Thatcher Among First to See Global Warming

2. Thatcher Among First to See Global Warming

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was credited with being the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming — but she also became one of the earliest “climate skeptics.”

Thatcher expressed concern over climate change in 1988, calling for urgent international action and citing evidence presented to the U.S. Senate by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Christopher Booker noted in Britain’s Telegraph.

She supported the establishment of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 1990 opened the Hadley Centre to study man-made global warming.

But in her 2003 book “Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World,” Thatcher issued “what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views,” Booker reported, and “voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us.”

She questioned whether carbon dioxide is the chief force influencing world climate, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, and said claims about rising sea levels were exaggerated.

“She mocked Al Gore and the futility of ‘costly and economically damaging’ schemes to reduce CO2 emissions,” Booker wrote. “She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer.”

In fact, a prominent American geologist recently declared that global warming has ended and “even more harmful” global cooling has already begun.

As the Insider Report disclosed in May, Dr. Don Easterbrook, a university professor and associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, warned in a scientific paper that global cooling over the next two to three decades “will be far more damaging than global warming would have been.”

Thatcher, Booker also observed, “recognized how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind . . .

“What she set in train earlier continues to exercise its baleful influence to this day. But the fact that she became one of the first and most prominent of ‘climate skeptics’ has been almost entirely buried from view.”

Thatcher was back in the news recently when Britain’s Daily Mail reported that she had agreed to meet with Sarah Palin if the former Alaska governor visits Britain. Palin’s representatives had approached the “Iron Lady” to request the meeting.

“A meeting with Margaret Thatcher would be an enormous publicity coup for Sarah Palin,” a source in Britain told the newspaper.

“Palin’s big hero is Ronald Reagan. In U.S. Republican folklore, Thatcher and Reagan brought down the Soviet Union between them. That’s why Maggie is so important.”