The scientific context - Climate Change: The Facts - page 52

* Usually termed the 'climate sensitivity' issue, which equates in turn with the amount of
warming that will be produced by a doubling of carbon dioxide over its pre-industrial
level.
Why is this common ground not more generally understood? The answer is simple.
Since the formation of the IPCC in 1988, a wide-ranging and worldwide propaganda
campaign has been conducted to raise public alarm about global warming. 7 Though
initially promulgated by environmental organisations, commercial lobbyists (e.g. the wind
power industry), and the financial markets, the global warming bandwagon soon attracted
the attention of politicians because of the electoral advancement that it promised, and has
all the while been egged-on by a ceaselessly alarmist press corps.
All the classic tools of propaganda and spin have been deployed for the advancement
of public alarm about global warming, including scientific malfeasance, noble cause
corruption, the makeover of formerly independent expert groups such as academies of
science, the indoctrination of school children from kindergarten onwards and the ad
hominem demonisation of scientists who fail to conform to the orthodox IPCC view. The
many hundreds of risible claimed negative effects of global warming (many of which
are actually beyond parody) are summarised in a hilarious list of claimed warming
misadventures compiled by UK engineering professor, John Brignell. 8
During the 1990s and the first few years of the present century, public opinion was
visibly affected by this barrage of pseudo-scientific propaganda, as reflected by a clear
majority of the citizens of OECD countries regularly expressing their concern in opinion
polls. Over the last ten years, however, and thanks not a little to the assiduous efforts of
independent scientists and organisations such as the NIPCC, public opinion has swung
away from the global warming scare and other similarly over-hyped environmental causes.
At the same time, many cartoonists and comedians have started to lampoon the more
ridiculous claims of the global warming alarmists. As one expressed it:
Sojustwhenthosesupportingclimatealarmthoughtthattheyhadeverythingsettledandnaileddown,agaleofdiscontent
started to blow. Cartoonist heaven really. We love the spectacle of powerful people preparing their policy against strong
winds and rough seas, frantically rigging up fragile, flapping sails of spin and blather. If you're going to spend over
$15 billion of taxpayer's money on desalinated water, or manage a potentially ruinous carbon dioxide trading scheme…
then you certainly don't want to be questioned too closely, let alone lampooned, about the scientific details that you
misunderstood or got wrong. 9
Science should not be about emotion or politics, yet it is uncomfortably true that public
discussion of the global warming issue has for many years been conducted far more in
accordance with those criteria than it has been concerned with science per se. There are
three prime reasons for this.