Nevertheless when the BBC, no less, starts to allow an interviewee to start telling the truth like this: I hate to say this – but there is a very strong –it’s very small – but there is a very strong green fascism in much of the environmental world. I’ve heard it said at meetings I’ve been at – that climate change is so important - democracy has to be sacrificed something big is definitely happening. And that something is the disintegration of anthropogenic global warming theory. The ‘scientific’ basis for it is de-materialising day by day, leaving merely the sulphurous stink of intellectual fraud on an epic scale. The IPCC has been forced to admit that it was wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 and has been accused of falsely linking global warming to a rise in extreme weather events. Subsequently it wasrevealed that the IPCC stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps. Roger Pielke further reveals that the influential (and idiotic) Stern review, which relied upon an IPCC misrepresentation of a piece of research to make misleading claims about the link between rising temperatures and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, quietly modified its own figurers after publication to conceal the error – and yet still got it wrong. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, has saidthe impact of global warming has been exaggerated and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change: When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves. You don’t say!! And just look also at what the Chinese are saying: ...the IPCC reports contained very little data from Chinese researchers. I was told the IPCC refused to consider Chinese data because the Chinese research was not peer-reviewed. China is not a small country. Its landmass spans several climate zones and includes the roof of the world. I have to wonder how data from China would affect the IPCC’s findings. How indeed! And let’s not dwell again on the scandal at the University of East Anglia where scientists upon whose work the IPCC relied for its apocalyptic predictions were exposed as being willing to manipulate the data to exaggerate the extent of global warming; nor the great Hockey Stick That Wasn’t Cricket, which managed to lose several hundred years of climate history to arrive at the ‘evidence’ that 20th century climate warming was aberrantly high; nor the testimony of numerous distinguished former IPCC reviewers that their research had been distorted or falsified. The great Philip Stott, the (now emeritus) professor of biogeography who for the past twenty years has patiently explained the bogus anti-science behind AGW theory and its real agenda of anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-human ideology, has put up a terrific post about all this on his blog, The Clamour of the Times. It is, as he says, nothing less than the collapse of a Grand Narrative, of a jaw-dropping speed and magnitude: And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades. Here’s the kind of thing he means: Indeed, the nonsense written about the Indian Sub-Continent has been a particular nadir in climate-change science, and it has long been judged so by many experts on the region. My ex-SOAS friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Bradnock, a world authority on the Sub-Continent, has been seething for years over the traducing of data and information relating to this key part of the world. In June, 2008, he wrote: “However, in my own narrow area of research, I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!” Maybe Dr Bradnock might have a word with Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Poor Miliband – the Minister for Laputa -- appears to be at breaking point over all this. At the weekend he made a piteous plea: Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband issued a warning that recent controversies over scientific data must not be allowed to undermine efforts to tackle global warming. Mr Miliband said the evidence that man-made climate change was occurring was ‘overwhelming’ and was backed by the vast majority of scientists. Miliband resembles one of those people who are discovered living in the jungle decades after the end of a war without realising it is all over. Someone should sit him down with a nice strong cup of hot sweet Fairtrade tea and a blanket over his shoulders, and embark him without delay upon a course of post-traumatic stress counselling. An awful lot of reputations are about to be reduced to, um, carbon – his included.
By the waters of denial they sit and weep...
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
A few days ago, Analysis on BBC Radio Four featured a programme about environmentalism by Justin Rowlett which concluded that the green movement was using climate change as a cover to smuggle in other agendas such as poverty or equality. No! You don’t say. It was a timid, tentative thesis; the fact is that from the start environmentalism has self-evidently been all about changing the nature of society rather than changing society’s views about nature. And of course Rowlett’s concern was that these hidden agendas might only confirm people’s scepticism about the science of anthropogenic global warming, which as we all know is Settled and an Unchallengeable Consensus, amen.
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