Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
establishment continues to prop up its outmoded hypothesis by increasingly nefarious
means.
Like most of those who have engaged on the behalf of the sceptical cause, I have bitter
personal experience of these methods. A few years ago, a BBC producer wrote politely
to ask whether I would appear in a documentary on global warming. The presenter, she
promised me, had a completely open mind on the subject and was anxious to consult my
opinion because I was one of the journalists who had exposed the Climategate scandal.
I happily consented, not least because the presenter was an impressive-sounding
Nobel-prize-winning future head of the Royal Society called Sir Paul Nurse.
Yes, with hindsight I should have known better. It was, of course, intended all along as
ahatchet-jobdesignedtodiscreditthecauseofclimatescepticism.Scepticswerebracketed
in the same category as opponents to GM crops and people who don't believe there's a
connection between HIV and AIDs. And about the only section of the gruelling four-hour
interview with me they used was one in which Nurse tried to catch me out with a weird
analogy. Being against the 'consensus' on climate change, Nurse suggested, is the same as
if you've got cancer and instead of seeking treatment through mainstream medicine you
choose some alternative therapy quack cure.
Asaprofessionalwriterandpolemicist Ihavenoprobleminprinciplewithanalogies.I
often use them myself when discussing the Climate Wars. For example, I have sometimes
argued that the warmist establishment's desperate attempts to prop up its fatally flawed
hypothesis is as absurd as if, shortly after news began to break about the sinking of the
Titanic, the ship's owners the White Star Line had held a press conference insisting that,
no, the Titanic was continuing to steam ahead to New York.
The analogy works because that's pretty much exactly what is happening right now
with mainstream climate science. All the models say one thing: the Titanic is unsinkable;
the ship is sailing at so many knots on such-and-such a course and therefore will arrive
at its destination on the scheduled date. But observed reality says something rather
different—and no amount of cunning spin, or establishment rank-closing, or legal threats
can ever possibly make it otherwise.
Nurse's analogy does not work, however, because this 'cancer' he and his fellow
warmists have diagnosed is starting to look like nothing more serious than an ingrown
toenail. Do we really want to go through the misery of chemotherapy or surgery on the
precautionary principle that at some unspecified future date the toenail problem might
suddenlymetastasiseintosomethingdeadlier?That'scertainlywhereweareatthemoment
with regard to international policy on climate change: billions if not trillions of dollars are
being diverted into renewable energy schemes, decarbonisation projects, biofuels and such
like for no better reason than that, some while back, a bunch of scientists came up with a
theory that anthropogenic CO
2
posed a serious health risk to the planet.
