There are so many good reasons not to believe in global warming: summers lately have been cool and wet; since 1998 global temperatures have actually fallen; dissident scientists say it’s not happening; green believers are irritating — they wear Tibetan hats that only look good on Tibetans, and are so often wrong that they’re probably wrong about the Big One; large parts of the punditocracy say it’s all nonsense, usually that it’s a left-wing plot against capitalism; the rainforest is growing back faster than it’s being cut down and polar bears are, apparently, doing quite well. Global warming? Yeah, right!
But here’s the best reason of all not to believe, to sit back and relax. Global warming is just the latest apocalyptic story. There is always someone, somewhere predicting the end of the world.
He may be a man with a sandwich board in Oxford Street or an American Christianist who expects the Book of Revelation to happen tomorrow. But he’s equally likely to be a scientist warning about asteroid impacts, super-eruptions, molecule-sized robots turning everything into grey goo or, not so long ago, the descent of Earth into a new ice age. Taking all these possibilities into account, Sir Martin Rees, the great cosmologist, says humans only have a 50/50 chance of making it into the next century. Yeah, right!
No wonder opinion polls show a majority of the population are sceptical about global warming. Just scanning the papers, the internet or watching TV is enough to convince anyone it’s just the usual apocalyptic hype. And, if they want to dig deeper into their own disbelief, there are shelfloads of books to give them a hand. There’s Nigel Lawson, ex-chancellor of the exchequer, with An Appeal to Reason. There’s Scared to Death by Christopher Booker and Richard North. There’s Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg. There was even a very serious documentary on Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle with some serious-looking science guys pouring cold water on the warming atmosphere.
Just a couple of weeks reading and watching and you can be out there, crushing dinner-party eco-warriors with devastating arguments based on cold, hard facts. You will be a stern, hard-headed denialist, your iron jaw set firmly against the tree-hugging, soft-headed warmists in their irritating hats.
That was me, once. I thought global warming was all bog-standard, apocalyptic nonsense when it first emerged in the 1980s. People, I knew, like nothing better than an End-of-the-World story to give their lives meaning. I also knew that science is dynamic. Big ideas rise and fall. Once the Earth was the centre of the universe. Then it wasn’t. Once Isaac Newton had completed physics. Then he hadn’t. Once there was going to be a new ice age. Then there wasn’t.
Armed with such historic reversals, I poured scorn on under-educated warmists. Scientists with access to the microphone, I pointed out, had got so much so wrong so often. This was yet another case of clever people, who should have known better, running around screaming, “End of the World! End of the World!” and of less-clever people finding reasons to tell everybody else why they were bad. And then I made a terrible mistake. I started questioning my instinct, which was to disbelieve every scare story on principle.
I exposed myself to any journalist’s worst nightmare — very thoughtful, intelligent people.
I talked to some brilliant scientists and thinkers, some mainstream Greens, some truly tough-minded scientists. There was James Lovelock, the man whose Gaia hypothesis sees the world as a single, gigantic organism. There was Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University in New York. There was Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and former head of the British Antarctic Survey. There was Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics Group at Oxford. There was Sir David King, once chief scientific adviser to the British government. There were many others.
There is, I saw, a fine line between the hard-head and the bone-head. The denialist hard-head swaggers his way through life hearing only what he wants to hear, that warmism is either a hoax, a gross error or just another End-of-the-World scare story. But if you suspend your prejudices and your vanity for a moment, everything changes. You find out that the following statements are true beyond argument.
The climate is warming. It is almost certain this is caused by emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity. Nobody has come up with an alternative explanation that stands up. If the present warming trend continues, nasty things will probably start happening to humans within the next century, possibly the next decade. Something must be done. If nothing is done, then the benign climatic conditions that have sustained human civilisation for 10,000 years are in danger of collapse to be replaced by… well, write your own disaster movie.
You will note that there is some wiggle room in these statements. It is “almost certain” that humans are responsible; nasty things will “probably” happen. That is because all science can ever be is the best guess of the best minds. Also, the climate is a complex system, meaning it can behave in ways that are opaque beyond our most sophisticated calculations. But, as I have often been told, those statements are as true as any scientific statements can be, and nobody — I repeat, nobody — has been able to refute this. In short, to deny any of these statements is to put yourself beyond the bounds of rational discourse.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931598.ece
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