Funny old world, innit? These days, if you’re a right-wing Conservative, or a right-wing commentator or blogger, it is virtually a badge of honour to proclaim that all this global warming stuff, and action taken to counter it, is a load of cobblers, nay, more: it is a fraud, perpetrated upon a deceived public by free-spending liberal or left-wing politicians who don’t have Britain’s own best interests at heart, and who are backed up by scientists exaggerating the problem so that they can ensure the continuation of their research funding.
Yet the woman regarded by right-wingers as their icon thought just the opposite. She was at the forefront of those who first perceived, in the late 1980s, that our increasing production of greenhouse gases was posing a real and mortal threat to the stability of the atmosphere and thus to the welfare of human society itself. Her Royal Society speech, passionate in its rhetoric, set off the second wave of environmentalism in this country (after the first one in the late 1960s). In the two years remaining of her premiership, she treated the Tory cabinet to a global-warming seminar, instigated the process of the UK cutting its carbon dioxide emissions and oversaw the establishment of the Hadley Centre at the Met Office, Britain’s world-renowned institute for climate prediction and research.
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