Nobody has spoken today about the costs implied for ordinary people of the measures that will be necessary to attempt to reach the targets that are implied in the IPCC report. We know that, in 2015-16, environmental levies, as part of the Government's anti-climate change policies, amounted to nearly £5 billion, and, for 2017-18, that rose as high as £11 billion, and this is forecast to rise to nearly £14 billion by 2022, which will add over £200 a year to the average power bill. This will impact, of course, most heavily upon those who are most vulnerable—the poor, those who are on low incomes. So, we have to be really sure that what we're doing in going down this road is going to produce the results that are required, and that's what I want to take on first of all, because this report is predicated on the assumption that we can succeed in reducing the likely increases in temperature to 1.5 degrees and that the way of achieving that is by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But if we look at the evidence of observations in the last 100 years, we can see that there's no obvious connection between rises in carbon dioxide levels and what's happening in the atmosphere on temperature.

Between 1850 and 2010, the average global temperature, as far as we can measure it, has increased by 0.8 of a degree centigrade, and if we look at various periods in the last 100 years, we'll see that there isn't any correlation at all between carbon dioxide levels and temperatures. Between 1900 and 1940, the temperature globally rose rapidly, but there was only a modest rise in carbon dioxide. Then, from 1940 to 1970, the temperature actually dropped slightly, but there was a strong growth of carbon dioxide. Between 1970 and 1990, temperature and carbon dioxide rose strongly together. And between 1995 and 2015, the temperature has plateaued, and yet there's been record carbon dioxide growth. Nobody has been able to explain the pause. And the reason they can't explain it is that all the climate models on which this report is based are just that: they're models based on speculation about past temperatures and also on speculation about what might happen in the future in certain circumstances on the basis of inadequate information, information we couldn't in any event accumulate. 

The data itself is unreliable, first of all for the very obvious reason that 71 per cent of the planet's surface is water, where there are no temperature measurement facilities, and then much of the land surface as well is inaccessible. We've only had reliable satellite data since 1978—