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after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government’s infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years – paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing “carbon emissions”. There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.

a Government policy which, in the next few years, will inflate the cost of a new home in Britain by as much as 66 per cent. The soaring cost of 'zero carbon’

one major obstacle to any improvement in the figures is their own Government’s building regulations, already being phased in. These decree that, by 2016, all new homes must be “zero carbon” in terms of energy-use and emissions. According to official estimates in the Code for Sustainable Homes, this will increase the cost of building a house by up to £37,793.

In rural areas, where there is already a serious housing crisis, this will be made still worse by the Government’s wish by 2013 to abolish the “Fuel Factor”, a relaxation of the rules for new homes in places without access to the natural gas grid

Our disappearing nuclear capability In his Annual Energy Review for Parliament last week, Chris Huhne announced, through gritted teeth, that he is still hoping to see a new fleet of nuclear power stations to plug Britain’s fast-looming energy gap, as older power stations are closed down by age or EU anti-pollution laws. His review coincided with a devastating report from the Lords Science and Technology Committee on Nuclear Research and Development, dismally depicting how Britain, which led the world in this field 50 years ago, has allowed its pool of expertise to run down so far that we no longer have the know-how even to run a new generation of nuclear plants.

will have to rely on wood pellet boilers or “heat pumps”.

extraordinary discrepancy between the view, on the one hand, of some senior Government officials and the Secretary of State (Mr Huhne) and on the other, those of independent experts from academia, industry, nuclear agencies, the regulator and the Government’s own advisers

we would be wholly reliant on foreign-owned companies to build new nuclear power stations. Britain’s last world-class nuclear company, Westinghouse, was sold by Gordon Brown to the Japanese in 2006, at a knock-down price of £3.4 billion.

Inside the climate cabal While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO2 emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity,

ll this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors

are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory – even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell. And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

The upper limit tentatively stands at 500 becquerels per kilogram.

eter Bosshard, Policy Director of the campaign group International Rivers, contacted me to point out that the scenario for 77 per cent renewables included (against standard practice) large hydropower projects among the technologies to be promoted.

Most environmentalists believe that more large scale dams are not the right approach to generating electricity in a sustainable way.

While water is a renewable resource, the ecosystems that are destroyed by hydropower projects are not. Not least due to dam building, rivers, lakes and wetlands suffer from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem.

Not only this but because of the decomposing organic matter found in reservoirs, dams emit greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. In some cases, it is claimed, these emissions can be higher than those of thermal power projects with the same electricity output.

Ivan Lima of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research  estimate that the total methane emissions from large dams at 104 million tons per year.

Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and Lima’s figure amounts to more than 4 per cent of the total warming impact of human activities – roughly equal to the climate impact of the global aviation sector

So why is the IPCC contravening international standard practice to promote hydropower?

Well this may be total coincidence but in addition to several independent scientists, the IPCC selected a number of authors to write the section of hydropower who have a vested interest in growing the sector.

Of the nine lead authors there are representatives of two of the world’s largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.