Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (77 page)

Another “independent inquiry” conducted by the University of East Anglia, where the Climatic Research Unit is housed, and supported by the Royal Society, concluded with the statement, “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit.”
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The inquiry was headed by Lord Oxburgh, who has deep personal and financial interests in climate policy. He is the chair of a multinational wind energy company and the chair of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association.
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Missing from the inquiry’s report is the fact that the inquiry did not examine the “Climategate” emails or consider evidence from anyone other than the CRU staff. In this report the “trick” “to hide the decline” was not even mentioned; never mind the many other indications of impropriety that were contained in the emails.
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Phil Jones himself clearly requested that his colleagues delete previous emails containing damaging information.
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The Enigmatic Dr. Lovelock

James Lovelock is one of the most insightful and at the same time most enigmatic of scientists. He is certainly one of the leading experts on atmospheric chemistry. Earlier passages in this book have shown Lovelock to be profoundly pessimistic about the future of civilization and the earth’s environment. In an interview in 2006, he stated, “We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma…Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable…a broken rabble led by brutal war lords”.
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Nice visuals! Cue James Cameron! I feel a Hollywood blockbuster coming on. Yet recently, in the wake of the “Climategate” scandal and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit, Lovelock has had some change of heart.

Speaking at the London Science Museum in March 2010 Lovelock said, “It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age…. If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age and we can look at our part as holding that up. I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing.” This sounds surprisingly like the line of thinking I challenged him with during my visit to his home in 2002. His other colleagues have undoubtedly raised similar points, that there is a possibility we are a positive force rather than an entirely negative one.

It is clear Lovelock was rattled by the revelations in the thousands of leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. During his first interview after the “Climategate” scandal he stated, “Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do.” And he was surprisingly warm toward skeptics, allowing, “What I like about skeptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: ‘Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?’ If you don’t have that continuously, you really are up the creek…If you make a [computer] model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it’s a model and think of it as the real world.”
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Some of his recent statements are chilling. Lovelock contends that, “We need a more authoritative world…even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
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If we are indeed preventing a new ice age, then why is it like a war, and why must we suspend democracy? Perhaps Lovelock just can’t make up his mind which it is, catastrophe or salvation. In any case he provides good reason why brilliant scientists who have been cloistered in labs and research institutes most of their lives should not be running the government.

Conclusion

From the 1980s until very recently a widespread alarmist view has developed regarding future climate change. The United Nations, most national academies of science, the majority of political parties, the mainstream media, many scientists, and virtually all environmental activist groups have come to believe that if human emissions of CO
₂
continue at present levels the global temperature will soar, resulting in untold destruction to civilization and the environment. This has caused many countries to consider, and even to adopt, policies to reduce fossil use to levels that could cripple their economies.
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It has now become clear that the global temperature stopped rising 12 to 15 years ago after a 20-year period of increasing temperature. This is despite the fact that CO
₂
emissions have continued to rise at an increasing rate. No scientist professes to know why global warming has stopped, but many continue to believe humans are driving a “climate catastrophe.” Experts and opinion leaders who have publicly bought into the climate crisis hypothesis are obviously reluctant to change their views. They can’t do so without losing face, having invested their reputations in such a high-profile issue. There is a sense that the true believers have become the real deniers.
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Considering that the increase in temperature has stopped for the time being, and noting the three issues of the “Climategate” scandal, the collapse of the Copenhagen conference, and the errors in the 2007 IPCC report, it seems clear that the foundation of climate change alarmism has been shaken. Many top scientists have made public statements to distance themselves from the supposed prevailing view.
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One of the most influential skeptical voices is that of physicist Freeman Dyson, considered one the world’s most brilliant thinkers by many of his peers.
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A feature article that made his views on climate clear appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
in March 2009 and turned a lot of heads.
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He said, “The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” and “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.” He explained, “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now, and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson referred to Al Gore as climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and as someone who preaches “lousy science, distracting public attention from more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

While the author of this article politely derided Dyson’s point of view, there was no doubt about where one of the great thinkers of our time stands on the subject. I think one Freeman Dyson is worth 10,000 true believers who mimic one another, falsely claiming that there is an “overwhelming consensus” and extolling, “the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions” without providing any details of the “vast body of evidence.”

In recent months a number of mainstream media outlets, including many British and American newspapers, have abandoned their strong biases and are now publishing articles that are balanced and even skeptical of human-caused warming. The collapse of the “overwhelming consensus” is good news for everyone who believes this topic should be discussed openly and objectively. There is a breath of fresh air in the climate change debate.

There is much work to do in trying to validate or reject the assertions of the major players in climate science. They include the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Goddard Institute of Space Science of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All these top agencies are implicated in the “Climategate” scandal and are being investigated by various authorities. The U.K. Institute of Physics’ submission to the Parliamentary Committee investigating the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit made these observations:
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1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
   
2. The CRU e-mails as published on the Internet provide prima facie [at first sight] evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
   
3. It is important to recognize that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:
   

• those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and
  
• historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of ‘proxies’, for example, tree-rings.
  

1. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the [rejected] requests for further information.
   
2. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.
   

The Institute of Physics has no reason to exaggerate or to hold any bias. The Institute makes it clear that the information provided by the Climatic Research Unit may not be credible or trustworthy. Clearly it will be some time before the “science is settled.”

On May 29, 2010, Britain’s top science body, the Royal Society, announced it would review its literature on climate change in order to reflect the skeptical view. The Royal Society stated, “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect—there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” Along with the change of tone by the London Science Museum this marks a sharp turning point, from certainty and “overwhelming consensus,” to a balanced dialogue on the subject. One can only hope that other major science bodies will adopt the same policy.

At this writing the developments in the climate change debate are changing faster than the climate itself. The public is becoming more skeptical by the day, while the believers work doubly hard to shore up their position, assuring us warming will eventually return in earnest. This may be, but it is not happening now, and even if warming does recur in future it won’t prove that we are the main cause. I remain open to new information and continue to follow the discussion on a daily basis.

Some readers will argue that I have only presented the skeptical side of the debate. This is only because the historical evidence, what has actually occurred, does not support the idea that we are the primary cause of global warming, never mind that its impacts will be “catastrophic.” All the predictions based on computer models in this world can’t change history or manufacture the future. For that we must patiently wait. Meanwhile we should embark on the path toward a future that focuses on sustainable energy as outlined in Chapter 15. We must gradually reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and replace them with clean, sustainable energy sources. This will satisfy many agendas, including the agenda of the believers in human-caused climate change.

[1]
. “A Human Health Perspective on Climate Change,” National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, April 2010, http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/docs/climatereport2010.pdf

[2]
. “Impact of Climate Change on Wine in France,” Greenpeace International, September 2009, http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/impacts-of-climatechange-on-w.pdf