For
much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on
what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s
analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a
difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a
scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff
coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at
pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified
food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that
it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments
get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea
cannot survive long in science.
Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate
science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in
science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders
they can turn into intolerant dogmas.
This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a
pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to
change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted
for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita
Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart
disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became
unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.
What these two ideas have in common is that they had
political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate. Scientists
are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency
we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and
dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the
defence. It’s tosh that scientists always try to disprove their own
theories, as they sometimes claim, and nor should they. But they do try
to disprove each other’s. Science has always been decentralised, so
Professor Smith challenges Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what
keeps science honest.
What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a
monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed.
Nina Teicholz’s book
The Big Fat Surprise
shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat
hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an
intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by
a docile press.
Cheerleaders for alarm
This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate
and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science. The “bad
idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings
influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently
dangerous to require urgent policy responses. In the 1970s, when global
temperatures were cooling, some scientists could not resist the lure of
press attention by arguing that a new ice age was imminent. Others
called this nonsense and the World Meteorological Organisation rightly
refused to endorse the alarm. That’s science working as it should. In
the 1980s, as temperatures began to rise again, some of the same
scientists dusted off the greenhouse effect and began to argue that
runaway warming was now likely.
At first, the science establishment reacted sceptically and
a diversity of views was aired. It’s hard to recall now just how much
you were allowed to question the claims in those days. As Bernie Lewin
reminds us in one chapter of a fascinating new book of essays called
Climate Change: The Facts (hereafter
The Facts),
as late as 1995 when the second assessment report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its
last-minute additional claim of a “discernible human influence” on
climate,
Nature magazine warned scientists against overheating the debate.
Since then, however, inch by inch, the huge green pressure
groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but ever-changing alarm
about the future. That these alarms—over population growth, pesticides,
rain forests, acid rain, ozone holes, sperm counts, genetically modified
crops—have often proved wildly exaggerated does not matter: the
organisations that did the most exaggeration trousered the most money.
In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the distant future, so
can never be debunked.
These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the
hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated
science, as well as industry and media, with the result that many
high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have
become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of
increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody
who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all
mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally
dangerous.
Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts,
is based on a “pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are
ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are
not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express
even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised,
accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of
funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly
exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the
media as neutral.
Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “
Climate and Species Range”
that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot
butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward.
The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the
White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third
assessment report.
Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele
found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions
in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development
than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the
butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature
anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range.
When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused.
Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change.
Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical
ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.
Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard
Institute of Space Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in
lucrative green prizes, regularly joined protests against coal plants
and got himself arrested while at the same time he was in charge of
adjusting and homogenising one of the supposedly objective data sets on
global surface temperature. How would he be likely to react if told of
evidence that climate change is not such a big problem?
Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who
frequently testifies before Congress in favour of urgent action on
climate change, was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist
for nineteen years and continues to advise it. The EDF has assets of
$209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million from charitable
foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants. In that time it has
spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has fifty-five people on thirty-two
federal advisory committees. How likely is it that they or Oppenheimer
would turn around and say global warming is not likely to be dangerous?
Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna Laframboise,
for the IPCC to “put a man who has spent his career cashing cheques from
both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace in charge of its
latest chapter on the world’s oceans?” She’s referring to the University
of Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
These scientists and their guardians of the flame
repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate
change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that
it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There
is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not
dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself
in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is
impossible; but they think it is unlikely.
I find that very few people even know of this. Most
ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either
it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested
interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you
would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate
change.
What consensus about the future?
Sceptics such as Plimer often complain that “consensus” has
no place in science. Strictly they are right, but I think it is a red
herring. I happily agree that you can have some degree of scientific
consensus about the past and the present. The earth is a sphere;
evolution is true; carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The IPCC claims
in its most recent report that it is “95 per cent” sure that “more than
half” of the (gentle) warming “since 1950” is man-made. I’ll drink to
that, though it’s a pretty vague claim. But you really cannot have much
of a consensus about the future. Scientists are terrible at making
forecasts—indeed as Dan Gardner documents in his book
Future Babble
they are often worse than laymen. And the climate is a chaotic system
with multiple influences of which human emissions are just one, which
makes prediction even harder.
The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming
within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future
temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four
degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge
range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is
hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability
density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards
the lower end.
What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions
of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top
of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is
high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates
(which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows
down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd
direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is
implausible).
But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on
about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as
a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks
much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic.
Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of
taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out
the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral
and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate
connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not
fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along
with this fundamentally religious project.
Politicians love this polarising because it means they can
attack a straw man. It’s what they are good at. “Doubt has been
eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway
and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech in 2007:
“It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the
seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is
time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time for a meeting of the
flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists
agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”. That’s just
a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I point out above, there is no
consensus that it’s dangerous.
So where’s the outrage from scientists at this presidential
distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per cent figure is
derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a
homeopath. The first was a poll that found that 97 per cent of just
seventy-nine scientists thought climate change was man-made—not that it
was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854 members of the American
Meteorological Society found the true number is 52 per cent.
The second source of the 97 per cent number was a survey of
scientific papers, which has now been comprehensively demolished by
Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is probably the world’s
leading climate economist. As the Australian
blogger Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings,
John Cook of the University of Queensland and his team used an
unrepresentative sample, left out much useful data, used biased
observers who disagreed with the authors of the papers they were
classifying nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed
the data in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their
preliminary conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever
there was one. The data could not be replicated, and Cook himself
threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal nor the
university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the scientific
establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow the whistle on
it. Its conclusion is too useful.
This should be a huge scandal, not fodder for a tweet by
the leader of the free world. Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an example
of a new breed of science critic that the climate debate has spawned.
With little backing, and facing ostracism for her heresy, this talented
science journalist had abandoned any chance of a normal, lucrative
career and systematically set out to expose the way the huge financial
gravy train that is climate science has distorted the methods of
science. In her chapter in The Facts, Nova points out that the
entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a
single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to
this day there is no evidence.
The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide
must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms
there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive
feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be
tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large
positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one just
is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores
unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide stays
high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive
feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all,
the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models.
Scandal after scandal
The Cook paper is one of many scandals and blunders in
climate science. There was the occasion in 2012 when the climate
scientist Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of the (sceptical)
Heartland Institute’s board of directors, leaked confidential
documents, and included also a “strategy memo” purporting to describe
Heartland’s plans, which was a straight forgery. Gleick apologised but
continues to be a respected climate scientist.
There was Stephan Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western Australia, who published a paper titled “
NASA faked the moon landing therefore [climate] science is a hoax”, from which readers might have deduced, in the words of a
Guardian
headline, that “new research finds that sceptics also tend to support
conspiracy theories such as the moon landing being faked”. Yet in fact
in the survey for the paper, only ten respondents out of 1145 thought
that the moon landing was a hoax, and seven of those did not think
climate change was a hoax. A particular irony here is that two of the
men who have actually been to the moon are vocal climate sceptics:
Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin.
It took years of persistence before physicist Jonathan
Jones and political scientist Ruth Dixon even managed to get into print
(in March this year) a detailed and devastating critique of the
Lewandowsky article’s methodological flaws and bizarre reasoning, with
one journal allowing Lewandowsky himself to oppose the publication of
their riposte. Lewandowsky published a later paper claiming that the
reactions to his previous paper proved he was right, but it was so
flawed it had to be retracted.
If these examples of odd scientific practice sound too
obscure, try Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for thirteen years
and often described as the “world’s top climate scientist”. He once
dismissed as “voodoo science” an official report by India’s leading
glaciologist, Vijay Raina, because it had challenged a bizarre claim in
an IPCC report (citing a WWF report which cited an article in New Scientist),
that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. The claim originated
with Syed Hasnain, who subsequently took a job at The Energy and
Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri
is director-general, and there his glacier claim enabled TERI to win a
share of a three-million-euro grant from the European Union. No wonder
Dr Pachauri might well not have wanted the 2035 claim challenged.
Yet Raina was right, it proved to be the IPCC’s most
high-profile blunder, and Dr Pachauri had to withdraw both it and his
“voodoo” remark. The scandal led to a highly critical report into the
IPCC by several of the world’s top science academics, which recommended
among other things that the IPCC chair stand down after one term. Dr
Pachauri ignored this, kept his job, toured the world while urging
others not to, and published a novel, with steamy scenes of seduction of
an older man by young women. (He resigned this year following criminal
allegations of sexual misconduct with a twenty-nine-year-old female
employee, which he denies, and which are subject to police
investigation.)
Yet the climate bloggers who constantly smear sceptics
managed to avoid even reporting most of this. If you want to follow Dr
Pachauri’s career you have to rely on a tireless but self-funded
investigative journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise. In her chapter
in The Facts, Laframboise details how Dr Pachauri has managed
to get the world to describe him as a Nobel laureate, even though this
is simply not true.
But male sceptics have scored successes too. There was the
case of the paper the IPCC relied upon to show that urban heat islands
(the fact that cities are generally warmer than the surrounding
countryside, so urbanisation causes local, but not global, warming) had
not exaggerated recent warming. This paper turned out—as the sceptic
Doug Keenan proved—to be based partly
on non-existent data on forty-nine weather stations in China. When corrected, it emerged that the urban heat island effect actually accounted for 40 per cent of the warming in China.
There was the Scandinavian lake sediment core that was
cited as evidence of sudden recent warming, when it was actually being
used “upside down”—the opposite way the authors of the study thought it
should be used: so if anything it showed cooling.
There was the southern hemisphere hockey-stick that had been created by the omission of inconvenient data series.
There was the infamous “
hide the decline” incident when a tree-ring-derived graph had been truncated to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent cooling.
And of course there was
the mother of all scandals, the “hockey stick” itself:
a graph that purported to show the warming of the last three decades of
the twentieth century as unprecedented in a millennium, a graph that
the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it six times in its
third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC chairman at his
press conference. It was a graph that persuaded me to abandon my
scepticism (until I found out about its flaws), because I thought
Nature
magazine would never have published it without checking. And it is a
graph that was systematically shown by Steven McIntyre and Ross
McKitrick to be wholly misleading, as McKitrick recounts in glorious
detail in his chapter in
The Facts.
Its hockey-stick shape depended heavily on one set of data
from bristlecone pine trees in the American south-west, enhanced by a
statistical approach to over-emphasise some 200 times any hockey-stick
shaped graph. Yet bristlecone tree-rings do not, according to those who
collected the data, reflect temperature at all. What is more, the
scientist behind the original paper, Michael Mann, had known all along
that his data depended heavily on these inappropriate trees and a few
other series, because when finally prevailed upon to release his data he
accidentally included a file called “censored” that proved as much: he
had tested the effect of removing the bristlecone pine series and one
other, and found that the hockey-stick shape disappeared.
In March this year Dr
Mann published a paper claiming the Gulf Stream was slowing down.
This garnered headlines all across the world. Astonishingly, his
evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down came not from the Gulf
Stream, but from “proxies” which included—yes—bristlecone pine trees in
Arizona, upside-down lake sediments in Scandinavia and larch trees in
Siberia.
The democratisation of science
Any one of these scandals in, say, medicine might result in
suspensions, inquiries or retractions. Yet the climate scientific
establishment repeatedly reacts as if nothing is wrong. It calls out any
errors on the lukewarming end, but ignores those on the exaggeration
end. That complacency has shocked me, and done more than anything else
to weaken my long-standing support for science as an institution. I
repeat that I am not a full sceptic of climate change, let alone a
“denier”. I think carbon-dioxide-induced warming during this century is
likely, though I think it is unlikely to prove rapid and dangerous. So I
don’t agree with those who say the warming is all natural, or all
driven by the sun, or only an artefact of bad measurement, but nor do I
think anything excuses bad scientific practice in support of the carbon
dioxide theory, and every time one of these scandals erupts and the
scientific establishment asks us to ignore it, I wonder if the extreme
sceptics are not on to something. I feel genuinely betrayed by the
profession that I have spent so much of my career championing.
There is, however, one good thing that has happened to
science as a result of the climate debate: the democratisation of
science by sceptic bloggers. It is no accident that sceptic sites keep
winning the “Bloggies” awards. There is nothing quite like them for
massive traffic, rich debate and genuinely open peer review. Following
Steven McIntyre on tree rings, Anthony Watts or Paul Homewood on
temperature records, Judith Curry on uncertainty, Willis Eschenbach on
clouds or ice cores, or Andrew Montford on media coverage has been one
of the delights of recent years for those interested in science. Papers
that had passed formal peer review and been published in journals have
nonetheless been torn apart in minutes on the blogs. There was the time
Steven McIntyre found that an Antarctic temperature trend arose
“entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together”. Or
when Willis Eschenbach showed a published chart had “cut the modern end
of the ice core carbon dioxide record short, right at the time when
carbon dioxide started to rise again” about 8000 years ago, thus
omitting the startling but inconvenient fact that carbon dioxide levels
rose while temperatures fell over the following millennia.
Scientists don’t like this lèse majesté, of
course. But it’s the citizen science that the internet has long
promised. This is what eavesdropping on science should be like—following
the twists and turns of each story, the ripostes and counter-ripostes,
making up your own mind based on the evidence. And that is precisely
what the non-sceptical side just does not get. Its bloggers are almost
universally wearily condescending. They are behaving like
sixteenth-century priests who do not think the Bible should be
translated into English.
Renegade heretics in science itself are especially
targeted. The BBC was subjected to torrents of abuse for even
interviewing Bob Carter, a distinguished geologist and climate science
expert who does not toe the alarmed line and who is one of the editors
of Climate Change Reconsidered, a serious and comprehensive survey of
the state of climate science organised by the Non-governmental Panel on
Climate Change and ignored by the mainstream media.
Judith Curry of Georgia Tech moved from alarm to mild scepticism and has endured vitriolic criticism for it. She recently wrote:
There is enormous pressure
for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This
pressure comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding
agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists
themselves who are green activists and advocates. Reinforcing this
consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests.
The closing of minds on the climate change issue is a tragedy for both
science and society.
The distinguished Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson
was so frightened for his own family and his health after he announced
last year that he was joining the advisory board of the Global Warming
Policy Foundation that he withdrew, saying, “It is a situation that
reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”
The astrophysicist Willie Soon was falsely accused by a
Greenpeace activist of failing to disclose conflicts of interest to an
academic journal, an accusation widely repeated by mainstream media.
Clearing the middle ground
Much of this climate war parallels what has happened with
Islamism, and it is the result of a similar deliberate policy of
polarisation and silencing of debate. Labelling opponents “Islamophobes”
or “deniers” is in the vast majority of cases equally inaccurate and
equally intended to polarise. As Asra Nomani wrote in the Washington Post
recently, a community of anti-blasphemy police arose out of a
deliberate policy decision by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation:
and began trying to control
the debate on Islam. This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe”
on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist
ideology in the religion … The insults may look similar to Internet
trolling and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site.
But they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.
Compare that to what happened to Roger Pielke Jr, as
recounted by James Delingpole in The Facts. Pielke is a professor of
environmental studies at the University of Colorado and a hugely
respected expert on disasters. He is no denier, thinking man-made global
warming is real. But in his own area of expertise he is very clear that
the rise in insurance losses is because the world is getting wealthier
and we have more stuff to lose, not because more storms are happening.
This is incontrovertibly true, and the IPCC agrees with him. But when he
said this on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website he and Silver were
savaged by commenters, led by one Rob Honeycutt. Crushed by the fury he
had unleashed, Silver apologised and dropped Pielke as a contributor.
Rob Honeycutt and his allies knew what they were doing.
Delingpole points out that Honeycutt (on a different website) urged
people to “send in the troops to hammer down” anything moderate or
sceptical, and to “grow the team of crushers”. Those of us who have been
on the end of this sort of stuff know it is exactly like what the
blasphemy police do with Islamophobia. We get falsely labelled “deniers”
and attacked for heresy in often the most ad-hominem way.
Even more shocking has been the bullying lynch mob
assembled this year by alarmists to prevent the University of Western
Australia, erstwhile employers of the serially debunked conspiracy
theorist Stephan Lewandowsky, giving a job to the economist Bjorn
Lomborg. The grounds were that Lomborg is a “denier”. But he’s not. He
does not challenge the science at all. He challenges on economic grounds
some climate change policies, and the skewed priorities that lead to
the ineffective spending of money on the wrong environmental solutions.
His approach has been repeatedly vindicated over many years in many
different topics, by many of the world’s leading economists. Yet there
was barely a squeak of protest from the academic establishment at the
way he was howled down and defamed for having the temerity to try to set
up a research group at a university.
Well, internet trolls are roaming the woods in every
subject, so what am I complaining about? The difference is that in the
climate debate they have the tacit or explicit support of the scientific
establishment. Venerable bodies like the Royal Society almost never
criticise journalists for being excessively alarmist, only for being too
lukewarm, and increasingly behave like pseudoscientists, explaining
away inconvenient facts.
Making excuses for failed predictions
For example, scientists predicted a retreat of Antarctic
sea ice but it has expanded instead, and nowadays they are claiming,
like any astrologer, that this is because of warming after all.
“Please,” says Mark Steyn in The Facts:
No tittering, it’s so
puerile—every professor of climatology knows that the thickest ice ever
is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break
off the Himalayas and are carried by the El Ninja down the Gore Stream
past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet,
named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet …
Or consider this example, from the Royal Society’s recent booklet on climate change:
Does the recent slowdown of
warming mean that climate change is no longer happening? No. Since the
very warm surface temperatures of 1998 which followed the strong 1997-98
El Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed
relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases, with
more of the excess heat being stored in the oceans.
You would never know from this that the “it’s hiding in the
oceans” excuse is just one unproven hypothesis—and one that implies
that natural variation exaggerated the warming in the 1990s, so
reinforcing the lukewarm argument. Nor would you know (as Andrew Bolt
recounts in his chapter in The Facts) that the pause in global
warming contradicts specific and explicit predictions such as this, from
the UK Met Office: “by 2014 we’re predicting it will be 0.3 degrees
warmer than in 2004”. Or that the length of the pause is now past the
point where many scientists said it would disprove the hypothesis of
rapid man-made warming. Dr Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research
Unit at the University of East Anglia, said in 2009: “Bottom line: the
‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get
worried.” It now has.
Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way
pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if
you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and
insist you’re even more right than before. The Royal Society once used
to promise “never to give their opinion, as a body, upon any subject”.
Its very motto is “nullius in verba”: take nobody’s word for it. Now it
puts out catechisms of what you must believe in. Surely, the handing
down of dogmas is for churches, not science academies. Expertise,
authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great
Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge
absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him,
scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable
sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is the belief in the
ignorance of experts.”
The harm to science
I dread to think what harm this episode will have done to
the reputation of science in general when the dust has settled. Science
will need a reformation. Garth Paltridge is a distinguished Australian
climate scientist, who, in The Facts, pens a wise paragraph that I fear will be the epitaph of climate science:
We have at least to
consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the
global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously
overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of
seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate
problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty
trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for
centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which
is the basis for society’s respect for scientific endeavour.
And it’s not working anyway. Despite avalanches of money
being spent on research to find evidence of rapid man-made warming,
despite even more spent on propaganda and marketing and subsidising
renewable energy, the public remains unconvinced. The most recent
polling data from Gallup shows the number of Americans who worry “a
great deal” about climate change is down slightly on thirty years ago,
while the number who worry “not at all” has doubled from 12 per cent to
24 per cent—and now exceeds the number who worry “only a little” or “a
fair amount”. All that fear-mongering has achieved less than nothing: if
anything it has hardened scepticism.
None of this would matter if it was just scientific
inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is
that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and
who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive
and risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods. They
want us to spend a fortune getting emissions down as soon as possible.
And they want us to do that even if it hurts poor people today, because,
they say, their grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very wealthy) matter more.
Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind their concern. That seems wrong to me.
Matt Ridley is an English science journalist
whose books include The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. A
member of the House of Lords, he has a website at www.mattridley.co.uk.
He declares an interest in coal through the leasing of land for mining.
