David Coburn on climate change

The following is an excerpt from a recent, wide-ranging interview with UKIP Scotland leader David Coburn. Unfortunately there was not space to include it in the main piece, which can be read here – David Coburn sets the record straight.

What is your view on fracking?

David Coburn (DC): “It is a question of money, I mean the oil price has gone through the floor boards, but of course it will, hopefully, at some point in the future go up. But fracking I have no real objection to as long as they are careful about what happens to the water table. We must be careful about that.”

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What about the effect on climate change?

DC: “Climate change is a very interesting thing, there is a climate change industry in so much as a lot of people who dare to say ‘hang on, wait a minute, could it be something else?’ are just trashed. You can’t get a grant to be at university unless you completely subscribe to the modern idea.”

Couldn’t it be the other way round? That people who are doing research at universities, who are at the top of their fields, believe climate exists because it does?

(DC) “Well there are an awful lot of other people who don’t. Well, it exists, but when you say climate change you mean the CO2 thing.”

I mean man-made climate change.

(DC) “Yes, well there may be some change in that, mankind must have some effect, but a lot of other people are saying ‘whoa, hang on, what’s causing this? Is it caused by other reasons?’ There are reasonable arguments about the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun. The climate has always changed, in the Middle Ages you would grow vines in Yorkshire.”

Sure. But this is over a different period of time. This is a change that has come about since industrialisation.

(DC) “Well I was told also that the poles on Mars are shrinking. As are the poles on Earth. But there are no cars, well there is a car, but just a little nuclear vehicle, poodling around on Mars. But you know, it [Mars] hasn’t had loads of cars racing around on motorways. So I think you’ll find there has been greater climate change caused by other matters. The magnetic field of the Earth, that does change from time to time, and there was a time when there was a snowball earth, when the Earth was completely frozen and the whole planet was frozen, at other times we have had ice ages.

“When I was at school I went off to Iceland on a school expedition to put markers on Icelandic glaciers, because at that time they thought we were going into an ice age. Apparently, technically, we are going into an ice age. So what may have happened was that global warming exists and it has retarded that. Because an ice age would probably be much more dangerous for mankind than anything else.”

“I am no expert on this matter. From what I have read about it, too many people are jumping to one conclusion.”

Around 97 per cent of climate scientists say they back the concept of anthropogenic climate change.

(DC) “Well, climate scientists? A lot of people disagree with it. Not everybody agreed with Einstein.”

That’s true.

(DC) “And Galileo. People were going to burn him at the stake.”