At this point the plot grew murkier when it emerged that Hasnain was one of Pachauri’s employees. For the previous two years, he had worked as head of TERI’s new glaciology unit, which seems to have been created in order to extract part of a $500,000 research grant being offered by the Carnegie Corporation for research into Himalayan glacier melt. Dr Hasnain’s alarmist and erroneous claim that glaciers in the region would ‘vanish within forty years as a result of global warming’ was – it became clear on Carnegie’s grant statement – influential in securing the deal.
Finding himself under pressure to resign, Pachauri began backtracking. First he claimed it was a slip-up, adding, ‘I don’t think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what’s happening with the climate of this earth.’ Then he blamed it on ‘human error’, while Hasnain claimed – incorrectly – that he had been misquoted.
According to another IPCC author, however, it was no such thing. Professor Murari Lal told an investigation conducted by the United Nations Environment Program that ‘it was wrong to assume, as has been done in sections of media, that the year 2035 had crept in the report by mistake’. The implication is that a known untruth was inserted into the IPCC report quite deliberately, for reasons we can only guess, but which surely had nothing whatsoever do with TERI’s appetite for that handy grant funding.
You may feel overwhelmed by the detail at this point. That’s very much how we sceptical bloggers felt in the months following Climategate, as we tried to keep up with it all. It was like a gushing oil strike we couldn’t turn off – not at night, not on weekends, not ever. Day after day the black stuff kept coming. Stories about the tangled dealings of the increasingly tarnished Pachauri. Stories that exposed the BBC’s Warmist bias. Stories about lying NGOs, lying government ministers, lying advertisements. Stories which exposed so many flaws in the Fourth Assessment Report it seemed no one could take the IPCC seriously ever again. Stories which discussed the various inquiries being conducted on Climategate. Stories detailing the legal actions being considered against Phil Jones, Michael Mann et al., for alleged malfeasance.
The enemy was on the run. Obviously it was difficult, on occasion, to resist the temptation to gloat – ‘Climategate goes über-viral; Gore flees leaving evil henchmen to defend crumbling citadel’ ran one of my more excitable headlines. But generally I remember feeling towards the Warmists rather the same pity as for Saddam’s trashed and terrified convoys of demoralised troops as they fled back to Baghdad, strafed by A-10 Warthogs, after the first Gulf War. The baddies got their just come-uppance but now the time was fast approaching for magnanimity and forgiveness.
Instead, however, something shocking happened – several shocking things, in fact. Perhaps it was naïve of us to have expected otherwise but I don’t think any of us realists believed they were capable of quite such chutzpah. But they were. Rather than throw up their arms in surrender, the enemy fought back. Not with hard facts to counter our hard facts, not with new scientific evidence to bolster their argument, but with a barrage of lies and stonewalling and back-scratching and panel-rigging and appeals-to-authority and bullying and all those other nefarious techniques we’d seen exposed in the Climategate e-mails and that we imagined (in our innocence) they’d be too embarrassed to try again.
Most disgraceful of all – in a tightly competitive field – were the three inquiries into Climategate. The first, a cursory parliamentary investigation by the UK’s House of Commons Science committee, concluded after a short hearing that the CRU had done nothing wrong and that the case for AGW remained intact. Professor Jones’s refusal to share data and computer codes was entirely normal practice within the ‘climate science community’, it decided. As for those awkward e-mails about a ‘trick’ and ‘hiding the decline’: these were merely colloquial terms used in private e-mails and not part of a ‘systematic attempt to mislead’.
The second inquiry, though, made the first one look tougher than the Spanish Inquisition. It was headed by one Lord Oxburgh, whose appointment by the University of East Anglia to chair an investigation into the scientific aspects of the CRU scandal was likened by an anonymous insider to ‘putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank’. As well as having financial interests in the carbon trading and wind farming industries, Lord Oxburgh is director and vice-chairman of Globe International (Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment). This cryptic organisation is a worldwide network which lobbies governments to take more drastic action on climate change and other environmental issues. Strangely enough, Lord Oxburgh’s inquiry found no evidence of any wrongdoing either.
But the third inquiry was different. Thorough, wide-ranging, incisive, scrupulously fair… No, I jest. The third inquiry, headed by Sir Muir Russell, was also a whitewash. Besides stuffing its panel with avowed Warmists or friends and former friends of the UEA, the inquiry appeared to imagine that the most effective way of ascertaining the CRU scientists’ guilt was to call some of them in for a chat over a cup of tea and ask them whether they had done anything wrong. The scientists said they hadn’t. The inquiry then concluded that it had found no ‘evidence’ of any wrongdoing. This was more or less true – but then, it hadn’t looked for any.
Yet at the Heartland Institute conference, despite these setbacks, the mood was still euphoric. Climategate, the generality of opinion ran, had been a game-changer – the event which finally drew to the public’s attention the skullduggery which sceptics had been trying to expose for years, hitherto with little success. From now on, it would simply be a question of showing our new interested audience that there was more – much more – where Climategate came from. All we needed to do was to win the world over to our side through sheer weight of evidence and force of argument.
But I wasn’t so sure, hence the vein of pessimism running through my otherwise upbeat speech. We were, I said, in the midst of a conflict every bit as important as the world wars fought by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and whose repercussions if we lost would be every bit as dire. The battle we were fighting was one between liberty, plenty, joy and optimism on the one hand and despair, pessimism and tyranny on the other. We so-called ‘deniers’, I told my audience – and they didn’t seem to mind being told this – represented the true forces of goodness and light. It was the pushers of the great AGW lie, perhaps the biggest conspiracy in the history of the world, who were the forces of evil.
As you’ll realise when you read on, I wasn’t exaggerating. But before I take you on that particular journey, I want first to dispense very briefly with a business some of you have been gulled into thinking is much, much more important than it really is in this debate: the so-called ‘science’ of global warming.
In the early stages of writing Watermelons, I visited my old friend Alain de Botton. We talked about works in progress, as fellow authors do, and I asked Alain which big questions he would most like to see answered by my new book.
‘I’d like to know about the science,’ he said. ‘Is global warming happening? Is it man-made? What can we do to stop it?’
‘Oh,’ I said, rather disappointed. ‘You want to know about that, do you?’
What troubled me was not the thought of having to deal with awkward scientific questions – I’ll do so in a moment – but rather the realisation of just how big an ideological struggle remained to be fought.
Alain, as you’ll know if you’ve read any of his many splendid philosophy books, is well-informed and no fool. Yet here he was, an intelligent, free-thinking, open-minded political moderate asking the green equivalent of questions like ‘Is private property permissible in any circumstances?’, ‘How soon can we nationalise the means of production?’ and ‘Will the next five-year plan prove even more ineffably glorious than the last five-year plan?’
By which I mean that all three of those questions come so freighted with cultural assumptions that they’re not so much questions as ideological statements.
‘Is global warming happ
ening?’ presupposes:
a) that this is something which might be worth worrying about;
b) that it isn’t something that has been happening on and off, quite harmlessly and naturally, for millennia; and
c) that it’s implicitly worse than global cooling.
‘Is it man-made?’ presupposes that human influence on climate must perforce be an issue of major concern.
‘What can we do to stop it?’ is the most ideologically-charged of the lot because it takes as a given every single one of the climate alarmists’ most extravagant doomsday scenarios. This suggests that the recent period of global warming is not only unprecedented but catastrophic, that it’s worse than global cooling, that it’s something we are capable of doing something about.
Not, of course, that I’m blaming Alain for thinking this way. After twenty or more years of intensive eco-propaganda, it’s how most of us have been conditioned to think. We’re like Pavlov’s Dogs. Treat us to a ‘hurrah word’ like ‘sustainable’, ‘renewable’, or ‘organic’, and we’ll drool and salivate and whimper for more. But at the mention of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’, we growl, bark and stiffen in trepidation. We delude ourselves that we’re capable of forming rational judgements about ‘global warming’ based on our careful sifting of the evidence. But we’re not – not least because the ‘evidence’ that has been provided for us by the sources of supposed authority (our political leaders, the media, the scientists…) is so corrupt as to be meaningless. We may think we’re free agents in all this. Actually, though, we’re green Manchurian Candidates.
To understand the scale of the deception that has been used to brainwash us, let’s consider the four reports produced so far by the IPCC. As Professor Bob Carter notes and summarises in Climate: The Counter Consensus, each report has grown increasingly extreme in its portrayal of the crisis facing us. This especially applies to the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ section of each report which, of course, is the part intended for our political leaders to read, on which they base policy decisions.
First Assessment Report (1990) – ‘The observed [twentieth-century temperature] increase could be largely due … to natural variability.’
Second Assessment Report (1996) – ‘The balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.’
Third Assessment Report (2001) – ‘There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last fifty years is attributable to human activities.’
Fourth Assessment Report (2007) – ‘Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-twentieth century is very likely [= 90 per cent probable] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.’
If the IPCC were Pinocchio, its nose would have grown longer and longer in those seventeen years between the first and fourth reports. That’s because the increasingly alarmist tone of its Summaries for Policymakers has not remotely been borne out by the real-world data. On the contrary, by the time of the Third Assessment, global warming had stopped. In the past ten years, even CRU’s data suggest that global warming has halted.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that global warming will never happen again (and certainly, the benefits of moderate, slow warming would far outweigh the disadvantages). What it does mean, however, is that there’s something very, very creaky about the central plank of the climate alarmists’ theory about the relationship between man-made CO2 levels and rising global temperatures.
Bear this in mind next time you hear a climate alarmist banging on about ‘the science’. What ‘the science’ has shown is that while levels of man-made CO2 have continued to rise as industrial output around the world has increased, global temperatures have not. The world stopped warming in 1998. This is important. What it means, essentially, is that the theory claiming that catastrophic and unprecedented global warming is linked with man-made CO2 has been (in science-speak) ‘falsified’. In you-and-me speak, the theory has been torpedoed below the waterline, hit in the magazine and blown out of the water.
‘Oh, now come, on!’ some of you must be thinking. ‘No way is this problem as easily solved as that. If it were, we would have heard about it. It would be a massive scandal. The repercussions would be tremendous. People would be absolutely livid if billions upon trillions of pounds, dollars and euros had been wasted trying to deal with CO2, if it doesn’t cause global warming and global warming isn’t happening anyway. Wouldn’t they?’
Yep, you’d think. In the rest of the book I’ll explain why that assumption is entirely wrong – and how the AGW propagandists have managed to pull the wool over the eyes of so many, for so long, on such precious little evidence.
First, though, I want to make sure you’re absolutely clear on how very flimsy is the ‘science’ supporting AGW. This open letter sent by 141 scientists to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the eve of the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, neatly makes the point:
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:
1. Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2. Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3. Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4. Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5. The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6. Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7. Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in polar regions, is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8. Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate-change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9. Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10. Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.
Does this letter disprove the existence of potentially catastrophic man-made global warming? No. But then, as it goes on to point out, it really doesn’t need to:
It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do.
Indeed. At which point, defenders of the Warmist creed wheel out the mighty engine they call the Precautionary Principle. ‘All right,’ they say. ‘Even if the chances of dangerous man-made global warming happening are much, much slimmer than “the scientists” have claimed, surely it still makes sense to do something just in case. After all, the consequences if they are proved right will be so horrific that the price of not doing something could be incalculable.’
Sometimes this is called the Pascal’s Wager argument. In 1670, the French philosopher Pascal argued that even if there is no proof for the existence of God, it still makes rational sense to believe in Him because the potential losses from not believing in Him if He does exist are far greater than the potential costs of believing in Him if He doesn’t exist. Worst-case scenario for an atheist is eternal hellfire; worst-case scenario for a Christian is the discovery that his life spent going to church was completely wasted.
Pascal’s Wager was a bad idea in 1670 (what if God is Muslim? Or a giant
cockroach who hates Christians every bit as much as he hates atheists?). It’s an even worse idea now, because of its dismally feeble grasp of cost-benefit analysis. When applied to AGW, it presupposes that the costs of not doing something are potentially infinite, while the costs of doing something are negligible. This is emphatically not the case.
That’s why I prefer to call it the Tin-Foil Hat Argument. I do so in honour of all those people out there who believe that evil aliens from outer space are trying to control our minds and that the only way of preventing this is to wear a tin-foil hat. Now, I personally don’t believe this theory is correct, but I would have to concede that if it did turn out to be true, we would all be in serious trouble. What if bored teenage aliens took charge and possessed us all with a simultaneous urge to jump off a high building or run in front of a bus? What if they took control of our governments and made every country in the world declare war on one another? What if they decided to destroy our countryside by persuading us to abandon effective carbon-based fuels and erect vast barrages of ugly, ineffective, bird-chomping wind farms, instead? Truly the horror possibilities of alien mind-control are endless.
For this reason, you might argue, based on the Precautionary Principle, it makes absolute sense for our governments to pass a decree enjoining that from now on we all wear tin-foil hats. Forever. It needn’t be too obtrusive. It might even be good for us: men could revive the chic tradition of going to work in bowlers (only tin-foil-lined this time, obviously, and they’d have to wear them at their desks, not put them on a hat stand when they got into the office). Women would love the excuse to experiment with different styles. The millinery industry would benefit hugely. Kids could happily incorporate their new ‘Foilies’ or ‘Tinfers’ in their childish antics, with games like ‘throw Johnny’s hat up a tree and watch him jabber in terror for fear that the aliens will suck out his brain’.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 13
