... and with only 40 days left for saving the world!

The BBC has maintained a united Global Warming front, in all its news stories, until recently, but the cracks are beginning to show. It started with its scientific correspondent, Paul Hudson, on 9 October 2009 saying What happened to global warming?

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Now the BBC's Andrew Neil is saying "Apocryphal, some might even say hysterical" about Lord Stern's recent outburst. Neil makes some sound points:

• Part of the problem is that, as those worried about global warming become more apocalyptic, so the supposed scientific consensus about the matter begins to fray at the edges. Then there is the problem that global temperatures have actually been falling since 1998:

• And there is the simple populist resistance to rock stars and rock politicians who lecture the rest of us on the evil of low cost flying while circling the globe in their private jets.

• The media also needs to become tougher in questioning what the experts tell us -- for example, there is much coverage of claims that the Arctic is melting, very little mention that Antarctica, which counts for 90% of the world's ice, has been cooling for the past three decades.

• And we need to be very wary indeed of events that are clearly stunts: there was much unquestioning coverage of the recent underwater meeting of the Maldives cabinet, meant to highlight the danger to the islands of rising sea levels, caused by global warming. Hardly anybody bothered to ask the question: are the seas around the Maldives actually rising? The answer, from the world's greatest authority on the subject, the Commission on Sea Level Change, would seem to be no. It has visited the Maldives regularly in recent years. Its studies show that sea levels today are about 20 centimetres LOWER than they were in the years below 1970, that the current lower level is stable and there is no sign the islands are about to be submerged.

Is global warming just one big scam? It would begin to appear so and remember it wasn't many years ago that the scare was that we were entering a new ice age. However, don't expect this scam to disappear anywhere soon. It is far too convenient a scare for the worlds political class to create new "green" taxes and other powers that have very sinister undertones.