Matt Ridley's Blog, page 32

Iceland's lesson for Europe

My Times column on the economy of Iceland:

 

I spent part of last week in Iceland, the
antithesis of Greece. It’s been a hard winter and a cold spring up
there, but despite the stiff northerly breeze off the Arctic ocean,
economically speaking Iceland is basking in real warmth, while
Greece shivers in financial winter. Iceland teaches a very acute
lesson for Greece, Britain, Europe and the world: independence
works.

Iceland and Greece had equally terrible crashes seven years ago,
yet Iceland is now growing rapidly, running trade and budget
surpluses, with minimal unemployment and strong pension funds. A
settlement with the creditors of its three failed banks is
imminent, and exchange controls will soon be lifted.

The country’s fundamental advantages (fish, tourism, geothermal
energy, and a highly educated workforce) were untouched by the
financial crisis. With the help of a sharp 60 per cent devaluation,
Iceland set about working its way through austerity to
prosperity. It cut public spending, hiked interest rates and at the
behest of the International Monetary Fund brought in exchange
controls to stem inflation. Helped by the cheap krona, tourist
numbers have doubled in five years, and the fishing catch is at a
record high with stocks of capelin and cod sustainable.

With a banking sector nine times its economic output by the
early 2000s, and a reputation for borrowing money abroad to buy
dodgy assets such as football clubs, also abroad, Iceland’s economy
was caught hard and early by the credit crunch.
Yet Swiss and Scottish banks were larger than Iceland’s in relation
to their GDP. The world chose to save Swiss and Scottish banks,
while Iceland’s were allowed to collapse. That, many Icelanders now
think, looks like a blessing in disguise.

Beset by seemingly false rumours of Russian mafia money being
laundered through Iceland, and without any strategic interest in
helping the country as there would have been during the Cold War,
the world left Iceland to its fate.

In September 2008 the United States Federal Reserve refused a
currency swap to Iceland (while offering it to the other Nordic
countries), which started a bank run. Gordon Brown then made it
worse by describing Iceland as virtually bankrupt, refusing
liquidity support to its banks’ British branches, and — shockingly
— using anti-terrorism legislation to freeze Icelandic bank assets
in the UK.

Mr Brown’s government then unilaterally compensated British
depositors in Icesave, the overseas branch of Landsbanki, one of
Iceland’s biggest banks, and sent the bill to the Icelandic
government.

Icelanders refused to pay, twice confirming this in referendums,
and two years ago the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) court ruled that Britain’s action was illegal, which
put an end to the episode. In practice, the overseas branches of
the banks were sound and creditors would have recovered most of
their money.

In short, Britain behaved abominably towards Iceland during the
crisis; I am amazed they let me into the country last week. The
world allowed Iceland to fail because it was small. It has a
population the size of Cardiff. But it turns out that there is no
safe haven for small countries as part of a larger entity.

Contrast Iceland’s experience with that of small countries that
had sought shelter in the embrace of the EU: Greece, Cyprus,
Ireland, all still at various stages of denial or debilitation or
serfdom. “We are,” says Professor Hannes Gissurarson, who is
writing the definitive report on the crisis, “masters of our own
fate.”

The big advantage Iceland had over Ireland and Greece was that
it could devalue its currency and become competitive. Iceland is
also outside the disastrous common fisheries policy of the EU,
which means it can run a far more sustainable and economically
efficient policy, involving transferable quotas. This means that
fishermen have a strong incentive to be good stewards of fish
stocks and keep the value of their quotas high, so it works as a
conservation tool as well as promoting economic efficiency.

As a member of EFTA and the European Economic Area, Iceland is
outside the EU’s external tariff so it can trade freely with the
world as well as the EU. Last year it signed a free-trade agreement
with China. An MP from the governing party was in London last week to invite Britain to
join them in a similar status, and thereby to assume leadership of
a trade-only bloc of European nations.

True, an Icelandic firm must apply EU rules if exporting to the
EU, but then it has to apply American rules if exporting to
America, and neither if not exporting at all. Iceland represents
itself on the World Trade Organisation, whereas Britain is
represented mainly by the EU trade commissioner, a Swede. The
notion that being outside the EU means you don’t get to write the
rules of world trade is back to front. The EU is increasingly at
the mercy of others’ rules set at the supranational level anyway:
regaining our independence would increase our influence there.

Iceland’s entire history confirms the benefits of independence.
Having developed self-governance as a commonwealth in 930AD —ie,
without a king or a bureaucracy but with the earliest of all
parliaments, the Althing – it then succumbed in 1262 to the
temptation of seeking “shelter” as part of a larger entity. It
negotiated protection from the Norwegian king.

Big mistake. The shelter became a trap as later monarchs – of
Denmark by now – imposed agrarian feudalism on the country. Every
citizen was forcibly registered to a farm and no foreigner was
allowed to overwinter, effectively stifling all attempts to develop
trading partnerships, start industry, or even get fishing. Briefly
in the 18th century, when a volcanic eruption left the island
starving, there was interest in Britain getting Iceland from
Denmark in exchange for a small Caribbean island, but we decided
against it: probably just as well. Only in the 19th century did
Icelanders begin to exploit their rich fish resources and later
their cheap energy, quickly becoming one of the world’s richest
countries.

Iceland reminds us that size does not matter nearly as much as
most politicians pretend. Small countries often thrive. Look at New
Zealand, Singapore, Estonia, Kuwait. They can be that much more
nimble in their decisions. And if a country of 320,000 people can
have the confidence to thrive alone in the North Atlantic, trading
with the EU but not enmeshed in it, why on earth cannot the world’s
fifth largest economy?

The Paris Climate Summit

My Times column on the coming summit on climate
policy in Paris:

 

The first council of Nicea, held 1,690 years ago
this summer, decided upon a consensus about the nature of God,
namely that the son had been “begotten not made, being of one
substance with the father”, as Athanasius argued, and not created
out of nothing, as Arius argued. Phew. Glad they settled that.

The 21st conference of the Parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as
the “11th session of the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto
protocol”, in Paris this December, will be scarcely less
theological.

Its purpose is to get international agreement to emissions cuts
that will limit the global temperature increase to 2C above
pre-industrial levels. Given that nobody knows for sure what those
levels were, how sensitive to industrial emissions global
temperatures are, how emissions will change, when the 2C threshold
would be reached, how much natural climate change there will be, or
how much damage (or benefit) two degrees of global warming would
cause, this is as practical as arguing about the nature of the
trinity.

It is a fair bet that 17 centuries from now, the Paris climate
summit will seem as unworldly as the first council of Nicea, and a
lot less consensual. All 20 of the previous climate summits have
proved futile, even though their participants usually declare
victory at the final press conference. There are no binding
international agreements to cut emissions and the chances of one
this time are small.

Developing countries will not agree to limit the growth of
emissions (and put economic growth at risk) unless they get the
$100 billion a year they were promised at Copenhagen five years
ago. Few developed countries wish to fulfil that promise. A binding
climate treaty has as much chance of passing the
Republican-controlled Congress in the United States as a
declaration of atheism would have had at Nicea.

To resolve this, the sherpas working towards the Paris climate
summit have come up with a neat formula. As Bloomberg
reports, they are “coalescing around a deal that would commit every
country to restricting greenhouse gases but bind none to specific
targets”. Brilliant: a binding agreement to non-binding
targets!

Gesture, in other words, is all. The British government seems to
understand this well. Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, said in her speech on Friday, that she wants a
“strong, ambitious, rules-based agreement that makes the shift to a
clean global economy irreversible” — knowing full well that such a
thing is vanishingly unlikely to emerge in a form that commits us
to anything. She’s just reciting the Nicene creed.

She is meanwhile boldly trying to rein in some of Ed Miliband’s and
Chris Huhne’s regressive stealth taxes on energy bills, which have
been subsidising crony capitalists in the renewable energy industry
and driving jobs abroad. Since these measures have been bringing
down emissions very little and at a cost per tonne far exceeding
the damage likely to be done by climate change, this is sensible
reform.

The spectacle of Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians
lamenting the harm these reforms will do to the confidence of
wealthy investors in the wind industry is a wonder to behold. It is
not as if the Tory manifesto’s promise to stop onshore wind farms
was a secret, and it allows Conservatives to champion the poor, on
whom the cost of these green measures has fallen
disproportionately, through their energy bills. Our electricity
prices are twice as high as America’s.

It was always fanciful to think that wind and solar farms could
stop global warming. Despite vast subsidies, their deployment is
not even keeping up with the increase in energy demand. To the
nearest whole number, wind produced 1 per cent of global energy (ie,
3 per cent of global electricity) in 2014; solar, 0 per cent.
Fossil fuels’ share was 87 per cent, unchanged from ten years
earlier. With current technology, only a vast expansion of nuclear
power, a switch from coal to gas and a surge in energy efficiency,
especially in China and India, can slow down the rise in emissions
significantly, let alone affordably. (As always, I declare an
interest in fossil fuels, mainly coal.)

[According the the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which
is the best source for these matters, wind energy production grew
by 14.8 million tonnes of oil equivalent in 2014 and and solar by
11.6 mtoe. So between them they grew by 26.4 mtoe in 2014, whereas
total energy use grew by 121 mtoe. Total wind production was 145
mtoe, solar 30 mtoe. Total world energy use was 12,928mtoe. So wind
was 1.12%; solar was 0.23%. Total renewables was 317 mtoe (2.4%),
which includes hydro and biomass.]

Ms Rudd also signalled that she would stop Britain’s policy of unilateral
decarbonisation at a faster rate than other countries, as mandated
in Mr Miliband’s Climate Change Act of 2008. Rightly she realises
that it simply exports the problem, along with jobs in
energy-intensive industries. Messrs Miliband and Huhne used to
justify our unilateralism on the grounds that we were setting an
example that the world would follow. We are the “ world leader” in
offshore wind, which produces electricity at three times the
wholesale price and intermittently, only because the world seems
unpersuaded to follow.

Supposing the Paris conference produces its expected fudge, what
should our energy policy look like? The European Union is trying to get agreement on a 40 per cent
reduction in emissions (from 1990 levels) by 2030, but this is
conditional on agreement in Paris. The Poles and other Eastern
European countries are opposed to going it alone again, even before
a non-binding agreement in Paris.

That will give the British government the opportunity to revisit
its own targets. According to part 1, section 2, of the Climate
Change Act, the secretary of state has the power to amend the act’s
CO2 targets if there is a significant change in international
climate policy. She should grasp it. The targets were predicated on
rising fossil fuel prices to make renewables look affordable
(whereas fossil fuel prices have plummeted), on rapidly rising
temperatures (temperatures have risen much more slowly over the
past 40 years than predicted), and on international agreement
(which has not been reached). Put money into research instead.

The political risk would be small. Parties sceptical of
renewable energy have done well at the ballot box in Poland, Canada
and Australia. The big green pressure groups have little backing
among the public, just a lot of influence in parliament, the City
and the BBC. In a United Nations opinion poll, in which people all
over the world are asked to list their most urgent priorities in
order, and which has already attracted more than seven million
responses, climate change comes dead last of 16 options.
People are no more obsessed with climate change policy than they
were with whether the son was begotten of the father in AD325.

The need for tax simplification

My recent Times column on tax simplification:

 

Can we try tax simplification, please?

Though I applaud the motive, I am not sure I fully understand
George Osborne’s plan to cut inheritance tax. I gather that if you
hand your family home to your children (or grandchildren?) you will
get an extra credit against inheritance tax when you die, but that
if that home is worth more than £2.35m, you won’t. But that leaves
a lot of questions. What counts as a family home? What happens if
you vary a will like the Miliband family? And so on.

We will have to wait for the small print in the finance bill
after Wednesday’s budget, and even then will need tax accountants
to explain it. And that’s my problem with the proposal. It’s a
further complication of the already horrendously complicated tax
system. There are 89 different tax breaks from inheritance tax
alone. Our complete tax code, at 21,000 pages and ten million
words, may now be the fattest in the world (Hong Kong
gets by with 300 pages), and is ten times longer than the
Bible.

In 2010 Mr Osborne called Britain’s tax system “one of the most
complex and opaque tax codes” on earth and promised radical
simplification. He even set up the Office of Tax Simplification.
Yet he has not been a simplifying chancellor. For partly
understandable reasons – cohabiting with Liberal Democrats, the
need to pluck every feather of revenue from the taxpayer goose, and
his bad experience with the simplification of the pasty tax – the
tax code has only grown more complex.

As for the Office of Tax Simplification, we have barely heard from it. Some even doubt
it still exists. Its boldest suggestion, that national insurance be
merged with income tax, has been ignored. With six employees
against HM Revenue and Customs’ 64,000, it was never more than a
gesture.

Andrew Tyrie MP, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, in
an interview withThe Times last
week, called for the OTS to be given independence and put on a
statutory footing similar to that of the Office for Budget
Responsibility: it should then give Parliament an annual report on
the complexity of tax.

A complex tax code plays into the hands of the rich, creates
overemployment among expensive tax accountants and distorts
incentives. It becomes uncool to pay tax rather than find ways
round it. Look no further than Greece for what happens to an
economy when the better-off avoid paying taxes. In Greece, lawyers,
doctors and accountants spend more, on average, than their reported
income to service debt on consumer loans: not because they have
especially big loans, but because they hugely under-report
income.

Across the Atlantic, at least one presidential candidate gets
the point that simplification is the least damaging way of taxing
the rich. Senator Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican, wants to “blow up our terrible tax code and
start over”. He would abolish duties and tariffs, all gift and
estate (inheritance) tax, all employee payroll taxes, and almost
all tax breaks, except on mortgage interest and charitable
donations. Tax credits for the low paid and child tax credits would
also stay. He would levy one flat income tax of 14.5 per cent on
all income, personal and corporate, with a $50,000 exemption per
family of four.

He calculates that a radically simpler tax system would boost
growth and hit the rich. He would “end corporate welfare and eliminate
the army of lobbyists and tax lawyers gaming the system”.

The Tax Reform Commission, set up by George Osborne as shadow
chancellor in 2006 and chaired by Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, pointed
out that taxes had become not just more complex but more unstable –
changes are more frequent, making planning harder. In 2012, the
2020 Tax Commission, chaired by Allister Heath (and to which I
contributed), recommended abolishing eight taxes and folding
all income tax, national insurance, capital gains tax, transaction
taxes and corporation tax into a single income tax with a 30 per
cent maximum rate and a £10,000 exemption: not unlike Senator
Paul’s suggestion. Both have been ignored.

You can see why. Simplifying tax is politically risky, because
it inevitably creates losers among special interests, who tend to
make disproportionately more noise than the dispersed winners.
That’s why it is usually only possible when revenues are booming,
so the closing of loopholes can be offset by the lowering of rates.
Hence now is the time to begin to think about it. As the economy
recovers, says Stephen Herring of the Institute of Directors, “both
business and individual taxpayers will rightly expect more wide
ranging tax reforms and simplification than the previous government
was able or willing to undertake”.

Nigel Lawson made it his policy to abolish one tax in each
budget and did so six times, while cutting income tax and reducing
it to two bands. He was the last chancellor to achieve
simplification. The Brown years were a missed opportunity as
revenue boomed but so did tax complexity. During this century,
Tolley’s tax guide, the bible of tax accountants, has more than
trebled in length for corporate tax and capital gains tax, and
roughly doubled in length for income tax.

So when Mr Osborne stands up to deliver his budget it would be
refreshing if he could catch just a little of Rand Paul’s tax
radicalism, just as his colleague Iain Duncan Smith is bringing
radical simplification to welfare. He should announce an ambition
over the next five years to close as many reliefs as he can, while
cutting rates of tax to compensate.

The Institute of Directors has a helpful menu for him. He could
merge inheritance tax and capital gains tax, align reliefs for
various investment schemes, and perhaps give small businesses the
option to be taxed like an individual or a partnership, rather than
a corporation. Simpler taxes mean a less blurred line between
legitimate tax planning and aggressive tax evasion.

In the case of inheritance tax, Adam Memon at the Centre for
Policy Studies suggests he abolish agricultural and business
property relief and halve the rate from 40 per cent to 20 per cent.
That would hurt some landowners (including me) but help most
households far more simply than his present scheme.

What the climate wars did to science

In June I published a lengthy essay in Quadrant
magazine on the effect that the global warming debate is having on
science itself:

 

For much of my life I have been a science
writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories
so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art
critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science
critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb,
we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of
science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at
pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically
modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about
science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad,
because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test.
So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate
science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist
in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious
defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a
pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained
to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet
persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith
under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity
and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the
1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading
slowly.

What these two ideas have in common is that they had
political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate.
Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation
bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our
favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if
we were counsel for the defence. It’s tosh that scientists always
try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and
nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other’s. Science
has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges
Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what keeps science honest.

What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each
case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were
imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book 
The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail
how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved
of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus
backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile
press.

Cheerleaders for alarm

This is precisely what has happened with the climate
debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of
science. The “bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes,
nor that human beings influence climate change; but that the
impending change is sufficiently dangerous to require urgent policy
responses. In the 1970s, when global temperatures were cooling,
some scientists could not resist the lure of press attention by
arguing that a new ice age was imminent. Others called this
nonsense and the World Meteorological Organisation rightly refused
to endorse the alarm. That’s science working as it should. In the
1980s, as temperatures began to rise again, some of the same
scientists dusted off the greenhouse effect and began to argue that
runaway warming was now likely.

At first, the science establishment reacted
sceptically and a diversity of views was aired. It’s hard to recall
now just how much you were allowed to question the claims in those
days. As Bernie Lewin reminds us in one chapter of a fascinating
new book of essays called Climate Change: The
Facts(hereafter The Facts), as late as
1995 when the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its last-minute
additional claim of a “discernible human influence” on
climate, Nature magazine warned scientists
against overheating the debate.

Since then, however, inch by inch, the huge green
pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but
ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms—over
population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone
holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops—have often proved
wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the
most exaggeration trousered the most money. In the case of climate,
the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be
debunked.

These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the
hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically
infiltrated science, as well as industry and media, with the result
that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who
cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a
hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to
ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist
on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might
not be lethally dangerous.

Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in
his chapter in The Facts, is based on a
“pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and
analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not
available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express
even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are
ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or
starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups
and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards
and treated by the media as neutral.

Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named
Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “
Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for
threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in
California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more
than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she
was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report.

Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim
Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local
extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to
urban development than in the north, so only the statistical
averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated
local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since
recovered throughout their range. 
When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused.
Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate
change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a
highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break
cover.

Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard
Institute of Space Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in
lucrative green prizes, regularly joined protests against coal
plants and got himself arrested while at the same time he was in
charge of adjusting and homogenising one of the supposedly
objective data sets on global surface temperature. How would he be
likely to react if told of evidence that climate change is not such
a big problem?

Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who
frequently testifies before Congress in favour of urgent action on
climate change, was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior
scientist for nineteen years and continues to advise it. The EDF
has assets of $209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million
from charitable foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants.
In that time it has spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has
fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory committees. How
likely is it that they or Oppenheimer would turn around and say
global warming is not likely to be dangerous?

Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna
Laframboise, for the IPCC to “put a man who has spent his career
cashing cheques from both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and
Greenpeace in charge of its latest chapter on the world’s oceans?”
She’s referring to the University of Queensland’s Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg.

These scientists and their guardians of the flame
repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about
climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right
way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a
false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real,
partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school,
and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not
think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is
unlikely.

I find that very few people even know of this. Most
ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that
either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with
vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the
only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t
believe” in climate change.

 

What consensus about the future?

Sceptics such as Plimer often complain that
“consensus” has no place in science. Strictly they are right, but I
think it is a red herring. I happily agree that you can have some
degree of scientific consensus about the past and the present. The
earth is a sphere; evolution is true; carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas. The IPCC claims in its most recent report that it
is “95 per cent” sure that “more than half” of the (gentle) warming
“since 1950” is man-made. I’ll drink to that, though it’s a pretty
vague claim. But you really cannot have much of a consensus about
the future. Scientists are terrible at making forecasts—indeed as
Dan Gardner documents in his book 
Future Babble they are often worse than laymen. And the
climate is a chaotic system with multiple influences of which human
emissions are just one, which makes prediction even harder.

The IPCC actually admits the possibility of
lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of
possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between
about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the
century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to
terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if
you look at the “probability density functions” of climate
sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.

What is more, in the small print describing the
assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it
admits that the top of the range will only be reached if
sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world
population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon
dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable);
and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up
gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and
babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more),
then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower
end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This
is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip
Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a
systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as
heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the
pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations
of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully
understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with
this fundamentally religious project.

Politicians love this polarising because it means they
can attack a straw man. It’s what they are good at. “Doubt has been
eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of
Norway and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech
in 2007: “It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to
question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis
is over. Now it is time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time
for a meeting of the flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97
per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made
and dangerous”. That’s just a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I
point out above, there is no consensus that it’s dangerous.

So where’s the outrage from scientists at this
presidential distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per
cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would
have embarrassed a homeopath. The first was a poll that found that
97 per cent of just seventy-nine scientists thought climate change
was man-made—not that it was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854
members of the American Meteorological Society found the true
number is 52 per cent.

The second source of the 97 per cent number was a
survey of scientific papers, which has now been comprehensively
demolished by Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is
probably the world’s leading climate economist. As the
Australian 
blogger Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings, John Cook of the
University of Queensland and his team used an unrepresentative
sample, left out much useful data, used biased observers who
disagreed with the authors of the papers they were classifying
nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed the data
in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their preliminary
conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever there
was one. The data could not be replicated, and Cook himself
threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal nor
the university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the
scientific establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow
the whistle on it. Its conclusion is too useful.

This should be a huge scandal, not fodder for a tweet
by the leader of the free world. Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an
example of a new breed of science critic that the climate debate
has spawned. With little backing, and facing ostracism for her
heresy, this talented science journalist had abandoned any chance
of a normal, lucrative career and systematically set out to expose
the way the huge financial gravy train that is climate science has
distorted the methods of science. In her chapter in The
Facts, Nova points out that the entire trillion-dollar
industry of climate change policy rests on a single hypothetical
assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day there is
no evidence.

The assumption is that modest warming from carbon
dioxide must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the
air warms there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing
“a positive feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions
that could be tested. And the tests come back negative again and
again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming
into a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical
troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature
can fall while carbon dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate
sensitivity, which should be high if positive feedbacks are strong,
are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the temperature has
failed to rise as predicted by the models.

Scandal after scandal

The Cook paper is one of many scandals and blunders in
climate science. There was the occasion in 2012 when the climate
scientist Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of the
(sceptical) Heartland Institute’s board of directors, leaked
confidential documents, and included also a “strategy memo”
purporting to describe Heartland’s plans, which was a straight
forgery. Gleick apologised but continues to be a respected climate
scientist.

There was Stephan Lewandowsky, then at the University
of Western Australia, who published a paper titled “
NASA faked the moon landing therefore [climate] science is a
hoax”, from which readers might have deduced, in the words of
a Guardian headline, that “new research finds
that sceptics also tend to support conspiracy theories such as the
moon landing being faked”. Yet in fact in the survey for the paper,
only ten respondents out of 1145 thought that the moon landing was
a hoax, and seven of those did not think climate change was a hoax.
A particular irony here is that two of the men who have actually
been to the moon are vocal climate sceptics: Harrison Schmitt and
Buzz Aldrin.

It took years of persistence before physicist Jonathan
Jones and political scientist Ruth Dixon even managed to get into
print (in March this year) a detailed and devastating critique of
the Lewandowsky article’s methodological flaws and bizarre
reasoning, with one journal allowing Lewandowsky himself to oppose
the publication of their riposte. Lewandowsky published a later
paper claiming that the reactions to his previous paper proved he
was right, but it was so flawed it had to be retracted.

If these examples of odd scientific practice sound too
obscure, try Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for thirteen
years and often described as the “world’s top climate scientist”.
He once dismissed as “voodoo science” an official report by India’s
leading glaciologist, Vijay Raina, because it had challenged a
bizarre claim in an IPCC report (citing a WWF report which cited an
article in New Scientist), that the Himalayan
glaciers would be gone by 2035. The claim originated with Syed
Hasnain, who subsequently took a job at The Energy and Resources
Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is
director-general, and there his glacier claim enabled TERI to win a
share of a three-million-euro grant from the European Union. No
wonder Dr Pachauri might well not have wanted the 2035 claim
challenged.

Yet Raina was right, it proved to be the IPCC’s most
high-profile blunder, and Dr Pachauri had to withdraw both it and
his “voodoo” remark. The scandal led to a highly critical report
into the IPCC by several of the world’s top science academics,
which recommended among other things that the IPCC chair stand down
after one term. Dr Pachauri ignored this, kept his job, toured the
world while urging others not to, and published a novel, with
steamy scenes of seduction of an older man by young women. (He
resigned this year following criminal allegations of sexual
misconduct with a twenty-nine-year-old female employee, which he
denies, and which are subject to police investigation.)

Yet the climate bloggers who constantly smear sceptics
managed to avoid even reporting most of this. If you want to follow
Dr Pachauri’s career you have to rely on a tireless but self-funded
investigative journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise. In her
chapter in The Facts, Laframboise details how Dr
Pachauri has managed to get the world to describe him as a Nobel
laureate, even though this is simply not true.

Notice, by the way, how many of these fearless
free-thinkers prepared to tell emperors they are naked are women.
Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist, has 
steadfastly exposed the myth-making that goes into polar bear
alarmism, to the obvious discomfort of the doyens of that
field. Jennifer Marohasy of Central Queensland University, by
persistently asking 
why cooling trends recorded at Australian weather stations with no
recorded moves were being altered to warming trends, has
embarrassed the Bureau of Meteorology into a review of their
procedures. Her chapter in The Factsunderlines
the failure of computer models to predict rainfall.

But male sceptics have scored successes too. There was
the case of the paper the IPCC relied upon to show that urban heat
islands (the fact that cities are generally warmer than the
surrounding countryside, so urbanisation causes local, but not
global, warming) had not exaggerated recent warming. This paper
turned out—as the sceptic Doug Keenan proved—to be based
partly on
non-existent data on forty-nine weather stations in China. When
corrected, it emerged that the urban heat island effect actually
accounted for 40 per cent of the warming in China.

There was the Scandinavian lake sediment core that was
cited as evidence of sudden recent warming, when it was actually
being used “upside down”—the opposite way the authors of the study
thought it should be used: so if anything it showed cooling.

There was the graph showing unprecedented recent
warming that turned out to depend on 
just one larch tree in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.

There was the southern hemisphere hockey-stick that
had been created by the omission of inconvenient data series.

There was the infamous “
hide the decline” incident when a tree-ring-derived graph had
been truncated to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent
cooling.

And of course there was the
mother of all scandals, the “hockey stick” itself: a graph that
purported to show the warming of the last three decades of the
twentieth century as unprecedented in a millennium, a graph that
the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it six times in its
third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC chairman
at his press conference. It was a graph that persuaded me to
abandon my scepticism (until I found out about its flaws), because
I thought Nature magazine would never have
published it without checking. And it is a graph that was
systematically shown by Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be
wholly misleading, as McKitrick recounts in glorious detail in his
chapter in The Facts.

Its hockey-stick shape depended heavily on one set of
data from bristlecone pine trees in the American south-west,
enhanced by a statistical approach to over-emphasise some 200 times
any hockey-stick shaped graph. Yet bristlecone tree-rings do not,
according to those who collected the data, reflect temperature at
all. What is more, the scientist behind the original paper, Michael
Mann, had known all along that his data depended heavily on these
inappropriate trees and a few other series, because when finally
prevailed upon to release his data he accidentally included a file
called “censored” that proved as much: he had tested the effect of
removing the bristlecone pine series and one other, and found that
the hockey-stick shape disappeared.

In March this year Dr 
Mann published a paper claiming the Gulf Stream was slowing
down. This garnered headlines all across the world.
Astonishingly, his evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down
came not from the Gulf Stream, but from “proxies” which
included—yes—bristlecone pine trees in Arizona, upside-down lake
sediments in Scandinavia and larch trees in Siberia.

The democratisation of science

Any one of these scandals in, say, medicine might
result in suspensions, inquiries or retractions. Yet the climate
scientific establishment repeatedly reacts as if nothing is wrong.
It calls out any errors on the lukewarming end, but ignores those
on the exaggeration end. That complacency has shocked me, and done
more than anything else to weaken my long-standing support for
science as an institution. I repeat that I am not a full sceptic of
climate change, let alone a “denier”. I think
carbon-dioxide-induced warming during this century is likely,
though I think it is unlikely to prove rapid and dangerous. So I
don’t agree with those who say the warming is all natural, or all
driven by the sun, or only an artefact of bad measurement, but nor
do I think anything excuses bad scientific practice in support of
the carbon dioxide theory, and every time one of these scandals
erupts and the scientific establishment asks us to ignore it, I
wonder if the extreme sceptics are not on to something. I feel
genuinely betrayed by the profession that I have spent so much of
my career championing.

There is, however, one good thing that has happened to
science as a result of the climate debate: the democratisation of
science by sceptic bloggers. It is no accident that sceptic sites
keep winning the “Bloggies” awards. There is nothing quite like
them for massive traffic, rich debate and genuinely open peer
review. Following Steven McIntyre on tree rings, Anthony Watts or
Paul Homewood on temperature records, Judith Curry on uncertainty,
Willis Eschenbach on clouds or ice cores, or Andrew Montford on
media coverage has been one of the delights of recent years for
those interested in science. Papers that had passed formal peer
review and been published in journals have nonetheless been torn
apart in minutes on the blogs. There was the time Steven McIntyre
found that an Antarctic temperature trend arose “entirely from the
impact of splicing the two data sets together”. Or when Willis
Eschenbach showed a published chart had “cut the modern end of the
ice core carbon dioxide record short, right at the time when carbon
dioxide started to rise again” about 8000 years ago, thus omitting
the startling but inconvenient fact that carbon dioxide levels rose
while temperatures fell over the following millennia.

Scientists don’t like this lèse
majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the
internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science
should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the
ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind based on the
evidence. And that is precisely what the non-sceptical side just
does not get. Its bloggers are almost universally wearily
condescending. They are behaving like sixteenth-century priests who
do not think the Bible should be translated into English.

Renegade heretics in science itself are especially
targeted. The BBC was subjected to torrents of abuse for even
interviewing Bob Carter, a distinguished geologist and climate
science expert who does not toe the alarmed line and who is one of
the editors of Climate Change Reconsidered, a serious and
comprehensive survey of the state of climate science organised by
the Non-governmental Panel on Climate Change and ignored by the
mainstream media.

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech moved from alarm to mild
scepticism and has endured vitriolic criticism for it. She recently
wrote:

There is enormous pressure for climate
scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure
comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding agencies,
universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves
who are green activists and advocates. Reinforcing this consensus
are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. The
closing of minds on the climate change issue is a tragedy for both
science and society.

The distinguished Swedish meteorologist Lennart
Bengtsson was so frightened for his own family and his health after
he announced last year that he was joining the advisory board of
the Global Warming Policy Foundation that he withdrew, saying, “It
is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”

The astrophysicist Willie Soon was falsely accused by
a Greenpeace activist of failing to disclose conflicts of interest
to an academic journal, an accusation widely repeated by mainstream
media.

 

Clearing the middle ground

Much of this climate war parallels what has happened
with Islamism, and it is the result of a similar deliberate policy
of polarisation and silencing of debate. Labelling opponents
“Islamophobes” or “deniers” is in the vast majority of cases
equally inaccurate and equally intended to polarise. As Asra Nomani
wrote in the Washington Post recently, a
community of anti-blasphemy police arose out of a deliberate policy
decision by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation:

and began trying to control the debate on Islam.
This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits,
journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in
the religion … The insults may look similar to Internet trolling
and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site. But
they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.

Compare that to what happened to Roger Pielke Jr, as
recounted by James Delingpole in The Facts. Pielke is a professor
of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and a hugely
respected expert on disasters. He is no denier, thinking man-made
global warming is real. But in his own area of expertise he is very
clear that the rise in insurance losses is because the world is
getting wealthier and we have more stuff to lose, not because more
storms are happening. This is incontrovertibly true, and the IPCC
agrees with him. But when he said this on Nate Silver’s
FiveThirtyEight website he and Silver were savaged by commenters,
led by one Rob Honeycutt. Crushed by the fury he had unleashed,
Silver apologised and dropped Pielke as a contributor.

Rob Honeycutt and his allies knew what they were
doing. Delingpole points out that Honeycutt (on a different
website) urged people to “send in the troops to hammer down”
anything moderate or sceptical, and to “grow the team of crushers”.
Those of us who have been on the end of this sort of stuff know it
is exactly like what the blasphemy police do with Islamophobia. We
get falsely labelled “deniers” and attacked for heresy in often the
most ad-hominem way.

Even more shocking has been the bullying lynch mob
assembled this year by alarmists to prevent the University of
Western Australia, erstwhile employers of the serially debunked
conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky, giving a job to the
economist Bjorn Lomborg. The grounds were that Lomborg is a
“denier”. But he’s not. He does not challenge the science at all.
He challenges on economic grounds some climate change policies, and
the skewed priorities that lead to the ineffective spending of
money on the wrong environmental solutions. His approach has been
repeatedly vindicated over many years in many different topics, by
many of the world’s leading economists. Yet there was barely a
squeak of protest from the academic establishment at the way he was
howled down and defamed for having the temerity to try to set up a
research group at a university.

Well, internet trolls are roaming the woods in every
subject, so what am I complaining about? The difference is that in
the climate debate they have the tacit or explicit support of the
scientific establishment. Venerable bodies like the Royal Society
almost never criticise journalists for being excessively alarmist,
only for being too lukewarm, and increasingly behave like
pseudoscientists, explaining away inconvenient facts.

Making excuses for failed predictions

For example, scientists predicted a retreat of
Antarctic sea ice but it has expanded instead, and nowadays they
are claiming, like any astrologer, that this is because of warming
after all. “Please,” says Mark Steyn in The
Facts:

No tittering, it’s so puerile—every professor of
climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of
thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the
Himalayas and are carried by the El Ninja down the Gore Stream past
the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet,
named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet …

Or consider this example, from the Royal Society’s
recent booklet on climate change:

Does the recent slowdown of warming mean that
climate change is no longer happening? No. Since the very warm
surface temperatures of 1998 which followed the strong 1997-98 El
Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed
relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases,
with more of the excess heat being stored in the oceans.

You would never know from this that the “it’s hiding
in the oceans” excuse is just one unproven hypothesis—and one that
implies that natural variation exaggerated the warming in the
1990s, so reinforcing the lukewarm argument. Nor would you know (as
Andrew Bolt recounts in his chapter in The Facts)
that the pause in global warming contradicts specific and explicit
predictions such as this, from the UK Met Office: “by 2014 we’re
predicting it will be 0.3 degrees warmer than in 2004”. Or that the
length of the pause is now past the point where many scientists
said it would disprove the hypothesis of rapid man-made warming. Dr
Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia, said in 2009: “Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has
to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” It now
has.

Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the
way pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago
insisted, if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just
make excuses and insist you’re even more right than before. The
Royal Society once used to promise “never to give their opinion, as
a body, upon any subject”. Its very motto is “nullius in verba”:
take nobody’s word for it. Now it puts out catechisms of what you
must believe in. Surely, the handing down of dogmas is for
churches, not science academies. Expertise, authority and
leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas
Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge
absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him,
scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one
unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is
the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

The harm to science

I dread to think what harm this episode will have done
to the reputation of science in general when the dust has settled.
Science will need a reformation. Garth Paltridge is a distinguished
Australian climate scientist, who, in The Facts,
pens a wise paragraph that I fear will be the epitaph of climate
science:

We have at least to consider the possibility
that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue
has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate
problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating
the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort
to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the
context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for
centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty
which is the basis for society’s respect for scientific
endeavour.

And it’s not working anyway. Despite avalanches of
money being spent on research to find evidence of rapid man-made
warming, despite even more spent on propaganda and marketing and
subsidising renewable energy, the public remains unconvinced. The
most recent polling data from Gallup shows the number of Americans
who worry “a great deal” about climate change is down slightly on
thirty years ago, while the number who worry “not at all” has
doubled from 12 per cent to 24 per cent—and now exceeds the number
who worry “only a little” or “a fair amount”. All that
fear-mongering has achieved less than nothing: if anything it has
hardened scepticism.

None of this would matter if it was just scientific
inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big
difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their
word for it, and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to
make huge, expensive and risky changes to the world economy and to
people’s livelihoods. They want us to spend a fortune getting
emissions down as soon as possible. And they want us to do that
even if it hurts poor people today, because, they say, their
grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The
Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very
wealthy) matter more.

Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind
their concern. That seems wrong to me.

Britain's global health role

My Times column on Britain's opportunity to be
the world's doctor:

 

If the 19th century saw extraordinary changes in
transport, and the 20th saw amazing changes in communication, my
money is on health as the transformative industry of the current
century. It is already arguably the biggest industry in the world
and it is growing at a phenomenal rate, especially in Asia, where
India and China are expanding their health sectors at 15 per cent
and 12 per cent a year respectively. And health is ripe for a
series of revolutionary advances in biotechnology, digital
technology, robotics and materials.

A new report commissioned by three
parliamentarians, Meg Hillier, MP, Lord Crisp (former chief
executive of the NHS) and the surgeon Lord Kakkar, and written by
researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
makes the case that Britain is well placed to become the world’s
“health hub”. Just as the City of London is the world’s financial
centre and Wimbledon is the centre of tennis, so Britain is already
a surprisingly dominant player in research, practice, policy and
regulation when it comes to health, and widely emulated around the
world. There is an opportunity here.

The sheer breadth of our dominance in global health came as a
surprise to me. I was aware that Britain has played a prominent
role in biomedical research. After all, “we” found or invented
antibiotics, DNA’s structure, cloning, in-vitro fertilisation,
mitochondrial donation and much more. But I had not realised how
much clout — or “soft power” to use the fashionable term — we wield
in health policy and regulation: in rules as well as tools.

Take, for example, the Cochrane Collaboration. In 1992 in
Oxford, a group of health researchers set up a centre named after
the Scottish doctor Archibald Cochrane, who had realised while
treating fellow prisoners of war in Germany that there was “no real
evidence that anything we had to offer had any effect on
tuberculosis, and I was afraid that I shortened the lives of some
of my friends by unnecessary intervention”. He pioneered the use of
randomised control trials.

Today that centre has grown into a network of collaboration in
120 countries whose database has reviewed the effectiveness of
8,700 treatments. The reviews are free from commercial sponsorship
and are considered the gold standard in providing the evidence base
to justify using a drug or procedure.

Or consider Nice International, the global offshoot of the
National Institute of Health and Care Excellence — the body that
decides, often to the fury of some pharmaceutical firms and patient
groups, that some treatments are not cost-effective. It turns out
that the Nice model is in demand around the world from countries
keen to work out how best to spend limited health budgets. Set up
in 2008, Nice International does not make a profit but charges fees
to client countries as well as aid agencies and foundations.

Unlike in manufacturing or agriculture, we really are top of the
league in health. We have three of the top five universities in the
world for clinical, pre-clinical and health subjects. We have the
top science journal and two of the top four medical journals. We
have the world’s second largest charity (Wellcome) and the world’s
largest cancer research charity (Cancer Research UK). We rank top
among G7 countries for the quality of research in clinical
medicine, pre-clinical and human biological sciences, and infection
and immunology.

The world’s top-selling drug Adalimumab (for rheumatoid
arthritis) came out of Cambridge. The stunning decline in malaria
in recent years — global mortality down by 47 per cent since 2000 —
though heavily funded by the Gates Foundation, is to a large extent
down to British research, including the discovery of artemisinin
therapy and promising trials last month of a malaria vaccine, both
from Oxford University.

We also punch above our weight in health aid. We are the second
largest aid donor in the world, and health is the top category of
aid spend in most countries. Britain is the second largest donor to
the Global Fight Against Aids, TB and Malaria and the largest state
donor to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. We dominate
research in the battle against “neglected tropical diseases” such
as blinding trachoma and Guinea worm.

Apart from patting ourselves on the back for this, what’s the
opportunity? After all, London’s dominance in international finance
leads directly to large fees, whereas a lot of our dominance of
global health battles comes from our willingness to spend money
generously — especially taxpayers’ money. Getting rid of tropical
diseases is a good thing in itself, and it eventually must enrich
our potential trading partners, which benefits us too. But it is
not immediately profitable.

In fact, the one sector where the report finds we are not quite
so dominant is the commercial sector. We have one big medical
technology company (Smith & Nephew) and cannot match
Switzerland’s and America’s dominance of the pharmaceutical
industry. We have (only) the fourth biggest biotech pipeline in the
world. It’s South Korea that is pouring money into data management
for medical purposes.

That, says Lord Crisp, is where the opportunity comes in: to
turn some of our soft power into commercial opportunities. DfID,
anxious not to confuse aid with trade, still does too little to
exploit the expertise of the NHS. Sierra Leone, where 800 British
NHS workers volunteered during the ebola epidemic, is surely the
place to start.

I have my doubts as to whether a centralised monopoly is the
best way to deliver healthcare for Britons, but given that this is
what we have, it’s worth noting that it brings certain
opportunities that more fragmented health systems lack and other
countries are keen to learn from: central accreditation of doctors,
or the ability to share and analyse huge amounts of data.

We can train doctors from other countries, set up overseas
campuses and market the services of the royal colleges and General
Medical Council as model regulators and standard setters. This
already happens to some extent: the Tropical Health Educational
Trust has projects in 26 countries reaching 25,000 health workers,
while Newcastle medical school has a campus in Malaysia and
Moorfields Eye Hospital one in Dubai. The Royal College of General
Practitioners accredits an exam for doctors in Bangladesh, India,
Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as other countries.

If America is the world’s soldier, Germany its engineer, Brazil
its farmer, China its manufacturer and India its service provider,
then Britain can be the world’s doctor.

Technology, consumerism and the pope

My Times Thunderer article on the pope's
encyclical:

Why are people so down on technological progress?
Pope Francis complains in his new encyclical about “a blind confidence in
technical solutions”, of “irrational confidence in progress” and
the drawbacks of the “technocratic paradigm”. He is reflecting a
popular view, held across the political spectrum, from the
Unabomber to Russell Brand, that technology, consumerism and
progress have been bad for people, by making them more selfish and
unhappy.

But however thoroughly you search the papal encyclical (a
document that does at least pay heed to science, and to
evolutionary biology in particular), you will find no data to
support the claim that as people have got richer they have got
nastier and more miserable. That is because the data points the
other way. The past five decades have seen people becoming on
average wealthier, healthier, happier, better fed, cleverer,
kinder, more peaceful and more equal.

Compared with 50 years ago, people now live 30 per cent longer;
have 30 per cent more food to eat; spend longer in school; have
better housing; bury 70 per cent fewer of their children; travel
more; give more to charity as a proportion of income; are less
likely to be murdered, raped or robbed; are much less likely to die
in war; are less likely to die in a drought, flood or storm.

The data show a correlation between wealth and happiness both
within and between countries and within lifetimes. Global
inequality has been plummeting for years as people in poor
countries get rich faster than people in rich countries. The vast
preponderance of these improvements has come about as a result of
innovation in technology and society.

So what precisely is the problem with technology that the Pope
is complaining about? He cannot really think that life’s got worse
for most people. He cannot surely believe that the dreadful
suffering that still exists is caused by too much technology rather
than too little, because surely he can see most of the suffering is
in the countries with least technology, least energy, least
economic growth, and most focus on ideology and superstition. Do
Syria, North Korea, Congo and Venezuela have too much
consumerism?

“Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle . . . can only lead to
violence and mutual destruction,” says the encyclical. Really?
Only? If you hear of an atrocity in a shopping mall, do you
immediately think of consumerism or religious fanaticism as the
more likely cause? There is no mention in the encyclical of the
suffering caused by fanaticism, totalitarianism or lack of
technological progress — of the four million who die of indoor
smoke from cooking over wood fires, for example.

Yet the Pope is exercised about the dangers of genetically
modified food, for although he admits, “no conclusive proof exists
that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings”, he thinks
“difficulties should not be underestimated”. This in a world where
golden rice, a genetically modified cereal fortified with vitamin
A, could be preventing millions of deaths and disabilities every
year, but has been prevented from doing so entirely by fierce
opposition from the environmentalists the Pope has now allied
himself so closely with.

The Pope has latched on to the wrong end of the environmental
movement, the reactionary and outdated faction that still thinks
like the Club of Rome, a group of grandees who started meeting in
the 1960s to express their woes about the future in apocalyptic
terms and blaming technology rather than lack of it.

Having been comprehensively discredited by history (their
prediction was that by now we would be mired in ecological horror),
they are still dispensing misanthropic gloom.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was the only scientist at the launch
of the papal encyclical. He is a member of the Club of Rome.

Technological progress is what enables us to prevent child
mortality; to use less land to feed the world, and so begin
reforesting large parts of the rich world; to substitute oil for
whale blubber and so let whales increase again; to get
fossil-fuelled electricity to people so they don’t die of pollution
after cooking over fires of wood taken from the rainforest.

“Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need
to slow down and look at reality in a different way,” says the
Pope. Personally, I would rather speed up the stunning and
unprecedented decline in poverty of recent decades.

Invasive species are the greatest cause of extinction

My Times column on the causes of extinction:

Human beings have been causing other species to go
extinct at an unnatural rate over the past five centuries, a new study has confirmed. Whether this
constitutes a “sixth mass extinction” comparable to that of the
dinosaurs is more debatable, but bringing the surge in extinctions
to an end is indeed an urgent priority in conservation.

So it is vital to understand how we cause extinctions. And here
the study is dangerously wrong. It says that “habitat loss,
overexploitation for economic gain, and climate change” are the
main factors and that “all of these are related to human population
size and growth, which increases consumption (especially among the
rich)”.

Inexplicably, they have left out the main cause of extinctions
over the past five centuries: invasive species. The introduction by
people of predators, parasites and pests, especially to islands,
has been and continues to be far and away the greatest cause of
local and global extinction of native fauna. In his green
encyclical, Pope Francis likewise never once refers to this
problem. It is the Cinderella of the environmental movement.

Over the past 500 years, we know of 77 mammal species (out of
about 5,000) and 140 bird species (out of about 10,000) that have
gone totally extinct. There may be a handful more we do not know
about, and there are plenty more on the brink. Nonetheless, these
are the official total species extinctions for the two groups of
animal we know best, as compiled by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature.

Of those 217 species of bird and mammal, almost all lived on
islands — if you count Australia as an island — and just nine on continents: Bluebuck antelope,
Algerian gazelle, Omilteme cottontail rabbit,Labrador duck,
Carolina parakeet, slender-billed grackle, passenger pigeon,
Colombian grebe and Atitlan grebe.

Were it not for the efforts of conservationists there would be
more, of course. And this is not counting subspecies, or those in
extinction’s waiting room — ones that have not been seen for years,
but have yet to be officially declared extinct, like the
slender-billed curlew. Nonetheless, the extinction rate of bird and
mammal species on continents is a few hundredths of a per cent per
century.

This is far short of the apocalyptic predictions being made in
the 1970s. Paul Ehrlich, one of the authors of the new paper,
himself forecast in 1975 that half of all the species
in tropical rainforests would be gone by 2005. Yet not a single
bird or mammal that we know of has gone extinct in a tropical
rainforest.

My point is not to say extinction does not matter, but to try to
get at the real cause of the extinction surge, and it is clearly
not the growth of human population and consumption, which has
mostly happened on continents. Europe has lost just one breeding
bird in 500 years, for example — the island-breeding great auk in
1844.

It is true that there was a surge in extinctions of mammals in
the American continent about 12,000 years ago, but that was caused
by hunter-gatherers with stone-tipped spears, not modern people
with cars. Indeed, there is a pretty spectacular revival of
wildlife today in rich continents like North America and Europe.
Modern prosperity is plainly not the cause of animal
extinctions.

So what is? By far the greatest cause is invasive species,
especially on islands. Hawaii has lost about 70 species of bird
since contact with Captain Cook: ten times as many as all the
world’s continents combined. The cause is man-made, all right, but
it’s not because we killed them or destroyed their habitat.

It’s the rats, cats, goats, pigs, mosquitoes and avian malaria
we brought with us that did the damage on Hawaii and throughout the
Caribbean, the south Atlantic, the Indian ocean and the rest of the
Pacific. The dodo disappeared from Mauritius not because sailors
ate them (though they did) but because of predation by monkeys,
pigs, rats and the like. The Tristan albatross is in trouble on
Gough Island because its chicks are eaten alive by introduced
mice.

Closer to home, it’s invasive species that are the main cause of
conservation problems and local extinctions: grey squirrels, mink
and signal crayfish have recently all but extinguished red
squirrels, water voles and native crayfish respectively near where
I live. Ash dieback, zebra mussels, harlequin ladybirds, Chinese
mitten crabs, New Zealand flatworms and muntjac are all causing
declines in native British animals.

Misdiagnosing the cause of extinction leads to mistaken
policies. Here’s an example. Two decades ago, scientists began to
notice alarming declines and disappearances among frogs and toads
all over the world but especially in central America. At the time,
the hole in the ozone layer was topical, so environmentalists
blamed the amphibian declines on ultraviolet rays getting through
the supposedly thinner ozone layer.

When sceptics pointed out that the ozone was not thinning over
the tropics, many environmentalists fell back on blaming climate
change, and for a while the extinction of the golden toad in Costa
Rica’s cloud forest was confidently blamed on a changing climate:
the first of many extinctions brought about by climate change.

This too proved wrong, and scientists are now agreed that the
golden toad’s demise, and that of up to 30 other amphibians in
central America, was caused by a chytrid fungus, originating in
Africa, to which frogs on other continents are especially
vulnerable. How did the fungus reach the Americas? Through the use
by scientists of the African clawed toad as a popular laboratory
animal. The clawed toad carries the fungus but does not die from
it, and has escaped into the wild in many places. Conservation
efforts had been misdirected.

So it is not just dishonest to pretend that the way to prevent
species extinctions in the future is to throttle back on economic
activity and to spend a fortune fighting climate change. It is also
dangerous. It has already slowed and hindered the conservation
movement from focusing on the real, growing and urgent threat to
native wildlife all over the world, and especially on islands. We
have to get serious about bio-security, about regulating the trade
in live animals and plants, which results in more and more alien
species jumping into ecosystems where they run amok.

The inventor of vaping

My Spectator article on meeting the man who
invented vaping, Hon Lik.

 

Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s
probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met.
Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine
vapour from an electronic device rather than a miniature bonfire
between your lips. Vaping is driving smoking out at an
extraordinary rate, promising to achieve what decades of public
health measures have largely failed to do. And it is doing so
without official encouragement, indeed with some official
resistance.

Via an interpreter, and sucking on an electronic pipe, Mr Hon
told me how it happened. And here is the key point, the one that
panjandrums of public health still seem to miss. He invented vaping
in order to stop smoking, and that’s what it’s used for today.

He says he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day while
working as a chemist at the Liaoning Provincial Institute of
Traditional Chinese Medicine. He thought: ‘How can I quit?’ He
tried cold turkey several times and failed. In 2001 he tried a
nicotine patch but it gave him nightmares when he forgot to take it
off at night, and it failed to replicate the initial rush of a
cigarette.

Being a chemist with a penchant for electronics, he went into
the laboratory and set about emulating the effect of smoke without
a fire. The lab where he worked had a good supply of pure nicotine,
used for calibrating other products. He needed to find a way to
vaporise it instantly, and began with ultrasound, later turning to
a heating element.

His first machine was a monster. By 2003 he had filed a patent
on a smaller, more practical model. ‘I already knew it would be a
revolutionary product,’ he told me with a smile. ‘Some in China
have called it the fifth invention — after navigation, gunpowder,
printing and paper,’ he laughs. ‘But that’s too much.’

He went to work on miniaturising the device further, and
refining the mechanism for vaporising nicotine in response to a
puff. Why did he do it, I asked. ‘To solve a social problem,’ he
replied. ‘Quitting is suffering.’

After eight months of toxicology testing by the Pharmaceutical
Authority in Liaoning and by the Chinese military’s medical
institute, the product went on sale. There was modest interest in
China, but it was only when firms began selling versions in Europe
and North America, about eight years ago, that the vaping
revolution took off.

Today more than a million smokers in Britain have quit by using
e-cigarettes, and at least another million have cut down. The
number is growing all the time, and it’s now easily the most
popular method of quitting tobacco. That means a lot less lung
cancer, heart disease, stinky clothing and fire risk. What’s more,
none of these people had to get a prescription, or be subsidised by
the taxpayer or treated by the NHS, as with other methods of
quitting such as patches, gum, psychiatry or acupuncture. It’s a
purely voluntary, private-sector solution.

You would think the public health authorities would be shouting
this from the rooftops, but the Welsh government is trying to ban
the use of e-cigarettes in enclosed public spaces, the British
Medical Association remains implacably disapproving, the World
Health Organisation censorious, and the European Commission set on
banning refillable versions. Southern Rail is banning vaping on its
trains from next month, and Starbucks, Caffè Nero, All Bar One, and
KFC also have bans.

The opponents fear that vaping is a gateway into smoking, when
all the evidence suggests it’s a floodgate out. The number of
‘never smokers’ who vape remains negligible. I am genuinely baffled
by how hard it is to get medics to understand the concept of harm
reduction: that if people are doing something harmful but hard to
give up, you should encourage them to switch to something much less
harmful that satisfies their urges. They talk of vaping as
‘renormalising smoking’, which makes about as much sense as saying
coffee-drinking renormalises whisky-drinking. It’s denormalising
smoking.

There is a hint that these die-hard prohibitionists are losing
allies, though. The anti-smoking group Ash, the British Heart
Foundation, the Royal College of Physicians and even Cancer
Research UK have come out against the Welsh ban, and effectively in
favour of letting vaping drive out smoking. The penny is
dropping.

Perhaps we should do a controlled experiment. Divide the country
in two. In one part — let’s call it Wales — we regulate
e-cigarettes as medicines, ban their use in enclosed public places,
restrict advertising, ban the sale of refillable versions, and ban
the sale of e-cigarettes stronger than 20 milligrams per
millilitre. All these measures have been urged or are in the
pipeline.

In the other part, England, we leave them as consumer products,
regulated as such, let them be advertised as glamorous, let them be
used on trains and in pubs, allow the sale of refills, allow the
sale of flavoured ones, and allow stronger products. We encourage
their use: the Health Secretary even goes on television to urge
smokers to try them. In which country would the death rate fall
fastest?

Given that there is no evidence that vaping is harmful, that the
toxic contents of vapour are far, far fewer and less abundant than
those of smoke, and that most experts think vaping is a thousand
times safer than smoking, it is a racing certainty that England
would see the better outcome.

Mr Hon now works for Fontem Ventures, a Dutch-based subsidiary
of Imperial Tobacco. (He says he is at last looking forward to
making some serious money from his invention.) The fact that the
tobacco industry has bought up many of the small firms that
dominated the vaping industry in its first decade makes doctors
highly suspicious.

They have hated Big Tobacco for so long that they cannot bring
themselves to believe it might abandon the weed. Their conspiracy
theory is that the tobacco industry is getting hold of this
technology so it can win back society’s support for something that
at least looks like smoking and then — bang! — at the appropriate
moment announce that smoking has become acceptable again. Or
something. It’s that illogical.

Isn’t it much more likely that tobacco executives looked across
at vaping firms a few years ago and realised that if they didn’t
join them they would be beaten by them? It would be their Kodak
moment — like when the huge film firm failed to adapt to the
digital photography revolution and died. It is surely great news if
the tobacco industry turns itself into a nicotine-vapour industry
instead and stops killing people.

 

Post-script. The first comments below the article were
interesting:

I had my first cigarette when I was 10 yrs old. At fifteen
and having left school

and working as an engineering apprentice, I was on 10 a day. By
the

time I married at 26, I was on 40 a day. It stayed that way
for

another 33 yrs with countless failed attempts to quit. Then, in
June

2013, I tried my first e-cig. I've never smoked a proper
cigarette

since. After a year of vaping and gradually reducing the
nicotine

strength, I stopped altogether in July 2014. It was so easy I
still

can't believe it. I don't have any cravings at all. I will
never

smoke again. And it's all thanks to vaping.

another one:

Similar history of smoking...began around 12 and other than a
2weeks abatement in my early20s,continued for 55years..a brain
aneurysm was discovered in January this year and I immediately went
on e-igs...early days I know but 5months without a real roll-up
represents a massive change for me..ok the thought of sudden death
IS a factor...nevertheless(and my fingers are permanently crossed
on this) a day at a time on ecigs has added up.

The Welsh health police really need to just mind their own
business on this..that goes for the other begrudgers..

and the third:

This man should get the Nobel Prize for Science. I have seen so
many smokers switch to ecigs and it made a huge difference in their
lives. Their health improves because they are no longer sucking in
all that smoke and ash. The drive to ban them is totally
insane.

Waterloo or railways

My Times column on the bicentenary of the battle
of Waterloo:

 

In Waterloo week, I confess I am a sucker for
tales of military glory. I cannot get enough of the closing of the
doors of Hougoumont, the charge of the Scots Greys, Wellington’s
use of the reverse slope, the moment when Ney’s Old Guard broke, or
the disappearance of Lord Uxbridge’s leg. Not just Waterloo, but
derring-do in general is often by my bedside: I’ve just finished
reading books on climbing K2 and the Battle of the Bulge; I am up
to speed on seracs and panzers.

But I don’t approve of my own taste. Galloping bravely against
an enemy, in however good a cause, is not the chief way the world
is improved and enriched. The worship of courage as a pre-eminent
virtue, which Hollywood shares with Homer, is oddly inappropriate
today — a distant echo of a time when revenge and power, not
justice and commerce, were the best guarantee of your security.
Achilles, Lancelot and Bonaparte were thugs.

We admire achievements in war, a negative-sum game in which
people get hurt on both sides, more than we do those in commerce,
where both sides win.

The Rothschild skill in trade did at least as much to bring down
Napoleon as the Wellesley skill in tactics. Throughout the war
Nathan Rothschild shipped bullion to Wellington wherever he was,
financing not just Britain’s war effort but also that of its
allies, almost single-handedly. He won’t get much mention this
week.

So I ought to prefer books about business, not bravery, because
boring, bourgeois prudence gave us peace, plenty and prosperity. It
was people who bought low and sold high, who risked capital, set up
shop, saved for investment, did deals, improved gadgets and created
jobs — it was they who raised living standards by ten or twentyfold
in two centuries, and got rid of most child mortality and hunger.
Though they do not risk their lives, they are also heroes, yet we
have always looked down our noses at them. When did you last see an
admirable businessman portrayed in a movie?

Dealing is always better than stealing, even from your enemies.
It’s better than praying and preaching, the clerical virtues, which
do little to fill bellies. It’s better than self-reliance, the
peasant virtue, which is another word for poverty. As the economic
historian Deirdre McCloskey put it in her book The
Bourgeois Virtues: “The aristocratic virtues elevate an I.
The Christian/peasant virtues elevate a Thou. The priestly virtues
elevate an It. The bourgeois virtues speak instead of We”.

We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece
rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots
about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war. “The
history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of
Aryan warrior elites,” wrote the historian of antiquity Thomas
Carney. “But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans, Syrians, and
Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.”

In 1815, a modern Agamemnon landed from Elba, and promised the
Grande Armée a second chance at glory. Had he succeeded, it would
have meant more violence, more plunder and less trade, at least for
a while. Defeating him required wasting huge amounts of blood and
money, limbs and metal. Everybody was worse off as a result. It had
to be done, of course, but it would be better if it had not had to
be done.

Yet in the very same year, 1815, George Stephenson, a humble,
self-taught engine-wright with an impenetrable Geordie accent (to
which he probably gave the name), put together all the key
inventions that — at last — made steam locomotion practicable: the
smooth wheels, counter-intuitively less likely to slip if heavily
laden; the steam-blast into the chimney to accelerate the draught
over the coals; the vertical cylinders connecting directly with the
wheels; the connecting rods between the wheels. A year later came
his redesign of rails themselves, then later his multi-tubular
boiler.

As his biographer, Samuel Smiles, put it:

“Thus, in the year 1815, Mr
Stephenson, by dint of patient and persevering labour . . . had
succeeded in manufacturing an engine which . . . as a mechanical
contrivance, contained the germ of all that has since been
effected. It may in fact be regarded as the type of the present
locomotive engine.”

Suddenly the movement of goods and people fast and cheaply over
long distances became possible for the first time.

Not content with that, in 1815 Stephenson also invented the
miner’s safety lamp (though snobbish London grandees, unable to
conceive that such a humble man could have done so, gave and have
continued to this day to give the credit to Sir Humphry Davy). The
year of Waterloo was an annus mirabilis of the
industrial revolution, putting Britain on course to dominate and
transform the world, whether we beat Boney or not. Steam, followed
by its offspring internal combustion and electricity, would
catapult humankind into prosperity.

Incidentally, there is a tenuous connection between Napoleon and
Stephenson. If Bonaparte’s conquests and the corn laws had not
driven up the price of corn, then horse feed would have been
cheaper and the coal owners who employed Stephenson would not have
risked so much money in letting him build a machine to try to find
a less expensive way to pull wagons of coals from the pithead in
Killingworth to the staithes on the Tyne.

Yet while the great and the good gather at Waterloo this week to
celebrate the 200th anniversary of the battle, few of them will
travel to Killingworth this year. There is no Killingworth station
in London, no Stephenson boots. (In 1814 Stephenson did call his
previous version of the “travelling engine” Blucher. A sculpture of
it stands in Killingworth.)

I do not mean to diss the Duke of Wellington, and it would miss
the point to elevate Stephenson into a mythic hero. For all his
brilliance, his achievements were incremental and collaborative
improvements on the work of others: the work of we, not me. But
Wellington’s way of changing history by killing people — while
sometimes regrettably necessary — is as old as Troy, whereas
Stephenson’s new way, by letting people work productively for each
other, was far more momentous in the end.

Commercial prudence is surely a high virtue, and has delivered
at least as much good as martial spirit, rustic self-reliance or
devout piety have done. It is a pity it does not make for better
books and films.

Ecomodernism and sustainable intensification

My Times column on eco-modernism:

 

In the unlikely event that the G7 heads of state
are reading The Times at breakfast in Schloss
Elmau in Bavaria, may I make a humble suggestion? On their agenda,
alongside Ukraine, Greece, ebola and Fifa, is Angela Merkel’s
insistence that they discuss “sustainability”. The word is usually
shorthand for subsidising things that are not commercially
sustainable, but if they want to make it meaningful, they have a
ready-made communiqué to hand. It comes in the form of
the Ecomodernist Manifesto, a short but
brilliant essay published online recently by 18 prominent greens.
It gets sustainability right at last.

Until now, green thinking has wanted us to go back to nature: to
reject innovations such as genetically modified food, give up
commerce and consumption and energy and materials and live simpler
lives so that nature is not abused and the climate is not wrecked.
The eco-modernists, who include the veteran Californian green
pioneer Stewart Brand and the British green campaigner Mark Lynas,
say this is a mistake. “Absent a massive human die-off, any
large-scale attempt at recoupling human societies to nature using
these [ancestral] technologies would result in an unmitigated
ecological and human disaster.”

Seven billion hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers would
devastate the planet. Seven billion people living mostly in cities
and using plastic, glass, metal and farmed chicken instead of wood,
skins, fur and bushmeat, could actually afford to set aside vast
nature reserves. The ecomodernists say humanity must embrace
technology and growth so as to “shrink its impacts on the
environment to make more room for nature”.

Look around the world. The places with the cleanest rivers, the
cleanest air, the fastest rates of reforestation, the most abundant
and expanding wildlife populations are in rich countries. Wolves,
beavers, deer and raptors are reinvading much of Europe and North
America even as human populations grow and prosper.

In Vancouver last year I watched otters dodging between joggers
in a city park — in a country where they were once hunted almost to
oblivion to make hats and coats. On the islands around Antarctica,
seals, penguins and whales, once driven to the brink of extinction
for their oil (yes even king penguins were hunted so their blubber
could be rendered into oil), are now breeding in vast numbers again
— because we get oil from holes in the ground instead.

Instead of seeking to live in harmony with nature, we should
decouple from nature. The ecomodernists argue that “intensifying
many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction,
forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere
less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human
development from environmental impacts.”

This is anathema to traditional greens, who see growth as the
enemy and who prefer renewable to non-renewable resources.
Actually, renewable resources keep running out; non-renewable ones
do not. When kerosene was invented, sperm whales were suddenly off
the hook (or harpoon), their lamp oil undercut by a non-renewable,
but far more sustainable, resource.

The most striking example of this “sustainable intensification”
is modern farming. By vastly improving yields, we use nearly 70 per
cent less land today to grow a given quantity of food than we did
half a century ago. On present trends we will need less and less
land to feed more and more people during this century. That’s
assuming we stop turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into
motor fuel, in the belief that it is somehow good for the planet,
when all it does is raise food prices and encourage rainforest
destruction.

In some parts of the world, we are already releasing land from
agriculture: much of the Scottish highlands, for instance, no
longer produces food. The home counties of England are dominated by
horseyculture and golf courses. New England was once mostly
farmland; now forest.

Energy was shrinking its footprint nicely, thanks to the shift
from wood, water, wind and whales to fossil fuels and nuclear,
until the green movement came along and told us to use the
landscape for generating power again. Now we are back to cutting
wood from forests and dotting the hills with windmills. Most
renewables, say the ecomodernists, are a mistake because their
footprint is too large.

(The ecomodernists rightly favour nuclear power, but partly
because they think that cutting CO2 emissions is urgent. I
disagree. On current trends — the rate of warming over the past
half century is about 0.12C per decade — it will be about another
century before the world hits the much-vaunted two degree threshold
above pre-industrial temperatures, which is when climate change may
turn damaging.)

Imagine a city on a desert coast at the end of the 21st century.
Its main business is software. Its energy comes from advanced forms
of nuclear power. Its food is grown in multi-storey, hydroponic
factories in the desert, which exclude pests and use sunlight,
LEDs, desalinated water and fertiliser manufactured from the air.
The city’s metal comes from ore; its glass from sand; its plastic
from oil. Its demands on the wild landscapes, free-flowing rivers
and fertile soils of the rest of the planet are virtually nil. All
just about feasible today.

Reconciling environmentalism with crony capitalism often takes
the rather dismal form of getting greedy investors on side with
hefty subsidies for crackpot schemes. Ecomodernism promises
something better: to reconcile environmentalism with innovation and
trade.

The Ecomodernist Manifesto promises a much
needed reformation in the green movement. Its 95 theses should be
nailed to the door of the Vatican when the pope’s green-tinged
encyclical comes out next month, because unlike the typical
eco-wail, it contains good news for the poor. It says: no, we are
not going to stop you getting rich and adopting new technologies
and leaving behind the misery of cooking over wood fires in smoky
huts with no artificial light. No, we do not want you to stay as
subsistence farmers. Indeed, the quicker we can get you into a city
apartment with a car, a phone, a fridge and a laptop, the better.
Because then you won’t be taking wood and bushmeat from the
forest.

The G7 host Angela Merkel says it should be possible to achieve
steady global growth without dangerous climate change, and points
out that Germany has managed to “decouple” economic growth from
greenhouse gas emissions. She is an ecomodernist already.