The Climate Consensus Died in Parliament This Week

In the debate that followed Ed Miliband's statement on "nature and climate" something new was heard in the House of Commons: dissent.

Following the Met Office’s report, Ed Miliband appeared in the House of Commons on Monday to give a ministerial statement on the “state of nature and climate”. Following the statement, based on the misleading and alarmist headlines produced by the Met Office (which have been debunked by Paul Homewood here), there was a short debate. But if Ed Miliband was hoping to put “climate and nature” centre stage, he will have been disappointed. The statement and the debate revealed more 'hard truths' about the state of UK politics than it did about climate change.

The most striking indication that the climate agenda is weakening is its conflation with “nature”. In recent years, green politics has extended the notion of the 'climate crisis' into the 'nature crisis'. Neither of them has any scientific credibility. Despite Miliband’s emphasis on "science" the IPCC makes no statement about the ‘climate emergency’. And, as I have pointed out, attempts to measure the extent of the 'climate crisis' requires metrics of human welfare that are seemingly 'linked to' climate change (often also without any scientific basis) to be compared with the same metrics produced by simulations based on counterfactual scenarios in which there is no global warming.