Climate Conversation Group

20 July 2012

Archbishop Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace
Lambeth Palace Road
London SE1 7JU

Dear Archbishop Williams

There was a report this morning on the Today programme, to which I trust you paid due regard. If you didn’t, you should have.

The report, concerning the effect of the current American drought on levels of grain harvests, aired a remarkable and arresting statistic – disturbing too, if you have a conscience. It appears that 40% of the grain production of the Western world’s primary producer has been diverted to the generation of feed stocks for the so-called ‘biofuel’ industry. That this will result in hardship to countless within the developed world can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. That the already dispossessed, impoverished and disenfranchised will be the ones mainly to suffer, even unto starvation and death, is an absolutely foregone conclusion.

And the reason for this? Why, to be sure, to pursue policies common on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at sustaining the greatest scientific swindle in history. I refer, of course, to the much hyped issue of climate change, amongst the principal advocates of which has been organised religion in all its gaudy and rich variety. In pursuit of this fraudulent chimera, for the time being so beloved of duplicitous politicians, free loading scientific mountebanks, self-preening churchmen (senior ones especially) and wilfully ignorant pseudo-environmentalists, usually of a leftist persuasion, you yourself being a snappy exemplar:

• all sensible empirical enquiry is to be abandoned;
• all who have the wit, knowledge and energy to question are to be vilified;
• all time honoured protocols of scientific method are to be spurned;
• all regard for truth, indeed even just factual accuracy, are to be sacrificed to the dictats of a secular cult;

but

• every form of skullduggery and chicanery is not only to be encouraged but marshalled and deployed.

This is not to say that you and your brethren of a religious inclination are uniquely responsible for this calculated lie. There are many others even more culpable than are you, not least The Royal Society. Individually and collectively, however, you are responsible for your own response to, and promotion of a farrago which, since inception, has been challenged by scientific authorities of the highest distinction and integrity and, above all, men and women with no conflicts of interest in the pursuit of their own empirical investigations. [Kindly note repetition of the word ‘empirical’.]

In that sense, you will be personally as responsible as any for the consequences that will flow, and which have been predicted times without number. In fact, let’s be clear, prediction is anyway unnecessary. The consequences of giving credence and respectability to demonstrable falsehood are readily deducible for oneself, and have presented ethical issues for religion since time immemorial.

What is unravelling now is firstly a false hypothesis, but misguided error is not the core issue. The core issue is calculated and depraved mendacity. In the longer term, from this and other matters, what is unravelling is the moral authority of your office and the entire creaky edifice atop which it rests.

Yours sincerely

R.C.E Wyndham

Cc: The Archbishop of York, The Bishop of London, Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh, Archbishop of Westminster, Bishop of Exeter, As the spirit moves.