Lord Lawson claims that more CO2 emissions have only served to “warm the planet slightly”
The board member of a new campaign group called Net Zero Watch, which has been featuring on the likes of GB News during the crucial COP26 climate summit and has received the backing of Tory MPs, has claimed ‘global warming is not a problem’.
Lord Lawson made the ridiculous claim in an article for the Spectator Magazine, in which the former Tory chancellor also claimed that more CO2 emissions have only served to “warm the planet slightly”, adding: “This is no bad thing: many more people die each year from cold-related illnesses than from heat-related ones.”
Net Zero Watch says it exists to highlight the serious economic and societal implications of expensive and poorly considered climate and energy policies” but is more often than not found to be ‘decrying climate hysteria’ on talkRadio and GB News.
It is backed by prominent anti-net zero Tory MPs Steve Baker and Craig Mackinlay. Net Zero Watch is run by the campaigning arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has been described as the country’s most prominent source of climate-change denial. It has also previously described scientific facts on climate change as ‘contested’.
Lawson made the claims as the UK hosts the COP26 climate summit and tries to get countries to reduce global carbon emissions, with prime minister Boris Johnson warning that the world is at “one minute to midnight”, having run down the clock on waiting to combat climate change.
A recent UN report on climate change warned that if emissions don’t fall in the next couple of decades then temperatures could rise by 3C, and if they don’t fall at all temperatures will rise by 4-5C.
That would result in devastating consequences for the planet. Countries like Germany and Belgium have suffered the deadliest flooding in decades, with at least 190 people losing their lives last month. The 20 hottest years since records began in 1850 have occurred in the last 22 years.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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