Guest essay by Eric Worrall

James Delingpole tells us prominent British journalist and climate skeptic Christopher Booker has sadly passed.

Delingpole: RIP Christopher Booker, the World’s Greatest Climate Change Sceptic

by JAMES DELINGPOLE
3 Jul 2019

Christopher Booker, the world’s greatest climate sceptic, has died.
Booker – “Bookers” as I used to call him on our regularly weekly phone chats – would have hated being called the ‘greatest’ but he was, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, he wrote the definitive book on the climate change scam: The Great Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out to be the Most Costly Blunder in History?

Secondly, he was one of very, very few journalists capable of getting climate sceptical arguments prominent coverage in the mainstream media – notably in the hugely influential and widely read Daily Mail and also in his weekly Sunday Telegraph column.

Thirdly, he was a figure of such journalistic eminence, who did his research so thoroughly, that he made it very hard for his many enemies on the green side of the argument simply to dismiss him as an ignorant crank.

Fourthly, unlike more than a few on the sceptic side of argument, Booker did not attempt to cover his rear or make himself seem more reasonable and moderate by billing himself as a ‘lukewarmer’. Booker told it as he saw it and for many years was in no doubt whatsoever that ‘climate change’ was the most expensive, pointless and dishonest scam in the history of the world.

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Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/07/03/rip-christopher-booker-worlds-greatest-climate-sceptic/

The Guardian also paid tribute to Booker, though they are less sympathetic to some of Booker’s views.

Christopher Booker obituary

Stephen Bates
Thu 4 Jul 2019 22.10 AEST

First editor of Private Eye who revelled in the perversity of taking a contrary stance

For nearly 30 years the discordant sound that Sunday Telegraph readers heard each weekend was the paper’s columnist Christopher Booker barking up the wrong tree. Booker, the first editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, took iconoclasm to extraordinary, and frequently eccentric, lengths. In his weekly columns he regularly annoyed and frustrated scientists, climatologists and doctors with his assertions that asbestos was not dangerous, speed cameras caused accidents, fossil fuels were necessary, global warming was a hoax and Darwinian evolution was not proved.

But he certainly gave the paper’s readers what they wanted to be told: that bureaucrats and social workers were meddlers, that the European Union was a dangerous and unaccountable bureaucracy and that experts were conspiring to pull the wool over their eyes. That he did so with tenacity, brio and absolute certainty in his own rectitude over the apparent obtuseness of officialdom merely reinforced all their prejudices about the world. He enjoyed the perversity of taking a contrary stance, an outlook that also fuelled his satires. Ian Hislop, Private Eye’s current editor, said that “no one agreed with Christopher all the time, including Christopher himself”.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/04/christopher-booker-obituary

Christopher Booker will be missed. But Booker’s legacy will live on. Britain’s vocal climate skeptic and Euroskeptic movements owe much to Booker’s tireless efforts to speak truth to power, to expose the lies and corruption of the British and European establishment.