Australian Warmists breathing steam over Bjorn Lomborg

Australian universities are full of Warmists but appointing just one person who questions their dogma to a university post is outrageous, it seems.  Bias and bigotry anyone?  Certainly no willingness to debate ideas or engage in civil discourse there

HIS own country stripped him of funding and he’s famously known as a “climate contrarian” so why is Australia giving Dr Bjorn Lomborg $4 million to set up a university think tank?

That’s the question being asked in the scientific community, which has been left reeling by the decision. It comes after the government abolished the Climate Commission, because its $1.5 million annual operating cost was considered too expensive.

While Dr Lomborg doesn’t deny that climate change exists, the Danish author has been internationally criticised for his controversial research which many believe downplays its effects.

He is famous for suggesting the problem has been overstated and priority should be given to tackling other problems such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

His controversial Copenhagen Consensus Center has now partnered with the University of Western Australia to establish a new research centre called the Australian Consensus Centre, which the government will fund to the tune of $4 million, in a move that has been criticised for being “politically motivated”.

Certainly no one seems eager to claim ownership of the controversial move, with the university and Education Minister Christopher Pyne being blamed at first. The decision has now been traced back to the Prime Minister’s office, according to Fairfax sources, and at least one international research fellow at the university is reportedly set to transfer their fellowship in protest..

School of Animal Biology head Sarah Dunlop has complained that Dr Lomborg does not have the necessary academic track record to justify his appointment as an adjunct professor.

“Existing PhD students in the school are concerned that this appointment will tarnish their accomplishments as graduates from this university,” she reportedly wrote in the letter.

Meanwhile, the decision has been described as an insult to Australia’s scientific community given the deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations.

Many of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts lost their positions in 2013 when the government axed the Climate Comission, saying its $1.5m operating costs were too expensive.

“To see the best Australians, the best qualified Australians in the field, be let go because there was no money and then have someone from overseas just a few years later put in their place with abundant funding struck us as being odd,” environmental science and climate change writer Tim Flannery told Lateline.

Mr Flannery was the chief commissioner of the former Climate Commission, which relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians donated to keep the organisation going.

Dr Lomborg seems to be a favourite of the Prime Minister, who praised him in his 2009 book Battlines. He was also invited to launch the Department of Foreign Affiars and Trade’s development innovation hub.

The National Tertiary Education Union has questioned the Commonwealth funding, saying there appeared to have been no competitive process.  Union president Jeannie Rea said the cash “seems to have arisen from discussions between UWA, the government and departmental officials”.

Why are Dr Lomborg’s views so controversial?

Dr Lomborg has been referred to as a “climate change refugee” after funding for his Copenhagen Consensus Centre was cut by the Danish government in 2012. But he has managed to continue operating with the help of private funding in countries like the US, where there are more people sympathetic towards his views.

His centre has denied receiving funding from fossil-fuel companies but the DeSmogBlog claims to have uncovered donations from organisations with links to the billionaire Koch brothers, who have funded climate-denying think tanks in the US.

In Australia, the government’s $4 million contribution towards the centre is expected to cover just one-third of its operating costs, with the UWA saying other financial support would be drawn from corporate sponsors and government grants.

Dr Lomborg has been accused of cherrypicking data to understate the threat of climate change, and has questioned whether the benefits of efforts to curb climate change justify the costs. He believes funding would be better spent on adapting to changing conditions, investing in renewable technology and tackling poverty.

His books The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It have been criticised by climate scientists for underplaying the rate of global warming.

“Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn’t take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it’s usually a sign those views are politically motivated,” the Climate Council said in a statement.

The Australia Consensus Centre will commission economists to “generate evidence and rational arguments” that will “result in the adoption of smarter, more cost-effective policies”.

The UWA Student Guild said the $4 million in “politically motivated” federal government funding should be rejected.

“While Dr Lomborg doesn’t refute climate change itself, many students question why the centre’s projects should be led by someone with a controversial track-record,” guild president Lizzy O’Shea said. “Students, staff and alumni alike are outraged.”

But UWA vice-chancellor Paul Johnson said Dr Lomborg was not leading the research and was not being paid as an adjunct professor.

“Lomborg is a contrarian but he is not a climate change denier,” Professor Johnson told AAP.  “His contrary stance is around the use of economic efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation and adaptation strategies.  “Contrarians are, I think, useful, particularly in a university context.”

He said a cost benefit analysis was one way of ranking possibilities in order to make decisions on how to tackle climate change.  “The United Nations is currently considering what to do for the period 2016 to 2030, and there are over 1400 proposals that have to be whittled down.”

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Global warming IS making our weather worse and man-made emissions are to blame for 75% of extreme heatwaves, claims study (?)

Just another application of models already known to lack predictive skill

The majority of heatwaves and almost a fifth of extreme rain storms can be blamed on human activity, a new study has warned.

Researchers say that three quarters of extreme hot weather and 18 per cent of heavy precipitation is being driven by global warming that has occurred due to man-made emissions.

They warn that as climate change pushes global temperatures higher over the coming decades, humans will become responsible for 40 per cent of extreme rainfall events.

The scientists claim it is the rarest and most destructive events that seem to be the most responsive to human influence.

Dr Erich Fischer, from the institute for atmospheric and climate science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who led the study, said: 'Climate change includes not only changes in mean climate but also in weather extremes.

'With every degree of warming it is the rarest and the most extreme events and thereby the ones with typically the highest socio-economic impacts for which the largest fraction is due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.

'We show that at the present-day warming of 0.85°C about 18 per cent of the moderate daily precipitation extremes over land are attributable to the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times, which in turn primarily results from human influence.

'For 2°C of warming the fraction of precipitation extremes attributable to human influence rises to about 40 per cent.

'Likewise, today about 75 per cent of the moderate daily hot extremes over land are attributable to warming.'

The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined the probability that heatwaves and heavy rainfall events could be attributed to humans using 25 climate models.

The models examined the weather between 1901 and 2005 using historical simulations.

They analysed daily temperatures and daily rainfall totals from climate models and looked for events that would be expected to occur once in 1,000 days in an unperturbed climate - referred to as moderate daily extremes.

They then used the models to look at predictions of extreme weather between 2006 and 2100 under an emissions scenario that is expected to lead to 2°C of warming around the world.

While attributing individual extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods and heatwaves to climate change is notoriously difficult, climate scientists have predicted they will become more common as the world warms.

Dr Fischer and his colleague Professor Reto Knutti, also based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said taking a more global perspective made it easier to examine the role that human activity was having on such events.

They say their research demonstrated a strong signal for human influence in the extreme weather that is having impacts around the world today.

They found that the longer the period of the event - such as a heatwave, the greater the fraction is attributable to global warming.

Dr Fischer said: 'A warmer and moister atmosphere does clearly favour more frequent hot and wet extremes.'

Professor Peter Stott, a scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in the UK, pointed to the extreme weather that has happened in the past year - one of the warmest on record.

He said Bangladesh was hit by flooding in 2014, Australia suffered heatwaves and Kenya was battered by downpours.

California, for example, is in the grip of one of the most severe droughts on record.

He added that human-caused climate change had 'loaded the dice' in favour of heatwaves like the one that hit Europe in 2003 and the flooding that hit the UK in autumn 2000.

Writing in the journal, Professor Stott said: 'As each year goes by, evidence continues to accumulate that our climate is changing and that human influence plays a dominant role in observed warming.

'The prevalence of extremely hot temperatures is expected to increase with warming and more moisture in the atmosphere leads to a tendency towards more extreme rainfall events, changes that have been detected in the observational record.

'But what has been lacking up to now is a robust calculation of how much more likely extreme temperatures and rainfall have become worldwide.

'The idea that in a two-degree world almost half of heavy rainfall events would not have occurred were it not for climate change is a sobering thought for policymakers seeking to mitigate and adapt to climate change.'

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Now every EU nation joins the battle to banish plastic bags

This crap never seems to die.  It is a classic case of preconceptions swamping the evidence.  See two accounts of the truth of the matter here

Every nation in the EU is to follow Britain’s lead and introduce tough measures to slash the use of plastic bags after a vote yesterday.

The European Parliament backed strict new targets to cut plastic bag use by 80 per cent before 2025 in a huge boost for conservationists.

They have fought for years to stop billions of bags ending up as litter, harming the environment and killing marine life.

The campaign led by the Daily Mail has resulted in a 5p charge on supermarket carrier bags in England to start in October.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have already introduced the charge, slashing litter as a result. Now the rest of Europe will have to bring in similar measures or face large fines.

Each nation can choose what action to take but most are expected to introduce a charge for bags or tax shops giving them out for free.

The directive orders that the EU’s 28 members reduce disposable plastic bag use by 65 per cent by 2019 and 80 per cent by 2025.

That equates to a drop in the average number of bags used per person each year from 200 to 40.

An estimated 100billion carriers are used every year in Europe, with eight billion ending up as litter. Many blight seas and rivers, where they suffocate countless animals each year.

Recent studies show that plastic pollution hits 395 marine species, including puffins, seals, whales and every type of sea turtle.  The toll includes 67 which are on the international Red List of threatened species. A recent report suggests that an astonishing five trillion pieces of plastic litter are floating in the world’s oceans.

Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder said: ‘This is a huge step in tackling the plastic waste in Europe’s oceans that kills thousands of marine animals each year.’ But she criticised Tory MEPs who abstained from the vote.

They responded that the directive was poorly drafted and claimed businesses would be burdened by new reporting obligations and labelling rules.

Plastic bags kill marine animals by getting trapped around their heads or when they are swallowed. Sea turtles suffer as they mistake floating or billowing bags for their jellyfish prey.

Latest research suggests that they are vulnerable as they hunt using vision whereas other sea creatures rely on their hearing.

Danish MEP Margrete Auken, who steered the law through parliament, said: ‘This will create a win-win situation.

‘We’re talking about an immense environmental problem. Billions of plastic bags end up in nature. It damages nature, harms fish, birds, and we have to get to grips with this.’

But Left-wing Irish MEP Luke Flanagan warned: ‘If you force member states, they won’t do it right. Leave it up to them.’

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No need to go veggie: Bill Gates says you can eat meat and STILL care for the planet

For many of those concerned about the future of the planet, giving up meat is seen as a major way for people to reduce the impact they have on the environment.

Producing beef, for example, requires large amounts of water, land for grazing and emits tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

But now Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft and philanthropist, has said it may in fact be possible to keep eating meat and still care for the planet.

In his most recent blog post, the world's richest man, has defended meat eating, saying was unrealistic to expect large numbers of people to become vegetarian.

He also explains that some of the impacts of meat farming have been overstated.

Instead he believes it will be possible to provide enough meat for the world's growing population as demand in developing countries increases.

He said: 'Although it might be possible to get people in richer countries to eat less or shift toward less-intensive meats like chicken, I don't think it's realistic to expect large numbers of people to make drastic reductions.

'But there are reasons to be optimistic. For one thing, the world's appetite for meat may eventually level off.  'Consumption has plateaued and even declined a bit in many rich countries, including France, Germany, and the United States.  'I also believe that innovation will improve our ability to produce meat.'

The consumption of meat has met with considerable criticism in recent years as climate change experts have warned about the harm it is doing to the planet.

A recent report from Chatham House said that the global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than cars, planes, trains and ships combined.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also found that dietary change was also necessary to 'substantially lower' emissions.

Lord Stern, the economist appointed by the British government to assess the financial impacts of climate change, has also urged people to give up meat.

However, calls for widespread vegetarianism have been deeply unpopular with the general public.

Some researchers have also estimated that it takes several thousand litres of water to produce just one kilogram of beef due to the water needed to grow feed for them.  This makes livestock farming increasingly difficult in areas hit by drought.  Cattle grazing can also take valuable land that could be used to grow more affordable agricultural crops.

Demand for meat is expected to soar over the next 30 years or so, with global beef consumption rising from 64 million tonnes in 2005 to 106 million tonnes in 2050 according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations.

It also says pork demand will rise from 100 million tonnes to 143 million tonnes and chicken consumption will increase from 82 million tonnes to 181 million tonnes.

However, Mr Gates, who set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife to fund research into sustainable technology that can tackle poverty around the world, said some of the impacts of meat have been overstated.

He points to research that suggests most of the water needed for livestock production is known as green-water, which is used to grow grass.

Most of this green water comes from rainfall and also evaporates back into the atmosphere, meaning it is not lost. He said: 'One study that excluded green water found that it takes just 44 litres – not thousands – to produce a kilo of beef.'

Mr Gates has also been funding new research projects aimed at producing meat substitutes and says he has been impressed with the results.

Companies like Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek Foods have been experimenting with turning plant proteins into foods that taste and look like meat and eggs.

Mr Gates also explains that he once dabbled with being vegetarian himself in his late twenties but found he couldn't keep it going.

He argues that meat is an important source of nutrition needed to help children develop healthy and said it was important that people in developing countries have access to these foods.

He said: 'With a little moderation and more innovation, I do believe the world can meet its need for meat.'

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Media, Environmentalists Were Wrong: How the Gulf Coast Roared Back After Oil Spill

Five years ago this week a blowout of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig 40 miles from the Gulf Coast tragically claimed 11 lives and spilled 3 million barrels of oil from the damaged wellhead into the Gulf. It’s hard to forget the video images of thick oil day after day gushing into the region’s waters.

It was a horrific accident that caused substantial damage to the ecology and commerce of the region. Gulf area wildlife, portions of the shoreline, tourism, fishers and shrimpers, and energy sector employment suffered large losses in the aftermath of the spill.

BP has paid close to $27 billion in penalties, payments to aggrieved parties, and clean up costs in one of the largest payouts for an accident in American history. This is enough money to hand every man, woman, boy, and girl in Chicago or Houston a $10,000 check. In addition, as the result of a court ruling last fall finding BP acted with willful misconduct and gross negligence leading up to the spill, BP could have to pay another $13.7 billion in Clean Water Act penalties.

But the good news on this fifth anniversary is that the lasting ecological damage from the spill that was originally feared, has not happened. The dire predictions by the media and the major environmental groups proved wildly off base.

Today, the Gulf region affected by the spill is enjoying a renaissance of energy production, booming tourism, and a healthy fishery industry. Scientific data and studies over the past five years show the Gulf environment is returning to its baseline condition. The remnants of the spill are hard to find.

A July 2011 report from the Coast Guard’s environmental assessment found that none of the dispersant constituents found in the thousands of water and sediment tests conducted exceeded the EPA’s chronic aquatic benchmarks. Five years later, wildlife populations have proven largely resilient. For instance, NOAA commercial fishery landings data show that after a drop off in the year of the spill, catch levels bounced back in 2011 to levels not seen in 11 years and they remain strong today.

Why has the damage been contained? First, thankfully, the vast majority of the 3.2 million barrels of crude leaked into the Gulf dispersed naturally, evaporating into literal thin air or biodegrading. Microbes, which already feast on the up to 1.4 million barrels of oil that scientists estimate seep naturally into the Gulf each year, increased in number following the spill — aiding greatly.

The massive $14 billion human clean-up response, with 100,000 personnel, 6,508 vessels, and 13.5 million feet on boom was unprecedented and effective. Dispersants successfully assisted natural dissolution by reducing the size of the oil compounds.

Some of the apocalyptic damage estimated proved to be mere propaganda. The National Center for Atmospheric Research predicted at the time that oil would enter the so-called “loop current”, reaching Florida’s Atlantic coast within a week. Synte Peacock, a NCAR scientist, warned “the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida.” Not to be outdone, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers breathlessly reported that “there will be tar balls all the way up the East Coast, all the way to Europe.”

But the oil didn’t make it to Tampa — let alone Europe as the requisite combination of winds and current failed to materialize. By the end of July, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco admitted that “For southern Florida, the Florida Keys, and the Eastern Seaboard, the coast remains clear … ”

And what of the long-term effects on the fishing and shrimping industries?

Advocacy groups such as the Southern Shrimp Alliance’s Jon Williams predicted the spill could last 40 years. CBS News Network’s Melanie Warner suggested that “this could mean a permanent end” to the Gulf’s seafood industry and that “ten years from now … there will very likely still be seafood — shrimp, bluefin tuna and maybe snapper and grouper — that are contaminated with BP’s oil.”

Not to be outdone on the contamination concerns, CNN correspondent David Mattingly worried about the “cascading effect on the entire food chain” from the spill.

Fewer than four months after the spill stopped, NOAA’s director of Sustainable Fisheries Science Center reported, “It appears so far that the impact on the larval population is relatively small.”

Data from NOAA confirm that post-spill Gulf fish populations are robust and that commercial seafood landings have generally been consistent with pre-spill ranges. And more than 10,000 government tests show it’s safe to eat.

The Audubon Society director Gregory Butcher warned the spill “could be the strikeout punch” for Louisiana’s state bird, the brown pelican. The executive director of the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, Cecilia Riley, cautioned, “The disruption of the food web and lack of adequate food supplies could reduce avian productivity for several years.”

But in fact, Louisiana’s brown pelican population was still strong just a year after the spill, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services.

The effects of the spill were predicted to have long-term negative effects on tourism as well. The managing director of Oxford Economics USA opined, “History and current trends indicate a potential $22.7 billion economic loss to the travel economies of the Gulf Coast states over the next three years.”

In actuality, tourists have flocked to the Gulf every year since the spill, shattering records the summer immediately following the disaster in numerous locales, including Panama City and the Emerald Coast.

Big Green has tried to capitalize on the BP spill as the reason to block any further offshore drilling. And while there are critical caution signals from the accident, what is needed most is rational offsetting of costs versus tens of billions of benefits and hundreds of thousands of jobs, increased access to energy, community development and so on.

Most in the environmental movement portray the ecology of our planet as fragile and weak. No. The story of horrific accidents like this and natural ecological occurrences like Katrina, is that Mother Nature adapts and she has awesome healing powers.

The Gulf recovery has been swift and impressive and the doomsayers were thankfully wrong. When something like this happens, we should listen to the sage advice of the world’s most famous lawgiver, Moses, who warned us of false prophets:

“If the thing does not come about or come true … the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” (Deut. 18:22).

Good advice when it comes to the Green Movement prophets of doom.

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UK: The pottiest and costliest mistake of our times: Forget his tax and spend plans. Red Ed's climate change law in the Brown years will cost £50,000 per home

By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

One astonishing fact not getting a mention in this bizarrely unreal [British] election campaign is that Ed Miliband can already claim to have been by far the most expensive politician in Britain’s history.

This is because it was he more than anyone else who in 2008 was responsible for pushing through the final version of the Climate Change Act — on official figures easily the most costly law passed by Parliament.

Thanks entirely to a last-minute amendment by Miliband, this Act commits us within 35 years to cutting Britain’s emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, by a staggering 80 per cent — to a level so low it hadn’t been seen since the early 19th century.

Even on figures sneaked out by the Government a few months later, the cost of this law was then estimated as high as £734 billion, or £18 billion every year until 2050.

But more recent estimates made by the EU and the International Energy Agency suggest that the cost of meeting Mr Miliband’s target will be even higher, at £1.3 trillion — almost equivalent to our entire current national debt, or more than £50,000 for every household in the country.

Hysteria

The story behind how this unprecedentedly far-reaching law came to be passed almost unanimously is itself one of the weirdest political episodes in our history.

The idea for it originated with a young climate activist, Bryony Worthington, when she was the campaign director on climate change for the green lobby group Friends Of The Earth.

In 2007, when hysteria over global warming was at its height — thanks not least to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth — Ms Worthington was co-opted by then-Environment Secretary David Miliband to join his department’s staff.

As she described in a talk which can still be seen by googling ‘Bryony Worthington YouTube’, she was put in charge of a small group tasked with drafting a Bill to make Britain the only country in the world committed by law to slashing its ‘carbon emissions’ by 60 per cent.

But in 2008, when the Bill was already well on its way through Parliament, David Miliband was promoted by Gordon Brown to become Foreign Secretary. A new ministry was created, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), to be headed by his brother, Ed. It was Ed Miliband who decided, following pressure from green lobby groups, to up the emissions reduction target from 60 per cent to an even more mind-boggling 80 per cent. This alone, on his department’s figures, nearly doubled its cost.

What seems barely credible, if one reads through the lengthy debates in Parliament on this Bill, is that scarcely a single MP showed the slightest interest in how the new target could in practice be met — any more than did Mr Miliband himself.

The CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, such as coal, gas, oil and petrol, is inseparable from pretty well every activity which keeps our economy functioning, from the way we make 70 per cent of our electricity to virtually our entire transport system.

As for electricity alone, we no longer use this just for lighting, heating and refrigeration, as we did in those far-off ‘three-day week’ days of the Seventies.

In the age of the computer, we are now dependent on it for everything from our work and mobile phones to shop and supermarket tills, the cashpoints where we collect our money and the signalling and traffic lights which keep our trains and roads running.

Yet thanks to Mr Miliband, and those MPs who mindlessly voted for his Bill, we are committed to cutting back on what currently makes this possible by such a colossal amount, it is impossible to see how it could be realistically achieved without closing down virtually all our economy.

What our ministers and officials fondly imagine — as we can see from their speeches and policy papers — is that we can somehow meet Mr Miliband’s target by closing down all those old ‘CO2 polluting’ coal and gas-fired power stations, to replace them with tens of thousands of wind turbines and a fleet of ‘zero carbon’ new nuclear reactors (though it looks increasingly unlikely we will get even one of those in the next decade).

The fossil fuel plants we still rely on for more than two-thirds of the electricity we need will be allowed to survive only if they are fitted with ‘carbon capture and storage’, to pipe away their ‘carbon emissions’ to be buried in holes under the sea — a hugely expensive technology which is pure wishful thinking, since it has never yet been made to work commercially, and would treble the cost of electricity even if it were viable.

Lesson

The drive to ‘decarbonise’ our economy by piling on ‘green taxes’ and building ever more hugely subsidised windfarms has already added hundreds of pounds a year to individual electricity bills, helping to drive millions more households into fuel poverty. But even now we are scarcely scratching the surface of meeting our legal commitments.

The one lesson above all we might have learned from Ed Miliband’s brief spell in charge of our ‘energy and climate change’ policy is that he is quite astonishingly out of touch with any practical reality.

So lost was he in his green fantasy world that his only concern was the ‘climate change’ part of his job title. He showed no interest in the other half of the job he was paid for, the ‘energy’ bit, i.e. how to keep our lights on.

Informed observers at the time noted how the only people Secretary Miliband seemed to want to talk to were green lobby groups, such as Friends Of The Earth, Greenpeace and the canny chancers making millions out of windfarms and the ‘renewables’ subsidy bonanza.

The ‘Big Six’ energy giants — who, whatever we think of them, were actually keeping the lights on — he treated with disdain or outright hostility, as ‘polluting’ capitalists, interested only in making ‘obscene profits’ (unlike those green, clean developers of the wind farms which were increasingly disfiguring our countryside).

Many may recall their shock in September 2013 when Mr Miliband, by then Labour leader, announced one of his first acts on becoming PM would be to ‘freeze energy prices’ for three years (instantly knocking £3 billion off the share value of the big energy companies).

But what made this even more ludicrous was that no one had done more to push up Britain’s fast-rising energy bills than Mr Miliband himself.

Lacklustre

It was he who had set in train the policy which made this inevitable, with his Climate Change Act.

And it was this same policy which was then so enthusiastically carried on after 2010 by his Lib Dem successors at DECC: first Chris Huhne (until he had to resign before being jailed for lying), and now that lacklustre green zealot Ed Davey, so dim that he has shown no more practical grasp of the technicalities of electricity production than Mr Miliband himself.

All this alone should raise a huge black question mark over the man now aspiring to become leader of our country next week. It shows he is so obsessively blinkered by woolly ideology that he has no practical judgment at all — about money or anything else.

We should remember that, in an earlier time, he and Ed Balls were the most intimate Treasury advisers of Gordon Brown when, in 1998, our formerly ‘prudent’ Chancellor took the reckless gamble of announcing he intended to double Britain’s public spending in ten years.

This was what happened, leading of course to the most disastrous public spending deficit our country has ever known: a catastrophe from which we shall be struggling to recover for years to come.

Ed Miliband was right behind that gamble. It should show us it is not only his stupidity over the Climate Change Act which made him our ‘most expensive politician’ in history. Worse still, his lack of judgment also marks him out as easily the most dangerous man who has ever come within touching distance of becoming our Prime Minister.

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