise that you are being taken for a fool.

Paul Masters said...

Henry Crun said...
Perhaps if you had paid attention in O-level chemistry, you would realise that you are being taken for a fool.

Henry, like me, you were obviously taught science before the AGW religion corrupted teaching in our schools.

While our younger friend can't be blamed for not being taught real science, perhaps he'll take the time and trouble to look up the difference between acidification and neutralisation.

In terms of volume, there just isn't enough carbon dioxide to turn the sea into an acid and let's remember that ocean coral growth actually started in a period when the CO2 levels (air and ocean) were much higher than they are now.

Roy G Davis said...

JimK said:

Global warming is fact beyond all reasonable scientific doubt. In order to fight it, we need to understand. That takes scientists, equipment and money to pay for it all.


Erm, if MMGW is indeed "fact, beyond all reasonable doubt" then why do we still need to pay more scientists more money for more equipment in order to understand it more? Your argument for more funding suggests to me that scientists have not proven beyond reasonable doubt that Global Warming (Man-made or not not) is actually taking place...