Action can be 'riskier than doing nothing'

A LEADING sceptic blames the green movement for Third World starvation.

BRITISH climate change sceptic Christopher Monckton told a Brisbane audience yesterday that acting because of the risk of climate change could be riskier than doing nothing.

Lord Monckton dismissed the "risk management" argument about climate change -- which broadly runs that, even if the science is not definitively proved, then taking actions to reduce the risk is sensible management -- by claiming that these actions often had unintended consequences.

He said that one such action was growing crops for biofuels instead of food, which was leading to widespread starvation in Third World countries.

"The laws of supply and demand, which cannot be repealed even by the UN's climate change panel, are that prices will go up," Lord Monckton said. "And they have gone up; they have doubled in a couple of years. For us, that is an inconvenience -- a burger that used to cost $1 now costs $2. But in Third World countries, in a dozen different regions, there have been major food riots in the last two to three years."

Lord Monckton also questioned the independence of the scientists who formulated the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, claiming the admission this month that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated showed how they were prepared to manipulate data.

"The scientist who said that said `I know it was wrong, but I wanted it to be said because I wanted to influence government policy'," Lord Monckton said.

"The moment you have scientists tampering with science and telling scientific lies for the sake of influencing government policy, that is a body in which you would not place any faith whatsoever."

While most of Lord Monckton's appearances in Australia have taken the form of an address, yesterday in Brisbane he had a broad debate in front of about 500 people, with his main opponent being professor Barry Brook of Adelaide University.

Professor Brook presented data showing that the world's climate had changed, especially since the 1940s, with most of the change coming about in Arctic regions. But he stressed that science is about "projections rather than predictions", and while it was unwise to expect that scientific reasoning and research could give a definitive answer, it could "narrow the boundaries of uncertainty".

Lord Monckton says that even if UN figures were accepted as true, the proposed remedies would have a huge cost but negligible impact in forestalling perhaps warming of 0.02C over the next decade.

He was a policy adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, where he first investigated the issue of climate change, and then a columnist. He is a mathematician by training.