“The long pole in the tent” is an expression used in military parlance to mean “the intractable part of a problem.”   The editor of Aviation Week defines the term to be “the thing in a long list of tasks for a project that will… hold everything up” – in essence, the core of the problem.

Now that 2007 is over, the long pole in the tent for the climate change movement appears to be the weather itself!  Over the New Year, Siberia is bracing itself for its coldest winter in 149 years with temperatures dropping to a teeth chattering minus 55 degree Celsius!  All over the Northern Hemisphere, from the United States to Europe, the thermometer continues to drop to record lows with plunging temperatures, ice and sleet causing major road chaos as Americans and Europeans returned to work after the festive break.  Chicago reported below freezing Siberian-like temperatures of minus 33 degrees Celcius with the wind-chill factored in. Temperatures dropped to an unseasonal minus 17 degrees Celsius in Britain, and Piers Corbyn from long range forecasters Weather Action says: “The winds are going to make it extremely cold like the conditions we experienced in January 1987 where it was minus 12 degrees C in the South.”  All month through December 2007 to January 2008, the Weather Report on CNN showed shocking videos of the consequences of record plunging temperatures throughout much of the United States as well as shots of the Sierra Nevada snowed under with 5 feet of snow forcing the closure of roads and airports with the attendant chaos that ensued. 

In Afghanistan, more than a thousand people have died in what is called "the most severe winter" in decades!  In a land that is quite accustomed to adversities, this sudden onslaught from the most severe winter conditions seen in decades have cut a huge swathe of destruction across this mountainous country.

Over in Central, Eastern and even Southern China, an unseasonably cold winter and heavy snow continued to snarl roads, railways and airports this January 2008, delaying millions of travellers trying to head home for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday.  The snowfall, the coldest in a century, has brought traffic to a standstill in the Eastern and Central Provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Guizhou, Hubei and Hunan cut off a key rail link and stranded thousands of vehicles on icy highways.  Up to 100,000 passengers were stranded in the Guangzhou railway station, the southern end of the key rail link to the capital Beijing, with numbers expected to grow to 600,000 over the weekend.  To make matters worse, scores of people caught in severe blizzards in the worst winter weather for one century, across the normally warm Central and Eastern China region perished.  In the past four weeks, snow and cold killed more than 80 people and caused the collapse of more than 300,000 homes and even commercial structures!

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation observes that through all this, the environmental movement has been conspicuous by their embarrassed silence. After the melodramatic attempt to exploit world media attention on the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali from the 3rd to the 14th of December 2007, when Greenpeace published a report called “Palm Oil: Cooking the Climate” and the blockade of a shipment of palm oil from Indonesia, ostensibly to protest against the destruction of rain forests that they say goes hand in hand with the extinction of the orang utan and global warming.  Just two weeks later with the record cold winters blowing though much of the Northern Hemisphere and even in Central Asia, Greenpeace and others of their ilk, such as the Friends of the Earth (FOE) have gone strangely quiet!  

From almost blanket coverage of "global warming" in the weeks preceding and following the Bali Conference, not a single mention of the words "global warming" could be discerned, seen or heard in the print and electronic media respectively, in the weeks following the New Year in 2008, in the light of severe winter storms blowing through much of the Northern Hemisphere and Central Asia. 

When the environmental movement, politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

So, 2007 is another grim year for environmental scams.  Grim, because the position that these environmental scam artists have adopted on global warming, is predicated on the world experiencing warmer summers and milder winters.

However, by riding on the global warming scare initiated by well meaning but misguided weather scientists and unwittingly blown up by the unsuspecting print and electronic media, and quickly jumping on the hot-air bandwagon, environmental NGO's such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) have, just as quickly, been knocked out cold when the contrarian weather hits them hard in the face!  The proof of the pudding is, as always, in the eating. 

So when the weather decides to act as the long pole in the tent, refusing to dance to the tune of these environmental scam artists, it is only a matter of time before the world would wake up to the unsteady platform on which they’ve pitched their transparent and flimsy billowing tents!