How did this frightening
climate threat dissolve into scientific uncertainty and political confusion?
What of the many billions of dollars of wasted public resources? Some might
blame the "sceptics", the "merchants of doubt" or the
"deniers". Others point to the global financial crisis.
We can say for certain that
many hesitant individuals overcame the pressures of group-think, intimidation
and tribal disapproval to have a closer look at the relationship between real
science, politics and business.
I was once told by a friend
that when it comes to scientific issues of major public concern, it is
"not what you know but who you know".
I think he meant that my
fledgling scepticism about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (DAGW) was
pointless, for as a cartoonist I was as unqualified to assess the science as he
was.
The implication was that
all who are untrained in "climate science" are required to accept the
scientific and political authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and its local colleagues such as the CSIRO: the scientific
establishment.
I found my friend's advice
baffling. Anyone familiar with the judicial process knows the gravest issues of
liberty and fortune are often determined by a jury selected from the public.
Expert witnesses can give evidence in support of either side at a trial. The
judge must rule on questions of admissibility, but in the end it is the jury
that decides which scientific evidence is to be believed.
In the climate debate, the
only "judge" is the scientific method - a testable hypothesis
followed by factual or experimental challenge. The "facts" here
represent an anxious problem for the DAGW advocates. For example, everybody
agrees that the warming trend paused 16 years ago, despite a corresponding 10
per cent increase in atmospheric CO2. This ought to be an embarrassment to the
global warming alarmists. What exactly is the relationship between CO2 and
temperature? Why did the warming trend stop as it did between 1945 and 1975,
when CO2 emissions took off?
As Dr David Whitehouse, the
former BBC online science editor, said in the New Statesman in 2007
"something else is happening to the climate and it is vital we find out
what or we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly".
Obviously
we should pay close attention to the computer models that form the basis of
climate scientists' projections. In fact these models apparently failed to
anticipate the current pause in global warming, not to mention the abundance of
post-drought rainfall in Australia. Scientific "consensus" based on
these computer models is becoming rather shaky.
The reason why scientific
consensus emerged in this debate is because political activists want to get
things moving, and if they say that consensus is scary and urgent, then
sceptics had better get out of the way.
The activist cause peaked
early in 2007 when Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth became an international
hit. This documentary was superficially compelling for the uninitiated, but in
October 2007 the British High Court found the film contained nine errors of
fact.
Professor Bob Carter of
Queensland's James Cook University gave evidence in this case; few people in
Australia are aware of this severe embarrassment for Mr Gore.
Later that year, the ABC
broadcast Martin Durkin's provocative documentary, The Great Global Warming
Swindle, against the outraged objections of many prominent alarmists. How
interesting. The science was "settled", the debate was said to be
over and no further discussion was required. Any media professional should have
been aroused by such an excited censorship campaign, and it stimulated my first
cartoon on the subject (above), which depicted the family TV set as medieval
stocks with an imprisoned climate sceptic being pelted by the family with their
TV dinner.
It seemed to me that things
changed after that documentary was screened. Perhaps the shock of hearing the
likes of Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, and Patrick Moore,
co-founder of Greenpeace, had joined the ranks of the sceptical was just too
much for some people.
Things got nasty. Someone
came up with the brilliant but insidious idea of using the term
"denier" to describe a person who remained agnostic or sceptical
about the exact human contribution to the 0.7 degree global warming of the past
100 years. This malicious rhetoric came to be adopted by climate activists,
media reporters and politicians up to head-of-state level. Many distinguished
scientists such as Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Professor
Richard Lindzen of MIT, and Bill Kininmonth, former head of our National
Climate Centre, were casually defamed in this way. The same label was applied
to world-renowned theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and Australia's
distinguished Professor Bob Carter.
Holocaust denial describes
the heartless and despicable refusal by anti-Semites to acknowledge the
historical truth of the Jewish genocide of World War II. If you use the
offensive term "denier" you do so for reasons best known to yourself.
You may be calculating or you may be indifferent, but as Wong, Rudd and Gillard
would have known, the effect is pungent. No sensible, morally responsible
person wants to be stigmatised in such a way.
Some prominent Australian
intellectuals to this day continue to explicitly endorse the moral equivalence
between Holocaust and global warming denial. This is all the more incredible
because it comes from academics who understand the horror of the Holocaust. For
good measure, sceptics have also been compared with 18th century slave trade
advocates, tobacco lobbyists and even paedophile promoters.
But times have changed, and
since 2007, the non-scientific players in this great intellectual drama have
been confronted by creeping uncertainty about many of the major climate science
issues. These have included the composition of the IPCC and the credibility of
its processes; remember Glaciergate?
The IPCC predicted the end of the
Himalayan glaciers based on non-scientific literature; the unusual (or not)
melting of sea ice and glaciers; the evidence for warm temperatures during the medieval period; the importance of sun spots; changes (or not) in patterns of
extreme weather events; ocean "acidification"; ocean warming and
rising sea levels; bio-mass absorption and the longevity of molecules of
atmospheric CO2; the influence of short-period El Nino southern oscillation
(ENSO) and other similar oscillations on a multi-decadal scale; the chaotic
behaviour of clouds; and the impact of cosmic rays on climate. Even James
Lovelock, the founder of the "Gaia", movement has turned sceptic.
By early 2010, it seemed
that nearly every single element of the global warming debate was up for grabs,
and scandals like Climategate and gross mistakes in their work had weakened the
credibility of the IPCC. Even Professor Paul Jones of the Climate Research Unit
at the University of East Anglia, a leading contributor to IPCC calculations,
confirmed in a 2010 BBC interview that the warming rates of the periods
1860-80, 1910-40 and 1975-98 were statistically similar. He also said that
"I don't believe that the vast majority of climate scientists believe that
the climate change [debate] is over".
To the great credit of The
Age and its pluralistic tradition, the occasional sceptical science article has
been published along with regular cartoons on the issue.
However, I still feel that
the voices of highly qualified sceptics are not heard enough. In an effort to
redress this imbalance, an unusual book on the sceptics' view will be published
in 2013.
The text, sprinkled with
cartoons and illustrations, takes the Socratic form, giving answers to commonly
asked questions about the science and economics of climate change. The content
is provided by a collaboration of five highly qualified experts. They include a
meteorologist, the former director of the Australian National Climate Centre; a
geologist, a former member of the Australian Research Council and chairman of
the Earth Sciences Panel; an independent energy consultant who manages his own
small hydro power station; a professor of environmental engineering (hydrology)
and one of Australia's leading tax consultants.
I trust the integrity and
compassion of these "deniers", and admire their courage and awesome
perseverance. We hope the book will help redress the imbalance in easily
accessible knowledge for a "jury" of ordinary Australians.
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