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

by James Delingpole

  (That muffled rumbling noise you can hear in the background, by the way, is Einstein, Newton and Copernicus turning in their graves at the suggestion that they might have anything in common with the likes of Phil Jones, Michael Mann or Ross Garnaut.

  This same ‘more sinned against than sinning’ line was assiduously promoted in a BBC Horizon documentary of January 2011 called ‘Science Under Attack’. It was presented by Sir Paul Nurse who, flourishing his authority as a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and the newly appointed President of the Royal Society, set out to uncover the ‘truth’ behind Climategate.

  Nurse was shown nodding sympathetically as a subdued and pitiful-looking Dr Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit recounted how he’d been harassed and persecuted by vicious sceptics during the Climategate affair.

  In a concerned and sorrowful voice, Nurse read an extract from a joint letter that had been published in Science magazine, signed by many of the world’s leading climate alarmists, including Stephen Schneider and Paul Ehrlich. It began, ‘We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular.’ The letter claimed that these assaults were led by ‘climate-change deniers’ who are ‘typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence’.

  The documentary went on, somewhat implausibly, to bracket these climate ‘deniers’ with anti-GM protestors and people who believe that AIDS is not caused by HIV. In a key section of the programme, Nurse was shown pitching a curve-ball question to a prominent climate sceptic. The gist was: ‘Suppose a relative of yours had cancer. Would you prefer him to get conventional treatment in line with the medical consensus? Or would you prefer to trust his survival to the whacko fringe…?’ As the sceptic hesitated while trying to consider and then reject this dishonest analogy, Nurse smirked in triumph. Gotcha!

  Sour grapes? Well, of course for the sceptic in question was me. The programme’s producer had assured me in an e-mail beforehand that Nurse was completely open-minded on the subject of global warming, and that he was simply interested in hearing the sceptical point of view. And I, poor, naïve fool that I am, was tickled pink that an actual Nobel Prize-winning scientist was prepared to come to my house and hear what I had to say. As a result, my guard was down. Had I known that Nurse’s intentions were hostile all along, I would have been much more aggressive in defending my position. But when you think someone’s your mate (between filming he seemed such a delightful, sympathetic chap as I plied him with tea and cake) you tend to respond with polite restraint when he asks you a silly question. Only later, when you’ve signed the release form and it’s far too late to do anything about it, do you realise that your moment of hesitation is the bit they were after all along, not the other three or four hours’ worth of film where you were articulate and fluent.

  What’s even more annoying is that, had I done my research, I would have known Nurse was already a pillar of the watermelon establishment. Just a year before our interview, he had hosted a private dinner at his New York home for such Warmist prominente as David Rockefeller, Ted Turner and George Soros to discuss issues including population control. This is hardly consistent with the idea that he was ‘open-minded’ on the subject of AGW: for that particular circle, it’s one of the key articles of faith.

  Serves me right for not having done my homework, I suppose. For weeks, afterwards, I was inundated with poison e-mails and toxic Tweets, most of them from readers of The Guardian’s Environment pages, I think telling me that I was something beginning with ‘c-’ and ending with ‘-unt’ and gloating over the rightful come-uppance of a know-nothing English literature graduate at the hands of a truly brilliant Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

  The irony that the English literature graduate has almost certainly read more and knows more about ‘global warming’ than the Nobel Prize-winning scientist does was, of course, lost on Nurse’s amen corner of foaming, right-on eco-zealots. But not on Christopher Booker, who noted at least one scientific error so glaring and basic that it made a mockery of the documentary’s claims to any kind of authority.

  The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from NASA, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that seven gigatonnes (billion tonnes) are emitted each year by human activity, while only one gigatonne comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.

  This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the seven billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the ‘carbon cycle’ and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme’s other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression.

  If that Horizon documentary had been just one programme among many others representing all shades of scientific opinion, then of course we could safely ignore its straw-man arguments and junk science. Problem is, all the BBC’s coverage of the global-warming issue is slanted in the same direction. Indeed, since 2007, this bias has been the BBC’s official policy:

  The BBC has held a high level seminar with some of the best scientific experts (on whose and what measurement) and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of consensus.

  A 2011 report into the BBC’s science coverage by the geneticist Professor Steve Jones (an expert in snails and Drosophila, but right up there with Paul Nurse in his ignorance of climate change, apparently) attempted to justify this position with still more unsupported slurs. ‘Denialism,’ Jones argued, was typical of a range of similar belief systems, such as that ‘AIDS has nothing to do with viruses, the MMR vaccine is unsafe, complex organs could never evolve, or even that the 9/11 disaster was a US government plot.’

  Jones did pause to note with some concern that climate scepticism is growing in Britain:

  A poll carried out by the Cardiff University Understanding Risk Group in early 2010 showed in contrast that one in seven among the British public said that the climate is not changing and one in five that any climate change was not due to human activity. Fewer than half considered that scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.

  But rather than draw the obvious conclusion that the British public might actually have reasonable grounds to think this way, Jones instead seemed to blame it on what Marxists call ‘false consciousness’. In other words, the BBC needed to work harder to get its propaganda message across:

  The divergence between the views of professionals versus the public may be seen as evidence of a failure by the media to balance views of very different credibility. The BBC is just one voice but so many in Britain gain their understanding of science from its output that its approach to this question must be considered.

  You might find that last comment a bit scary, with its overtones of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Is Jones seriously suggesting that the BBC’s job is to exploit its compulsory-licence-fee-funded near-monopoly on broadcasting in the UK to indoctrinate the benighted populace in the ‘correct’ way to think about global warming? And what if that ‘correct’ version is wrong? What if the ‘consensus’ being promoted by the BBC has about as much to do with real climate science as Lysenkoism did with real genetics?

  Were we living in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea, I suppose, the kind of educative broadcasting being advocated by Jones might indeed prove most ef
fective in suppressing incorrect thought. But we’re not. At least not yet. Despite the best efforts of the BBC and also of CNBC, MSNBC, ABC, The Guardian, the New York Times, The Independent, the Washington Post, Al Gore, NASA, NIWA, the United Nations, the European Union, the Prince of Wales, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, Glastonbury Festival, the Sierra Club, David Cameron, Chris Huhne, Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Springwatch’s Chris Packham, your kids’ schoolteacher, my kids’ schoolteacher, Build-A-Bear, David Attenborough, Coldplay, Radiohead, Michael Moore, the Hon. Sir Jonathon Porritt, Walkers crisps, Mackie’s ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s, Julia Gillard, Tim Flannery, David Suzuki, Ed Begley Jr, Leonardo DiCaprio, Plane Stupid, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Soros, Richard Branson, and the team that brought you the ‘No Pressure’ video it is still possible, just about, for the determined seeker-after-truth to learn that there is in fact an alternative to the version of events promoted by the ‘consensus’.

  And that, what’s more, this alternative seems a lot more plausible than the ‘official’ version. Jones’s report was written after a winter in which nothing seemed to go right for the watermelons. From all around the world, stories both tragic and comical emerged to make a nonsense of the environmentalists’ predictions and policy measures.

  In December and January 2010–11 in Queensland, Australia, terrible floods killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage. Of course it was a natural – not a man-made – disaster. Like the even more dreadful floods in 1974, it was caused by a cyclical ocean-atmosphere phenomenon called La Niña. But what so infuriated the victims is that much of this new tragedy was avoidable. After the 1974 floods, action was taken by the state of Queensland to ensure that next time it would be prepared.

  So why wasn’t it? Because state officials – persuaded by their green activist advisors that ‘global warming’ was now the real threat, and that drought was more to be feared than excess rainfall – had either cancelled or neutered flood defence programmes, such as the Wivenhoe Dam. Instead, they pumped public money into supposedly more ‘urgent’ projects, such as Australia’s $13bn desalination plant programme.

  In Israel, the country’s worst-ever fire blazed for four days in December 2010, destroying over 5,000 hectares of forest. Greenpeace blamed the fire on global warming. ‘Israel must cancel its plans to construct another coal plant, reduce use of fossil fuels, and realise that we are dealing with an international struggle,’ said Greenpeace in a statement which described the fire as ‘a direct expression of the effects of climate change’. However, a subsequent investigation revealed the real cause of the fire: a global-warming activist at a Rainbow Festival was trying to burn her used toilet paper in order to protect the environment.

  In Britain, the US and many other countries in the northern hemisphere experienced their third successive bitter winter, with heavy snowfalls causing transport chaos. Among the many victims of the extreme weather were the millions of British households compelled by new government eco-regulations to install condensing boilers with external pipework, which froze, then burst, causing much misery and expense. The weather appeared to contradict claims made in 2000 by Dr David Viner, a talking head from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Viner was quoted, in a newspaper article entitled ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’, as saying that in the future ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

  In the Sea of Okhotsk, between Russian and Japan, a massive rescue operation was underway to free a Russian factory fishing ship that became stuck in ice more than six feet thick. The ship was stranded on one of those sea routes which, not so long ago, climate alarmists promised would become more easily navigable, thanks to the alleged runaway melting of the polar ice caps. The first ice-breaker sent to rescue the ship also got stuck, so another ice-breaker had to try to rescue that one.

  In the US, NASA tried fighting back against all this inconvenient real-world evidence by declaring that 2010 had been the third-hottest year since records began in 1880. But it didn’t take long for sceptical websites like Watts Up With That? to put this impressive-sounding claim in its proper perspective.

  1. By curious coincidence, those parts of the world where NASA detected the most significant ‘anomalous’ warming in 2010 were also those where it had no weather stations. With no real-world confirmation, how can its estimates be trusted?

  2. Since 1850, the world has been emerging from the Little Ice Age (LIA), when average temperatures were significantly lower than they are now. It should not be surprising, then, if many of the warmest years in the last 100 years should have been measured in the last decade.

  3. The ranking ‘third-hottest year’ is all but meaningless, as even Hansen himself admitted when he said: ‘It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005 or 1998 was the hottest year on record.’ That’s because these claims are based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few hundredths of a degree. The idea that something as complex and ever-changing as global mean temperature can be calculated to this level of accuracy is nonsense. In other words, Hansen’s ranking announcement was a political statement, not a scientific one.

  4. Even if 2010 was the third-hottest year since 1880, so what? We’re talking about a global temperature increase in that period of barely 1°C. This hardly sounds like an imminent climate apocalypse.

  Perhaps you see now why the Warmists are growing so peevish. Up until 1998, it all seemed to be going so well: temperatures were rising; climate scientists were taken seriously; everyone (apart from a few whacko mavericks) seemed to be coming round to the view that Anthropogenic Global Warming was THE great issue of the age; the grants were lavish, the junkets plentiful, the living easy…

  But here we are, fourteen years on, and their dreams have turned to ashes. Nature itself seems to mock their every prediction. And as for the ‘science’ by which they have set so much store: it seems to have deserted them in favour of upstarts like Henrik Svensmark, the Danish physicist whose theories on cosmic rays were apparently vindicated in August 2011 when an experiment at the CERN laboratory in Geneva threatened to drive a coach and horses through AGW theory.

  ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ the economist John Maynard Keynes once supposedly said. But if he was a Warmist he wouldn’t have done. For a Warmist, the ‘correct’ response goes more like this: ‘When the facts change, I jump up and down and stamp my little feet and scream and scream that they haven’t changed, oh not one bit, in fact the facts are stronger than ever before. Why? Because I SAY SO, that’s why!’

  Here’s a classic example from October 2011, from the (Warmist) online publication The Daily Climate. It’s headlined: ‘Far from being “alarmist”, predictions from climate scientists in many cases are proving to be more conservative than observed climate-induced impacts.’ Oh really? And what evidence does the author, Douglas Fischer, have for supporting this claim? Mainly, it seems, a few helpful quotes from Naomi Oreskes, a professional alarmist who has managed to land herself a tenured position – nice work if you can get it, eh, greenies? – as a ‘science historian’ at the University of California, San Diego.

  ‘Many people in the scientific community have felt that it’s important to be conservative, that it protects your credibility,’ says Oreskes. ‘There’s a low-end bias. It has led scientists to understate, rather than overstate, the impacts.’

  A more spectacular inversion of the truth it is harder to imagine. As Marc Morano noted at the Climate Depot website, all the real-world evidence is pointing in exactly the opposite direction to the one which has been promoted with increasing hysteria by the alarmists:

  The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim from A–Z the scientific case for man-made climate fears has collapsed.

  The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea
level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major US hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists and scientists continue to dissent at a rapid pace.

  The alarmists are losing the climate wars, big time.

  In fact, you might say, the alarmist camp has started to resemble that much-parodied scene in the film Downfall: the one where Hitler is sitting in his dingy bunker marshalling imaginary divisions against the advancing Soviets, his terrified minions too scared to admit to their murderously irascible and clearly deranged Führer that it’s all over. Der Krieg ist verloren. And it’s unfortunately at this bitter end-game stage of a war when tyrants tend to turn particularly nasty. Not that they were ever all that pleasant in their earlier stages. But the more desperate they get, the less compunction they have in deploying whatever dirty tricks they can to strike back at their enemy.