first published as weblog one hundred and twenty seven on Sunday 7th May 2006

Questioning Global Warming Orthodoxy instantly banishes you to outer darkness…with holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists as your cellmates. The abuse poured on Michael Crichton for getting State of Fear into the US bestsellers list is a case in point. Use Goggle to locate the columns of journalistic vitriol. Psychologically this is perhaps more interesting than the fear that a challenge to the global warming orthodoxy itself engenders. Let me discuss the Scientific Enterprise as seen by a former Minister for Science and Technology in a Socialist Government.

Scientific tradition derives from six main principles: (1) an insistence upon maintaining a rigorous regime of accurate scholarship; (2) a practice of subjecting hypotheses arising from research to the critical scrutiny of the scientific community which then judges those results by the highest possible standards; (3) a determination to defend and entrench academic freedom to protect scientists from improper pressures which might lead them to abandon their research or to corrupt their results to suit the powers that be; (4) an acceptance of the importance of dissent within the scientific tradition allowing scientists to seek to establish new hypotheses even though these may run counter to the conventional scientific wisdom of the day; (5) the maintenance of an output which overrides political, theological or ideological divisions between nations; (6) the assertion of the importance of publishing results so that the whole world may benefit from the new knowledge as it is acquired.

In Dare To Be A Daniel Tony Benn then goes on to contrast these scientific traditions and principles with the ideas that lie at the root of parliamentary democracy. Benn’s view…which was also the official view of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party when I stood as their Parliamentary Candidate for Oldham West and Royton in 1997... is that in Britain the idea of democracy is not based on the sovereignty of Parliament or Government but upon ‘the sovereignty of the people as a whole who have a moral right to govern themselves.’ By exercising their vote they lend their sovereign powers to members of Parliament to be used on their behalf for the duration of a single parliament…and these powers must be returned intact to the electorate to lend again at a subsequent election.’

Benn then points out that ‘in the end the people can dismiss ministers without bloodshed, and replace them by others’ and that it is this ‘destructive power of democracy that gives it its vitality, because ministers who know they can be dismissed are obliged to listen.’ So Benn’s democratic theory rests on being able to kick the rascals out because ‘in this way the capacity to dismiss changes the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed.’

For Benn the role of the elected representative is not to reproduce the expertise of the expert but to subject him or her to rigorous cross-examination on behalf of the people. In Dare To Be A Daniel the 80-year old veteran of countless socialist rallies…and the best Prime Minister this country never had… is reflecting on projects that came up on his watch…like Concorde and Nuclear Power rather than Climate Change. But general principles are just that and indicate the direction he was leaning in his thinking. Here are the first nine of Benn’s Ten Questions for Scientists.

1. Would your project promise benefits to the community? What are they? To whom and when will they accrue?
2. What are the disadvantages? Who experiences them? What remedies might correct them? And when?
3. What are the demands on skilled manpower? Can this be met?
4. Is there a cheaper, simpler, less sophisticated way to achieve all or part of the objectives? What are the options?
5. What new skills would people need to acquire? How are they to be created?
6. What old skills would be rendered obsolete? How serious is this for those involved?
7. Is the work being done elsewhere? Is there experience elsewhere to help assess the proposed project?
8. If the project happens what disadvantages would accrue to the community? What are the alternative approaches?
9. What other supporting projects are needed to cope with consequences or subsequent stages?

Benn regarded his tenth question as very important. ‘If an initial decision to proceed is made, for how long will the option to stop remain open, and how reversible will this decision be at progressive stages beyond there.’ It is on this tenth point that I took Kirk Sale to task in an e-mail exchange this week when commenting on the Global Warming lobby’s abuse of the Precautionary Principle…which has now become a policy of convenience to environmentalists.

The Precautionary Principle should mean that we do not meddle around implementing half-cock solutions that are just as likely to make matters worse...the dynamics of complex systems often means that things get worse before they get better for instance...until we understand what their long-term and intermediate impacts will be. The Precautionary Principle is being misapplied to justify ignorant meddling in very complicated processes that are not understood.

By the way I should warn you that Michael Crichton owns the patent for ‘essay or letter criticizing a previous publication’. So I am taking this stance on Global Warming to avoid getting sued…and not because of threats by right wing corporations to withdraw their funding of my Life of Reilly as a Mad Blogger and Journeyman Tenor.

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