Lord Deben was on the Today programme promoting the Committee on Climate Change's 2015 progress report, which I shall read at my leisure. However Lord D's performance was amazing: he sounds more and more like Paul Ehrlich every day. No doubt the writing in capital letters will follow in due course.
This was completely swivel-eyed stuff, a full-on regurgitation of every bit of environmentalist disinformation that he could conjure up in three minutes with barely a pause for breath. For example, we had a bogeyman tale about Bangladesh facing doom, although Lord D was rather vague about what precisely it was that was going to be causing this crisis:
Bangladesh will be practically be unable to be lived in if we do not halt the march of climate change and we'll have 170 million displaced people wandering around the world looking for somewhere to live.
One assumes he means the old sea level rise canard, about which the academic literature says something very different:
There is a widespread misconception that a rising sea-level with global warming will overwhelm Bangladesh’s coastal area contour by contour and will thereby displace as many as 10–30 million people in the 21st century.
Brammer H. Bangladesh’s dynamic coastal regions and sea-level rise. Climate Risk Management 2014; 1: 51-62
We had a fairy story about drought and floods in the UK, despite the fact that every reputable scientists says it's almost impossible to predict rainfall at a regional level and particularly for the UK.
And then there was the inevitable bonkers conspiracy theory about big oil-funded opposition to his madness.
This was, in its way, an extraordinary performance and you have to wonder whether the great man is losing his grip on reality. What do you think?
The audio is below.