EurActiv website interviewed Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. They reported Davey as saying:-
“My recommendation to most politicians who want to talk about the climate is to listen to the scientists and listen to the evidence,” he said. “Of course you can question it, but when there is overwhelming evidence you should tend to shut it.”
Rather denounce critics Ed Davey needs to grasp the policy problem. Britain is the only country in the world committed to an aggressive carbon reduction policy. The sum of actual carbon reduction policies in place globally will do practically nothing to offset the growth in emissions from emerging economies. If, as Ed Davey believes, the science is correct about the catastrophic consequences resulting from all these emissions, then he is faced with a terrible truth. Britain will incur hundreds of billions of pounds of cost over the next few decades, yet leave future generations to bear 99% of the climate change problem when compared to having done nothing at all. Ed Davey is fronting policy that is net harmful to this country by any measure.
If Britain wants to truly lead the way on getting a global agreement on carbon emissions, it should show that it is possible to successfully transfer to a low carbon economy for costs of 1% of GDP (as Stern claimed), and with zero impact on long-term economic growth. Britain’s current policies are something any country would avoid like the plague, even if they had the same views on the “science” as Ed Davey. From the evidence to date in Britain and other countries, there are no policies of net benefit, even if the political issues can be sorted out. The fact that no other country has followed the UK’s lead in passing the Climate Change Act 2008 would suggest that see the harm that the policy is causing.
These comments were reported by The Daily Mail on 6th March and Bishop Hill on 8th March. I looked into this issue in the recent post “Why Climate Change Mitigation Policies Will Always Fail“.
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Kevin Marshall
ManicBeancounter 
Brian H
/ 08/03/2014“there are no policies of net benefit”
Perfect!
If AGW is a danger, it is an unavoidable one, and we’ll cope with the consequences — necessarily. If it is imaginary, we will have to cope with the consequences of our folly in wasting resources and lives pushing back against nothing. That is already happening.
manicbeancounter
/ 09/03/2014if AGW were a danger there is a further consequence. We would need accurate predictions about the the dangers. The “what”, “where”, “when” and magnitude. Climatologists have a very poor track record in these sort of things. In fact so poor, that we would have wasted huge amounts of money doing unnecessary preventions.