Many Warmists revere these scientists as the high priests of their faith. Twice, when debating Guardian journalist George Monbiot, I have been treated to a little homily on the lines that anyone who denies AGW must also either be in denial or ignorance of the basic physics of Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius. At this point, our George likes to cock his head, a triumphant smile on his lips, as if to say: ‘Hah! You’ve no answer to that!’
But I do. Science advances all the time. Just because Fourier theorised something in 1824 or Tyndall in 1860 or Arrhenius in 1896 does not make it an Immutable Law of Irrefutable Truth. It would be like me trying to pooh-pooh your theory that oxygen is a vital part of combustion, on the grounds that in the seventeenth century it was entirely disproved by the discovery of phlogiston by the great Johann Joachim Becher. Or to declare that the apparent discovery at CERN of neutrinos capable of travelling faster than the speed of light couldn’t possibly be true, because if it had Einstein would have known about it and Einstein was cleverer than anyone ever, so there.
The other key figure in the genesis of the great AGW scare – albeit unwittingly – was Dr Roger Revelle. Today, thanks to An Inconvenient Truth, Revelle is best remembered as the Harvard professor who first alerted the young Al Gore to the threat of man-made climate change. This is a bit like Orson Welles being best remembered as the man who did the voiceovers for the Sandeman port and Carlsberg lager ads – deeply unfair, but also entirely typical of the reverse Midas effect Gore has on everything from presidential aspirations to distinguished former professors.
Before Gore dragged him into his web, Revelle was a well-respected oceanographer whose team at California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography had speculated (in 1957) that the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels might be too great to be absorbed completely by the oceans. According to science historian Spencer Weart in The Discovery of Global Warming, they never considered it more than a ‘side issue … a detour from their main professional work to which they soon returned’.
Nevertheless, to test their theory they dispatched Dr Charles Keeling, a young geochemist, to a weather station atop the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa to try to establish a baseline snapshot of atmospheric CO2 levels.
Sure enough, Keeling and the Scripps team discovered that levels were increasing. In 1956, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was 316 parts per million (ppm); by 1980, this figure had risen to nearly 340 ppm. (Cue massive panic among those who wished to see this as a cause for panic.) CO2 – or carbon as greens increasingly took to calling it, because carbon sounds all black and evil and scary, whereas CO2 just sounds like the boring, harmless, plant-feeding trace gas you learned about in biology – was the hideous new menace that was going to kill us all!
Now, those of you with a rudimentary scientific background may have noticed an ozone-over-the-Antarctic-sized hole in this argument. ‘All right,’ you may say. ‘Atmospheric CO2 levels are rising. I accept that. But how can we be so sure that this will lead to dangerously increasing temperatures? What if Arrhenius got his calculations wrong? What if, maybe, global climate is controlled by something a bit more complicated than the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas?’
And if this is what you’re saying, you may be absolutely right. The key phrase to remember here is: ‘correlation is not causation.’ Yes, it’s perfectly true that from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s global mean temperatures increased. It’s also true that in that same period, man-made CO2 emissions rose and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased. But then, so too, in that same period did the price of oil. And the number of actors who have played Doctor Who. And the value of Microsoft’s shares. And the total amount of flatus produced by my bottom. Are we really saying then that global warming has in fact been caused by a weird combination of CO2 emissions, the Middle East, Bill Gates, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann – and the cumulative eructations of my bum?
Well no, clearly not; that would be absurd. But in scientific terms, it is no more absurd than to conclude that because CO2 levels have increased and temperatures have risen it is, therefore, proof of cause and effect. That is only correlation, not an explanation of causation.
Indeed, if you were to glean just one single fact from this book, I’d suggest it should be this: no one in the entire history of climate science has ever managed to prove that there is a connection between man-made carbon emissions and dangerous climate change. Not one scientist. Ever.
That isn’t to suggest that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist. Nor is it to say that industrial civilisation and agriculture have no effect on global climate – of course they do. The methane emitted by beef and dairy cattle undoubtedly contributes to the heating of the atmosphere. At the same time, cities create localised warming (known as the Urban Heat Island effect, which explains why, for example, as a Londoner I don’t bother digging up my dahlia tubers before each winter, because I know the frost is never likely to be severe enough to kill them).
I’m not even suggesting that there might not be a dangerous causative link, and that sometime in the future this connection will be discovered, forcing Evil Climate Change Deniers like me to blush for shame and possibly end up being tried by kangaroo courts staged by hard-core greenies, and sentenced to death for culpability in having encouraged such toxic complacency about the very real threat to Gaia in the days when there was still time to do something about it.
But I do say that the jury on AGW is still out. This is a fact which proponents of AGW theory have tried very hard to suppress, by using techniques more traditionally associated with fascist politics – lies, bullying, black propaganda – than with the dignified neutrality of real science.
Ethical scientists have long understood this, among them the aforementioned Roger Revelle. Revelle’s scepticism proved most inconvenient for Al Gore. While campaigning in the 1992 presidential election on a fashionable eco-warrior ticket, Gore published a book called Earth in the Balance. It praised Professor Revelle’s influence in alerting him to the ‘global environmental threat’ posed by CO2.
Revelle’s position, however, was rather different from his student protégé’s. In July 1988, he had written to Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, chairman of a Senate committee investigation into the greenhouse effect and climate change, urging caution. ‘We should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer,’ he said.
Later, Revelle made his scepticism even more explicit in a paper written in collaboration with his old friend Dr Fred Singer, professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, and with an energy expert, Dr Chauncey Starr. Published in the small-circulation journal Cosmos, the authors stated: ‘Drastic, precipitous and especially unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty without being effective.’ It concluded: ‘The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.’
Al Gore’s response? To mount a campaign of disinformation and character assassination. He persuaded a friend to circulate the story that the elderly Revelle (who died shortly after the Cosmos article appeared) was coerced into putting his name to the article while sick and not in his right mind. (Singer later successfully sued his accuser for libel.) Gore also rang the ABC news presenter Ted Koppel, urging him to expose the alleged fact that Singer and his fellow sceptics were being funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Koppel’s principled on-air response could scarcely have summed up the truth of the matter more perfectly. Koppel noted that there was:
…some irony in the fact that Vice-President Gore – one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century – [is] resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis. The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientists nor the peop
le with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of the hypothesis into the acid of truth. That’s the hard way to do it, but it’s the only way that works.
I’m as shocked as Koppel was, though some readers may find this naïve: ‘Bleeding politicians. They’re all as rotten as each other.’ But it’s one thing to know that politicians are capable of corruption and to doubt their ability to make things better. It’s quite another, I would suggest, to be so thoroughly cynical that one no longer either expects them to behave honourably, or feels able to condemn them when they behave dishonourably. That way anarchy lies.
So what kind of behaviour do we expect of our politicians – and scientists? This issue has a vital bearing on one of the key questions of this whole debate: how did a theory as loony as AGW manage to gain such widespread traction to become one of the defining political ideas of our age?
One answer, I believe, lies in the instinctive faith we have in our public representatives, be they politicians, diplomats, experts, technocrats or scientists doing vital work at state-financed institutions. (Yeah, all right, I hear all you conspiracy theorists at the back. I know that you’ve known better all along. I’m thinking more of the voting public in general.) I’d suggest that when our public representatives tell us something is true, most of us still rather sweetly believe that it’s because they’ve done their due diligence and they’re presenting us with the facts as they know them. Especially when that something is of such all-pervasive, life-changing, economy-shifting, geopolitical importance as AGW.
Yet as we’ve seen with Al Gore, this simply hasn’t been the case. Nor has it been so with Dr James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Nor with Dr Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Nor with Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC. Nor
Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ben who? Well quite. Unless his name rings a bell as the guy from the Climategate e-mails who wanted to ‘beat the crap out of’ climate sceptic Pat Michaels, you almost certainly won’t have heard of him. Yet in the mid-1990s, this climate modelling near-nonentity was somehow placed in the extraordinary position of being able to dictate world opinion on global warming at the stroke of a pen.
He achieved this in his role as lead author of Chapter Eight of the scientific working group report on the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995. Nothing to write home about there, you might think, except that Santer was personally responsible for the most widely reported sentence in the entire report, originating in the ‘Summary for Policymakers’. The sentence in question claimed that ‘the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate’.
But was this line actually true? Was this really a fair summary – the kind of summary the IPCC purports to rigorously and definitively provide – of the general state of scientific understanding at that particular moment? Well, not according to some of the scientists who contributed to that chapter of the report.
The original version of the chapter – as agreed on and signed off by all twenty-eight contributing authors – expressed considerably more doubt about AGW than was indicated in Santer’s summary. It included these passages:
None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.
No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change observed) to (man-made) causes.
Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.
When will an anthropogenic climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to the question is ‘We do not know.’
Strangely, none of these passages made it to the final draft. They were among fifteen deleted by Santer, who also inserted a phrase of his own to the effect that ‘the body of statistical evidence’ now ‘points to a discernible human influence on climate’. In other words, the chapter did not represent the ‘consensus’ position reached by twenty-eight scientists. What it in fact represented was the scientifically unsupported opinion of one man: Benjamin D. Santer.
Among the old school scientists disgusted by this behaviour was Professor Frederick Seitz, formerly president of the National Academy of Sciences. In a Wall Street Journal article titled ‘A Major Deception on Global Warming’, he wrote: ‘I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events which led up to this IPCC report.’
He concluded:
IPCC reports are often called the ‘consensus’ view. If they lead to carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth, they will have a major and almost certainly destructive impact on the economies of the world. Whatever the intent was of those who made these significant changes, their effect is to deceive policy makers and the public into believing that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.
In this he was correct. Subsequently it emerged that orders had come from a letter issued by the US State Department to Sir John Houghton, then head of the IPCC. The letter stated that ‘chapter authors should be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner’. In all likelihood, the letter was issued at the behest of one of Vice-President Al Gore’s closest political allies, former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, who was employed in the Clinton Administration as Under Secretary for Global Affairs.
‘Appropriate’ of course meant ‘more alarmist’. With the UN’s Kyoto conference on the horizon (to be held in late 1997), Gore, Wirth and fellow believers in the ‘True Faith’ of AGW were naturally anxious that the US should show itself to be a more willing combatant in the ‘War on Climate Change’. So far, the US had only committed to ‘non-binding agreements’.
Sure enough, the certainty expressed in that one line penned by Santer had the desired effect. At the next international climate meeting – a pre-Kyoto discussion held in Geneva – the US finally declared itself willing to accept a ‘realistic but binding target’ on carbon emissions. The reason for this change in attitude, Senator Wirth admitted, was the IPCC’s latest declaration that ‘the science is convincing, concern about global warming is real’.
Finally, let me tell you a story that shows perhaps better than any other that the entire global warming industry is built not on solid science but on smoke, mirrors and lies. Like many of the stories in this chapter, I first read it in Christopher Booker’s thoroughly indispensible The Real Global Warming Disaster. It concerns a day in the summer of 1988 when global warming became a household phrase, thanks to a memorable, widely reported White House committee meeting into the ‘greenhouse effect and global climate change’ chaired by our old friend Senator Tim Wirth, and attended by his Senate colleague Al Gore.
This was the occasion on which Dr James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute, dramatically testified that ‘the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements’. The four hottest years ever recorded all had been in the 1980s, rising to a peak in 1987 – and this massive warming could ‘with a high degree of confidence’ be ascribed to the ‘greenhouse effect’, said Hansen at the meeting.
What made this speech so notable was that, first, no leading scientist had ever discussed dangerous, man-made global warming with such certainty, and second, as Hansen spoke, he was filmed with sweat visibly pouring from his brow. No wonder Time magazine was inspired to write a big story titled ‘Is the Earth Warming Up?’ and the New York Times reported: ‘Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate.’ No wonder a senior New York Times journalist subsequently described the moment as a ‘major breakthrough’.
The true reasons for this didn’t emerge until much later, by which time the damage to public debate was irreversible. It turned out that the whole event was elaborate stagecraft, arranged by Wirth and his collaborators to ga
in maximum public attention. Having found their tame NASA scientist with his out-there message of doom, they rang up the Weather Bureau to inquire which day of the year was likely to be the hottest – and scheduled his testimony for that day.
Then, as Wirth proudly confessed to a US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) documentary in 2007, they rigged the temperature of the room where the hearing took place:
What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows inside the room … so that the air conditioning wasn’t working … so when the hearing occurred there wasn’t only bliss which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot.
So Al Gore lied. So Tim Wirth rigged a congressional hearing. So James Hansen exaggerated. So Ben Santer rewrote the report. So Sir Crispin Tickell flattered and cajoled Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher into taking a highly influential public line on ‘climate change’ which she would subsequently regret. So an obscure Swedish scientist called Bert Bolin suddenly became renowned when his hitherto disregarded theory came to suit the mood of the times. So what?
So what, indeed. Not a single example I’ve given in this chapter in any way proves that AGW isn’t happening or that it’s not a serious problem worthy of our urgent attention. But what these examples do show quite clearly, I hope, is how grievously we have been deceived.
For over twenty years now, scientists, politicians and environmentalists have been telling us, with ever increasing shrillness and urgency, that the science of global warming is settled, the time for inaction is over, and that catastrophe can be averted only by making radical shifts to our lifestyles and economy. Yet what we’ve seen throughout this chapter is that both the degree of scientific certainty and the unanimity of opinion are fictitious.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 6