THE
PRICE OF DISSENT ON GLOBAL WARMING
An opinion on
climate change made me a pariah at the BBC explains botanist, David Bellamy
David Bellamy
says, when I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t
believe what we were being told about global warming, I had no idea what the
consequences would be. I am a scientist and I have to follow the direction of
science but when I see that the truth is being covered up, I have to voice my
opinions. According to official data in every year since 1998 world
temperatures have been getting colder and in 2002 Arctic ice actually
increased. Why then do we not hear about that? The sad fact is that since I
said that I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming, I’ve not been
allowed to make a television programme.
My absence has
been noticed because wherever I go I meet people who say I grew up with you
on the television, where are you now? It was in 1996 that I criticized wind
farms while appearing on childrens’ programme Blue Peter and I also had an
article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.
The truth is I
didn’t believe wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I
said so. Back then at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing
that. At that point I was still making loads of TV programmes and I was
enjoying it greatly, then I suddenly found I was sending ideas for TV shows
and they weren’t getting taken up. I’ve asked around about why I’ve been
ignored but I’ve found that people didn’t get back to me.
At the beginning
of this year, there was a BBC show with four experts saying this is going to
be the end of all the ice in the Arctic and hypothesizing that it was going
to be the hottest summer ever. Was it hell? It was very cold and very wet and
now we’ve seen evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing
rapidly and they have not grown for a long time. I’ve seen evidence which I
believe that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998
despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This
makes me think the global warmers are telling lies. CO2 is not the driver.
The idiot fringe has accused me of being like an holocaust denier which is
ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles. It’s a natural thing and has
always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good
red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot
warmer.
If you were
sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for
global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. People
such as former American Vice President, Al Gore, say that millions of us will
die because of global warming which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if
you’ve got no proof. And my opinion is that there is absolutely no truth that
CO2 has anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The science has
quite simply gone away in fact it is not even science anymore it is
anti-science.
There’s no proof
it is just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore use,
you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs. To date the
way the so-called greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even political
parties have handled this smack of McCarthyism at its worst.
Global warming is
a part of a natural cycle and there is nothing that we can actually do to
stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in
tax to try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
And how were we
convinced that this problem exists even though all the evidence from
measurements goes against the fact, God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are
drying up but that’s not global warming. They are drying up for the very
simple reason that most of them have dams around them.
So the water once
used by local people is now used in the production of cut flowers and
vegetables for the supermarkets of Europe. One of Gore’s clangers was saying
that the Aralc in Uzbekistan was drying up because of global warming.
Well, everyone’s
knows because it was over the news 20 years ago that the Russians were
growing cotton there at the time and that for every tonne of cotton you
produce, you use a vast amount of water.
The thing that annoys
me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that desperately
require attention. I’m still an environmentalist. I’m still a Green. And I’m
still campaigning to stop the destruction of the bio-diversity of the world
but money will be wasted on trying to solve the global warming problem that I
would much rather was used for looking after the people of the world. Being
ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me not when there are
bigger problems at stake. I might not be on TV anymore but I still go around
the world campaigning about these important issues eg, we must stop the
destruction of tropical rainforests, something I’ve been saying for some 35
years.
Mother Nature
will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and
over fishing the seas. This is where the real environmental catastrophe could
occur.
David Bellamy is
a botanist, author of 35 books and has presented 400 television programmes
