Why not? Because we don’t need to. We’re not trying to hide anything, and we’re certainly not on a mission to disseminate lies. Quite the opposite. All we care about is that the truth be published. If that truth takes the form of conclusive evidence that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a significant, unprecedented and dangerous driver of climate, then fine: we’ll lay aside our scepticism and start discussing how to address the problem. Until that happens, what we’d like is an open and honest debate in which the known facts are made available and in which the best-supported case is allowed to prevail until such time as it’s replaced by an even better one.
This is what differentiates us from our opponents and it’s a fact that emerges very clearly from those Climategate e-mails. The very last thing those scientists want is openness and honesty. At the merest whiff of dissent, instead of responding with the superior force of their argument, they crush it with bullying, blackmail and ad hominem assaults.
Consider their response when two Harvard astronomers – Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas – have the temerity to publish a paper suggesting that the MWP was significant and widespread. The ‘Hockey Team’ sees this not as a valuable contribution to the state of scientific understanding, but as a personal threat. Here, for example, is Tom Wigley’s suggestion of how to deal with them:
Might be interesting to see how frequently Soon and Baliunas, individually, are cited (as astronomers). Are they any good in their own fields? Perhaps we could start referring to them as astrologers (excusable as … ‘oops, just a typo’).
Wigley does love a smear. Earlier, he can be seen discussing how best to blacken the name of the peer-reviewed journal Climate Research (CR), whose editor Hans von Storch published the offending Soon and Baliunas paper:
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring [sic]. Hans von Storch is partly to blame – he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about – it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
Michael Mann has another idea:
Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that ‘Climate Research’ has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the sceptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit.
Peer review, as far as Mann and his Hockey Team are concerned, is a one-way street. A vital badge of distinction if attached to papers supporting their cause; utterly worthless if those peer-reviewed papers happen to contradict it. Mann states this quite explicitly here, as he dismisses another peer-reviewed journal, Energy and Environment.
Don’t read E&E, gives me indigestion – I don’t even consider it peer-reviewed science, and in my view we should treat it that way. i.e., don’t cite, and if journalists ask us about a paper, simply explain its [sic] not peer-reviewed science, and Sonja B-C, the editor, has even admitted to an anti-Kyoto agenda!
Perhaps the most sympathetic complexion one can put on this approach is that the Climategate scientists genuinely believed they were men on a mission to save the world, and that by suppressing any dissent they were doing us all a favour. If so, this was essentially a political decision, not a scientific one. I’ll discuss the dangers of scientists behaving like political activists in another chapter. What I want to do, by way of conclusion to this one, is to ask a simple question. Suppose for a moment that there really is a strong consensus in favour of AGW; and suppose that the scientific evidence for AGW theory is – as Mann, Jones et al. seem to think – so compellingly rock solid that it brooks no opposition. Then why is it that, throughout the Climategate e-mails, the scientists pushing AGW emerge as being so utterly terrified of having their research, opinions and credibility exposed to the crucible of open public debate? What exactly are they trying to hide?
THREE
IT’S NOT ABOUT ‘THE SCIENCE’
For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world’s systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Margaret Thatcher, speech to the Royal Society, Fishmongers’ Hall, City of London, 27 September 1988
So you see, yet again, it was all Maggie’s fault. As so many commentators are so fond of reminding us, she was responsible for everything: from the decline of Britain’s industrial base, the Falklands War, and the death of Britain’s mining and shipbuilding communities, to the rise of greed and selfishness and the Big Bang in the City of London, which of course led to the current economic crisis. So why not add AGW alarmism to the charge sheet, too?
And if you think that first quote is damning, wait until you read what she said next:
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons – which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s – though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
Shocking, eh? There some of us were imagining that the Iron Lady was the shining exemplar of rigorous empiricism, robust common sense and achingly sound Conservative values. And now, it turns out all along that she was just another Swampy-style eco-freak with a dog on a rope, a recycled faux-leather pure hemp handbag, and, presumably, parked somewhere round the back of No. 10, a battered VW Kombi with an Atomkraft? Nein Danke sticker on the back window. And, remember, this was long before the twenty-first century, by which time the ‘Save the Sinking Maldives’ meme was spreading faster than Spanish flu. This was earlier, way earlier – long before anyone had heard of Rajendra Pachauri or the IPCC or the Hockey Stick or An Inconvenient Truth.
Indeed it has been suggested that ‘probably the most important fact in the entire global warming issue’ is this: ‘Margaret Thatcher had a BSc degree in chemistry.’
Can this be true?
Up to a point, yes.
It was at Margaret Thatcher’s personal instigation that the UK Met Office set up its Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which – in one of her final acts as Prime Minister – she opened in 1990. The Hadley Centre, in turn, helped to produce the primary data set which was used by the newly founded IPCC to ‘assess observed global warming’. Under the leadership of committed Warmist Sir John Houghton, Hadley was also responsible for selecting the lead authors for the IPCC’s scientific working group (Working Group I) – authors who, it need hardly be said, would reliably push the IPCC’s reports in the ‘correct’ alarmist direction.
Was she stupid? Crazy? Ill-advised? What?
One of the more cynical theories is that Mrs Thatcher’s early adoption of the ‘climate change’ issue was rooted in Realpolitik. After the challenge to her power posed by the 1984 miners’ strike, she wanted to ensure that never again could Britain be
held hostage by the National Union of Mineworkers. By posing it as a global environmental issue quite beyond the realm of party politics, she could cunningly reduce Britain’s reliance on coal without provoking further confrontation with the miners.
What’s more, she could use CO2 reduction – just as Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme did in the mid-1970s – as an excuse to justify a push for otherwise unpopular nuclear energy. Two years after the Chernobyl disaster, a nuclear-plant-building programme would hardly have been a great vote-winner, but the Conservative government needed nuclear processing facilities in order to upgrade its nuclear deterrent with the Trident missile system.
The more prosaic explanation is that Mrs Thatcher was influenced by one of her senior advisors, career diplomat and British ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Tickell. Though no one who worked with Margaret Thatcher has ever accused her of being the suggestible type, it may be that the smoothie ambassador managed to, ahem, ‘tickell’ her pride in her Oxford Natural Sciences degree and her former job as an industrial research chemist. Certainly, it was at Tickell’s suggestion that Thatcher made her influential speech to the Royal Society.
Tickell had long been a keen amateur student of ‘climate change’. In the 1970s, he took a sabbatical from his job as a civil servant to study climate science at Harvard, which in turn inspired him in 1977 to publish a book on the imminent doom facing mankind: Climatic Change and World Affairs. Mysteriously, his website and CV fail to mention that the form of doom he was predicting at the time was global cooling.
Eleven years later, in the revised 1988 edition of the book, Tickell was hedging his bets: ‘Why then does the climate change? And what is its time scale? There is no short, complete or even adequate answer to either question, and most of the ideas which have been put forward remain controversial.’ Despite this admitted uncertainty, however, Tickell was quite sure of one thing: something needed to be done – and quickly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his job, Tickell’s proposed solution to this apparently urgent crisis (the precise nature of which he did not yet understand) was the creation of a new supranational environmental body, to be run under the auspices of the United Nations, to act as ‘international custodian of the world’s climate’. As Tickell writes in his book, its job would be to shame and bully the countries of the world into ecological correctness:
In the last resort the policing of agreements on climate as on other aspects of the environment would depend on the translation of a consensus of opinion into means of mobilising, persuading and, if necessary, shaming governments into co-operation and compliance.
Among the carrots and sticks it might use were ‘taxes on the use of fossil fuels to promote wider use of energy resources’ and punitive import tariffs. All this, remember, to deal with a problem whose precise nature and cause Tickell admitted he couldn’t identify.
By the time his revised edition was published, his wishes had come true. In November 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed, set up under two UN umbrella bodies: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Do you find this kind of detail deathly dull? I do too. But unfortunately, it’s very much grist to the mill of the kind of good-intentioned technocrats and diplomats such as Tickell who are compelled to work for organisations such as the United Nations and the European Union. They wear outsiders down with the tedium of their arguments and the smallness of their fine print. By the time anyone else notices what they’re up to, the damage has been done and it’s too late to do anything about it.
In the European Union, this process of enlargement of powers by stealth is known as ‘engrenage’ – which means ‘gearing’, i.e. ‘ratcheting up little by little’. As the EU’s founders – notably the wily cognac salesman Jean Monnet – understood all too well, no electorate would allow its nation’s sovereignty to be abandoned for the sake of some pie-in-the-sky, Socialist Euro project. The only way to get around this, they realised, was always to pretend what was happening wasn’t really happening.
The Times incisively analysed this process:
It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledged that it will be implemented but in such a diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the outset.
Follow the history of the various UN bodies concerned with global warming and you’ll notice the same process. The obscure obsessions of a handful of activists mutate into mainstream thought, then almost holy writ. Tiny, obscure, feeble, toothless committees blossom into mighty institutions employing thousands and costing tens of millions. Bodies which were initially established purely in an advisory capacity gradually accumulate the authority, influence and regulatory powers of government. Engrenage.
In the 1970s, global warming – climate change generally – was little more than a minor cult followed by a few tousled eccentrics. By the late 1980s it had become an important policy issue for all the world’s serious nations. By the mid-1990s, it was one of the greatest crises ever to face mankind. And by the twenty-first century it was the world’s most powerful religion – its guilt-laden mantras taught in every classroom, its pontiffs, mullahs and vicars-general enriched, almighty and triumphant, its tenets rigorously applied in almost every last detail of daily life from waste disposal to household illumination, from food and fuel prices to air travel. How?
Engrenage.
Yeah, all right, but just because I keep saying ‘engrenage’ in that knowing way doesn’t necessarily make it so, does it? Surely the more likely explanation for the way AGW gained the world spotlight is because scientists found more and more evidence to show it was happening and that it posed a real threat. Surely politicians took note, and legislation was passed accordingly?
A reasonable supposition, I would agree. But as we’ve already seen elsewhere in the book, one of the truly astonishing things about AGW theory is how little solid, reliable evidence there actually is to support it. If there were, all that skullduggery we saw in the Climategate e-mails would have been entirely unnecessary. The facts would have spoken for themselves.
What you’ll see in this chapter is that far from being a scientific process, the AGW industry is essentially a political one. Sure, a bit of science comes into it – scientists behaving like politicians, politicians à la Margaret Thatcher behaving like scientists manqués – but the science on each occasion is little more than a handy excuse. Climate change, as we shall see, is far less important as a scientific reality than as a Rahm Emanuel-style beneficial crisis: real or imagined, it doesn’t much matter, as far as its high priests are concerned. It’s a pretext for action by a handful of dedicated individuals determined to impose their peculiar views of how things should be done, and how we should live our lives, not just on their own families, or even their own nation states, but on the entire world.
If you shared these people’s motives, you’d no doubt consider them heroes. One of your heroes, definitely, would be Professor Bert Bolin, the mild-mannered, self-effacing Swedish meteorologist (1925–2007) who had talked up the carbon terror since as early as 1959, when he travelled to Washington to warn the National Academy of Sciences of the potential threat posed by increased CO2 emissions. It was Bolin who came up with the notion (now commonplace among policymakers) that if atmospheric CO2 concentration goes beyond a certain tipping point (450ppm was the figure he came up with), then we are all doomed. He was also author of the 500-page keynote paper which set the alarmist tone for an influential UN-sponsored conference on man-made global warming in
Villach, Austria, in 1985. This in turn paved the way three years later for the creation of the IPCC, with Bolin himself as its first chairman. As Al Gore said on collecting his Nobel Peace Prize (given jointly to him and the IPCC for their work in supposedly combating global warming): ‘Bert, without you we would not have come to where we are today.’
Bolin’s theories were based on one first formulated by a fellow Swede – a chemist named Svante Arrhenius. In 1896 Arrhenius tried to calculate what might happen if, as a result of man’s burning of fossil fuels, the natural quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere were to double. It would, he decided, increase the Earth’s average temperature by a hefty 5°C.
Arrhenius’s calculations were in turn based on those of two earlier scientists, Joseph Fourier and John Tyndall. Fourier was a French mathematician and engineer who discovered the ‘greenhouse effect’ (in which the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat radiated by the sun, delaying its escape into space and thus keeping our planet habitable). Tyndall, an Irish physicist, discovered that only certain gases have this property – not nitrogen and oxygen, which constitute about 99 per cent of the atmosphere, but mainly water vapour, which contributes 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, followed by carbon dioxide (3.62 per cent), nitrous oxide (0.95 per cent); methane (0.36 per cent) and others, including CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons (0.07 per cent).
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 5