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Investing in sea and flood defences is a more sensible reaction to possible global warming than trying to cool the planet, a former British Cabinet minister told the Business Roundtable in Auckland yesterday.
Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's Government and father of food writer Nigella Lawson, acknowledged there was evidence of global warming and that carbon dioxide emissions did play some part in warming the planet.
But he told the gathering that it was not at all clear how much CO2 emissions were contributing to global warming, and that humankind could adapt to whatever problems global warming caused.
Lord Lawson, in New Zealand as a guest of the Business Roundtable, has written extensively about climate change and has raised concerns about what he says are the scientific uncertainties surrounding it.
He told the gathering last night that mankind had adapted to many dangers over the years without the need for government intervention, but governments could invest in "public goods" such as adequate sea and flood defences.
Governments in developed countries in this case had a moral obligation to invest in such defences in warmer developing countries, which were likely to be the biggest losers from any global warming.
"The more one examines the current global warming orthodoxy, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It contains a grain of truth - and a mountain of nonsense.
"We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting."
- NZPA
