AFTER my article last week, I received a message from a reader who asked me an interesting question: “If you were still a States Member what would you do about the decisions being made about Jersey being carbon neutral by 2050, and to achieve this, is it worth losing what we have? The answer I gave him was quite simple: “I would have lodged a proposition calling on the States to rescind the decision they made in 2019 and ask them to approve that no action should be taken at all on this matter until 2030 at the earliest.”

By this time, new technology would have developed, making it possible for Jersey, if we wanted to, to take part in the process in a way that won’t damage all of us economically.

This delay would also give us a chance to see how seriously China, India, America and Russia, who are the major emitters of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, are prepared to damage their economies and change their ways as, unless they do, our sacrifice would be meaningless.

By then, we could also assess whether the cost of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide, of which Jersey contributes (0.0007%), is worth spending up to £300 million on this ideological nonsense.

A sum which could be better spent on paying our teachers and nurses more, revitalising Fort Regent as a centre of sporting excellence and helping mothers with young children get back into the workplace by creating government-run free nursery schools in every parish. The list of where money is needed is a long one.

In this debate, I would have to be prepared, of course, for an impassioned discourse with our Environment Minister, Jonathan Renouf, who is likely to call on all the knowledge he has from his PhD in geography, and will probably tell the States that “I regard our scientific understanding of climate change as one of our great human achievements.

“The impacts of carbon dioxide on the climate system are well understood and in terms of the basic principles have been understood for well over a century”.

Why do I think he will say that in a States debate? Because one of his constituents has this in writing from him when he refused a request to give the constituent – a person with a physics degree – an opportunity to present the counter case that shows there is no climate emergency and that the current state of the world’s temperature is part of the natural cycle of events that have been unfolding for millions of years.

Obviously, as a humble journalist, I would not be able to match the Deputy in a verbal joust in the Chamber about the science of global warming and the impact of carbon dioxide on this and how much of it is caused by human activity.

But throughout my journalistic and political life, I have been guided by the maxim that “a man’s judgment is only as good as his information. Check the information and check it again”.

My major source of information about science and climate change has been John Francis Clauser, an American theoretical and experimental physicist, who last year won the Nobel Prize for physics for his contribution to the foundation of quantum mechanics.

In a recent speech to the International Monetary Fund, he said: “Well-educated scientists can solve the world’s problems by acting as scientific ‘fact checkers’.

“A ‘fact checker’s’ most common problem, unfortunately, is delivering what is true and what is not. The world is awash with someone else’s perception of truth as an alternative to real truth.”

Last month, Dr Clauser joined 1,600 other scientists from around the world and signed a declaration stating that: “There is no climate emergency.”

When asked why he had taken this step, he said: “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the wellbeing of billions of people.

“Misguided climate science has metastasised into massive shockjournalistic pseudoscience.

“In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies and created an associated unnecessary energy crisis exacerbated by incorrect climate science.

Dr Clauser has joined Guus Berkhout, a Dutch professor of acoustics, geophysics and innovation management at the Delft University Technology near Rotterdam, who has expressed his deep concerns about the amount of pseudoscience and misinformation being spread about global warming.

Our Environment Minister puts great weight on why he is a passionate believer to the point of raising it to a religious status that the world is warming because of human activity, and Jersey must “punch its weight” in the global effort to reduce this, regardless of the cost or interruption to our lives.

He makes it clear that during his television career as a producer for the BBC’s science-based programmes he produced a number of television documentaries dealing with climate change.

When making these programmes, he would obviously read a certain amount of material and choose who he wanted to make the case that global warming and human activity were closely related.

The last person he would want to interview would be someone like Dr Clauser, or Guus Berkhout, who would probably say “what you’re showing is total rubbish and there is no climate emergency”.

What sort of pictures can illustrate the story that “there is no climate emergency”? No sad pictures of a lonely polar bear with its cub floating on a block of ice because global warming is unfreezing the ice they need to live on; no pictures of Florida being flattened by a cyclone; no towns in Greece being ravaged by fires; no 12-year-old in plaits to harangue politicians for their failures – in short, no visuals, no story but plenty of pseudoscience.

The efforts of the BBC to deal with the subject of climate change and maintain its legal requirement role of impartiality and balance has not gone unnoticed.

Only last month in the Daily Telegraph under the heading of “Net zero dam has burst but the BBC is still papering over the cracks”, their prominent columnist Charles Moore launched a withering attack on their handling of climate change saying: “For decades, the Beeb’s coverage has been shamelessly onesided, presenting politicised theory as irrefutable fact. Their coverage has been very self-important, very emotional and very, very one-sided.”

As he is a major producer of these programmes, I understand that the Environment Minister will do his best to defend his climate-change stance.

But that he is not prepared to take any notice of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, who have proved that the modelling used by those responsible for some of the important conclusions were deeply flawed, is extremely concerning.

I was amazed to read an email the minister sent to one of his constituents who had requested a meeting with him – a person with similar scientific qualifications to him – who also included a considerable amount of material showing why there was no climate emergency.

The minister’s response was: “I appreciate you’ve put a lot of work into your presentation, but I’m afraid I’m not going to read it. I cannot tell you how many of these dossiers I was sent over the years of my TV career. They never present convincing evidence, and the fact that I was able to find a basic error in your first presentation within three minutes suggests that I will not be convinced this time either.”

This arrogance is breathtaking. He never explained what he felt the error was and dismissed the views of people of the calibre in scientific terms of Dr Clauser and Guus Berkhout. If this was sporting contest between the minister and those two, it would be like Jersey playing Manchester City.

The time has come for the Chief Minister to now step in and relieve this minister of his responsibilities in this area, as he has shown himself to be hopelessly conflicted by his previous career and cannot address this vital matter with an open, impartial and fair mind.