Beware
The Fossil Fools
By George Monbiot
27 April, 2004
The Guardian
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?
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