Thatcher was Far Smarter Than the Warmists Claim !

A great leader is dead. Margaret Thatcher was not merely Britain's first female Prime Minister. She was one of the greatest, overshadowed only by Winston Churchill among her nation's Prime Ministers in the 20th Century. Her great achievement was to smash the sclerotic and suffocating state socialism that had made Britain weak and contemptible. She reformed the crippling power of the arrogant trade unions, sold off nationalised industries and restructured the British economy by cutting top tax rates of 83% down to 60% and creating a nation of shareholders. In doing so she made her country a nation of opportunity. Thatcher left Britain richer, stronger and more confident than it had been since WW ll. She also fought the great battles for freedom for other peoples, combining with Ronald Reagan to help destroy communism in East Europe.

When it came to the budding hysteria of global warming she was at first convinced of the science presented. At the second World Climate Conference in 1990, she said in a speech, ''The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so we do not live at the expense of future generations.''   But ten years later, with her training in chemistry, she began to change her mind after studying further evidence. She thereby became one of the earliest and most prominent sceptics. At first, back in 1988, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, England's man at the U.N. In the 1970's, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling. This led to the famous 1974 issue of TIME magazine with it's front cover headline declaring "An Ice Age Coming!" Unfortunately, Sir Tickell got sucked into the warmist hype and converted to the belief that it was warming instead.

Mrs Thatcher found equally persuasive the views of another prominent convert to the warmist cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the United Kingdom's Met (Meteorological) Office. She backed him in setting up the United Nation's (now defunct) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. It is not widely appreciated, however, there was a dramatic twist to her climate convictions. In 2003, towards the end of her last book ''Statecraft'', in a passage headed "Hot Air and Global Warming'', she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views. She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us.

Pouring scorn on the ''doomsters'', she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping the world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as (the now proven) solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and his his largely misleading documentary, "The Inconvenient Truth'' and the futility of ''costly and economically damaging schemes'' to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind. She saw firsthand what a corrosive force socialism is to freedom.

The Way I See It....Margaret Thatcher championed individual liberty and had an unapologetic optimistic patriotism that rang true with her citizens that led to her being elected for three momentous terms of office as British Prime Minister. When the British Conservative Party had lost its way in the 70's and decided to go left, Thatcher went right and by doing so she saved English democracy. Also, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both the scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. Now we just need more of the world's leaders to get ''the Big Idea."

For the ratbags that marched in celebration at news of her death with rude placards of ''Ding Dong the Bitch is Dead'' yesterday I try to imagine a world by their like. The pictures which reoccur are the French Terror, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao. Of people once described by Bertrand Russell: ''Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power."  Or on these ''moral thugs'' C.S. Lewis wrote: ''Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.''   Enough said.