Global Warming Alarmism is Not About Science

James Delingpole reports on his experience as the only non-scientist speaker at the Heartland Institute's 4th International Conference on Climate Change held recently in Chicago.

Wow! Finally in my life I get to experience what it’s like to be a rock star and I’m loving every moment. OK, so the drugs are in pretty short supply. As too is the meaningless sex with nubile groupies. But what do I care, the crowd love me and I love them. God bless America! God bless the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change!

When time comes for Delingpole's speech he explains why he is there even though he is not a scientist:

At my session, I find myself in the ludicrous position of being on a ‘science’ panel with distinguished rocket scientist Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick (the Canadian economist who, with Steve McIntyre, exposed the flaws in the infamous Hockey Stick) and meteorologist Joe D’Aleo (whose research into the siting of weather stations and the Urban Heat Island effect has cast serious doubt on the extent of late-20th-century ‘global warming’). . . . The BBC’s Roger Harrabin — one of the Beeb’s army of die-hard Warmists — has noticed too. ‘What’s a know-nothing like Delingpole doing on a science panel?’ he has asked the organisers, as if this simple fact alone is enough to render the entire conference invalid. . . .

I make this the subject of my speech. What is a non-scientist like me doing here? Simple. I’m here to point out that the Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not about science and never was. As Climategate proved (but as some of us suspected long before), AGW is the invention of a cabal of activists, all working towards more or less the same ecofascist agenda: Mother Gaia is suffering; it’s mostly our fault; the only way to atone for our sins is to destroy Western industrial civilisation and shackle ourselves with a form of One World government run by ‘experts’ and bureaucrats over whom we have no democratic control. It is a battle against a tyranny every bit as great as we faced in the second world war or the Cold War. All what’s different about this enemy is that instead of jackboots it wears long hair, a warm, caring smile and drives a VW Combi with an ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ sticker.

But wasn't the conference funded by Big Oil?

It’s no wonder that the bit of my speech that got the biggest laugh was when I asked: ‘How many of you here are in the pay of Big Oil?’ No hands were raised. ‘And how many of you would like to be in the pay of Big Oil?’ Up shot 150 arms. ‘Guess we picked the wrong side of the debate to be on,’ I said, hardly needing to explain that companies like Shell and BP pump far, far more money into eco-nonsense like carbon trading and green posturing than they do into sceptical science.

Sounds like he had a good time. Good for him.