Brace yourself for a hurricane of hot air

TOMORROW sees the start of the 21st annual United Nations conference on climate change in Paris.

It’s due to last two weeks, will be attended by more than 20,000 world leaders, officials and green activists – and is being billed (once again) as a ‘last chance’ for the world to avoid a global warming catastrophe.

It’s almost certain that the search for a legally binding global agreement to reduce emissions will fail. Instead, the conference will look at each country’s individual emissions, and how they can reduce them – what they term ‘intentional nationally determined contributions’, or INDCs.

Britain is promising further deep cuts. Other nations’ pledges amount to little more than apparently meaningless verbiage. For example, India’s pledge starts with quotations from Hindu texts, stressing that it venerates ‘Mother Earth’. Yet India is not promising to make any cuts at all. As for China, it now emits 30 per cent of world emissions – twice as much as the US. Yet its INDC says they are set to go on rising for at least 15 years.

The huge imbalance between energy prices in Britain and developing world competitors is only set to get worse. But whatever agreements are reached, one thing is for sure – there will be wall-to-wall apocalyptic coverage on the BBC and left-leaning press, with little attention to some inconvenient facts about climate change… the ones they’d rather you didn’t dwell on.

Here then, is our handy guide to some of those facts and, above right, an all-too-human story of how Britain’s world-beating mania for carbon reductions is leaving real people and real factories facing ruin…