Blimey, I’ve just seen the Telegraph’s blog figures for the last week. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that James Delingpole is on the fringes of the global warming debate. He’s bloody not. In fact, as the (top secret) figures show, he’s amassing a vast army of climate change sceptics behind him, who think that anthropogenic global warming is a worldwide conspiracy between climatologists and politicians. Climategate – the furore surrounding some very dodgy emails exchanged by leading scientists at East Anglia’s CRU – has become their pièce de résistance.
The trouble is, when you loathe Al Gore and his climate porno buddies as much as I do, it’s easy to shrug it off. It’s just old Delingpole being his usual self, you think, no harm in that. Let him bash the Lefties as much as he likes. Maybe it’ll even stem the flow of climate change alarmism,stinking protest camps and weird polar bear adverts.
But what with the remarkable response to my post on Sunday and Delingpole’s weekly figures, it’s beginning to dawn on me quite how serious this all is: unbelievable numbers of Right-wing Brits and, yes, Right-wing Americans truly believe that global warming is a Left-wing conspiracy; that it was concocted by scientists with a hidden global agenda, corrupted by the skewed will of their puppeteering political masters. It sounds bonkers because it is.
Of course, it’s natural to distrust politicians. And there’s no reason to fear policy debate either: Are carbon credits a good idea? Should we cut methane before we cut carbon dioxide emissions? Should we erect unsightly windfarms which scar beautiful British landscapes? All these are valid questions which should be answered properly by those who decide national and international climate policy.
But to question the science behind manmade global warming? That’s a very different – and far more risky – game. So how on earth are people like Delingpole getting away with it?
The answer is sadly because myths are so easily spread online. (A favourite book of mine is about all of this.) Cranks and conspiracy theorists herd together, unchallenged by the mainstream who don’t view them as a threat. Well, it’s time to stop pretending the conspiracists don’t exist, and to take their bad science head on.
So, myth Number One: “Global Warming stopped in 1998.”
This is a classic cherry pick. Although the global mean surface temperature has consistently risen for the last century, coinciding with the rapid growth of manmade greenhouse gases, 1998 (as you can see from the helpful scienceblogs.com graph below) was an anomaly caused by “the strongest El Niño of the past century“. That’s NASA I’m quoting by the way – you know, that crazy lot who landed men on the moon, and who collate data on global warming entirely independently from East Anglia’s CRU.
Take the anomalous El Niño out of the equation, then, and the trend continues. Even more interestingly, the 1998 record is matched, anyway, by NASA’s records for 2005. The 1998 “record” does not disprove global warming.
But I’m not a scientist, as I’ve said before. I’m just an English graduate who recognises that the broad consensus among the world’s best climatologists is as follows: recent global warming is mostly caused by mankind’s emission of greenhouse gases. Delingpole, on the other hand, is slowly turning into a rather scary Dr Strangelove figure, whose bad science could help to usher the end of the world as we know it.
Except he, too, is an English graduate. So the Climategate crowd is lining up behind Mr Strangelove (BA). Does this worry no one else?
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Comments About Climategate: global warming deniers and the terrifying case of Mr Strangelove (BA)
// 2 comments so far.
Gillian Swain // December 12th 2009
If manmade global warming exists then countries such as Great Britain will get warmer and the result of this is that people will be able to turn off their heating thus saving great amounts of energy with the result that CO2 levels will then go down again and countries such as Britain will become colder again. An easy and cheap alternative to combat global warming. That is, of course, if you don’t believe that governments and the sceientific departments who put out the THEORY of manmade global warming aren’t making huge amounts of money from espousing this THEORY (please note Einstein’s THEORY of relativity, Avagadros HYPOTHISIS….both still not claimed as FACT). If you think melting ice caps will also cause sea levels to rise with disastrous results try putting ice in a glass of water - I think that you will find that the level won’t rise.
lee reynolds // January 04th 2010
Could we please have the graph extended to say 2,00 years before present time, this will then show that we are coming out of a the mini ice age (1,300 to 1,850), prior to this we was in the medieval warm period (800-1300) this was a time when Greenland really was green and was habitable.
If we go even further back we come the Roman warm period (450-950) we find yet again that the temperatures we equal or greater than we have today.
Science has lost it’s way, a true scientist does not start out with firm belief and then tries to make his experiments fits.
It is ironic that as I sit here writing this the weather man from the met office who only told us 2 months ago that we was in for a mild winter is now telling us that it has been the coldest period for 30 years, remember the fact that these are the people who are telling us that the world is going to warming up, these people cannot foresee the next few days let alone the next century.
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