The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational agency to combat the selfish multinationals and greedy consumerism that threatened to destroy the planet.
Meanwhile science, once a field for open contests between falsifiable hypotheses, was increasingly a creature of government, a wartime development accentuated by the race for technological leadership in the Cold War. Preferment, careers and funding now depended heavily on state favour. Inevitably, academic integrity was compromised.
The collapse of Soviet Communism brought a fresh ally. The Left found in global warming an appealing new anti-capitalist cause, and when EU governments and US Democrats adopted ‘fighting climate change’ as their badge of environmentalist solidarity, an unstoppable coalition of forces had assembled, able to silence dissent and seduce or cow the media on a scale hitherto seen only in ideological or religious regimes. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be crowned the sole authority on climate science.
Nature herself added credibility to alarmism, as temperatures continued to rise. ‘Greenhouse gas’ — the theory that incoming solar heat is partially prevented by atmospheric gases from escaping back into space — entered ordinary discourse. After all, mankind, as well as the oceans and the biosphere, emitted one of those gases, C02.
Other things being equal, physics suggested human influence on global temperatures would be trivial. But perhaps our influence was multiplied by complex climatic ‘feedbacks’. Perhaps we should not draw comfort from the modest (and beneficial) net rise of a few tenths of a degree in global temperatures since the Little Ice Age, but should at all costs prevent the irreversible heating predicted by officialdom’s computer models. That, at least, was the IPCC’s message.
Christopher Booker narrates this story with the journalist’s pace and eye for telling detail and the historian’s forensic thoroughness which have made him a formidable opponent of humbug. In doing so, he answers a question often posed by the open-minded: ‘If scepticism is justified, how did so many intelligent people come to accept the conventional wisdom? Why would politicians spend trillions on a wild goose chase?’.
As the 21st century began, the tide of opinion started, against all the odds, to turn. Already numbered among the counter consensus were many of the world’s leading climatologists, geologists, physicists, meteorologists and statisticians. But they were not networked effectively. They had little money and no lobbying power compared with the alarmist NGOs, researchers, government departments and profiteers, funded by taxpayers or investors. They had integrity and a handful of articulate media allies, including Booker, whose sceptical column was given generous leeway by the Sunday Telegraph. And in the internet they found at last a channel of communication and a massive audience.
The weather, too, changed sides. After the freak high of 1998, temperatures retreated, then stayed static. The computer models, programmed to project remorselessly rising temperatures as atmospheric CO2 grew, departed increasingly from observed reality. Those eminent scientists who believed the sun, cosmic rays, clouds and ocean currents to be the principal agents of climate change could no longer be ignored. The delusion of ‘settled science’ lost credibility, and with it the one-sided stance of the BBC and the Royal Society. Some of the central planks in the official account sprang leaks. Al Gore’s Nobel prize-winning film was scientifically dismembered and roundly criticised in court.
While Richard Lindzen of MIT led the scientific counter-consensus, Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts undermined crucial assumptions in the official narrative by showing that temperatures were fluctuating much as they had done since Roman times and that the accuracy of the official temperature record was often spurious. Through their blogs, we learned that dissent extended to distinguished Danish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, Israeli and American scientists. In parallel, David Henderson piercingly questioned the IPCC’s objectivity and Nigel Lawson replaced the alarmist Stern as the authentic voice of economic reason.
When fact and theory collide, the scientist re-examines or discards the theory: the ideologue re-selects or adjusts the facts. As Copenhagen approaches, the alarmist lobby grows ever shriller, vilifying doubters and urging the return of developed economies to the pre-modern age, at staggering expense to global prosperity. But the shelf of sceptical books keeps filling and Booker’s belongs there with the best.
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