Global warming hotheads would burn sceptics at the stake | ||
| NOTEBOOK | ||
| Mick Hume | ||
| 1 | The television advert about the apocalyptic dangers of climate change from the | |
| government-funded Carbon Trust is very shocking. It begins with an actor playing | ||
| Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the A-bomb”. The portentous voiceover tells us: “One | ||
| man has been where we all are today. When he saw what he had done, he said, ‘I am | ||
| become the destroyer of worlds’ (cue shot of atomic explosion). Now we all have to face | ||
| up to what we’ve done. Our climate is changing.” | ||
| 2 | To make us feel guilty about “what we have done”, we are shown cities, electricity | |
| pylons, personal computers and cars, followed by violent storms, huge waves and | ||
| flooded towns. The message is that we are destroying the world through climate | ||
| change, which has been brought about by modern industry and technology. So we must | ||
| change the way we live and work in order to repent of our sins — or as they put it now, | ||
| “reduce our emissions”. | ||
| 3 | What we ignorant laymen are rarely told is that there remain serious uncertainties | |
| about the extent and causes of climate change — as even some scientists working with | ||
| the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will quietly concede. Yet any expert | ||
| who tries to raise such questions in public is treated with contempt. | ||
| 4 | When it comes to climate change, “sceptic” is a dirty word. Scientists who dissent | |
| from the strict orthodoxy on man-made global warming have been shouted down, | ||
| labelled dupes of the US oil industry, even branded “climate change deniers” — a label | ||
| with obvious historical connotations. Instead of taking up the sceptics’ case, the | ||
| accepted response of our illiberal age is to yell: “You can’t say that!” | ||
| 5 | But is not scepticism crucial to scientific inquiry? Timothy Ball, a leading | |
| climatologist, says that those trying to test the theory of man-made climate change — “a | ||
| normal course of action in any real scientific endeavour” — are now being “chastised for | ||
| not being in agreement with some sort of scientific consensus, as if a worldwide poll of | ||
| climate experts had been taken, and as if such a consensus would represent scientific | ||
| fact. Nothing could be farther from the truth; science advances by questioning, probing | ||
| and re-examining existing beliefs.” | ||
| 6 | We need to separate the science from the politics. Let the experts thrash out the | |
| evidence. But let them do so free from the pressures of a political climate in which | ||
| human intervention is always seen as the problem rather than the solution, precaution is | ||
| always privileged over risk and the worst possible outcome is always assumed to be the | ||
| best bet. Perhaps those commanding us to “face up to what we have done” to the world | ||
| might first face up to the dangers of reducing complex scientific issues to a simplistic | ||
| political message, and presenting moralistic sermons as scientific laws. Whatever the | ||
| true impact on the environment of burning fossil fuels, there seems a real risk of | ||
| damaging the atmosphere of scientific inquiry by burning sceptics at the stake. |