first published in weblog one hundred and fifteen on Tuesday 25th April 2006

Global Warming was invented in 1988 by a prominent climatologist James Hansen. At the time he was giving testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee headed by Senator Wirth of Colorado. Hearings were scheduled for June so Hansen could deliver his testimony during a blistering heat wave. This would be fair enough for a Press Conference but Public Science should be beyond such ploys. However this was no isolated incident of media manipulation. Global Warming is awash with dodgy dossiers. Dossiers about Weapons of Mass Destruction are paragons of integrity by comparison.

In the late 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which comprises a huge group of bureaucrats…and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats. The idea was that since this was a global problem the UN would track climate research and issue reports every few years. The first assessment report in 1990 said it would be very difficult to detect a human influence on climate although everybody was concerned that one might exist. But the 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now ‘a discernible human influence’ on climate…echoes of the 45-minute claim when Alistair Campbell sexed up the WMD Dossier.

Much the same happened to the 1995 IPCC Dossier. Originally the document said scientists couldn’t detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn’t know when they would. They said explicitly, ‘we don’t know.’ The statement was deleted and replaced with a new statement that a discernible human influence did indeed exist. It was a major change…and one that caused a stir among scientists at the time with opponents and defendants of the change coming forward. If you read their claims and counter-claims you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth. But a review of the actual text changes makes it crystal clear that the IPCC is a political organisation and not a scientific one.

Back to James Hansen. In the summer of 1988 he accompanied his global warming announcement with a prediction that temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. The actual increase was 0.11 degrees and this prompted him to state…along with his fellow authors Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen and Elaine Matthews…in a 1998 article Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (127533-58) that ‘the forcings that drive long-term climate change are unknown with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.’ arguing for scientists to use multiple scenarios in future.

The problem is that climate is very complicated…so complicated in fact that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy…even though billions of dollars are being spent and hundreds of people are trying all around the world. Nobody is trying to predict weather more than ten days ahead but computer modellers are predicting what the temperature will be one hundred years in advance…sometimes a thousand years…three thousand years. And they are probably doing worse than the weathermen. The biggest events in global climate are the El Niños. They happen roughly every four years. But climate models can’t predict them - not their timing, their duration, or their intensity. Climate science simply isn’t there yet…not by a long chalk. It may be one day. But not now.

As for David Cameron’s trip to Norway. Like Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas and Mount Kilamanjaro, Norway has nothing to contribute to the scientific case for Global Warming. 94% of all the ice in the world is elsewhere…4% in Greenland and 90% in Antarctica where the ice is 5 to 6 miles thick in places. This merely reinforces the need for an impartial forum for Public Science. What Cameron is doing is media manipulation.

The irony is that Cameron’s key adviser on environmental matters is Zac Goldsmith who took over the editorship of his uncle’s scientific journal The Ecologist and to Edward Goldsmith’s horror has destroyed everything that Teddy had built up over the years. The impartial and respected scientific journal that once reported scientific facts and the considered opinions of leading scientists in the new field of Ecological Science is now no more than a glossy purveyor of ethical chic for the chattering classes. With The Ecologist Zac Goldsmith has done for ecology what Satish Kumar has done for politics with Resurgence.

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