- Picture a situation in which most of the media, despite
the overwhelming weight of medical opinion, refused to accept that there
was a connection between smoking and lung cancer. Imagine that every time
new evidence emerged, they asked someone with no medical qualifications
to write a piece dismissing the evidence and claiming that there was no
consensus on the issue.
-
- Imagine that the BBC, in the interests of "debate",
wheeled out one of the tiny number of scientists who says that smoking
and cancer aren't linked, or that giving up isn't worth the trouble, every
time the issue of cancer was raised.
-
- Imagine that, as a result, next to nothing was done about
the problem, to the delight of the tobacco industry and the detriment of
millions of smokers. We would surely describe the newspapers and the BBC
as grossly irresponsible.
-
- Now stop imagining it, and take a look at what's happening.
The issue is not smoking, but climate change. The scientific consensus
is just as robust, the misreporting just as widespread, the consequences
even graver.
-
- If it is true, as the government's new report suggested
last week, that it is now too late to prevent hundreds of thousands of
British people from being flooded out of their homes, then the journalists
who have consistently and deliberately downplayed the threat carry much
of the responsibility for the problem. It is time we stopped treating them
as bystanders. It is time we started holding them to account.
-
- "The scientific community has reached a consensus,"
the government's chief scientific adviser, Professor David King, told the
House of Lords last month. "I do not believe that amongst the scientists
there is a discussion as to whether global warming is due to anthropogenic
effects.
-
- It is man-made and it is essentially [caused by] fossil
fuel burning, increased methane production... and so on." Sir David
chose his words carefully. There is a discussion about whether global warming
is due to anthropogenic (man-made) effects. But it is not - or is only
seldom - taking place among scientists. It is taking place in the media,
and it seems to consist of a competition to establish the outer reaches
of imbecility.
-
- During the heatwave last year, the Spectator made the
case that because there was widespread concern in the 1970s about the possibility
of a new ice age, we can safely dismiss concerns about global warming today.
-
- This is rather like saying that because Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck's hypothesis on evolution once commanded scientific support and
was later shown to be incorrect, then Charles Darwin's must also be wrong.
-
- Science differs from the leader writers of the Spectator
in that it learns from its mistakes. A hypothesis is advanced and tested.
If the evidence suggests it is wrong, it is discarded. If the evidence
appears to support it, it is refined and subjected to further testing.
That some climatologists predicted an ice age in the 1970s, and that the
idea was dropped when others found that their predictions were flawed,
is a cause for confidence in climatology.
-
- But the Spectator looks like the Journal of Atmospheric
Physics compared to the Mail on Sunday and its Nobel laureate-in-waiting,
Peter Hitchens. "The greenhouse effect probably doesn't exist,"
he wrote in 2001. "There is as yet no evidence for it." Perhaps
Hitchens would care to explain why our climate differs from that of Mars.
-
- That some of the heat from the sun is trapped in the
Earth's atmosphere by gases (the greenhouse effect) has been established
since the mid-19th century. But, like most of these nincompoops, Hitchens
claims to be defending science from its opponents. "The only reason
these facts are so little known", he tells us, is (apart from the
reason that he has just made them up), "that a self-righteous love
of 'the environment' has now replaced religion as the new orthodoxy".
-
- Hitchens, in turn, is an Einstein beside that famous
climate scientist Melanie Phillips. Writing in the Daily Mail in January,
she dismissed the entire canon of climatology as "a global fraud"
perpetrated by the "leftwing, anti-American, anti-west ideology which
goes hand in hand with anti-globalisation and the belief that everything
done by the industrialised world is wicked".
-
- This belief must be shared by the Pentagon, whose recent
report pictures climate change as the foremost threat to global security.
In an earlier article, she claimed that "most independent climate
specialists, far from supporting [global warming], are deeply sceptical".
She managed to name only one, however, and he receives his funding from
the fossil fuel industry.
-
- Having blasted the world's climatologists for "scientific
illiteracy", she then trumpeted her own. The latest report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which collates the findings
of climatologists) is, she complained, "studded with weasel words"
such as "very likely" and "best estimate". These weasel
words are, of course, what make it a scientific report, rather than a column
by Melanie Phillips.
-
- If ever you meet one of these people, I suggest you ask
them the following questions:
-
- 1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
-
- 2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures?
-
- 3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of
more carbon dioxide?
-
- 4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon
dioxide? It would be interesting to discover at which point they answer
no - at which point, in other words, they choose to part company with basic
physics.
-
- But these dolts are rather less danger ous than the BBC,
and its insistence on "balancing" its coverage of climate change.
It appears to be incapable of running an item on the subject without inviting
a sceptic to comment on it.
-
- Usually this is either someone from a corporate-funded
thinktank (who is, of course, never introduced as such) or the professional
anti-environmentalist Philip Stott. Professor Stott is a retired biogeographer.
Like almost all the prominent sceptics he has never published a peer-reviewed
paper on climate change. But he has made himself available to dismiss climatologists'
peer-reviewed work as the "lies" of ecofundamentalists.
-
- This wouldn't be so objectionable if the BBC made it
clear that these people are not climatologists, and the overwhelming majority
of qualified scientific opinion is against them. Instead, it leaves us
with the impression that professional opinion is split down the middle.
It's a bit like continually bringing people on to the programme to suggest
that there is no link between HIV and Aids.
-
- What makes all this so dangerous is that it plays into
the hands of corporate lobbyists. A recently leaked memo written by Frank
Luntz, the US Republican and corporate strategist, warned that "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general
- and President Bush in particular - are most vulnerable... Should the
public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views
about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need... to
make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."
-
- We can expect Professors Hitchens and Phillips to do
what they're told. But isn't it time that the BBC stopped behaving like
the public relations arm of the fossil fuel lobby?
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1204194,00.html
|