At The Friends Meeting House...

An anecdote to share from ten minutes out of my day today:

Walking down Euston Road on my way to see a friend at The Welcome Trust, I happened to spot the administrative centre of Quakers in Britain. Curious, I stepped inside.

People were filing out of the main Friends meeting hall and into the lobby. In the lobby was a table playing host to what looked like electioneering pamphlets. Almost all of the leaflets were anti-EU on one subject or another. I looked around at the well-dressed crowd milling about the lobby – probably all of them over 35 and mostly Caucasian. Some of them were wearing badges with CIB written on them. Who on earth were these people?

I searched out the friendliest face in the room – an elderly man standing alone by the door – and asked him. Funnily enough, he was a Quaker and nothing to do with the CIB lot (he was there for another meeting in a smaller hall). CIB, it turns out, stands for Campaign for an Independent Britain.

I asked the man what the Quakers had to do with the CIB group. Nothing. They had just rented out the hall to them. He explained he didn’t know what the vetting procedure for renting out the hall was, but that they (The Quakers) were quite desperate for money.

I said I hoped they would draw the line at the BNP. He said he was sure there weren’t any BNP members there. He also said the CIB group hadn’t filled the hall; there were probably around 100 of them.

I had another browse of the table and a man behind it spoke to me. It turned out he was author Philip Foster, a sceptic of man-made climate change whose books include, "Sustainability – The New Religion” and “Evidence For The Reliability Of The New Testament”. He was there to promote his latest book, “While The Earth Endures”, which contains a forward by climate change sceptic, David Bellamy. Philip was also a CIB member.

I had never heard of him, so I asked him what he thought caused climate change. He said it was mainly radioactive energy from sunspots, completely outside mankind's control, and that CO2 played only a miniscule part. He told me that it was worth looking up the International Conference on Climate Change held in New York last month (which I hadn’t heard of) as opposed to the Copenhagen Conference (which I had). The New York Conference, I discover from google search, was a large gathering of global warming sceptics.

Philip also laid into the 2007 IPCC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), saying the number of scientists who believed climate change was man-made had been incorrectly reported by the cobbling together of signatures.

He chose to close his argument by showing me pictures from his book of 16th century landscapes where the painter had depicted overcast skies. During that period, he said, sunspot activity was low and we were experiencing a Little Ice Age.

It could just have been that the artist liked painting overcast skies, but I didn’t fork out for the book to find out more.