Christopher Booker

Web: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/

[2010 July] Did the RSPCA drive a man to suicide? By Christopher Booker

[2010] Child protection: MPs must act on the scandal of seized children

[2009 July] Is the state guilty of child kidnap? One of the most disturbing features of life in modern Britain has been the extraordinary powers given to social workers to seize children from their parents, too often – when those powers are abused – supported by the police and family courts. What makes this still more alarming is the legal bar on reporting these episodes, supposedly to protect the children, which again too often works to protect the social workers themselves at the expense of the children. John Hemming MP said: "Don't protest about Children's Services or the state will section you and silence you. What I find particularly concerning about this article is the way in which the father concerned was silenced as a result of being wrongly sectioned."

[2009 April] Pandemic of panic - After salmonella, bird flu, the Millennium Bug... should we actually be scared this time?    In 1996, when the greatest food scare of all exploded over BSE, front-page headlines greeted the admission on Newsnight by the Government's chief scientist John Pattison that the death toll from CJD caught by eating beef could within a few years reach 500,000. A year later, however, scarcely any attention at all was paid to Dr Pattison's confession that he had now revised his figure downwards to just '100' (indeed, it now seems highly likely that beef was not the cause of CJD at all).
    It is not long since, in 2005, an even more senior WHO official was telling us that, any time soon, a worldwide epidemic of Asian bird flu could kill '150 million people'. The actual death toll from bird flu to date is around 200, barely double the number already dead when that hysteria was at its height.

[2009 April] Lord Stern, 'Scaremonger in chief', exposed by simple blunders Stern's report, Tol pronounced, could be "dismissed as alarmist and incompetent", and his doomsday prophecies were simply "preposterous". Yet this is the man, reverentially treated by the BBC, the media and politicians everywhere as "the world's leading expert on climate change" – so lost in his apocalyptic dreams that he doesn't even know something so basic to his cause as how much CO2 there is in the air we breathe.

[2009 March] Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'  the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water.
    But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
    Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm".
    When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.

[2009 Feb] Climate change rhetoric spirals out of control

[2007] The deceit behind global warming by Christopher Booker and Richard North