But Ed’s stance on CAGW is, coming from a rationalist and a stalwart of the right, so weird it’s bordering on the delusional. It’s sad that Ed can’t (yet) see this, but let me offer up an analogy. One of Ed’s most thoroughly worthwhile campaigns this year has been the one he has conducted against a book called The Spirit Level.

He writes:

I wish that everyone who espoused The Spirit Level would read The Spirit Level Delusion, which explains just how dubious the science behind this grand theory is, and what the real agenda is – massive government expansion.

Now how would Ed feel, I wonder, if someone whose intellect he respected and whose politics he shared began buttonholing him about this marvellous new book he’d read called The Spirit Level?

“Ed, Ed you’ve just GOT to read this book. It explains exactly where we’ve all been going wrong. You only have to look at societies where there’s relative equality and then compare them with ones where there’s relative inequality to realise that massive government intervention and a heavily redistributive tax programme are the only way to sort out our problems. And the authors have got all the facts to prove it!”

I can imagine Ed replying, with growing impatience, how the entire thesis has been based on cherrypicked data. Anything that supports the thesis, the authors bunged in. Anything that didn’t support it, the authors carefully excluded. Result? A veneer of statistical authority disguising a farrago of leftist nonsense.

And I can imagine his friend annoying him further by saying: “Yeah well of course you’d say that Ed. You’re too set in your ways to accept the necessary changes in your lifestyle you’ll need to adopt if Britain is to create a truly fair and happy society.”

Yet on the issue of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), Ed is doing exactly what that annoying, imaginary friend I have supplied for him has done. He has read (or at least had interpreted for him by the biased Mainstream Media) the four increasingly hysterical Assessment Reports of the IPCC and accepted them with just the same gullible alacrity and reluctance to dig beneath the surface he so deplores in all those left-liberals who’ve been getting big in their trousers over The Spirit Level.

Happily for Ed, there is currently a superabundance of stories which should help steer him towards the path of righteousness. I’m sure if he has a glance at them he will begin to see sense for they all indicate just how thoroughly unreliable is the so-called “consensus” science which charlatans like Al Gore have been citing in support of their bankrupt theory.

Here’s a scoop from John Sullivan showing the flaws in the satellite temperature data which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – (the US government agency responsible for one of the world’s main temperature records) – has tried to cover up. No prizes for guessing in which direction (hotter or colder) they exaggerated climatic change.

Here’s a story from New Zealand where the New Zealand Climate Coalition is suing the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) – the Kiwi equivalent of our own disgraced Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – for having exaggerated warming trends in its temperature records using heavily biased data adjustments. (Hat tip: Richard Cumming).

Here’s a story in which Michael Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick has been thoroughly debunked yet again, this time in a prestigious statistical journal. If you’re unfamiliar with the territory – as Ed must surely be if he’s a believer in CAGW – then this story about the new McShane Wyner paper will seem involved and unimportant. And that’s certainly how subscribers to Al Gore’s consensus would wish you to view it. But let me explain, briefly, why it’s not.

Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick was a chart purporting to offer near-definitive proof that late Twentieth century temperature rises were catastrophic, unprecedented and – by inference – driven by man-made CO2. Though debunked – twice – by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, it is yet still defended by warmists as essentially sound. This latest report uses the same data that Mann used (palaeoclimatological samples from tree rings and such like), subjects them to statistical analysis and shows that even if one were to accept Mann’s claim that his data was not cherrypicked it still doesn’t prove what he says it does.

In other words one of the central planks in the argument for the existence of CAGW has been demolished for a THIRD time. How many more times does it need to be shredded and splintered before the eco zealots who gather to froth and foam at warmist sites like Real Climate accept that their flimsy theory has been falsified beyond credibility?