Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future

by James Delingpole

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  List of Acronyms

  One: Imagine

  Two: Climategate: How it Happened

  Three: It’s Not About ‘The Science’

  Four: In the Pay of Big Koch

  Five: The Science is Unsettled

  Six: A Few Things You Should Know About ‘Global Warming’

  Seven: Watermelons

  Eight: Welcome to the New World Order

  Nine: Malthus & Co.

  Ten: They Don’t Like It Up ’Em

  Eleven: Decline and Fall (Pt II)

  Postscript: The Big Lie

  Nihil Sub Sole Novum: A Brief Afterword

  References

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  LIST OF ACRONYMS

  AGU American Geophysical Union

  AGW Anthropogenic Global Warming

  CAGW Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming

  CO2 carbon dioxide

  CRU Climatic Research Unit [at the University of East Anglia]

  CSD Committee for Sustainable Development

  DECC Department of Energy and Climate Change

  ECE Economic Commission of Europe

  GCI Green Cross International

  GHG Global greenhouse gas

  GISS Goddard Institute for Space Studies

  ICSU International Council of Scientific Unions

  IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

  LIA Little Ice Age

  MWP Medieval Warm Period

  NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  NIWA National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

  PNS Post-Normal Science

  TERI The Energy Research Institute

  UEA University of East Anglia

  UHI Urban Heat Island effect

  UN United Nations

  UNEP United Nations Environment Program

  WMO World Meteoreological Organization

  WWF Worldwide Fund for Nature

  WUWT Watts Up With That

  (www.wattsupwiththat.com)

  ONE

  IMAGINE

  In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … all these dangers are caused by human intervention … the real enemy, then, is humanity itself.

  The Council of the Club of Rome, 1991

  Imagine if everything you knew about the environment was wrong.

  Imagine if global warming were something to be desired, not feared.

  Imagine that organic food, sustainability, biofuels and the WWF were far more harmful to the world and its inhabitants than GM food, industry, oil and ExxonMobil.

  Imagine if it didn’t matter one jot how big your carbon footprint was, and you could go out and buy as many 4x4s as you liked or run up as many air miles as you wanted without the need to feel the slightest sliver of guilt about the environmental damage you were causing.

  Imagine if carbon dioxide were our friend.

  Imagine if one of the world’s biggest mass murderers was a woman who campaigned against chemicals and pesticides, and the world’s biggest saviour was the man who saved hundreds of millions from hunger with mutant crops and modern agricultural technologies.

  Imagine if, for a fraction of the money we’re spending to ‘combat climate change’, we could ensure that no child went hungry or was malnourished, and that everyone in the world had access to clean drinking water.

  Imagine that ‘overpopulation’ was an illusory problem.

  Imagine that fossil fuels were a miracle we should cherish – not a curse.

  Imagine if we could stop worrying about ‘scarce resources’.

  Imagine if the polar bears, glaciers, coral reefs, rainforests, Pacific islands and the polar ice caps were all doing just fine.

  Imagine if economic growth, far from destroying the world, made it cleaner, healthier, happier – and with more open spaces. Imagine…

  As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I’m about to tell you that you don’t need to imagine these things because they are all already true. And already, in anticipation, some readers’ hackles will have risen and their scepticism boosters will have gone into overdrive, the synapses in their brain will have triggered hundreds of warning signals and a great big thought bubble will have appeared above their heads, with enormous capital letters, probably written in neon red with flashing light bulbs in the middle:

  ‘And why should we believe YOU, you bastard?’

  Don’t worry, I’m used to it. It’s just a reflection of how so many of us have been conditioned to think about people who don’t believe in ‘peak oil’ or catastrophic man-made global warming, or recycling, or ‘sustainability’, or organic food, or carbon footprints – or any of the other core tenets of the environmental religion.

  We don’t say: ‘Ah. There’s a person with an interestingly different point of view. I wonder why he thinks that and what evidence he has to support it?’

  We say: ‘That person’s evil. He’s probably funded by Big Oil, like most deniers. He’s only saying that stuff because it’s what he wants to believe, because he’s too selfish to change his lifestyle. And anyway, what the hell does he know about anything? It’s not like he’s a climate scientist…’

  So, before I delve more deeply into climate change and the misanthropy of green ideology, I thought I would give some indication of why you can trust what I have to say.

  This shouldn’t be necessary. In a rational world, people’s arguments would be judged on the merits of their case rather than, say, on how ‘nice’ they appear to be, or a long string of qualifications, or the number of politically correct minority boxes they tick. Unfortunately, we do not live in a rational world. Rather, we live in a world which is culturally in thrall to the politics of ‘identity’ – where who you are and where you’re coming from often seem to count for more than what you actually have to say.

  How many times – on a TV political debate programme, a radio phone-in or a letter to the editor – have you heard someone qualify their statement: ‘As a black woman…’, ‘as a gay man…’, as ‘someone who has been disabled for fifteen years…’? When the person’s identity is directly relevant to the point being made, that is of course fine. But often this modern preoccupation with identity corrupts the quality of the debate, rather than enhances it.

  Consider the case of Lee Bidgood Jr, a Florida war veteran with whom I had a run-in over a letter he wrote to Newsweek, which said:

  Propaganda by global-warming sceptics and deniers reminds me of 1944, when as an Army officer I saw living skeletons in striped pajamas. Horror stories about Nazi concentration camps suddenly rang true. I wondered how intelligent people could commit such atrocities. History records the effectiveness of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda. I hope Al Gore and others can prevail over today’s anti-science propaganda.

  Or, as he might just as well have abbreviated it: ‘Global warming is real because I witnessed the Holocaust; climate-change deniers are as bad as Nazis.’ When I first read the letter I assumed it was a fake. I know many World War II veterans – all humble fellows who would never dream of trying to parlay their experiences (of which they speak only reluctantly) into such a tendentious political point.

  But how many of the people who read that letter
in Newsweek shared my scepticism? My suspicion is that those few who did were far outnumbered by the ones who subconsciously thought: ‘Dear old chap. He has served his country and witnessed the twentieth century’s greatest crime. Clearly we must take his views on climate change seriously…’

  An even bigger problem with this identity-centric approach to political debate is that it implies that people who do not belong to the correct privileged group – whether a cultural minority or an ‘expert’ in their field – can safely be excluded from an argument simply by dint of who they are and what they represent.

  This technique was used in an attempt to silence the critics who debunked Michael E. Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’. The reason this matters was because the Hockey Stick was – and to some extent still is – the central pillar on which the case for catastrophic and unprecedented man-made global warming relied. You’ll have seen a version of the Hockey Stick in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It’s the graph which shows how global temperatures have changed in the last millennium.

  From the year 1000AD until the late twentieth century, the trend is pretty much flat. But suddenly, at the end, there’s a dramatic upward tick – like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. Taken at face value, the graph says: ‘Never in modern human history has there been a period of global warming so intense and sudden. We should all be very afraid and act now for this is almost certainly the result of man-made carbon emissions.’

  That, at least, is how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) chose to interpret it. Mann’s Hockey Stick was given star billing in the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (otherwise known as the bit everyone reads) – it was repeated no fewer than five times within the actual report, and the media launch featured a gigantic blown-up image as the backdrop. Environmental lobby groups went mad for it. It was widely cited at the UN’s 1997 Kyoto climate meeting (where the infamous carbon reduction treaty originated), and every household in Canada received a leaflet which claimed that the Earth was experiencing historically unprecedented warming (i.e. the conclusion of the Hockey Stick graph).

  All of which is fine and dandy – except the Hockey Stick was flawed to the point of uselessness. The chart was based on tree-ring data, but the scary upward bit at the end was the result of an overemphasis on data from one tree, bristlecone pine, which is widely acknowledged to be an unreliable indicator of twentieth-century climate change. The shape was derived from the combination of this dodgy data with a statistical sausage machine that would turn it into a hockey stick every time. As Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, explains:

  This meant that it didn’t matter what data you put into Mann’s algorithm, if there was one series within it that had a hockey-stick shape, there is a strong chance that, depending on the number of other series, a hockey-stick graph would emerge as the result. The algorithm was heavily weighted in favour of hockey sticks. It effectively disregarded any data that conflicted with, or contradicted, the hockey-stick finding.

  Two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick – neither of whom is a professional climate scientist – exposed this chicanery. Note Mann’s witheringly contemptuous posting at RealClimate, a website established by his friends and colleagues (‘The Hockey Team’, as they fashion themselves) to discredit critics of the hockey stick:

  False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist). The false claims were first made in an article … published in a non-scientific (social science) journal Energy and Environment.

  Mann uses the same technique in a letter to a Dutch science journalist, Marcel Crok:

  I hope you are not fooled by any of the ‘myths’ about the Hockey Stick that are perpetrated by contrarians, right-wing think tanks and fossil fuel industry disinformation… I must begin by emphasising that McIntyre and McKitrick are not taken seriously in the scientific community. Neither are scientists…

  The brandishing of the word ‘scientists’ as a totem of unquestionable and absolute authority, the paranoid invocation of ‘right-wing think tanks’ and ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation’, and the belittling and rejection of scientific journals which don’t fit in with the alarmist consensus, are ruses you’ll see cropping up again and again over the next few pages. It’s worth getting used to them, because they are vital to understanding both the nature of the corruption and malfeasance revealed in the Climategate e-mails and also the flaws in the case for anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Just ask yourself: if scientists like Michael Mann possess such solid, incontrovertible evidence to support their theory, why don’t they fight their critics’ supposed errors with factual arguments? Why, instead, must they resort to smears and ‘arguments from authority’? Why do they make it all so personal?

  Now, I’m acutely aware that one or two of you reading this may be sincere believers in man-made global warming. The last thing I want to do at this early stage is insult you by suggesting that you’re gullible and thick. I think you’ve been brainwashed, that’s all – and even the cleverest people can be brainwashed or back the wrong team now and again. Look at all those intellectuals who defended Stalin in the 1930s; look at all those brilliant minds who voted for Tony Blair…

  So what is it, you might sneerily ask, that makes James Delingpole so special that he hasn’t been brainwashed? Good question. After all, I’m not a meteorologist or a climatologist or a geologist or an astrophysicist or indeed a scientist of any description. As one of my more energetic critics, a blogger named Jo Abbess BSc is fond of pointing out, the only qualification I have to my name is a modest MA in English language and literature from Oxford University. Yet I, a mere arts graduate, have the temerity to question the expertise of the thousands, if not millions, of PhDs all around the world who know for absolute certain that AGW is real and if we don’t do something soon it’s going to kill us all.

  There are lots of good ripostes to this, one of which comprises just two words.

  No, not those.

  I mean:

  ‘Only Connect.’

  Those words come from a novel by E. M. Forster called Howards End. I’m personally not a great fan of Forster but I do like that quote. Not only is it easy to remember, but it’s true. Years before James Cameron invented that touchy-feely, healing, shiny tree thing in Avatar, years even before James Lovelock invented Gaia theory, Forster understood that the more closely and carefully you look at the world, the more you appreciate the extraordinary degree to which everything is interconnected.

  The interconnectedness I explore in this book is that between AGW and the ideology of the liberal-left generally – ranging from the green policy of the Nazis through to the cultural Marxism of Antonio Gramsci to the environmental legislation of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and, yes, even that notional ‘Conservative’ David Cameron, to the propagandising of Greenpeace to the eco-evangelism of The Guardian. And you really don’t need a science degree to understand that kind of thing. All you need is to look at the world around you. And be able to read.

  Indeed, quite often I’ve asked myself how I would fare were I to go out for a coffee one rainy morning, only to find that my entire office had been wiped out by mysterious assassins with silenced machine pistols. And the answer, I’ve decided, is that I’d fare pretty well. Why? For the same reason one of the CIA operatives gives in Three Days of the Condor when asked how the Robert Redford character – despite having had no special agent training – has nevertheless learned his clever evasive moves:

  ‘He reads.’

  At the beginning of each term, my English tutor Mr Conrad would hand us a sheaf of paper listing all the term’s lectures. ‘I’m supposed to give you these,’ he’d say, contemptuously. ‘But why bother going to lectures when you can read the critics? And why read the critics when you can read the texts?’

 
; When you’re nineteen or twenty years old, this is probably the second most exciting thing anyone could say after ‘Fancy coming back to my place for coffee?’ Here is your tutor – the man whose wisdom and intellect you revere above all others, an actual proper Oxford don, no less – telling you, a lowly undergraduate, that it’s quite OK not to bother with lectures. Nor even to wade through all those tedious critical textbooks.

  All he wants is for you to read the books you’re studying that term and form a judgement. Your own judgement. And that’s the key. What he wants is independent thought, considered analysis and personal insight. That’s quite a tall order when your entire education up to that point has been based on spoon-feeding and regurgitation. Even in our very best universities, the teaching method I describe barely survives today, the result of a combination of underfunding, oversubscription and the dismal trend towards anti-elitism and dumbing down anatomised in books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Melanie Phillips’s All Must Have Prizes. And what this means, unfortunately, is that even our supposed ‘intellectual elite’ no longer necessarily thinks with the nimbleness and independence of mind that were once the natural product of a sound education.

  Not only do people not know enough; but too easily they take for granted the opinions of supposed experts who pretend to have the answer to everything.

  We can see this sorry decline even in institutions like the Royal Society (founded 1660). Its once proud motto was Nullius in Verba – take no man’s word for it – but this hardly squares with the way the organisation has jumped so wholeheartedly on the AGW bandwagon, with barely a thought as to whether the underlying science supports it.

  More broadly we can see it in the way a theory as manifestly flawed as the Great Climate Change Peril has managed to penetrate so deeply into our culture, all but unchallenged even by clever people with science degrees like Jo Abbess. It’s an odd thing in this age of anti-elitism – when almost nobody defers to anyone over anything – but the AGW meme would never have spread so far or fast if not for the supine willingness of the many to surrender to the received ideas of the amazingly few.