Anyone remember the iron lady Maggie Thatcher climate change and the coal miners union in England. She started off climate change farce by calling on researchers to find a way to get rid of the coal miners union and they came up with climate change. Grants are all over the place for funding into climate change would they knock back the hand that feeds them.https://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
https://www.masterresource.org/climate-exaggeration/thatcher-alarmist-to-skeptic/
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/april-2013-online/energy-and-thatcher-a-tangled-legacy/
Iron Lady had tin ear on global warmingUpdated Jan 13, 2012; Posted Jan 11, 2012016sharesBy Today's SunbeamBy Paul MulshineI haven’t gotten a chance to see that new movie about Margaret Thatcher just yet, but I did take a look at the cast. Unfortunately, there’s no character representing Sir Crispin Tickell. That’s a real shame. Americans are missing out on a chance to learn about the roots of the global warming movement.Crispin Tickell may sound like a name out of a Monty Python sketch, but he is a real person, a descendant of Thomas Huxley, the man known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” True to the Huxley tradition, Tickell seized on a scientific topic and became its popularizer. However, only time will tell whether the bulldog was barking up the wrong tree.Tickell’s topic was man-made global warming. Though he lacked a scientific background, Tickell authored a book titled “Climate Change and World Affairs” in 1977.Tickell might have been dismissed as yet another amusing English eccentric if not for the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. “The Iron Lady” of the new film’s title came to power in the wake of the “winter of discontent” in 1979, during which the unions tried to force concessions from the Labor government.“Every day, they’d announce the power would be turned off in some neighborhood,” Myron Ebell recalls. “The garbage was piled over your head in parts of the city.”Ebell was then a student at the London School of Economics and is now an energy expert at the Competitive Energy Institute in Washington, a free market-oriented think tank. He went from London to Cambridge and, thus, had a front-row seat for the struggles of the era that began when Thatcher’s Tory Party took power.The way Ebell describes it, Thatcher’s fight with the coal miners’ union was like Ronald Reagan’s fight with the air-traffic controllers, but much more serious. The air-traffic controllers never even managed to shut down the airports. The miners, by comparison, could have shut down the country and tried their best to do so on occasion.Enter Sir Crispin.As a prominent academic and diplomat, Tickell got Thatcher’s ear. He pointed out to her that if she were to stress the possible role of coal consumption in warming the planet, she could accomplish two goals. One was to show she was smarter than the typical male politician on scientific matters — which she was, thanks to her Oxford degree in chemistry. The other was to provide a compelling argument for nuclear power, a maneuver that would outflank the coal miners union.“He saw her as a soft touch and I think she was,” Ebell says. “I suspect he made a very convincing case that this was a feel-good issue on which little Britain could take the lead.”Which is exactly what happened. The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was elevated from an obscure little department at an obscure little university into the world’s leading authority on global warming.The rest is history. By the time Al Gore authored “Earth in the Balance” in 1992, Thatcher was back in private life. Nonscientist Gore took up where nonscientist Tickell left off. With his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore proved himself a pit bull of a popularizer.But the real inconvenient truth here is that the idea of anthropogenic global warming was a political movement from the start. Even the most ardent of the greenhouse-gas theory would not argue that there was any sort of scientific consensus on the subject back when Tickell got Thatcher’s ear. As for the current “consensus,” it doesn’t include the physicists who argue that further experiments are needed to determine whether it is cosmic rays rather than carbon that play the primary role in climate change.That the movement got started among British conservatives might seem surprising to Americans. Tickell’s British critics, however, see a direct line back to Darwin. The great-great-grandson of Darwin’s bulldog has stated he would like to see the island’s population reduced by two-thirds. His English critics see his advocacy of greenhouse-gas limits as a cover for his Darwinian designs on what another English conservative, Edmund Burke, termed “the swinish multititudes.”So there’s the movie I’d like to see. I don’t care who they get to play Thatcher, but I hereby recommend John Cleese for the role of Sir Crispin Tickell.—Paul Mulshine writes for The Star-Ledger of Newark.View Comments (0)
