Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

She was very concerned, always – I remember when I was Secretary of State for Energy – to promote nuclear power, long before the issue of climate change came up, because she was concerned about energy security; and she didn’t trust the Middle East, and she didn’t trust the National Union of Mineworkers: so she didn’t trust oil, and she didn’t trust coal. Therefore she felt we really had to push ahead with nuclear power. And then when the climate change/global warming thing came up, she felt: “well this is great: this is another argument – because it doesn’t have any carbon dioxide emissions – this is another argument why you should go for nuclear. And that is what she was really, largely, saying. It’s been misrepresented since then.

And so she said to the scientists – she went to the Royal Society and she said: “there’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff”. So of course they went away and did that.

Inevitably, the moment politicians put their weight behind something, and attach their name to it – in some ways, of course, money will flow; that’s the way it goes. And inevitably research development institutions started to bubble up – if we can put it that way – which were going to be researching climate change; but with a particular emphasis on the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.

At the request of Mrs Thatcher, the UK Met Office set up a Climate Modelling Unit, which provided the basis for a new international committee called The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.