Nigel Lawson: Climate science has turned into religion

Why a think tank? Why now?

Fighting religion with a bishop?

"No. I've been constantly surprised by how big a religion it has become." The carbon campaign leaves very few parts of our lives untouched.

"That's right. Maybe my ears are attuned to it, but anything that happens in the world seems to have a climate change angle."

"I'm very glad that I've got a Bishop," he said. "Peter Forster, the Bishop of Chester. He's a very good man. I may be wrong but I think he's the only Bishop in the Church of England with a science degree, and it's very interesting that he should take a view that is in conflict with the Church of England's."

But there are religions and there religions. Not all of them think everything we do is wicked - and this directly informs the choices between mitigation and adaptation policy. Flagellation comes before growth, for example.

Why did Lawson call it a religion?

"There are two things really. One is the view that man is irredeemably bad, and needs to atone for his sins by making some kind of sacrifice. When bad things happen they are somehow a judgement on mankind," says Lawson.

"Then there is the position the Bishop of Chester takes which is that something of this age, and that's a pessimism. That's something he finds very undesirable."

But even in the great socialist utopias, there was an optimism in science. Scientific socialism could be applied to shape society. There wasn't anything that wasn't an engineering problem.

He agrees. So why are scientists viewed uncritically when they make pronouncements about climate, now?

"That's not real science."

Finally, on branding, the choice of 'Global Warming' is quite deliberate, Lawson said. “Climate change is a rather woolly term, sometimes it means man-made global warming and sometimes it doesn’t”.

The body will only take contributions from individual grassroots contributors and trusts, said Lawson. More from the GWPF here. ®