Warmism versus Science

I have said for some time that there really isn’t any fun in Atheism any more. It’s so fashionable that religious believers are beginning to look like exciting dissidents.  The Churches, meanwhile, have long ago abandoned the thumbscrew and the stake, and have resorted instead to the cup of tea and the biscuit. Approach the average Christian priest or pastor with Atheist sentiments these days, and he (or she) will welcome you with a smile, delighted to find someone who is even interested in God, even if they hate Him and simultaneously say he doesn’t exist. For them, hostility makes a pleasant change from the usual shrugging indifference.

 

If you want to run up against real, hard,  brainless faith-based intolerance, there are other things which offer far more of a challenge. Last week I was subjected to a personal finger-wagging by the new Statesman’s resident Headmaster figure, Peter Wilby (I picture him running one of those alleged Comprehensives, crammed with the children of left-wing middle-class parents who imagine that their  offspring are undergoing  a genuine egalitarian experience) for failing to make any comment on the recent bad weather. The assumption is that, having occasionally wondered if the failure of the temperature to rise casts doubt on the warmist orthodoxy, I have a duty to say that a lot of rain confirms it).

 

 

I then noticed lost of other leftist commentators, scientists, leaders of the opposition and even cartoonists, writing or daubing away on the similar assumption that the current wetness is prima facie evidence that man is wrecking the climate.

 

This is very odd. There is no proof that this is so.  Why have the Warmists exposed their soft underbellies in this daft fashion?  

 

The greatest and most intolerant faith-based orthodoxy of our time  is the movement which propagates and relies on the theory of Anthropogenic Climate Change . On its basis, national governments and supranational bodies, huge companies, schools , universities, local authorities, quangoes and the rest have all embarked on vast, expensive courses of penal taxation, and the construction of startling ineffective means of generating energy without the use of carbon-based fuels. Recently they began to close down perfectly good operational coal-fired power stations in this country (an act mad in itself, but madder still when set beside the unending increase in the use of such coal-fired stations in China, whose carbon emissions pour into the same atmosphere, and cancel out the trivial effects of our self-harming gesture many times over).

 

 

 

This Faith (for such it is) used to be called Global Warming, but had to be rechristened when the Globe stopped getting Warmer. Then it became Man-made Climate Change, but that (I think) turned out to be Sexist. So we have AGW.

 

Now, my own view on this is quite straightforward and reasonable. It is obvious that the climate is changing. It has always done so, as history shows. Whether it has done so in my lifetime, I am not sure. My childhood winters seem to me to have been colder than the ones we get now, and the summers seem to have been wetter. Whether this is because I lived through the Big Freeze of 1962-63, when I lived near the sea and it froze, or whether it is because I spent a lot of my childhood in the famously soggy South-West, or whether it is because I grew up largely deprived of central heating, I don’t know. If your summer holidays took place in Fife, Devon, Cornwall, the Sussex Coast and the Isle of Wight( with one very adventurous trip to Jersey) you would have better reason to recall the disappointments of rainy days. I also remember with extraordinary clarity the unbroken summer of 1959, day after day of temperate blue skies, not too hot thanks to cooling breezes, still in my memory the acme of English summer weather, which I was lucky enough to spend in a high-ceilinged Edwardian house on the edge of the Sussex Downs and close to the sea at West Wittering (later to be made famous by Keith Richard – as he then was – and Marianne Faithfull).

 

But, even if things have changed since then,  does this short period of planetary history betoken a real change? In my Bolshevik days, I  remember being warned against an error called ‘opportunism’. Like most Marxist categories, this is not what it sounds like. It meant, more or less,  mistaking a very gentle curve for a straight line, and assuming that a brief and apparently observable development would continue in the same direction forever.

 

Climates, it seems to me, change over very long periods. You’d have to have a long,  consistent observed pattern to be sure that such a thing was happening, and what its nature was. Even then, another century or two might show you were mistaken about the direction of things. Weather changes hour by hour, and week by week. And we forget it, or remember it wrongly. No doubt the recent heavy rain has been exceptional. But it is not unique (I’m told the winter of 1929-30 was considerably wetter) , and it has an immediate cause (the shifting of the Jetstream) , whose greater cause we do not know. This is similar to the phenomena known as ‘El Nino’ and ‘La Nina’ which have had great effects on weather elsewhere on the planet during the past 20 years or so.

 

So it is just plain silly to call me  a ‘Climate Change denier’, as I don’t deny that climate changes.  It is also a trick and a smear. The trick is to mix up disagreement with a contested theory about causation (a disagreement which I happily acknowledge) with  disagreement with the idea that climate is changing (which I don’t challenge at all). The smear is to equate reasonable disagreement about the validity of a speculative and unproven theory with an evil attempt to pretend that a recorded and undoubted historical event never took place.

 

As the expression ‘denier’ was first used to describe, and for many years used for no other purpose than to describe  those people who do actually deny the known recorded historical fact of the German National Socialist massacre of the Jews between 1942 and 1945, its application to dissenters from an unproven theory is especially repellent and a menace to free thought and speech.

 

The other thing that is going on here is to try to pretend that a majority view among scientists is the same as objective, demonstrable proof. Scientific majorities have repeatedly been wrong, or science would never progress. Every really major discovery in science, from Galileo to Einstein,  has overthrown an orthodoxy held by a majority. It has done so by the compulsory process of disproof of one theory, and the substitution for it of another theory, which is both capable of disproof by future experiment, but has yet to be disproved.  This does not mean that majorities are always wrong. But it does mean that they are not always right, and that they prove nothing in themselves. We don't know what is causing the climate change that we are experiencing. We should not pretend we do, or base policy on speculation.

 

In fact, given the increasing political and commercial pressures on science, and the bizarre admission into the Scientific pantheon of  diluted disciplines such as ‘neuroscience’, the lay person has all the more rightand cause to demand objective testable proof for any statement made in the name of science.