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

by James Delingpole

  I hope that doesn’t sound too sanctimonious. There was a time, I admit, when it might have struck me as such. When Tony Blair followed America’s example and in 2000 introduced Britain’s first Freedom of Information Act, I remember thinking that it would only lead to more taxpayer expense as government time was wasted dealing with frivolous queries by professional troublemakers. I just couldn’t see the point.

  But that was when I still retained a vestige of faith in what – for want of a better word, I suppose – I must call ‘the Establishment’. By this I mean not just the various agencies of government, but also institutions like the BBC, the universities, the learned bodies such as the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and so on. Of course, even then I recognised that these institutions had their flaws. But I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt in that casually trusting way most of us do with authority figures and authority bodies. We believe in them because they are The Authorities.

  Climategate killed all that. And almost worse than the revelations in those e-mails were the official lies and cover-ups that followed Climategate. Everyone was at it – from the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri, to the governing bodies of the University of East Anglia and Penn State University in the US, to the Gordon Brown Labour administration and the David Cameron coalition administration, from the United Nations to the European Union, from Obama’s USA to the CSIRO in Kevin Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s low-carbon-suicide Australia. Climategate exposed one of the greatest scientific scandals in the history of the world, on which billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money was being squandered.

  And what was the almost unanimous reaction of the Establishment across the world? Why, to use all the considerable power and resources and authority at its disposal to deny the problems revealed by Climategate.

  Ten, twenty, thirty years ago, they would probably have got away with it too. Today, it simply isn’t possible. From the patient, painstaking demolition of the Hockey Stick by McIntyre and McKitrick, to blogger Richard North’s forensic deconstruction of a false, non-peer-reviewed claim made in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report about the effects of climate change in the Amazon, from Donna Laframboise’s crowd-sourcing audits to David Holland’s and Andrew Montford’s cussedly determined Freedom of Information requests, the lying liars of the great green eco-fraud are being subjected to scrutiny so relentless and merciless you almost feel sorry for them.

  Almost.

  FIVE

  THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLED

  Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

  There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

  Michael Crichton, The Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003

  Do you remember those science experiments you used to do at school?

  In my day you got to dissect frogs and mice; and chuck sodium into water and watch it hiss, jump and burn blinding white, prompting the thrilling, shuddery thought that if it were to land on your hand, it would burn right through just like napalm.

  But that was before the first one got killed off by the animal rights lobby and the second one by the health and safety brigade. Still, even if you’re too young to have experienced the joy of slicing up amphibians or nearly burning your hand off, you’ll probably have grown a copper sulphate crystal. They haven’t banned that one yet, I hope.

  OK, so if you remember growing copper sulphate crystals, you’ll also remember how annoying it was when your classmates’ crystals grew bigger than yours. Or, worse, when your crystal didn’t grow at all because your copper sulphate solution wasn’t saturated or the seed crystal wasn’t dangling properly in the water – or some other basic error you’d made.

  Afterwards you had to write up the experiment and if you’re anything like me, you wanted to write up the experiment as it ought to have worked – just like it said in the textbook – rather than in the way it actually worked for you, which was rather crappily and embarrassingly.

  Your science teacher, though, would have insisted. ‘Use your own measurements, not the ones in the textbook,’ he would have said (or she, in my case: Miss Jones her name was. I still remember how prettily she blushed when she took us for that human biology class).

  And your teacher was quite right, of course. He was attempting to instil in you the principles of scientific method. Never mind what ought to be happening in this experiment you’re carrying out. Concentrate on what actually happened when you did it. To do otherwise isn’t science. It’s cheating.

  Not only that, but it’s the enemy of scientific progress. Think, say, of the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen in his lab in Wurzburg in November 1895. He’s trying to repeat a fairly routine experiment with cathode rays when suddenly he notices that something bizarre has happened. A barium platinocyanide screen some distance from his shielded apparatus keeps glowing whenever the cathode ray discharge is in process.

  Does Roentgen at this point say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever’ – or ‘Ja. Ja. Was auch immer,’ presumably – and move that inconvenient barium platinocyanide screen out of the way, since it has no relevance to the experiment he’s trying to conduct?

  Why, no, of course he doesn’t. Being a good scientist, he’s immediately intrigued by this anomaly and sets out to investigate further. Over the next few weeks – eating and sleeping in his lab – he prepares a series of further experiments which lead him to discover what are sometimes called Roentgen Rays, but which he himself terms X-rays (X being the mathematical designation for something unknown). The name catches on. First subject for an X-ray photograph is the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha, ring and all. Seeing the skeletal shape, she declares cheerily: ‘I have seen my death.’

  Many of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries have happened in this way: with a scientist setting out to replicate a routine and familiar experiment and instead, quite by chance, stumbling on something marvellous. When this happens, rival scientists are inclined to mutter jealously under their breaths: ‘You jammy bugger!’ and sometimes, to pour scorn on the new discovery and try to undermine it. When the physicist Lord Kelvin first heard about X-rays, his immediate reaction was to declare them an elaborate hoax.

  Australian scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall were greeted with similar scepticism in 1982 when they came up with the novel hypothesis that, contrary to the accepted belief that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, they were in fact created by the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. No one believed them until Marshall drank a Petri dish of the stuff and went on to win (with Warren) the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

  What those two Aussies had instigated was an unusually rapid and dramatic version of what Thomas Kuhn, in his seminal 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, called a ‘paradigm shift’. That’s the book where I found the story about Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays.

  In the 1990s, ‘paradigm shift’ turned into one of those buzzy phrases used by marketing men to describe any apparently dramatic move in popular cultural thinking. But what Kuhn meant by ‘paradigm’ was the current, more-or-less universally-accepted worldview held by the scientific community.

  A paradigm shift, Kuhn says, takes place when a growing number of dissenting scientists niggle away at ‘anomalies’ – inconsistencies in the paradigm – leading to a period of uncertainty and foment (‘crisis’), which in turn leads to the creation of a new paradigm. This is how science advances. It’s why we no longer think that the world is flat, or that the sun revolves round the Earth, or that the human body is governed by four competing humours. Someone, some
where, came up with a more plausible theory of how the world really works, and this theory was gradually, universally accepted.

  Science is never settled. That’s not how it works. ‘The science’ is neither more nor less than a series of hypotheses, none of which lasts any longer than it takes some impertinent, iconoclastic upstart to come along, prove it wrong, and replace it with some fancy new improved hypothesis of his own. As the philosopher Karl Popper first argued in the 1930s, in order to be properly scientific, a theory (or hypothesis) must be ‘falsifiable’: that is, it must be capable of being proven false either through observation or experiment. In other words, a useful theory holds the key to its own destruction.

  Let’s pick a theory, any scientific theory, and see how this works in action, shall we? Hey, I’ve just thought of a good one. How about the theory – widely promulgated by leading members of the scientific community since the mid-1980s – that the world is becoming inexorably, dangerously, unprecedentedly warmer and that the main driver of this increase is man-made CO2 emissions? You may have encountered this theory before. It’s quite topical.

  Right, so if this theory is correct then clearly we should all be very afraid. It would mean, essentially, that Industrial Civilisation is destroying our planet and that – presumably – our only hope of survival is to halt economic growth and slash our CO2 emissions to near zero, since CO2 is an unavoidable by-product of almost every conventional industrial process. It would mean we need to bomb ourselves back to the agrarian age, restore the barter system, live in mud huts and subsist contentedly on mung beans, Brussels sprouts and lentils, among pungent clouds of flatus, smugness and self-righteousness, secure in the knowledge that we have saved Mother Gaia for ‘the children’…

  Some people actually believe this stuff. Well, they would, what with ‘the science’ being ‘settled’ and ‘all the world’s top scientists’ having reached a ‘consensus’ that global warming is real and it’s man-made and it’s very dangerous and it’s unprecedented and it’s happening now. Who are we – we puny, ignorant non-scientists – to dispute the considered judgement of so many wise and revered and authoritative experts in their field?

  You get a lot of this at parties. For Warmists, it’s the first line of defence. ‘What?’ they say to me. ‘If it’s a choice between the opinion of James Delingpole – novelist and journalist – and the opinion of the 2,500 scientists who contributed to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the president of the Royal Society (and former Astronomer Royal) Lord Rees, top NASA scientist Dr James Hansen, and the government’s former chief scientific advisor Professor Sir David King, well, I’m sorry, but I know which side I’m backing.’

  And I totally see where they’re coming from, of course. I mean, I’m not altogether sure that even I (love him though I do) trust James Delingpole’s scientific opinion because I know, perhaps better than any man alive, just how woefully inadequate his science background actually is.

  That stuff at the beginning of this chapter about growing copper sulphate crystals? That pretty much is the extent of my scientific expertise. OK, so I did get a grade B for my Physics O level. But everything I ever learned about the subject I’ve completely forgotten, because I only studied it on sufferance. I really wanted to study Biology, but I’d read somewhere that to be an RAF fighter pilot you needed Physics, so I thought I’d better do it just in case I decided to diverge from my primary career plan of being an SAS troop commander who’d win a Victoria Cross in the upcoming war against the Soviets.

  Now let’s be even more harsh. Let us compare and contrast the scientific expertise of James Delingpole with that of the Royal Society.

  Yep. No contest. So let’s have a look at the Royal Society’s website to see what it says about man-made global warming. After all, with such a distinguished history, it’s bound have the right answer.

  Ah yes. Here it is. On 16 December 2009, following the UN’s Copenhagen Summit, the Royal Society issued an important and definitive statement entitled ‘Preventing Dangerous Climate Change’. How did we know it was important and definitive? Because the Royal Society told us so:

  This statement has been approved by the Council of the Royal Society, and was prepared in consultation with thirty leading climate scientists. It is informed by decades of publicly available, peer-reviewed studies by thousands of scientists across a wide range of disciplines. Climate science, like any other scientific discipline, develops through vigorous debates between experts, but there is an overwhelming consensus regarding its fundamentals. Climate science has a firm basis in physics and is supported by a wealth of evidence from real world observations.

  Often, when scientists are trying to communicate their discoveries to the wider world, they can be frustratingly vague, undogmatic, tentative. That’s because their job, by its nature, deals more in probability than it does in certainty. But the authors of this particular statement clearly had decided to dispense with such ethical niceties:

  There is no such thing as ‘safe’ climate change. Even the global temperature increase to date (about 0.75°C) is contributing to effects that are impossible to adapt to in some regions, notably small low-lying islands and coastal areas. As the temperature rises further, so will the risk of more widespread and dangerous climate impacts; from sea-level rise, from increasing frequency and intensity of climate extremes such as heat waves, floods and droughts, especially in vulnerable areas.

  A maximum global temperature increase of 2°C since pre-industrial times has been adopted by many nations as a goal to prevent dangerous climate change. If global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are reduced at 3–4 per cent per year after 2020 it has been estimated that there is a fifty-fifty chance of limiting global temperature increase to roughly 2°C; but only if GHG emissions begin to decline within the next decade. By 2050 emissions would need to be down to near 50 per cent of their 1990 levels, with continuing reductions in the second half of this century.

  It went on:

  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment in 2007, which involved a large number of the most eminent climate change scientists in the world, highlighted the severe climate effects that could result from a ‘business as usual’ approach to global GHG emissions. The balance of scientific research since the IPCC report broadly confirms and strengthens its key findings.

  Utter hogwash, of course. But unless you knew already that it was utter hogwash, I think that most likely you’d be inclined to believe it. After all, this isn’t just some crappy, two-bit blogger with an Oxford arts degree giving you his tuppeny-h’penny’s worth. This is, scientifically speaking, about as close as you can get to the Voice of God.

  Only after complaints from forty-three members was the Royal Society shamed into modifying its statement. Part of the 2010 update read:

  There is very strong evidence to indicate that climate change has occurred on a wide range of different timescales from decades to many millions of years; human activity is a relatively recent addition to the list of potential causes of climate change.

  At last! A fair and balanced acknowledgement of the uncertainties within climate science – and one, furthermore, with which ‘Warmists’ and ‘Sceptics’ alike would surely all agree. So why couldn’t the Royal Society have come up with something like this in the first place? Why chuck away 350 years’ worth of reputation for scientific distinction just to make a tendentious political point?

  The answer may well have something to do with the Royal Society’s leadership: all three of its most recent presidents – Lord May, Lord Rees and the current incumbent, Sir Paul Nurse – have been fervent believers in the perils of Man-Made Global Warming. So fervent, it seems, that all those tedious old traditions about not prostituting your fine institution’s name in pursuit of dubious causes no longer apply.

  For two centuries, the following ‘advertisement’ was printed in the Society’s house journal Philosophical Transactions:

  … it is an established rule of the Soc
iety, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.

  Such dignified restraint, however, would appear to be anathema to the new regime. Sir Paul Nurse made this explicit in a 2011 interview with the left-leaning New Statesman, where he was quoted as advocating that climate scientists should drop any pretence at impartiality and start agitating for political change:

  Nurse’s undergraduate socialist spirit is still alive and well: he wouldn’t be against scientists getting involved in activism. ‘We are citizens, and citizens should be involved in politics, and I think those that have a strong view should be involved in party politics,’ he says. ‘I’m happy to see fellows of the Royal Society politically engaged, if that’s what they see as right.’

  If you’re a socialist who shares Nurse’s commitment to political activism, great. But what if you’re not? What if you’re an ordinary person with no particular political axe to grind who just wants to know the ‘truth’ about climate change? Would you not feel a little disappointed that you couldn’t rely on the Royal Society to cleave to the known facts on the subject? Would it not leave your faith in the authority of such institutions somewhat shaken?

  Which brings us back to those people we all meet at parties: the ones who say ‘2,500 scientists can’t be wrong’. Or ‘well, the consensus is….’ Or ‘the IPCC says’. They’re not engaging with your argument because they feel they don’t need to. It’s like a game of Top Trumps where your card – the James Delingpole or Christopher Booker or Richard North one – has a Science Credibility rating of 2, and their card – the Royal Society or the IPCC one or the NASA one – has a Science Credibility rating of 800,000. They win every time.