Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?

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“Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?” When a newspaper article title ends with a question mark, it means that they want you to believe their headline but can’t get away with stating it directly. Steven Mosher links to a right-wing Telegraph article by Christopher Booker that tries to juggle his love of the union-bashing, argy-crushing “Iron Lady” with their need to fight blindly against the government intervention that they associate with Global Warming. She was tricked into voicing alarm over global warming!

Fortunately for denialists, as she has aged and her intellectual powers have diminished she’s subsided back into reflexive right-wing mutterings on environmental issues.”natural factors such as solar activity”, “beneficial effects”, “anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda”. Yay?

Of course the alternate explanation is that her global warming concern was merely a political weapon to be used against the then-powerful coal miner’s unions. Similarly the current opposition to global warming is a political weapon to try to inhibit government regulation.

4 thoughts on “Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?”

  1. The article claims she bashed Al Gore — but Statecraft was published in 2002. Al Gore wasn’t really broadly identified with the global warming issue until his movie came out in 2006.

    You don’t think the Telegraph might be stretching the truth in their climate coverage, do you?

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  3. Quote from Thatcher: Nov 8 1989 UN Meeting.

    What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.

    Quote from Thatcher: Nov 6, 1990 Speech at Second World Climate Conference

    And our uncertainties about climate change are not all in one direction. The IPCC report is very honest about the margins of error. Climate change may be less than predicted. But equally it may occur more quickly than the present computer models suggest. Should this happen it would be doubly disastrous were we to shirk the challenge now. I see the adoption of these policies as a sort of premium on insurance against fire, flood or other disaster. It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later.

    There is more to be found at Thatcher’s archive.

    In reply to Robert, I wouldn’t put it past the Telegraph to stretch the truth on climate change, but in relation to Al Gore he was already concerned and known for it before he became Vice President.

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  4. It’s unsurprising that Booker has not flinched from an opportunity to prey on the senile Margaret Thatcher whose daughter publicly advised that the Iron Lady’s dementia was apparent as early as 2000 when she confused the Bosnian conflict with the Falklands’ war of the ‘80s.

    Not so with astrophysicist, Nigel Weiss, who possesses far more than one half of one sensory neuron and patiently awaits a public apology from the duplicitous Booker. Come on Nigel – hit him with a class action!:

    http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/now/

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