Climate change deniers are anti-science and anti-reason — and they terrify me

Snowman

What do I think about whether we can have a British Sarah Palin? Hmmm, but we already have one: you, Hugo. You’ve nominated yourself, and won hands down few sentences from the top: ‘I don’t know anything about it at all’, you claim, the ‘it’, as you obligingly explain, being medicine, engineering, AGW and, I presume as befits a solidly impaired Sarah, the rest. Weird as it may be, the US idol is scoring higher on points, she knows a thing or two about shooting. Let’s not quibble though. In few hundred words you’ve succeeded easily in claiming the British Sarah’s crown. If you don’t see it, it’s because that’s the nature of the beast. Hopefully, the country won’t go any further, you will have to do.

It’s not me, a denier and medieval witch hunter who’s impervious to challenging facts, or counterarguments, it’s the lot you trust in. Check Prof. Richard Lindzer of MIT, please. But then, you wouldn’t, would you, you’re the British Sarah.

You reckon the East-Anglian set-up compares to dr. Shipman, do you? Would not a comparison with the Royal Society be better? Oops, forgot again, it’s the British Sarah I’m talking to.

A Q&A for you: two things matter in bridge building. First, whether to build the thing, the other how. People should have a good say in the former, the engineers with PhDs should get on with the latter. The AGW creed with its ‘let’s stop it’ baggage resembles one of the bridges into the future. The other bridge, that of ‘let’s adapt to it’ should be considered, too, since nobody knows if the ideal level of the CO2 in the air is 100, 280 or 1,000ppm. Should the people who are to fund either have a say? Y/N?

May be foolish of me, but I’d rather had Deligpole and a hairdresser diagnosing my multiple anything than the AGW crew leading the world into the future committing billions on the basis of a theory many are scientists are skeptical of. Hard for the British Sarah’s brain to figure this one, but what the heck, have a go.

A word of friendly advice: avoid shagging you sister, you won’t swing as you might have done in the medieval times, but any time spent in the cooler may keep you away, amongst other things, from basking in the sun as the British Sarah. What a national waste that would be.

For those who like you believe religiously what the esteemed, cooperative AGW scientists are feeding us, your column must delight. Although not exceedingly so. The goulash you are serving mixes only two ingredients currently in vogue, the AGW deniers, and Sarah Palin. The recipe’s strictly PC, of course. What about the Euro skeptics, and the bigots objecting to massive immigration, ha? Surely it wasn’t beyond the British Sarah’s brain to work the two into the dish. Next time, Hugo, do better, please.

PS: just finished reading an extract from the Sarah Palin’s book in the ST. It flows, it grabs attention, it’s better than your scribbling by a mile. Am warming up to the girl, you may end up holding the crown alone. Well done.

JohnPage

I suppose this is meant to be 'fine writing', where people with very little to say pad it out at great length.

Every paragraph is wrong, but life is too short to fisk such tripe.

Helen Hal

Oh well, Hugo Rifkind a journalist 'focusing on politicians, celebrities, and other well-known personalities' says it, it must be so. I must turn a deaf ear to the many statisticians, engineers, physicists, geologists and yes, climate scientists who think there's something dirty in the state of climate science. I must ignore my own background in maths, physics, chemistry, engineering and a lifetime in complex issues to take advice from... a hack.

Since you clearly have no understanding nor desire to delve into the murky world of climate science I won't go into it but I commend your knowledge of your own limitations by concentrating instead on a Sarah Palin rant. And did you slip in a bit about Maggie at the end there? Well done, ten out of ten for triviality.

Perhaps if more reporters did a little more reporting and a lot less pontificating the CRU wouldn't have let things slip as far as they have. It doesn't take a climate scientist to spot sloppy work.

Are sceptics smashing up fire engines? I honestly don't know, the science is in so much of a mess it's impossible to tell. What I do know is that AGW believers are so committed to their own cause they refuse to put their hands in their own pockets to solve the problem unless sceptics join in. I'm sure I speak for all other sceptics when I say, 'we don't mind how much of your money you spend on the subject, just keep your sticky paws off ours.' You might be willing to accept less stringent quality standards in your climate science than most manufacturing companies are allowed to get away with but I'm a little more discerning.

CO2 reduction will cost trillions, destroy lives and change the way we live forever. Those who glibly accept AGW without serious thought are insane.

I am entitled to my opinion, as are you, but I should warn you, journalists have to be one of the most expendable careers in a CO2 challenged world and for the level of reporting demonstrated here, I'm sure you'll accept your redundancy without a challenge.

Oh, and for the record, my carbon footprint is somewhere less than 4 tons so don't give me any manure about trying to cling onto my SUV driving, jet setting lifestyle.

Yes, I am very cross.

d.nier

Hugo,you are a brainwashed twat.

d.nier

Hugo,you are still a brainwashed twat

Alex Cull

Hugo, your comparison between Doctors Phil Jones and Harold Shipman would be somewhat more accurate if Dr Shipman had also been suspected of the following:

1) Misplacing, twisting, fudging and deleting decades' worth of the world's medical data, whilst collecting over £13 million in government grants.
2) Covering up said mismanagement by deleting e-mail evidence, urging colleagues to do the same, and by evading Freedom of Information requests.
3) Along with a cabal of fellow influential doctors, perverting the peer review process and making sure that opponents' work was not published.
4) Using his influence, with said cabal, to skew World Health Organisation reports in order to make some sort of immanent global medical catastrophe seem likely.
5) Helping to manipulate the world's nations, via the WHO, into diverting truly vast amounts of money and resources into tackling said looming theoretical catastrophe.

At least Dr Shipman's misdeeds, however appalling, had strict limits. The actions of Dr Jones and his fellows may well affect us all for decades to come.

David Storstock

"Go back a few hundred years, and it’s people like you who would have cried ‘witch’ and run for the kindling when the village crone predicted that bad things might happen if you shagged your sister."

This line of argument is both deeply ironic, as well as illuminating.

It is ironic because the authorities of the day were very certain regarding the existence of witches. One could even say that there was a consensus.

Also, this consensus was helped greatly by the fear of people speaking up, because doing so could get you branded... a witch.

It's always been safer to run with the herd. AGW is no exception.

David Storstock

"‘But there were these climate scientists at the University of East Anglia,’ you’ll chirrup, excitedly. ‘And leaked emails show that they were conspiring to conceal research that...’ Yeah, whatever. Not interested. So some of them are crooks. It’s like giving up on doctors because of Harold Shipman."

Sorry old chap, but the emails mark the end of the line of the general dissent management strategy on this topic - I.e. suppression.

These aren't randomly picked "doctors" acting all crooked - it is the leading people in the field.

A more apt comparison: If the world's top radiotherapists were caught admitting in private emails that their data was cooked, their results shoddy, etc. while trying to suppress the truth by breaking the law, that wold have repercussions for the entire field.

Your pretending that this is the equivalent of a single crooked-acting doctor is just pathetic.

Robert Dammers

What a stupid, snobbish man, and a waste of magazine space.

I'm interested in AGW because, if right, it is the greatest challenge ever to meet mankind. So it deserves the highest level of quality in debate, and this isn't happening. The vast majority of the alleged scientific consensus is at this low quality of assent - people accept the premise, and acknowledge the consequences. Most of the research reported on the television and in newspapers is of the same form: not real research, but scenarios making further assumptions, and predicting consequences (hence all the recent fuss about the consequences of a 4C temperature rise, which the IPCC has never foreseen). But the problem is that the premise is shaky.

The dreadful "Prove It!" exhibition and website created by the Science Museum talks about (but shamefully does not cite) two types of evidence that temperature depends upon CO2: firstly, the close correlation between the two in ice cores (as illustrated by Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth"), and secondly the alleged abnormal warming at the end of the 20th Century.

The first is problematic - subsequent improvements in the resolution of the timescale demonstrated that the changes in atmospheric CO2 lagged the change in temperature by 800 years. This was known at the time Gore was making his film, but this particular truth was too inconvenient to make the grade.

The second type of evidence is even more problematic: the dendochronological studies of Briffa (at the UEA) and Mann (both involved in the leaked correspondence) have both been shown to be fundamentally flawed, and at best indicate nothing about historical temperature (in fact, if they *were* accurate, they would imply a stability in climate that would belie the need for us to take urgent action). The best surface records are those from the USA, and there is now photographic evidence to prove that some 80% of these are so badly sited as to be subject to enhanced urban heating effects. Despite this, it has become clear that corrections are being applied which, rather than compensating for this incorrect extra heating, exaggerate it.

Taken together, the evidence for unusual warming at the end of the 20th century does not exist.

But, if one reads the scientific papers (or even just their abstracts), you know, like grown ups do when they want to understand something, you discover that the real concern in overheating is not CO2 per se, but the positive feedbacks assumed to follow from it (so increasing CO2 causes warming, which causes more water vapour to go into the atmosphere, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas, and so on). Whenever anyone talks about a "tipping point", they are referring to positive feedbacks. But the problem is, positive feedbacks are rare in nature - processes are often chaotic, but they don't spin asymptotically out of control. So understanding feedback is really important. And some interesting studies have been carried out which suggest that all out assumptions about feedback exaggerate the risk considerably. But in fact, the answer is staring at us on the screen in Gore's lecture - if his graph is correct (but the time access is out by 800 years), the consequence is obvious. The process must be dominated by negative feedback, so much so that there is no net contribution to climate change from CO2 - temperature changes result in change in CO2, not vice versa.

And if that is true, reducing your Carbon Footprints will have no more effect on climate change than hurling virgins off Beachy Head.

If you have some other evidence to offer that empyrically links CO2 levels with temperature, I will be interested to see it. But until then I'm afraid we are wasting our time, and staggering amounts of money.

FukTheSpectator

Not all Engineers or Doctors are good - how can you tell? If the bridge falls down or the patient dies.

Not all climatologists are good either, but with them it's more difficult because we won't know if they are right for hundreds of years.

One thing that we do know is that good scientists don't conspire to freeze out other scientists with different opinions.

If the skeptics' science is no good then why not give it the maximum possible exposure so that other scientists and lay people will be able to decide for themselves?

These guys didn't do that - they tried to stifle alternative opinions. That doesn't pass the smell test.

They are not good scientists and they are probably not good climatologists.

Ian C

I think the Spectator (Fraaser?) must be trying to screw you Hugo Rifkind. You would not write such tosh if you had done the necessary research that I and many others have had access to on the internet concerning the way in which a few climatolologists, aided and abetted by the green movement and their financial backers along with the UNIPCC which is so obviously an international NGO looking for an excuse for existence, have gone about hijacking what you are describing as science and preventing any real scrutiny of their work.

Among the serious skeptics there is little doubt that man is affecting the planet. The question is, how and how serious is it?

But those referred to above have alighted on CO2 as the one and only cause and it must be stopped. And they have not allowed scrutiny of that assertion by those scientists who know much more than they about the areas of science which they have presumed to know more about that affect their own climatological theories, notably statiisticians, physics, chemistry and geology. There are many of these who belive that the models created by the climatologists cannot possibly be telling them what they assert if they are correctly put together. An they have been ingnored; worse, they have been denied access by the selective method of so-called 'peer review' by keeping it within the 'believer' community.

It is a scandal of massive proportions because they have purported to say "trust me I'm a climatologist. I know better than you, do as I say". You might be willing to accept this as an educated individual, but your job as a journalist is surely to question it, rigorously?

And now we know the believers have been actively colluding to prevent just that from happening while many in the blogosphere and in related scientific fields have suspected as much for years.

Snowman

Hugo, and another thing. It may please you, although one wouldn’t expect that you learn anything about it, God forbid, that the movement you trust in has now embraced an ‘eco-friendly’ way of killing people. Have a peep at this:

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/56728,news-comment,news-politics,how-to-kill-and-maim-but-keep-it-eco-friendly?DCMP=NLC-daily

Doesn’t it engender a feeling of warmth in your knowledge vacuous heart? Come on, admit it, please.

Brian Johnson

"Saving the Planet" will not be helped one iota by anyone attempting to reduce their carbon "footprint' Mankind only adds 3% to Mother Nature's massive 97%. We in the UK provide about 1.6% of that insignificant 3%.
To give an idea of how little our contribution is, imagine the first kilometer of atmosphere. From sea level up. The layer that we, residents of the UK contribute, via all our cars, aeroplanes, ships, trains, lorries, buses/coaches, fires, power stations etc is not the thickness of one strand of human hair.
The last thing anyone should worry about is the climate. Guess what? It varies and has done since man appeared on this planet and eons before then too.

David Cameron should think really hard about how he projects his Green image it could get really murky very soon.

stevea526

"Call me a mindless stooge"

OK - you're a mindless stooge. Congratulations, though! Only someone who mindfully chooses to hold such a rigid opinion about a subject to which he has done NO skeptical research can hold such a title. P.S. It took less than 2 months of research for me to determine that the AGW theory was flawed. But I am an engineer. It may take 10 weeks for a Philospohy major.

g1lgam3sh

I'll say one thing, this article shows you are immune to embarrassment. The level of ignorance and sheer stupidity exhibited is almost awe inspiring.

If you accepted payment for this tripe you should repay it instantly lest you be taken for the same kind of lying shyster exposed in the HARRY_READ_ME file and the leaked emails from the flim flam artists at CRU.

daveyg

Great article but your concession to compare CRU emailers to Shipman does them a disservice. A close inspection of the emails shows there is no scandal to answer...

I suspect g1lgam3sh has not read all the 1073 emails and just the out of context sceptic propaganda. The context, that reading the entire exchange (on a highly complex subject) gives you, easily discredits the sceptics, who are the only true "flim flam artists".

The well researched Guardian article gave the headline "Climategate scientist cleared of manipulating data on global warming" whereas the shock and awe(ful) Daily Express reported the exact same story with "Secretive and unhelpful. But scientist in Climategate storm still gets his job back."

Says it all really.

The very problem is that the sceptics neither want to take the experts at face value or properly scrutintise the evidence themselves hence this non-argument will rage on forever...

daveyg

stevea526 you missing the point is hilarious! Less than 2 months of "research" (where is this peer reviewed and published?) from an engineer v decades of peer reviewed research conducted by scores of experts. It's hardly a conclusion worth glancing at.

Back to the point...if you know nothing trust the experts over the unqualified sceptical pundits.

daveyg

Brian Johnson...I haven't got the stats to which you refer to hand but can I say if a bucket holds 97 litres and is full, then adding 3 litres to the bucket will leave you with a wet floor and you probably wouldn't call it insignificant if you cared about your carpet.

Yes the climate does vary, as does your speed on a motorway. If you keep accelerating without looking ahead though there's a reasonable chance you will crash...and the distance it takes you to crash is probably not the thickness of one strand of human hair when you consider how many motorways there are.

We can all make nonsense statements like that. Would my analogy survive rigorous pre-publishing scrutiny though?!