Global warming is another man-made scare (From Bucks Free Press)

Global warming is another man-made scare

1:10pm Friday 8th August 2008 in

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FOR 200 years in the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe's Christian population became haunted by a great fear.

Many leading figures of the age had become convinced that society faced a terrifying threat.

Huge numbers of women, they believed, had been drawn into a vast, shadowy, conspiracy.

They had entered into a pact with the devil. They were branded as "witches".

Backed by voluminous and detailed evidence, supported by Popes and secular rulers, lawyers, theologians and learned men of all kinds the regulatory authorities went into action.

Countless thousands of "witches" and their male accomplices were tortured, imprisoned, burned, hanged, drowned or otherwise hounded to their deaths.

Only by the end of the 17th century did it finally become clear that witches did not exist.

The great "witch panic" had been based on no more than an immense collective fantasy very similar to "Man Made Global Warming".

At the latter part of the 19th century came the "Zionist conspiracy" where the Jews were branded as the root cause of all economic and financial hardship.

The real cause was the lack of understanding of economic theory by governments.

The resulting suffering was considerable and reached its final awful climax with the systematic murder of over five million Jewish men, women and children in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

Come the end of the Second World War a new fear arrived - the perceived communist Russian threat to world peace.

This led to the stockpiling of atomic weapons by both sides with potentially awesome consequences to mankind should a war break out as it nearly did in October 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis.

It also caused the McCarthy purges in the USA and the fictitious concept of "the enemy within" which caused much suffering to innocent people.

Only when the cold war collapsed in 1989 did we learn that the perceived threat from the Soviet Union never really existed.

As the cold war ended the then Chief Scientist urged Margaret Thatcher that since she was a scientist she should create a body to investigate climate change.

Thus the new secular religion arrived - "Man Made Global Warming".

All of the events described have one thing in common.

They are all "scares" the cost of which in both money and human suffering is immense. CO2 levels in the atmosphere although very low at 380 parts per million, continue to rise as they have been doing since about 1750.

Conversely, global temperatures have been falling since 1998 and with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) now negative we know from scientific records that the planet will continue to cool for another 30-40 years.

By then hopefully, we will realise that Man Made Global Warming is just another "scare" like all the other "scares" that have gone before.

Anthony Weeden, Bockmer End, Near Marlow