Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, I used to be on a different side on this issue until I was given a small book written by an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which he showed that global warming stopped in about 2000; that the warmest year was in 1934; and that Arctic sea ice is bigger this year than it has been for several years. He planted in my mind not a small seed of doubt but a great array of cuttings of doubt as to whether global warming was continuing. If we have all grasped the piece of religious mania that the world will be so hot that palm trees will grow only in Orkney, and that desertification will spread when the evidence for it seems to be very much less than before—serious doubt has arisen in my mind—we will all look awful asses for following the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or his next best friend, along a road that does not exist.