THE TEMPLE OF SCIENCE DENIAL: MELANIE PHILLIPS
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5610546/the-temple-of-science-denial.thtml
7th December 2009
I listened to the treatment of anthropogenic global warming on the BBC Today programme this morning with utter disbelief. First they had on the Climate Change Secretary (sic) Ed Miliband, who backed up Gordon Brown’s embarrassingly ignorant and fatuous sneer at ‘behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics’ by stating:
The overwhelming consensus of scientists across the world is that climate change is real and is man-made and is happening. The people who do somehow want to suggest that the science is in doubt are profoundly irresponsible.
…We know that carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest level in the atmosphere in 600,000 years – nobody doubts that. We also know from the physicists that the CO2 effect when CO2 is emitted is it traps the heat in the earth’s atmosphere and then warms the planet. That is very clear and not in dispute.
This is not an observation or people just running models. This is a clear scientific effect people are talking about. In those circumstances I think it’s right for us to say: ‘Look, we are not scientists, but we should represent to you fairly the science, and it’s because the scientific view is so clear and overwhelming on this we must fairly represent that.’
This was just yet more anti-scientific ignorance and ideological propaganda. There is no such ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientists; more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists are on record expressing deep scepticism of AGW. Is Miliband saying therefore that these eminent scientists are themselves ‘profoundly irresponsible’? Does Miliband even know they exist?
As for high carbon dioxide levels, the issue is not as Miliband stated; it is whether these levels are causing the earth’s atmosphere to heat up to an extraordinary and lethal extent. And that is a matter of very profound dispute among scientists — not least because the composition of the climate is an immensely complex process which cannot possibly be reduced to a simple ‘what goes in comes out’ formula of the kind that Miliband so idiotically expresses.
There was no informed scientist in this interview to put the zealot Miliband on the spot and expose his ignorant absurdity. At least though Today’s presenter John Humphrys did his best in trying to challenge him. But no balance at all was forthcoming in the subsequent item –billed as the first of three in-depth reports on the state of the scientific evidence of global warming – by Tom Fielden. This told us that global warming started with the industrial revolution, that it was proved that global warming was happening and humans were responsible and that the scientific debate was effectively settled.
Yet there was not one voice questioning these absurd or unproven assertions. Not one balancing voice to point out that the climate had warmed and cooled throughout history, that there was no evidence at all that the rise in the last century was anything out of the ordinary, that historically it had been warmer in the past, that there were hundreds of scientists who were saying that the theory was absurd or unproven or a scam – or that the global climate, totally contrary to everything the warmists have claimed, has been cooling for the past decade. It is the warmists who are the true ‘denialists’ — since they deny the evidence of science and history that tells us that the climate has always changed and that there is no credible evidence that what is now happening is anything out of the ordinary. Yet there was not one voice to say so.
Fielden also said that underlying these claims lay data from the Hadley Centre. Yes, the very same Hadley Centre which has been exposed as helping distort and manipulate the scientific evidence in order to shore up the AGW theory which is now crashing around the warmists’ ears. Yet Fielden made no mention whatsoever of this scandal which has left the Hadley Centre’s credibility in pieces – and with it the credibility of the entire IPCC process at the heart of which sits the data that the Hadley Centre has provided.
Even by the standards of the group-think at the BBC, such a wholesale negation of the most fundamental rules of objective reporting is simply astounding. Is this not a breach of the BBC’s Charter? How long is the pathetic BBC Trust going to be a party to this travesty?
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