This whole post was from articles linked by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser and sent out to his subscribers. Much has been written and I decided to post these articles together with the pictures as a true picture of Maggie Thatcher and her views. RK
Margaret Thatcher who has died this past week at the age of 87 was the first political leader to warn of global warming – but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy.
The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large amount of madness in their method. --Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft, HarperCollins 2002
It was precisely because Margaret Thatcher knew what scientific research was like that made her impervious to claims that science was a special case, with special features and incapable of being understood by outsiders, and therefore that science policy should be left in the hands of scientists. Such a strategy of persuasion and protection might have considerable purchase on a science minister with no direct experience of the working life of a scientist, but not Thatcher. – Jon Agar, Thatcher, Scientist, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 25 May 2011
The main reason, however, why the needs of energy security do not dictate any move away from carbon-based fuel is coal, of which pretty well all the major energy-consuming nations of the world (including not least the UK) have centuries-worth of indigenous supplies. It is true that, as I well recall from my time as her Energy Secretary, Margaret Thatcher was a deeply committed believer in nuclear power, largely on energy security grounds. But her rejection of coal in this context had nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions (although she understandably found it a useful debating point) and everything to do with her well-founded distrust of the politically-motivated leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers at that time. That problem is happily long gone. --Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, Duckworth & Co 2008, p. 73
Margaret Thatcher’s legacy to the universities was revolutionary. Her views on education were driven in large part by her personal experiences as a student; she was, in the main, satisfied with the school education she received in Grantham, but she was dissatisfied with some aspects of Oxford. In particular she felt that the universities were complacent because they were over-protected from the market. She therefore introduced them to greater accountability and to market forces. The leadership of British universities often being wrong on important issues, it was no surprise that Mrs Thatcher’s policy was a success. By introducing accountability for research – a policy that became known as the Research Assessment Exercise – Margaret Thatcher so galvanised the British universities that they now come second only to America’s in every international league table. --Terence Kealey, The Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2013
It was precisely because Margaret Thatcher knew what scientific research was like that made her impervious to claims that science was a special case, with special features and incapable of being understood by outsiders, and therefore that science policy should be left in the hands of scientists. Such a strategy of persuasion and protection might have considerable purchase on a science minister with no direct experience of the working life of a scientist, but not Thatcher. – Jon Agar, Thatcher, Scientist, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 25 May 2011
The main reason, however, why the needs of energy security do not dictate any move away from carbon-based fuel is coal, of which pretty well all the major energy-consuming nations of the world (including not least the UK) have centuries-worth of indigenous supplies. It is true that, as I well recall from my time as her Energy Secretary, Margaret Thatcher was a deeply committed believer in nuclear power, largely on energy security grounds. But her rejection of coal in this context had nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions (although she understandably found it a useful debating point) and everything to do with her well-founded distrust of the politically-motivated leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers at that time. That problem is happily long gone. --Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, Duckworth & Co 2008, p. 73
Margaret Thatcher’s legacy to the universities was revolutionary. Her views on education were driven in large part by her personal experiences as a student; she was, in the main, satisfied with the school education she received in Grantham, but she was dissatisfied with some aspects of Oxford. In particular she felt that the universities were complacent because they were over-protected from the market. She therefore introduced them to greater accountability and to market forces. The leadership of British universities often being wrong on important issues, it was no surprise that Mrs Thatcher’s policy was a success. By introducing accountability for research – a policy that became known as the Research Assessment Exercise – Margaret Thatcher so galvanised the British universities that they now come second only to America’s in every international league table. --Terence Kealey, The Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2013
Unlike the blanket TV coverage NASA climate scientist James Hansen generated at his 1988 appearance before Congress, there were no cameras when British prime minister Margaret Thatcher addressed the Royal Society on 27th September 1988. Told that the prime minister’s speech was going to be on climate change, the BBC decided it wouldn’t make the TV news. The speech had been a long time in the making. Flying back from visiting French president François Mitterrand in Paris in May 1984, Thatcher asked her officials if any of them had any new policy ideas for the forthcoming Group of Seven (G7) summit in London. Sir Crispin Tickell, then a deputy-undersecretary at the Foreign Office, suggested climate change and how it might figure in the G7 agenda. The next day, Tickell was summoned to Number 10 to brief the prime minister. The eventual result was to make environmental problems a specific item, and a statement in the London G7 communiqué duly referred to the international dimension of environmental problems and the role of environmental factors, including climate change. --Rupert Darwall, The Age of Global Warming, London March 2013
The truth behind this story is much more interesting than is generally realised, not least because it has a fascinating twist. Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed “Hot Air and Global Warming”, she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views. Long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. Alas, 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 sceptics” has been almost entirely buried from view. --Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 12 June 2010
The main reason, however, why the needs of energy security do not dictate any move away from carbon-based fuel is coal, of which pretty well all the major energy-consuming nations of the world (including not least the UK) have centuries-worth of indigenous supplies. It is true that, as I well recall from my time as her Energy Secretary, Margaret Thatcher was a deeply committed believer in nuclear power, largely on energy security grounds. But her rejection of coal in this context had nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions (although she understandably found it a useful debating point) and everything to do with her well-founded distrust of the politically-motivated leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers at that time. That problem is happily long gone. --Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, Duckworth & Co 2008, p. 73
Margaret Thatcher’s legacy to the universities was revolutionary. Her views on education were driven in large part by her personal experiences as a student; she was, in the main, satisfied with the school education she received in Grantham, but she was dissatisfied with some aspects of Oxford. In particular she felt that the universities were complacent because they were over-protected from the market. She therefore introduced them to greater accountability and to market forces. The leadership of British universities often being wrong on important issues, it was no surprise that Mrs Thatcher’s policy was a success. By introducing accountability for research – a policy that became known as the Research Assessment Exercise – Margaret Thatcher so galvanised the British universities that they now come second only to America’s in every international league table. --Terence Kealey, The Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2013
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