With a 19 December 2007 article in the new Statesman as a starting point, we checked up on the available literature showing there is a contrarian view, indicating many questions haven’t been answered yet.Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice ...A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will spread across the world ... deaths from war and famine run into the millions, until the planet's population is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope. Access to water becomes a major battleground ... Rich areas like the US and Europe would become 'virtual fortresses', to prevent millions of migrants from entering, after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops.
The Observer, 2004(1) This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime. Unless we act now ... these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, 29 October 2006(2)
It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply amoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. The time to act is now.
Gro Harlem Brundtland,9 Mai 2007(3)
Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
George Monbiot, the Guardian, 21 September 2006
Robert Frost, 'Fire and Ice'
It is no secret that in August 2007, Stephen McIntyre demolisher of the 'hockey stick', identified a serious flaw in the programme on which the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, run by Gore's ally James Hansen, based its influential record of US surface temperatures since 1880. The error was so glaring that GISS immediately had to post a revised graph. This showed that the hottest year of the twentieth century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the ten warmest years since 1880, it turned out, four had been in the 1930s, only three in the most recent decade. A leaked briefing to ministers by DTI officials on the cost of complying with the European Council decision in March 2007 that by 2020 the EU must derive 20 per cent of its energy from renewables estimated that this could cost UK electricity users alone an additional 22 billion a year, 2 per cent of GDP (double Stern's estimate for the entire cost for halting global warming). In practice, the officials predicted, this was not remotely achievable anyway. Thirdly, new calculations by Yale's Professor Nordhaus showed that Gore's proposed cuts in greenhouse gas emissions might possibly save $12 trillion (£12,000 billion) - but only at a global cost of $34 trillion, nearly three times as much.But it was as early as 1991 that Aaron Wildavsky, a respected professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, described global warming as 'the mother of all environmental scares,.4
In a way it had all started some 20 years earlier, when a number of scientists and environmentalists, followed by the media, first began to predict that Planet Earth could be facing a disastrous change in its climate.
In December 1972, following a conference of academic scientists at one of the USA's leading universities, its two organizers wrote to warn President Nixon of the strong possibility that the world's climate might be about to go through a change for the worse, by an 'order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind'. 5
'There are ominous signs', reported Newsweek some time later, 'that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically, and that these changes may portend a dramatic decline in food production - with serious implications for just about every nation on earth.6
Newsweek quoted a report by the US National Academy of Sciences that 'a major climactic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale'. The evidence cited for such a change ranged from a two-week shortening since 1950 of the English grain-growing season to 'the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded' in the USA, where, in 1974, '148 twisters killed more than 300 people'.
The science section of Time had already reported on how 'a growing number of scientists', reviewing 'the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years' were beginning to suspect that 'a global climactic upheaval' might be under way.7 The article opened:
In Africa drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the US, Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting ... rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells ... a series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.
The fear they were all expressing, of course, was not that the earth was warming but that it was dangerously cooling. It had been noted that, for more than three decades, average temperatures across the globe had been dropping. As a New York Times headline put it, 'Scientists ponder why world's climate is changing: a major cooling widely considered to be inevitable'. 8 Time reported how 'telltale signs are everywhere - from the unexpected thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo'.
In 1973 Science Digest had run an article headed, 'Brace yourself for another ice age'. This described how, as the earth gradually cooled and the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica grew, winter would eventually last the year round, cities would be 'buried in snow and an immense sheet of ice could cover North America as far south as Cincinnat,.9
For several years the fear of global cooling continued to inspire a spate of articles and books, such as Stephen Schneider's The Genesis Strategy and Climate Change and World Affairs by a British diplomat, Crispin Tickell. The Cooling (1976) by the US science writer Lowell Ponte claimed that 'the cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations'. In 1975 Nigel Calder, a former editor of the New Scientist, wrote that 'the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind' .10
But then, quite suddenly, around 1978, global temperatures began to rise again. The panic over global cooling subsided faster than it had arisen.
There was a simple explanation for this temporary hysteria over cooling in the 1970s. In imagining the future, as we know from the history of science fiction, human beings like to project onto it an exaggerated version of some tendency already evident in their own time. And what scientists were noticing in the 1970s was that, for more than 30 years, the average temperature of the earth had been in decline.
After many decades of rising temperatures in the earlier twentieth century, particularly between 1920 and 1940, the earth had suddenly begun to cool again. In Britain, for 30 years we became used to harsher winters, like those of 1946/7 and 1962/3, when snow remained on the ground for nearly three months between December and March. This phase was to become known to climate scientists as 'the Little Cooling', to distinguish it from the generally higher temperatures in the decades before and after it.
The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing.
And in our own time we now have so many ways of measuring the changes in climate and temperature of the past, from the width of tree rings and organic residues in marine sediments to ice cores dating back hundreds of thousands of years, that we can get a pretty accurate picture of how the earth's temperature has fallen and risen, stretching back to the start of the Ice Age a million years ago and even way beyond.We have become accustomed, for instance, to the idea that we are still living in the period known as 'the Ice Age'. At least four times in the last million years, since the start of the Pleistocene, the world has gone through long periods of freezing so intense that up to 30 per cent of its land surface has been covered in ice, drastically lowering sea levels and reducing much of the remaining land to cold, dry deserts. Although it has long been recognized that there were four major stages of glaciation in the Pleistocene period, these between them contained up to 14 individual glaciations.
These have been punctuated by warmer, interglacial periods, lasting up to 20,000 years before the ice returns. It is in one of these 'interglacial warming’s', that which began around 18,000 years ago, that we are living today. For a general account of temperature and climate changes over the past 10,000 years, based on a wide range of sources, see Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (2007) by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery. Chapter Seven, citing 62 sources, is based on human recorded evidence. Chapter Nine, citing 121 sources, shows how this has been confirmed by a mass of recent physical studies, covering every continent and ocean, using data ranging from pollen and stalagmites to boreholes and tree lines.
By 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently for glaciers to be in retreat and for sea levels to begin rising. Since the end of the last glaciations, the average temperature of the earth has risen by around 8.8 degrees Celsius, and the sea by 300 feet (separating Asia from Alaska 8,000 years ago and Britain from mainland Europe 6,000 years ago).
But this rise in temperature has been far from consistent. Within the general overall rise, there have been marked fluctuations between warmer and cooler times. During the warmest period of man's time on earth, known as the Holocene Maximum or Climate Optimum, roughly between 7000 and 3000 BC, the evidence shows that the world was on average hotter than it is today.
Average temperatures then declined slowly, dropping even more sharply in the three centuries around 700-400 BC, to create what is known as the 'pre-Roman Cold' phase. But this was followed by another rapid rise. Between around 200 BC and the sixth century AD, coinciding with the pre-eminence of Rome, the world enjoyed what is called 'the Roman Warming'. Vine-growing for the first time spread up through Italy into northern Europe, as far as Britain. By the fourth century AD the climate in many parts of the globe was warmer than it is now.11
The Roman Warming came to an abrupt end in the sixth century, coinciding with dramatic meteorological events around AD 540, which were followed by a sharp cooling. This ushered in the cold period of the Dark Ages, lasting more than three centuries. But around AD 900 temperatures again began to rise, leading to the 400-year-Iong period known as 'the Mediaeval Warming'. The Vikings colonized Greenland. Vines returned to Britain. The European civilization of the High Middle Ages flowered, as a new prosperity and spiritual and artistic confidence gave rise to the great Gothic cathedrals. Physical evidence from across the world again indicates that temperatures at the height of the Mediaeval Warming were generally higher than those of the present day.l2
Around 1300, shortly before the Black Death reached Europe in 1347/8, temperatures again began to drop significantly, leading to the four centuries of what is called 'the Little Ice Age'. This became particularly severe after 1550, when average temperatures dropped to their lowest level since the end of the last glaciations.
As usual, there were temporary reversals of the trend. The 1730s in central England, for instance, recorded seven of the eight hottest years since accurate records began to be kept in 1659.13 But in general the Little Ice Age was to last until the early nineteenth century. In human terms we associate the chilling winters of those centuries with the snowscapes of Pieter Brueghel, images of ice fairs on the River Thames and records of the sea freezing for miles around the coasts of Europe and Iceland. Glaciers all over the world advanced dramatically. Greenland became uninhabitable. All this reflected an exceptional period of cooling which has again been confirmed by physical data from all over the world.The last recorded freezing-over of the Thames was in the winter of 1813/14, a year after much of Napoleon's Grande Armee froze to death in the snows of Russia. Slowly, average temperatures again began to rise through the nineteenth century, giving rise to what is known as 'the Modern Warming'.
As always, however, there have been anomalies. A temporary advance of glaciers across the world at the end of the nineteenth century first prompted speculation about the approach of a new ice age, which was to continue on and off for several decades. In 1923, under the front-page headline 'Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada', the Chicago Tribune quoted Professor Gregory of Yale University warning that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes and that huge parts of Asia and Europe would be 'wiped out,.14
In fact already, as we have seen, temperatures in those decades between the two world wars were rising rapidly, faster than in any other phase of the Modern Warming. By the end of the 1920s this too was attracting attention. A US government meteorologist in 1933 noted that 18 of the previous 21 winters in Washington DC had been warmer than normal. In light of this 'widespread and persistent tendency towards warmer weather', he asked, 'is our climate changing?,l5
Within a decade he had an answer: that sharp drop in temperatures which was to lead to nearly four decades of the Little Cooling. But no sooner had this given rise, by the 1970s, to those widespread predictions that the world was fast heading for a new ice age than 'climate-change' again went into reverse. By the 1980s it was obvious that surface temperatures were again quite rapidly rising. Increasingly we began to hear two hitherto generally unfamiliar phrases: 'global warming' and 'the greenhouse effect'.
As early as 1827, the French mathematician and engineer ]osephe Fourier had theorized that the earth's atmosphere plays a crucial part in determining surface temperatures by trapping heat radiated by the sun, thus preventing it from escaping back into space. This 'greenhouse effect' was crucial to the survival of life on earth because, without it, the global average temperature of around 15C would drop to minus 18C, creating an intense, worldwide ice age.16
In 1860 John Tyndall, the Irish physicist, reported that only certain gases in the atmosphere had this invaluable property. As the earth is heated by the sun, the commonest gases, nitrogen and oxygen, do not prevent this heat, in the form of infrared radiation, escaping back into space. But the 'greenhouse gases' do, thus retaining the sun's heat. By far the most important of these greenhouse gases is water vapor, contributing around 95 per cent of the 'greenhouse effect'. This is followed by carbon dioxide (C02) (3.62 per cent); nitrous oxide (0.95 per cent); methane (0.36 per cent) and others, including CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, (0.07 per cent).17
In 1896 the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius attempted to calculate what might be the consequences of mankind continuing to burn vast amounts of fossil fuels, thus adding to the natural quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 was to double, he suggested, this would increase the average temperature by 5°C, equivalent to more than half the warming which had carried the earth from the depths of the last ice age to its present state.
In 1938, inspired by the rapidly rising temperatures of the 1920s and 1930s, a British meteorologist, Guy Callendar, suggested that the cause of this rise might be the marked increase in the burning of coal and oil in the age of mass industrialization, electricity and the motorcar. Far from seeing this as an unqualified disaster, however, he saw it as likely in several ways 'to prove beneficial to mankind'; not least in allowing for greater agricultural production. It might even hold off the return of a new ice age 'indefinitely' .18
What Callendar was recognizing, of course, was that although CO2 makes up only a minuscule proportion of all the gases in the earth's atmosphere - compared with nitrogen, oxygen and the rest it represents a mere 0.04 per cent of the total - it plays an absolutely vital role in the survival of life. Of the estimated 186 billion tons of CO2 that enter our atmosphere each year from all sources, only 3.3 per cent comes from human activity. More than 100 billion tons (57 per cent) is given off by the oceans. Seventy-one billion tons (38 per cent) is breathed out by animals, including ourselves. And on that supply of CO2 depends the survival of the entire plant kingdom, without which the rest of life could not exist.
Trees and all other plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, transforming it by photosynthesis into the oxygen essential to all animal life. And, as Callendar was aware, an increase in CO2 serves to promote plant growth, which was why he foresaw a higher CO2 level as likely to boost human food production.
Scarcely had Callendar made his prediction, however, than the Little Cooling arrived. As temperatures began dropping again, there now seemed little immediate cause for concern over global warming. But the essence of what he and Arrhenius had been saying was not forgotten. This was particularly true when the 1960s saw the rise of the modern environmentalist movement, rooted in a conviction that man's reckless greed in despoiling the planet was threatening to disturb the balance of nature to such an extent that the very survival of life was in doubt.
Even at the height of that 1970s panic over a new ice age, the article cited earlier from the Science Digest ended by quoting two geologists that 'man's tampering with the environment' might lead to the opposite effect: a 'global heatwave' caused by an excess of carbon dioxide emissions. Through 'the so-called "greenhouse effect''', they said, this could lead to such a rise in temperatures that the 'nine million cubic miles of ice covering Greenland and the Antarctic' would melt. The world's sea levels would be raised to such an extent that every coastal city would be flooded.
When, shortly afterwards, measurements showed surface temperatures sharply rising again, all might have seemed set for a revival of the belief that the ever-increasing emissions of CO2 resulting from human exploitation of the planet's resources were about to lead to a wholly unnatural and potentially catastrophic degree of global warming. This belief was reinforced by the findings of a team of American scientists who, for more than 20 years, had been systematically recording the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from a weather station on top of a Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Loa.
Dr Roger Revelle of the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography was an outstanding scientist in his field. He and his colleagues were well aware that, as part of the earth's climatic regulatory system, the oceans not only give out a huge amount of carbon dioxide but also absorb it from the air above them. At the time of the International Geophysical Year in 1957 they had surmised that so much carbon dioxide was now being pumped out by the burning of fossil fuels that there might be too much for the oceans to absorb it all. Might this excess be leading to a gradual build-up of the CO2 in the atmosphere?
To test this theory, Revelle commissioned Dr Charles Keeling and a Scripps team to begin taking detailed readings at Mauna Loa. In 1959, the first year of their study, they measured the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at 316 parts per million (316 ppm). By 1980 this had risen to nearly 340 ppm, an increase of more than 7 per cent in just 20 years. Since even this represented less than one 3,000th of all the gases making up the atmosphere, it might still have seemed insignificant - had not readings based on ice cores taken by the Vostok research station in East Antarctica begun to show that CO2 levels stretching 650,000 years back into the Pleistocene age had been as low as 180 ppm during glaciations, only rising occasionally as high as 300 during interglacial warming’s
.
Furthermore, it seemed widely accepted that, until the late eighteenth century, CO2 levels had for 10,000 years not been higher than around 280 ppm. Only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the ever-increased burning of fossil fuels had this level begun to increase. Now, according to Keeling's researches, it was rising at such a rate that, within a few decades, it might be above 400 ppm. For long periods of geological time, covering some 250 million of the last 600 million years, isotope readings and other evidence indicate that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were far higher than in more recent times, rising as high as 3,000ppm. The last such epoch was in the Jurassic, the 'age of the dinosaurs', between 150 million and 200 million years ago.Here, it seemed, was the 'smoking gun'. The obvious explanation for why CO2 was rising to record levels was the reinforcing of the 'greenhouse effect' by man's unprecedented burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. This created too much CO2 for oceans and plants to absorb the excess. The earth's natural regulatory system was breaking down. The result, as Arrhenius and others had long indicated, was the rise in global temperatures.
Unless urgent and drastic action was taken to curb CO2 emissions, the temperature rise would soon be so great as to unleash catastrophic consequences. The ice caps would melt. Sea levels would rise. Deserts would expand. The world's climate systems would be thrown into chaos. Thus was the fear of 'global warming' born.
There were two striking features of the alarm over global warming which emerged to such prominence around 1988 and 1989. One was the speed with which it became the prevailing orthodoxy of the time. The other was the conviction of its adherents that their case was so self-evident that scientifically it was no longer open to question. To emphasize the transcendent importance of their cause they felt the need to insist repeatedly that it was supported by an overwhelming 'consensus' of scientists.
There was no more dramatic indication of both these points than what followed when, in 1988, responsibility for the collective response of the human race to global warming was assumed by the United Nations. Under the auspices of its World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN set up an 'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change' (IPCC). The purpose of this was threefold: to assess (a) the scientific evidence for climate change; (b) the likely environmental, social and economic impacts of such change; and (c) what should be the political response.
An active lobbyist for the planned IPCC had been the UK's permanent representative at the UN, Sir Crispin Tickell, now an evangelist on global warming (although a decade earlier his book Climate Change And World Affairs had warned of the dangers of global cooling). He had briefed Britain's prime minister Mrs Thatcher on the overriding importance of global warming, although, as a former scientist herself, she was insistent that any political response must be based on 'good science to establish cause and effect' .19 The man chosen to be the first chairman of the IPCC's Working Group was Sir John Houghton, director of the UK's Meteorological Office.
The summer of that year 1988 was unusually hot in the USA. As the topic of the moment, climate change was being discussed in Washington by the Senate Committee on Science, Technology and Space, under its chairman Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.
Gore had first been introduced to global warming at Harvard in the late 1960s, when he attended classes given by Dr Roger Revelle. It was here he first heard of the findings by Revelle's Mauna Loa team that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were sharply rising. One of the witnesses before his committee was James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who said he was virtually certain that world temperatures were rising and that his computer model provided evidence of a man-made 'greenhouse effect,.20
Inconclusive though Hansen's evidence was, his testimony was warmly welcomed by Gore and widely publicized; unlike that of Lester Lave, a professor of economics, who received short shrift for his suggestion that the issue of global warming was still 'controversial'; i.e. that not all scientists were agreed on it. Lave was so surprised to be thus dismissed by Gore's committee that he wrote to one of America's leading climate scientists, Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to check that he was right. Lindzen confirmed that the case for global warming was not only 'controversial' but also, in his own view, implausible.21
In 1992 Lindzen was to write an informal paper recalling the extraordinary pressure which had built up in the late 1980s to convey the idea that there was 'scientific consensus' on global warming. He described how fervently the cause had been taken up at that time by environmental lobby groups, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Defence Fund, with 'budgets of several hundred million dollars' and whose support was 'highly valued by many political figures', such as Gore.
In 1989 a group known as the 'Union of Concerned Scientists', originally formed to campaign for nuclear disarmament and now campaigning against nuclear power, organized a petition urging for the recognition of global warming as potentially the greatest danger faced by mankind. Of the eventual 700 signatories, including Nobel laureates and many members of the National Academy of Sciences, 'only about three or four' were climatologists (at the 1990 meeting of the National Academy, the president went out of his way to warn members against 'lending their credibility to issues about which they had no special knowledge').
The cause became equally fashionable among leading figures in Hollywood and show business. In the summer of 1989 Robert Redford hosted a much-publicized seminar on global warming at his Sundance Ranch in Utah, proclaiming that it was time to 'stop researching and begin acting' (as Lindzen commented, this might have seemed a 'reasonable suggestion for an actor to make'). Barbra Streisand pledged financial support to the work of the Environmental Defence Fund. Meryl Streep appealed on television for global warming to be halted.Although, with such interest from the UN and politicians, there was suddenly a great deal of public money available for research into climate change, it soon became clear that projects that cast any doubt on global warming were not popular. Lindzen recalled how, in the winter of 1989, the National Science Foundation had withdrawn funding from one of his MIT colleagues, Professor Reginald Newell, when his data analyses failed to show that the previous century had seen a net warming ('reviewers suggested that his results were dangerous to humanity'). At the same time Lindzen was surprised, when invited to a seminar on global warming at another university, to find he was the only scientist on a panel of 'environmentalists'. 'There were strident calls for immediate action and ample expressions of impatience with science.' A Congresswoman from Rhode Island acknowledged that 'scientists may disagree, but we can hear Mother Earth, and she is crying'.
Lindzen himself submitted a critique of the global warming thesis to Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His article was rejected as being of 'no interest' to its readership, although Science then proceeded to attack his unpublished paper in print. Although it was eventually published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the editor made 'a determined effort to solicit rebuttals', including an attack by Stephen Schneider (another prominent global warming campaigner who ten years earlier had been warning of global cooling).
Letters from the Bulletin's readers, however, were predominantly skeptical of the case being made for 'anthropogenic' or man-made global warming. Indeed a subsequent Gallup poll of climate scientists belonging to the American Meteorological Society and the American Physical ,union showed that no fewer than 49 per cent rejected anthropogenic warming. Only 18 per cent thought that some warming was caused by man, and 33 per cent didn't know.
As one of the world's most distinguished climatologists, Lindzen's own doubts about the global warming thesis were profound. He did not deny that limited warming had taken place in the twentieth century, or that CO2 in the atmosphere had risen. But he believed that the computer models used by the global warming advocates to make their case were much too crude. By failing to appreciate the subtle complexities and interactions of the earth's climatic system, their findings were demonstrably misleading.
In particular, by concentrating their attention on CO2 and other man-made contributions to greenhouse gas, they had tended to overlook or to misjudge the part played by water vapor, by far the most important greenhouse gas of all, comprising all but a tiny fraction of the total. They had also failed to allow for the 'negative feedback' effect of cloud-cover.22 In both these respects, the computer models had 'neither the physics nor the numerical accuracy' to come up with findings which were not 'disturbingly arbitrary'. Put these two factors properly into the equation, argued Lindzen, and it could be seen that the 'greenhouse effect' caused by rising CO2 levels had been wildly overstated. What was more, this could be demonstrated by running those same computer models retrospectively, to 'predict' where temperatures should have been throughout the twentieth century.
It became glaringly obvious that these over-simplified programmes failed to explain the actual variations, which had taken place in twentieth-century temperature levels. In the 1920s and 1930s, when greenhouse gas emissions were comparatively low, temperatures had sharply risen. But in the very years when emissions were rising most steeply, during the Little Cooling between the 1940s and the 1970s, temperatures were in decline.
In fact, the assumptions on which the models were based would have led them to predict a twentieth-century warming four times greater than the rise that had been actually recorded (with most of that rise taking place before atmospheric CO2 had reached anything like its present level). On this basis, how could any trust now be placed in their attempts to estimate future rises?Clearly some significant factors were getting missed out by the modellers as they made their extravagant predictions of future warming. But the campaigners were already becoming distinctly impatient with 'climate skeptics’, such as Lindzen, who dared question their thesis. They were attacked in books and in a long article in the New York Times by Senator Gore, who compared 'true believers' such as himself to Galileo, bravely standing for the truth against the blind orthodoxy of his time. And in 1990 the global warming advocates won their most powerful support of all when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced its 'First Assessment Report' (FAR).
Over the years ahead the IPCC, through a succession of such reports, was to become the central player in the debate. As this initial report exemplified, these emerged from an elaborate two stage process. The first involved compiling a three-part scientific report, under the main headings of the IPCC's agenda: assessment of climate change, assessment of its impact, and recommendations for action. This technical report was compiled by three working groups, made up of many different scientists, economists and experts of every kind. These 'authors' contributed to a series of 'chapters', under the guidance of 'lead authors' and a 'lead chapter author'. The resulting draft was then circulated to hundreds of 'expert reviewers' throughout the world for comment.
The second stage was the drafting of a 'Summary for Policymakers', under the direction of the IPCC working group's chairman Sir John Houghton. This began with the submission of the technical report to governments, each of which could insist on changes. The result, as soon became apparent, was that the 'Summary for Policymakers' often became significantly different in key respects from the main technical report itself, although it was the Summary which would be most widely read, publicized and quoted.The way this was to work in practice was illustrated by the IPCC's first report. The Summary for Policymakers began by saying virtually everything the advocates of global warming could have hoped for. The IPCC was 'certain' that there was a 'greenhouse effect', enhanced by 'emissions from human activities'. It was 'confident' that the increase in CO2 alone had been 'responsible for over half the enhanced greenhouse effect', and that this would 'require immediate reductions in emissions from human activities of over 60 percent to stabilize their concentrations at today's levels'.
'Based on current models', the Summary predicted that, unless action was taken, global mean temperatures would increase through the twenty-first century by between 0.2 and O.SOC per decade. This was an increase greater than any 'seen in the past 10,000 years'. Over the previous 100 years, it found, surface temperatures had increased by between 0.3 and 0.6. It was thus now predicting a roughly similar increase every ten years.
Hence the need for such drastic action. The Summary did go on to admit, however, that this twentieth century increase could have been 'largely due to natural variability'. This appeared to contradict its earlier claim that increased CO2 was responsible for half the increase in greenhouse warming. To make the picture still more confused, the Summary hastened to add that natural and 'other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming'. Finally the Summary conceded that to reach an 'unequivocal' view of the 'enhanced greenhouse effect' would not be possible for 'a decade or more'.
These ambiguities were at least in part explained by comparing the Summary with the hundreds of pages of the main report. Here the findings of the technical experts were often much more cautious and even contradictory, supporting nothing like so straightforward a set of conclusions as the Summary tried to suggest. As Lindzen was to comment:
The report as such has both positive and negative features. Methodologically, the report is deeply committed to reliance on large models, and within the report models are largely verified by comparison with other models. Given that models are known to agree more with each other than with nature (even after 'tuning'), that approach does not seem promising. In addition a number of the participants have testified to the pressure put on them to emphasise results supportive of the current scenario and to suppress other results. That pressure has frequently been effective, and a survey of participants reveals substantial disagreement with the final report.
Lindzen went on to underline the startling contrast between the scientific report and the Policymakers Summary, written, as he said, 'by the editor Sir John Houghton':
His summary largely ignores the uncertainty in the report and attempts to present the expectation of substantial warming as firmly based science.23Another academic critic similarly observed how 'comments that were not welcomed by the main authors stood little chance of being considered seriously'.24 He went on to quote Houghton himself confirming this, in admitting that:
whilst every attempt was made by the lead authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus.25
Genuine consensus or no, the IPCC's report had given the global warming campaign tremendous momentum. Its most dramatic consequence came two years later in 1992, with a proposal that the world's governments should meet in Rio de Janeiro for an 'Earth Summit'.
Frenzied lobbying by environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, ensured that 20,000 activists from all over the world were destined to meet in Rio at the same time. This evidence of remarkable popular support ensured that politicians from 170 countries arrived in Rio, including no fewer than 108 prime ministers and presidents.
While most of the activists staged a giant rally nearby, known as the 'Non-governmental Organization Forum', 2,400 of them were invited to the main conference itself, to cheer on the politicians as they signed a 'Framework Convention on Climate Change'. This was a voluntary agreement that CO2 emissions by the year 2000 would be no higher than they had been in 1990. The intention was that this should soon be replaced by a series of 'protocols', setting mandatory targets for curbing emissions of all greenhouse gases (the first was to be agreed at Kyoto five years later),26
For the campaigners on global warming this was a heady moment. No one was more eager to exploit it than Al Gore, as he stepped down from the US Senate to become the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate alongside Bill Clinton.
Gore had now made his stand on climate change the defining issue of his political career. In his bid to become the Democrats' nominee, he had published a book, Earth In The Balance. Like much of his environmental writing, this was interspersed with personal reminiscences. One of the more important moments in his life, he recalled, was how he had been introduced to the cosmic significance of climate change at Harvard by Dr Revelle, father of the research project which had given the world those epoch-making figures on the rise in carbon emissions.
Gore seemed unaware that Revelle had for some time been taking a rather more cautious line on the panic over global warming than fitted in with his own agenda. In that summer of 1988 when Gore was conducting his Senate hearings on climate change, Revelle had written to several members of Congress urging that any action on global warming should be delayed, since not enough was yet known about the workings of the climate. 27
In 1990, at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Revelle presented a paper on the theory that seeding the world's oceans with nutrients such as iron filings would stimulate the growth of plankton, thus increasing marine absorption of CO2. After the lecture he was approached by an old friend, Fred Singer, professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and formerly the first director of the US National Satellite Weather Service. Next day the two men met to discuss writing an informal paper together on global warming, later inviting Dr Chauncey Starr, an expert on energy, to join them.
Singer drafted the paper, which, after discussion, was submitted to a new, small-circulation journal, Cosmos. When he and Revelle met to discuss the proofs, Revelle expressed scepticism about computer climate models (Singer tried to assure him that within ten years they would be greatly improved). After they had agreed several amendments, the article was published in April 1991, entitled 'What to Do About Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap'. The article's main conclusion, echoing the views that Revelle had expressed earlier in his letters to Congressmen, was that the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses.
The article attracted little attention at the time. Three months later, professionally active to the end of his life, Revelle died aged 82. Later that year Singer was invited to contribute to a book on global warming and, being busy, suggested that the article be republished.
The following summer, when Gore was running hard for the vice-presidential nomination, an article in Newsweek contrasted his reference to Revelle in his new book with the conclusion of the article Revelle had co-authored in Cosmos. This was picked up elsewhere in the media and even later raised in a televised election debate. Gore angrily protested that Revelle's views had been 'taken completely out of context'.
In the middle of this embarrassing coverage, Singer was called by one of Gore's associates, Dr Justin Lancaster of Harvard University, insisting that Revelle's name be removed from the article. When told this would not be possible, Lancaster persisted in his request, suggesting that Revelle had not really co-authored the article and that his name had only been included 'over his objections'. He claimed that Singer had pressured an old man when he was sick, with his mental capacities failing.
Similar accusations were made by a member of Gore's staff to the publishers of the book in which the article was shortly to be reprinted, with a demand that it be dropped. When these allegations were repeated, in April 1993, by which time Gore had become US vice-president, Singer sued Lancaster for libel. In the course of legal discovery, Lancaster revealed that he had been rung by Gore after the Newsweek article appeared, asking about Revelle's mental capacity at the end of his life. He now agreed that Revelle had in fact been 'mentally sharp to the end'. He also admitted that Revelle had shown him the article before it was published, observing that there did not seem to be anything in it that 'was not true', and that 'it was honest to admit the uncertainties about greenhouse warming'. These last details emerged from a computer disk containing a draft letter sent by Lancaster to Gore (Singer, 'The Revelle-Gore Story' (2003).
This was not the first occasion on which Gore had been associated with attempts to distort or suppress the views of those who disagreed with him. In one of the last of the hearings of the Senate committee he chaired, Professor Lindzen had appeared as a witness. In the course of arcane exchanges about the role of water vapour in the upper troposphere, Lindzen admitted he had now had to revise a point he had argued two years earlier about the effect of water vapour from clouds. Subsequent research had shown that another process, probably ice crystals from the clouds, must also be involved (even though this did not alter the overall effect).
Gore picked up Lindzen's admission that he had changed his mind, asking whether he was now rejecting what he had said two years earlier. When Lindzen agreed, Gore called for the recording secretary to note that Professor Lindzen had 'retracted his objections to global warming' .28
Others present assured Gore that Lindzen had done nothing of the kind and that he was confusing matters. But soon afterwards, in the New York Times, Tom Wicker, a prominent journalistic ally of Gore's, repeated the charge that Lindzen had retracted his opposition to global warming. Lindzen tried to correct this with a letter, which was eventually, more than a month later, published. But this did not prevent Gore from repeating the claim yet again in his book, despite Lindzen's attempt to set the record straight. This was not the first time Wicker had been involved in similarly rewriting history. A year earlier Robert White, former head of the US Weather Bureau, had written an article for the Scientific American suggesting that the scientific basis for global warming predictions was totally inadequate to justify any costly actions. The only actions that should be taken were those which would be justified even if there was no warming threat. Wicker reported this in the New York Times as a call by White for immediate action on global warming (Lindzen, 'Global Warming' (1992).
In February 1994, an ABC News presenter, Ted Koppel, revealed on his Nightline programme that Vice-President Gore had rung him to suggest that he expose the political and economic forces behind the 'anti-environmental movement'. Gore had urged him to expose the fact that several US scientists who had voiced sceptical views about global warming were receiving money from the coal industry and other dubious interests.
Such charges were to become an only too familiar feature of the debate. Any prominent scientist who dared to challenge the global warming orthodoxy would be likely to face accusations that he was funded by energy firms, 'Big Oil' or even the tobacco industry. Singer himself would be vilified in this way for having participated with Fred Seitz, a distinguished former president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a report criticizing the EPA's efforts to demonize passive smoking. The report's authors were described as 'corrupt' for having 'received funding through ideological partners of the tobacco companies'.
Not only did Koppel call Gore's bluff by reporting their conversation on air, he observed that there was;
some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore - one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century -(is) resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis. The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientists nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that works.Gore's attempt to use a leading news programme to denigrate his opponents in this way provoked such political embarrassment that, shortly afterwards, Lancaster settled his case with Singer by issuing a full retraction and apology. Twelve years later, in 2004, Lancaster issued a full 'retraction' of his 'retraction' on a website . He omitted, however, any reference to the evidence that had come to light during the discovery process of the legal action. This included his admission that Revelle had told him that he agreed with the main point the article sought to make: that the science on global warming was not yet sufficiently settled to justify drastic action.
One bid to promote the illusion of 'consensus' had failed. But it was now to be followed by another, very much more public, and conceived on an altogether grander scale.
By the mid-1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration had become closely involved in pushing America's energy interests across the world. In particular it was close to the new Texas-based energy giant, Enron, a significant contributor to Democratic Party funds. Washington supported Enron with $4 billion of federal loans, and supported the company's bids for a series of huge contracts to open up new oil and gas fields and to build power stations and pipelines in India, Russia, China, the Philippines, South America and Africa.
Gore took a close interest in some of these projects. In particular, in December 1995, he was reported as visiting South Africa to lobby the country's new president, Nelson Mandela, on behalf of Enron's bid to develop a large new gas field in Mozambique.
The Vice-President had not, however, lost his interest in the battle against global warming, and his visit to South Africa coincided with final political agreement being given to the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be launched in May the following year."
The second IPCC report (SAR) went rather further than the first in endorsing an anthropogenic explanation for global warming. The biggest headlines were reserved for its claim that 'the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate'. These words were to be quoted more often than any others in the report. But the story behind how they came to be included in the Summary for Policy Makers was curious.29
The source of this sentence was given as Chapter Eight of the technical report, the 'lead author' of which was Ben Santer, a relatively junior scientist working for the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This included much the same wording: that 'the body of statistical evidence' now 'points to a discernible human influence on the global climate'.
When the report containing these sentences was published, however, the scientific reviewers who had signed off the technical chapters the previous year were dismayed. These words had not appeared in the draft they had formally approved. It seemed they had been added subsequently, by the 'lead authon' himself. Santer had also, it emerged, deleted a number of key statements from the agreed text, all of which reflected serious scientific doubt over the human contribution to global warming. They included these passages:
- None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.
- No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change observed) to (man-made) causes.
- Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties. in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.
- When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is 'We do not know'.
All these sentences had been deleted from the original version. What was particularly odd about the new additions to the text was that the only source cited in support of them appeared to be two papers co-authored by Santer himself, which had not yet been published. That much-cited claim about 'discernible human influence on climate change' was based on what were known as 'fingerprinting studies'. These compared the patterns of climate change predicted by computer models with changes actually observed in the real world. Where these coincided (or displayed the same 'fingerprint'), this was taken as evidence that the computer model was correct.30
However, when Santer and several colleagues published their first, all-important paper, two other scientists, Dr Patrick Michaels and a colleague, examined their evidence. They were surprised to discover that its conclusions in favor of global warming had been based only on part of the data. The supposed 'fingerprinting' parallel between the computer models and observed data applied only to the years between 1943 and 1970. When the full set of data was used, showing earlier years going back to 1905 and later years after 1970, the warming trend claimed by Santer and his colleagues disappeared.31
This was surprising enough, in view of the significance attached to Santer's revised wording of Chapter Eight by the Summary for Policymakers and in all the publicity which followed. The realization that a comparatively junior contributor could have been allowed to make such a crucial change after the scientific text had been formally approved, gave rise to quite an uproar.
Even Nature, which published the Santer paper, was not happy about the rewriting of Chapter Eight to 'ensure that it conformed' with the Summary. The Wall Street Journal expressed outrage, both in an editorial ('Cover-up in the Greenhouse'),32 and in an excoriatory article by Frederick Seitz, the much-respected former president of the National Academy of Sciences, headed 'Major Deception on Global Warming,33
Just as surprising, however, was the sequence of events that, it seemed, had preceded these changes to the text. Just before the wording of the report was finalized in December 1995, there had been a 'plenary' gathering in Madrid, attended by politicians and officials from 96 nations and representatives of 14 non-governmental organizations. Their task had been to go through the 'accepted' text line by line.
Shortly before this, as later emerged, the IPCC working group's chairman, and lead editor Sir John Houghton, had received a letter from the State Department in Washington, dated 15 November. This read:
It is essential that the chapters not be finalized prior to the completion of the discussions at the IPCC Working Group I Plenary in Madrid, and that chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner following the discussion in Madrid.34The senior official who gave this instruction, that chapter authors should be 'prevailed upon to modify their text', worked with Timothy Wirth, the Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs. Not only was Wirth an ardent advocate of global warming. He was a close political ally of Vice-President Gore.35
The chief purpose of the second IPCC report was to provide the underpinning for a major international conference, to be held the following year in Japan. Its purpose, based on the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change, was to agree the first 'Protocol' which would lay the practical foundations for humanity's response to the global warming crisis.
The most obvious feature of the long and complex discussions which preceded this treaty, involving 160 countries, was a split between the industrialized countries, mainly in the northern hemisphere, held to have been responsible for most 'greenhouse forcing' up to this time, and the still-developing countries of the Third World. These were adamant that they could not be made to accept restrictions on their economic growth which would prevent them catching up with the developed world.
In these fraught negotiations Gore played a very active role. But he had something of a setback in the summer of 1997 when, on 21 July, the US Senate voted by 95 to 0 for a resolution opposing the proposed Protocol. This was precisely on the grounds that it was to be so damagingly one-sided. For it was now proposed that the already developed countries, led by the USA, would have to accept very severe restrictions on their greenhouse gas emissions, while still developing countries, such as China and India, would be excluded, even though their economies were now growing so fast that they would soon be major CO2 contributors.
If such a treaty left out the Third World, the Senate observed, the reductions required of the industrialized world would be so great that this would 'result in serious harm to the US economy, including significant job loss, trade disadvantages, increased energy and consumer costs'.
Despite the likelihood that the world's leading economic power would not participate, the planned treaty remained on course. On 8 December 1997, representatives of 160 countries gathered in Japan to agree the 'Kyoto Protocol'. They were addressed at the start of the conference by Vice-President Gore. He told his vast audience:
Since we gathered at the Rio Conference in 1992, both scientific consensus and political will have come a long way. If we pause for a moment and look around us, we can see how extraordinary this gathering really is. We have reached a fundamentally new stage in the development of human civilization, in which it is necessary to take responsibility for a recent but profound alteration in the relationship between our species and our planet.'The most vulnerable part of the Earth's environment', Gore went on:
is the very thin layer of air clinging near to the surface of the planet, that we are now so carelessly filling with gaseous wastes that we are actually altering the relationship between the Earth and the Sun - by trapping more solar radiation under this growing blanket of pollution that envelops the entire world ... Last week we learned from scientists that this year, 1997, with only three weeks remaining, will be the hottest year since records have been kept. Indeed, nine of the ten hottest years since the measurements began have come in the last ten years. The trend is clear. The human consequences - and the economic costs - of failing to act are unthinkable. More record floods and droughts. Diseases and pests spreading to new areas. Crop failures and famines. Melting glaciers, stronger storms, and rising seas."Inspired by Gore's vision, delegates proceeded to agree the Protocol at had been hammered out through those months of hard negotiation. Signatories could begin ratifying the treaty from larch the following year.
The Kyoto Protocol applied to all those industrialized countries listed in its Annex I (including Russia and its former satellites). These countries agreed, by 2008-12, to reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 per cent of their 1990 levels. Because their emissions levels would otherwise have increased, the true effect of these restrictions was estimated as equivalent to a cut by 2010 of 29 per cent.
Still developing countries, such as China and India, would not : bound by the agreement, however rapidly their own CO2 emissions might be increasing. Some industrialized countries would permitted to increase their emissions (Australia, for instance, by per cent). The substantial emissions from international aviation ld shipping were excluded from the agreement. And the Protocol would come into force only when it had been ratified by enough developed countries to have accounted in 1990 for 55 per cent of e world's CO2 emissions.
Just how these targets were to be achieved, no one as yet had any al idea. It would be up to each country to work out its own way to meet them. But Kyoto also introduced the idea of 'emissions trading', thereby countries or firms that were failing to meet their reduction targets could buy 'carbon credits' from those which had already more than met them, thus offsetting 'failures' against 'successes'.
One of the most obvious intended consequences of Kyoto was discourage the use of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, and to promote a switch to those energy sources which do not emit greenhouse gases, such as 'renewables' (wind, wave, solar and hydro). Nuclear power also offered a much more effective source
large-scale 'carbon free' energy than any of them. But most of the proponents of Kyoto were strongly opposed to it, since they viewed it as potentially 'polluting the planet' in a different way, by creating dangerous wastes.Revealingly, no official attempt was made to put a figure on just how much all this was going to cost the economies of the developed world. But in a study funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, William Nordhaus, a Yale University economics professor, estimated the cost of the first phase of Kyoto emissions reductions at $716 billion. Two thirds of that would fall on the USA, as the world's leading CO2 'polluter'. But this would only be the case if the USA agreed to participate, which, in light of that Senate vote, seemed highly unlikely.36
In terms of 'saving the planet', what would all this achieve? It was generally agreed, even by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol, that, even if all its targets for emissions reductions were met, the resulting reduction in global temperatures by 2050 would be equivalent only to 0.05C, or one twentieth of a degree.37 By the year 2100, it was estimated, Kyoto in full would have delayed the process of warming by a mere six years.
Recognizing this, global warming campaigners expressed disappointment that the targets had not been tougher. But they rested their hopes on the prospect of very much more drastic emissions reductions being agreed in a new 'Kyoto Two' protocol after 2012.For Gore's 'consensus', it had overall been quite an achievement. To up the ante still further, however, what was to follow was one of the most bizarre examples of the politicization of science in history.
Although it had long seemed peculiarly important to the global warming lobbyists to insist that their beliefs were supported by that 'scientific consensus', it was not always easy to see the evidence for this.
In 1996, for instance, the UN Climate Change Bulletin had reported on a survey of 400 American, Canadian and German climate researchers. When asked whether it was 'certain that global warming is a process already underway', only 10 per cent were prepared to express 'strong' agreement. Nearly half those surveyed, 48 per cent, said they didn't have faith in the forecasts of the global climate models.38 In 1997, a survey of climatologists employed by the 50 states of the USA found 90 per cent agreeing that 'scientific evidence indicates variations in global temperature are likely to be naturally occurring and cyclical over very long periods of time'. 39
One of the most awkward problems confronting those who wanted to link human activity with a sudden dramatic rise in global temperatures was how to explain that mass of evidence from every kind of historical and scientific source that there had been similarly dramatic fluctuations in temperature in the past, before man began adding to greenhouse gases. Particularly hard to explain was why temperatures during the Mediaeval Warming should have been higher than they now were at the end of the twentieth century.
Even the first two IPCC scientific reports had accepted this as not open to question, each showing a graph which reflected the received scientific view of how the world's climate had changed over the past 1,000 years. This showed temperatures during the Mediaeval Warming higher than those of the 1990s; falling steeply during the Little Ice Age; rising again in the nineteenth century with the Modern Warming; then falling during the Little Cooling between 1940 and 1975, just when CO2 levels had been rising sharply.
The warming enthusiasts, anxious to emphasize the influence of human activity on climate, tried to explain this last point by arguing that the warming effect of rising CO2 emissions had been masked during the Little Cooling by the 'dimming' effect of tiny aerosol particles produced by sulphur dioxide emissions from power stations burning coal and oil. These, they claimed, had shut out enough sunlight to counteract the effect of the increase in greenhouse gases. But, as even the IPCC was to accept in its next report, most of these aerosols were emitted in the northern hemisphere, which should have meant that, while its temperatures fell, the southern hemisphere continued to warm. Yet the Little Cooling had been experienced worldwide, showing no distinction between north and south. The third IPCC report accepted that between 1900 and 1940 the world had warmed by OAoC, that between 1940 and 1975 it had cooled by 0.2C (the Little Cooling), and that from 1975 onwards it had warmed again by OAoC, thus giving an overall warming trend for the twentieth century of 0.6C.
A much larger problem to explain away were those fluctuations in temperature which had occurred in earlier times. And here in 1998 the whole debate was suddenly, dramatically transformed by a new scientific study. Its chief author was Michael Mann, a young physicistcturned-climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts, who hag only just completed his PhD.
Mann published in Nature a paper on temperature changes over the previous 600 years.40 In 1999 he and his colleagues published a further paper, extending their original findings to over 1,000 years.41 These had enabled them to produce a new temperature graph quite unlike anything seen before. Instead of the rises and falls shown in previous graphs, this one showed the average temperature having scarcely fluctuated at all through nine centuries. But it then suddenly shot up at the end, to by far its highest level ever recorded.
In Mann's graph such familiar features as the Mediaeval Warming and the Little Ice Age had simply disappeared. All those awkward anomalies were shown as having been illusory. The only real fluctuation that emerged from their studies was that sudden exponential rise appearing in the twentieth century, culminating in the 'warmest year of the millennium', 1998.There were several very odd features about Mann's new graph, soon to be known as the 'hockey stick' because of its shape, a long straightish line curving up sharply at the end.42 But none was odder than the speed with which this, on the face of it, very obscure study by an unknown young scientist came to be adopted as the new 'orthodoxy' .
Within twelve months Mann's complete rewriting of climate science had become the major talking point of the global warming debate. In 2000, it was featured at the top of a major new report published by the US government, the US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change.
In the following year, 2001, when the IPCC's 'Working Group l' (still chaired by Houghton) published its 'Third Assessment Report' (TAR), Mann's 'hockey stick' was promoted even more dramatically. Not only was it printed at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers; elsewhere in the report, it was printed four more times, sometimes occupying half a page. The old graphs included in the IPCC's previous 1990 and 1996 reports, showing the Mediaeval Warming and the Little Ice Age, had vanished. Like those articles in The Times rewritten by Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, they had been blotted out of the record.
Mann was the hero of the moment. He had been made an IPCC 'lead author' and an editor of the prestigious Journal of Climate Change. He was besieged by the media. But then some rather serious questions began to be asked about the basis for his study.For a start, although he cited other evidence for his computer modeling of historical temperatures, it became apparent that he had leaned particularly heavily on data provided by a study five years earlier of tree rings in ancient bristlecone pine trees growing on the slopes of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. According to the 1993 paper, these had shown significantly accelerated growth in the years after 1900. But the purpose of this original study had not been to research into past temperatures. As its title made clear, it had been to measure the effect of increased CO2 levels in the twentieth century on the trees' growth rate.43
As the authors had specifically pointed out, temperature changes could not account for the faster growth of these long-established trees. It must have been due to the fertilizing effect of the increase in CO2, The pine trees had been chosen for study because their position, high up on the mountains, made it likely that they would exhibit an unusually marked response to CO2 enrichment.
Tree rings are a notoriously unreliable reflector of temperature changes, because they are chiefly formed during only one short period of the year, and cannot therefore give a full picture. This 1993 study of one group of trees in one untypical corner of the USA seemed a remarkably flimsy basis on which to base an estimate of global temperatures going back 1,000 years. Mann and his colleagues did at least seem in small part to acknowledge this when, in the title of their second paper, the phrase 'Global-scale temperature patterns' was changed to 'Northern hemisphere temperatures’.
Then there was Mann's unqualified acceptance of the recent temperature readings given by hundreds of weather stations across the earth's surface, which helped confirm the widely received view that temperatures in the closing years of the twentieth century were soaring to unprecedented levels, culminating in the record year 1998. But this picture was already being questioned by many expert scientists who pointed to evidence that readings from surface stations were becoming seriously distorted by the 'heat island effect'. The majority of such stations were in the proximity of large and increasingly built-up population centers. It was well established that these heated up the atmosphere around them to a significantly higher level than in more isolated locations.
Nowhere was this better illustrated than by contrasting the temperature readings taken on the earth's surface with those which, since 1979, had been taken by NASA satellites and weather balloons, using a method developed by Dr Roy Spencer, responsible for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Center, and Dr John Christie of the University of Alabama. Surprisingly, the readings showed that, far from warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century, global temperatures had in fact slightly cooled.44 As Spencer was at pains to point out, these avoided the distortions created in surface readings by the heat island effect. The reluctance of the IPCC to take proper account of this, he observed, confirmed the suspicion of 'many scientists involved in the process' that the IPCC's stance on global warming was 'guided more by policymakers and politicians than by scientists,.45
There was nothing the IPCC welcomed more in Mann's 'hockey stick' than the way it showed the line hurtling upwards at the end, to portray 1998 as having been 'the hottest year in history'. But, as many scientists had predicted at the time, 1998 was likely to be exceptionally warm because of the unusually strong '£1 Nino' of that year: the result of air currents in the Pacific failing to replace warm surface water off the western coast of America with colder water, which invariably results in warming over a large area of the earth's surface.
What was also remarkable about the 'hockey stick', as was again widely observed, was how it contradicted all that mountain of evidence which supported the generally accepted picture of temperature fluctuations in past centuries. As was pointed out, tree rings are not the most reliable guide to assessing past temperatures. There were scores of more direct sources of evidence from Africa, South America, Australia, Pakistan, Antarctica - almost every continent and ocean of the world. One of the first attempts to summarize this, in response to the 'hockey stick' thesis, was a paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, published in the journal Climate Research in January 2003. After reviewing 240 different studies, they reported that, according to the balance of evidence, the twentieth century had not been the warmest period of the last millennium. This enraged the global warming lobby, provoking a major internal row that resulted in half the journal's ten editors resigning. An account by one of them, Clare Goodess of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, is published on the website of SGR (Scientists for Global Responsibility).
Whether evidence was taken from lake sediments or ice cores, glaciers in the Andes or boreholes in Greenland, the results had been remarkably consistent in confirming that the familiar view was right. There had been a Little Ice Age, all across the world. There had similarly been a Mediaeval Warming. Furthermore, a mass of data confirmed that the world had been even warmer in the early Middle Ages than it was in 1998.46
If Mann and his colleagues had got it hopelessly wrong, nothing did more to ram this home than a study carried out in 2003 by two Canadian outsiders: Stephen McIntyre, a financial consultant on minerals, and Ross McKitrick, an academic economist. They might not have been climate scientists but they knew something about using computers to play around with statistics. They were also wearily familiar with people using hockey stick-like curves, showing an exaggerated upward rise at the end, to sell a business prospect or to 'prove' some tendentious point.
McIntyre and McKitrick approached Mann and his colleagues to ask for their original study data. This was eventually, with some difficulty, provided, but 'without most of the computer code used to produce their results', suggesting that no one else had previously asked to examine it, as should have been required both by peer reviewers for their paper published in Nature and, above all, by the IPCC itself.47
Feeding the data into their own computer, they found that it simply did not produce the claimed results. This was 'due to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components, and other quality control defects,.48 'Had the IPCC actually done the kind of rigorous review that they boast of', McKitrick was to tell the House of Lords committee in 2005, they would have discovered that there was an error in a routine calculation step (principal component analysis) that falsely identified a hockey stick shape as the dominant pattern in the data. The flawed computer program can even pull out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random numbers.
Using Mann'. algorithm, the two men fed a pile of random and meaningless data into the computer thousands of times. Every time the graph which emerged bore a 'hockey stick' shape. Even the telephone directory would have come out like a hockey stick. They found that their replication of Mann's method failed 'all basic tests of statistical significance'.
When they ran the program again properly, keeping Mann's data but removing the bristlecone pine figures on which he had so heavily relied, they found that the Mediaeval Warming once again emerged, large as life. Indeed their 'major finding' was that Mann's own data confirmed that warming in the Middle Ages exceeded anything in the twentieth century.
But McIntyre and McKitrick reserved their most withering condemnation for the IPCC itself. Not only had it failed to subject Mann's methods to any proper professional checking, but it had then given extraordinary prominence to; the hockey stick data as the canonical representation of the earth's climate history. Due to a combination of mathematical error and a dysfunctional review process, they ended up promoting the exact wrong conclusion. How did they make such a blunder?49
So embarrassing was this analysis that in 2004 Mann and his colleagues published a grudging 'Corrigendum'. They conceded that their proxy data had included errors, but insisted that 'none of these errors affect our previously published results'.
No admission of error came from the IPCC, for which the 'hockey stick' remained the single most prominent underpinning of its entire case on global warming. Although the graph had been as comprehensively discredited as any hypothesis in the history of science, the IPCC seemed determined to stand by it. When the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report came to be published in 2007 the 'hockey stick' graph was notably omitted. But the 'hockey stick' continued to have fanatical supporters among the scientific community,
Although the 'hockey stick' debate should have raised fundamental questions about the IPCC's scientific credibility, it was by no means the only issue over which its conduct attracted criticism. One example is worth a brief further note because it gave a unique inside picture of just how the IPCC was able to arrive at the conclusions that those in charge of it wanted.
Paul Reiter, a British-born professor at the Institute Pasteur in Paris and a senior adviser to the World Health Organization, was arguably the world's leading expert on mosquito-borne diseases. Giving evidence to members of the House of Lords in 2005, he explained how, before the 1996 report, he had been invited to join the IPCC's Working Group II, to act as a 'contributory author' to Chapter 18, assessing the impact of global warming on human health. 50
Among his fellow 'contributing authors' he had been surprised to find one whose 'principal interest was the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets (plus a paper on the health effect of cell phones)'. Not one of the chapter's 'lead authors' had ever written a research paper on mosquito-borne diseases. Two were full-time 'environmental activists', one of whom had written articles on topics ranging from mercury poisoning to land mines.
It soon became clear that the preoccupation of the lead authors was to demonstrate that global warming would increase the range and intensity of 'vector-borne' diseases (those spread by insects and other carriers), as 'predicted' by a 'highly simplistic' computer model. Reiter tried to explain that malaria was not a disease confined to hot countries, as was familiar to anyone versed in the history of the disease, but this appeared to fall on deaf ears.
When he saw the resulting chapter, he was shocked at how 'the amateurish text' reflected the 'limited knowledge' of the '21 authors'. Almost the only texts cited were 'relatively obscure' articles, almost all suggesting that disease became more prevalent in a warm climate. The text was riddled with 'glaring indicators of the ignorance of the authors', such as a claim that 'mosquito species that transmit ma1aria do not usually survive where the mean winter temperature drops below 16-18C' (some species, Reiter pointed out, can survive temperatures of 25 below zero).
In their determination to prove that greater warming was already causing malaria to move to higher altitudes, the authors quoted claims that 'had repeatedly been made by environmental activists', but which had been 'roundly denounced in the scientific literature'.
'In summary,' Reiter went on, 'the treatment of this issue by the IPCC was ill-informed, biassed and scientifically unacceptable.' Yet the Summary for Policymakers, drafted at political level, was able to use this chapter to support a claim that 'climate change is likely to have wide-ranging and mostly adverse impacts on human health, with significant loss of life'. It went on to predict that climate change at the upper end of the IPCC's predicted range would increase the proportion of the world's population vulnerable to malaria to 60 per cent, leading to 50-80 million additional cases every year.Following the publication of the report, Reiter was shocked to see how; these confident pronouncements, untrammeled by details of the complexity of their subject and the limitations of these models, were widely quoted as 'the consensus of 1,500 of the world's top scientists' (occasionally the number quoted was 2,500). This clearly did not apply to the chapter on human health, yet, at the time, eight out of nine major websites that I checked placed these diseases at the top of the list of adverse impacts of climate change, quoting the IPCC.
Reiter went on to describe how, when he was invited back to take part in preparing the third, 2001 report, he and a colleague, who were the only authors with any knowledge of vector-borne diseases, repeatedly found themselves 'at loggerheads with persons who insisted on making authoritative pronouncements, although they had little or no knowledge of our specialty'. Reiter eventually resigned, although when he saw a first draft of the report he was shocked to see his name still listed as a contributor. Only with great difficulty did he eventually succeed in having it removed.
For the IPCC's fourth report, due to be published in 2007, Reiter was nominated by the US government as a 'lead author'. He was rejected by the 'IPPC Working Group II Bureau' in favor of two 'lead authors', a hygienist and a specialist in fossil faeces. Neither had any knowledge of tropical diseases but they had both co-written articles with 'environmental activists'. When Professor Reiter questioned this with a relevant IPCC official (who worked for the UK Meteorological Office in Exeter), she thanked him for his 'continued interest in the IPCC' and told him that selection was decided by governments: 'it is the governments of the world who make up the !PCC, define its remit and direction' according to 'the IPCC Principles and Procedures which have been agreed by governments'. To his question as to why the 'lead authors' chosen appeared to have no expertise in the chapter's subject matter, he got no answer.
Faced with such evidence, Reiter went on to muse how:
the issue of consensus is key to understanding the limitations of IPCC pronouncements. Consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science ... in the age of information, popular knowledge of scientific issues - particularly issues of health and the environment - is awash in the tide of misinformation, much of it presented in the 'big talk' of professional scientists. Alarmist activists operating in well-funded advocacy groups have a lead role in creating this misinformation. In many cases they manipulate public perceptions with emotive and fiercely judgmental 'scientific' pronouncements, adding a tone of danger and urgency to attract media coverage ... these notions are often reinforced by drawing attention to peer-reviewed scientific articles that appear to support their pronouncements, regardless of whether these articles are widely endorsed by the scientific community. Scientists who challenge these alarmists are rarely given priority by the media, and are often presented as 'skeptics’. The democratic process requires elected representatives to respond to the concerns and fears generated in this process. Denial is rarely an effective strategy, even in the face of preposterous claims. The pragmatic option is to express concern, create new regulations and increase funding for research. In reality a genuine concern for mankind and the environment demands the inquiry, accuracy and skepticism that are intrinsic to authentic science. A public that is not aware of this is vulnerable to abuse.It was an admirably acute analysis of the essence of the scare phenomenon - from an 'authentic' scientist, puzzled by how mad the world had grown.
If the IPCC's 'consensus' had made clear with just what a crisis global warming was facing the world - not least thanks to that terrifying exponential upward flick at the end of the 'hockey stick' - what was the world going to do about it?
Nearly seven years after its signing, the Kyoto Protocol still hadn't come into force. This could not happen until it had been ratified by countries representing 55 per cent of all the world's human CO2 emissions in 1990. The only real hope of this happening was that it would be ratified by either the USA or Russia. The USA had so far been ruled out by that unanimous Senate veto in 1997. As for Russia, in December 2003 President Vladimir Putin reiterated that it had no intention of ratifying, because the treaty was 'scientifically flawed' and 'even 100 per cent compliance with the Kyoto Protocol won't reverse climate change'. 51
In fact this continuing delay had not prevented various richer countries, led by those making up the European Union, from already taking steps towards meeting those Kyoto targets on limiting carbon emissions. But even if Kyoto did one day come into force, there were limits to what these nations could hope on their own to achieve.
One problem was that, because it only applied to developed countries, there were so many sources of carbon emissions the developed world could do little or nothing about. The second largest human cause of CO2 emissions, for instance, accounting for some 18 per cent or nearly a fifth of the world total, was deforestation. But this was mainly centred in countries not affected by Kyoto, such as Indonesia and Brazil, where the destruction of their rainforests contributed 85 and 70 per cent of their total carbon output.
Just behind this, contributing around 14 per cent each, were agriculture, industry and transport. Again a significant part of agricultural emissions, as in those from rice growing which is particularly 'carbon-intensive', came from countries which would be unaffected by Kyoto. Some of the world's most polluting industries were in China and India, which would also be unaffected. Marginal steps were already being taken in industrialized countries to reduce carbon emissions from cars and lorries, but aviation (contributing around 3 per cent) and shipping (slightly more) were again not covered by Kyoto.
By far the biggest single contributor to carbon emissions, however, responsible for around 40 per cent or two-fifths of the total, was the use of fossil fuels for generating electricity. Inevitably it was here that the attention of those countries that wished to show their determination to 'fight global warming' had to be focused.
The most effective way to generate 'carbon-free' electricity would have been to revive the use of nuclear power, which for 20 years, after the scare over a relatively minor nuclear incident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the rather more serious emergency at Chernobyl in 1986, had become distinctly unpopular. The most nuclear-dependent country in the world was France, which, after its scare over future sources of energy in the 1970s, following the Yom Kippur war, had built the 58 new nuclear power plants which now supplied 83 per cent of its electricity. But from the environmentalists, so much in the ascendant, any talk of a return to nuclear power provoked howls of outrage, even though it offered by far the most practical solution to the problem they claimed to care about more than any other: the rise in greenhouse gases.
This left those 'renewable' energy sources, solar, wave and tidal power and, above all, wind, which had now seized the imagination of the environmentalists as being the answer to all their dreams. Everything about 'green' energy seemed appealing. It relied directly on the beneficence of nature itself, on such elemental forces as the sun, water and wind. It was pure, it was clean, it gave off no 'polluting' greenhouse gases, and, bar a little initial investment, it was free.
Thus it was that, from the early 1990s onwards, many of the countries of the western world had embarked on a love affair with the idea of 'renewable' energy as something which governments should do all in their power to encourage. As early as 1989, the British government introduced a 'non-fossil fuel obligation' (NFFO), whereby its newly privatized electricity supply companies were obliged to buy a percentage of their power from 'renewable' sources.
In 1997, no one was more enthusiastic for the Kyoto Protocol than the ED, which was soon aiming to set its own 'Kyoto targets' whereby, within 13 years, 10 per cent of all the ED's energy would be 'renewable'. In 2001 the member states committed themselves to an even more ambitious target, issuing a directive which laid down that, by 2010, 'of the total electricity consumption of the Community', no less than 22.1 per cent, more than a fifth, must be derived from renewable energy sources. 52 In 2002 this prompted the British government to introduce a Renewable Obligations Order, replacing the NFFO with a new system whereby electricity suppliers were obliged to buy an annually increasing percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. For this they would have to pay an inflated price, designed to encourage further investment in 'renewables', which would then be paid for by their customers through their electricity bills.
The most obvious source of additional renewable energy in Europe was wind. *Apart from in the handful of countries, such as Switzerland, that had mountains large enough to allow extensive use of hydro-electric power. In the UK, according to the DTI's 2006 Departmental UK Energy Statistics (DUKES 7.4), hydro-electricity in 2005 provided 29 per cent of total renewable energy, mainly from schemes built in the Scottish Highlands in the 1950s. Biofuels contributed 53 per cent, wind power only 17 per cent.
The three ED countries that led the way in building thousands of wind turbines were Denmark, Germany and Spain. By 2002 little Denmark was claiming to be generating nearly 20 per cent of its power from the giant turbines which now dominated vast tracts of its flat countryside and coastline.
But it was around this time the penny began to drop that wind power was not all it been imagined to be. Its most serious failing wC!s the simple fact that wind does not blow at a consistent speed, and often not at all. The wind companies invariably liked to talk of their turbines in terms of 'installed capacity'; as, for instance, 'two megawatts'. The politicians and the media almost invariably fell for this, imagining that such a turbine was capable of producing two megawatts (2 MW) of electricity.
Because wind speeds were so inconsistent, however, this in fact meant that the average output of a turbine in the UK was only a quarter of its capacity (known as the 'load factor'). Indeed all too often, notably on cold days in winter when electricity demand was at its highest, there was not enough wind to keep the turbines turning.
In short, wind turbines were extraordinarily unreliable. Furthermore, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, they were also unpredictable. This meant that, in order to guarantee a continuous supply of electricity to the customers, alternative sources of power had to be kept permanently on standby or 'spinning reserve', ready to step in at a moment's notice to make up for the lack of supply from the wind farms. Even when the wind was blowing, these backup power stations, usually coal-fired, would have to be kept running, using fuel, generating steam, emitting CO2 ready to ramp up their turbines the moment the supply from the wind machines stopped coming.
This remained one of the best-kept secrets of the wind power lobby, because what it meant was that the wind turbines were not saying anything like the amount of CO2 they liked to claim. Some 'spinning reserve' was unavoidable, to provide back-up for conventional power sources. But the greater the number of wind farms, the more it would be necessary to keep conventional plants running just to provide them with round-the-clock cover. When seeking planning permission to build a new wind farm, developers would invariably boast that it was going to help combating global warming by saving 'X thousand tones of CO2' from being emitted to the atmosphere. In fact it was going to save very much less.
In reality the contribution made by wind power, in terms of both the electricity it generated and its 'carbon savings', was derisory. By 2005 Britain was priding itself on having built 1,200 turbines, covering hundreds of square miles of countryside. But the amount of electricity they produced was less than half that generated by one 1,200 MW nuclear power station; and barely an eighth of that supplied by the huge 4,700 MW coal-fired plant at Drax in Yorkshire.
When it was proposed that the largest windfarm in England should be built at Whinash in Cumbria, 27 huge turbines, each two-thirds the height of Blackpool Tower, the developers boasted that this would save '178,000 tons of carbon emissions a year'. Yet even the Guardian's George Monbiot, the most prominent global warming crusader in Britain's media, had to admit that 'a single jumbo jet, flying. from London to Miami and back every day, releases the climate-change equivalent of 520,000 tones of carbon dioxide a year'. One 'Boeing 757 thus cancelled out three giant wind farms. 53
Another illusion about wind power was that it was cheap. In fact generating electricity by wind turbines was significantly more expensive than conventional power sources. A study carried out for the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2004 showed that the cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity produced by an onshore wind turbine, including the cost of standby generation, was 5Ap; more than double that of power from gas (2.2p), nuclear (2.3p) or the more efficient coal-fired plants (2.5p). From an offshore wind farm, the 7.2p cost made it well over three times more expensive.54
One reason why this was not more widely recognized was the ingenious way the government had managed to conceal the massive subsidy given to the owners of wind turbines. Under the Renewable Obligation, the electricity supply companies were required to buy an ever-higher percentage of their electricity from turbine owners, rising from 3 per cent in 2002 to 15 per cent and more in future years. In addition, they had to pay a Climate Change Levy on every MW-hour of electricity produced from conventional sources, from which renewables were exempted.
The net effect of all this was that the electricity supply companies were forced to pay twice as much for wind-generated electricity as they did for conventional power. In 2005 this amounted to around £90 per MW-hour compared with the normal price of £45. But this was hidden from the public because the additional cost, now approaching 1 billion GBP a year, was merely added, without explanation, to their electricity bills. 55
For the turbine developers themselves this created an extraordinary bonanza. Each 2 MW turbine, although on average it produced only 500 kilowatts of electricity, earned its owners around 400,000 a year, of which 200,000 GBPwas the value of the electricity and 200,000 the hidden subsidy. A big wind farm might have dozens of such turbines, like the 140 2.3 MW giants being erected in 2006 at White lee, south of Glasgow, the largest on-shore wind farm in Europe. Covering 30 square miles of moorland, with an installed capacity of 322 MW, this was due to earn its developers 32 million a year in subsidies alone. Yet its total output would be only 7 per cent of that of a nuclear power plant occupying less than a 30th of the same amount of land. In 2005 Sir Donald Miller, the former head of Scottish Power, announced that to meet the ED's target of 20 per cent of the UK's power from renewable sources by 2020 would cost 30 billion GBP in subsidies through higher electricity bills.
In many people's eyes, of course, wind turbines had another serious failing. It seemed ironic drat, in the name of some claimed 'environmental benefit', these vast industrial structures were all too often being erected in particularly beautiful stretches of countryside, such as the Scottish Highlands or the mountains of midWales, severely intruding on their natural environment. Rising as much as 400 feet into the air, the height of a tall city office block or the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, these incongruous towers of steel, with their blades giving off a dull, low-frequency 'whump' each time they revolved, dominated the once unspoiled landscape for miles around.
To others these towers seemed beautiful, not least because they symbolized man's belated attempt to 'save the planet' from his own folly. But even the greatest enthusiasts for wind power might have had pause for thought had they bothered to discover just how little, in practice, it was solving the problem that so concerned them. And a further huge practical drawback to turbines only became really apparent as ever more thousands of them came to be built.
The European countries which led the way in building wind turbines were Denmark and Germany. In 2002, Denmark announced that its dash for wind was so unbalancing its electricity supply that it was not going to build any more. In 2004, although turbines nominally represented 20 per cent of Denmark's electricity production, the wind blew so inconsistently that it in fact provided only 6 per cent of the power the country consumed. Because at any given time it either had too little wind or too much, Denmark either had to import power at considerable cost from other countries, or, worse, it had to export its surplus wind-generated electricity at a loss to Norway (because there was no means of storing it). In 2004 this represented a staggering 84 per cent of all the power Danish turbines produced. 56
The more dependent a country became on wind power, the more likely it was that this would create serious instabilities in its electricity grid, as conventional power stations switched on and off to compensate for the unpredictable vagaries of the wind. This was why Ireland in 2003 decided to follow Denmark by putting a moratorium on any more turbines.
The prospect of renewable energy in itself being able to make any significant contribution to the battle against global warming was beginning to look increasingly dubious. Rather more seriously for the climate change crusaders, however, the Kyoto Protocol itself, seven years after it was agreed, still remained ungratified.
At this point, in 2004, the temperature over global warming visibly rose. It was not that the earth's temperature itself continued to rise. The EI Nino year of 1998 was still regarded as the hottest on record. But as climate change had increasingly come to dominate the thinking and utterances of politicians, so were critics of the official orthodoxy becoming more vocal and better informed as to what the debate was about.
The real political prize was to get Kyoto ratified, and here the British government now tried to take the initiative. In January 2004, Sir David King, the British government's Chief Scientist and a close adviser to Tony Blair, published an article in Science warning that climate change was now 'the most severe problem we are facing today' and 'a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism'. 57
In Britain alone, said King, the number of people at high risk of flooding was expected to more than double, to nearly 3.5 million by 2080. Damage to property could run to tens of billions of pounds every year. But, asserting that the USA was responsible for more than 20 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (compared with only 2 per cent from the UK), King then attacked the Bush administration for failing to play its proper role in tackling the crisis by refusing to sign up to Kyoto (he did not mention that it was the Senate, under the previous Clinton-Gore administration, which had voted against Kyoto).
In April 2004, Blair himself joined the assault, warning that the situation facing mankind was 'very, very critical indeed'. In May, launching 'a new alliance of governments, businesses and pressure groups' to tackle global warming, he said he could not think of 'any bigger long-term question facing the world community' .58
Speaking on the same occasion, King claimed that the earth's temperatures had risen to their highest level for 60 million years, and that by the end of the twenty-first century Antarctica was likely to be the only habitable continent left on earth. Sixty million years ago, he claimed, CO2 levels had risen to 1,000 parts per million, causing 'a massive reduction of life'.
With full backing from the Blair government, King then led a determined bid to pressure the Russian government to change its mind on Kyoto. In July 2004 he took a team of British scientists to Moscow, to take part in an international seminar on climate change staged under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Mounting a ferocious attack on Russia's position, King repeatedly insisted that scientists critical of Kyoto were 'undesirable' and should not be allowed to speak. He gave an ultimatum that two-thirds of the scientific contributors invited by the Academy should be excluded. Frequently members of his team interrupted other speakers, or spoke themselves for much longer than their allotted time. On four occasions proceedings broke up in disorder. At one point, King, unable to answer Professor Reiter's evidence that the melting ice on Kilimanjaro had been shown to be caused by factors other than global warming, stormed out.
At the end of the conference Putin's chief economic adviser, Alexander Illarionov, was withering about the behavior of King and his followers, which had shocked many of those present. 59 He declared that 'European Union pressure on Russia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was equivalent to a war on truth, science and human welfare'. 60 He spelled out even more emphatically than Putin the previous December why Russia was not prepared to ratify Kyoto. The Russian government and its scientific advisers simply could not accept that rising temperatures were caused by rising CO2 levels. The Roman and Mediaeval Warmings had both seen higher temperatures when CO2 levels were significantly lower. There were no correlations between warming and higher sea levels, the spread of diseases or extreme weather events. Furthermore, global temperature changes correlated better with the patterns of solar radiation than with the rise in CO2 emissions.
Four months later, however, despite such vehemence from his own experts, Putin"' made a complete U-turn. He had struck a political deal with the EU which had no connection with climate change. Russia wished to enter the World Trade Organization on favourable terms, by being classified as a 'developing country'. In return for the EU agreeing to support him, Putin agreed to ratify Kyoto. He had also been made aware that, because Russia had closed down large parts of its most polluting industries since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its carbon emissions had already dropped drastically since the cut-off year of 1990. This meant that Russia would be able to make billions of dollars a year selling those 'carbon credits' which were a key part of the Kyoto system.
By this curious deal, the 55 per cent threshold had at last been reached. The Protocol could come into force. The Kyoto bandwagon could start rolling in earnest. And so keen now were the politicians and their advisers to talk up the threat of global warming there was scarcely need any longer for the environmental activists to egg them on.In 2005 Blair made tackling climate change the keynote policy of his six months in the chair of the G8 nations (alongside 'making poverty history' in Africa). In announcing this he said 'the science is well established and the dangers clear. For example, the number of people worldwide at risk of flooding has increased twenty-fold since the 1960s,.61
When, later that year, the opposition Conservative Party elected David Cameron as its new leader, he at once announced that the fight against climate change would be at the top of his party's agenda. To highlight his environmental credentials, he was photographed bicycling to work at the House of Commons (his chauffeur driving discreetly behind with a clean shirt and shoes). He flew off to Spitzbergen, to be filmed watching glaciers melting and driving a team of huskies across the fast-disappearing Arctic ice. He applied for permission to erect a mini-wind turbine on the chimney of his Notting Hill home. It seemed as if the need to tackle global warming was virtually his only policy.
Of all the world's politicians trying to identify themselves with the fight to 'save the planet', however, none was more prominent than the man who had been at the centre of this battle for nearly 20 years; who now liked to introduce himself to audiences all over the world with the words 'I used to be the next President of America'.
In the summer of 2006, with the backing of the Hollywood publicity machine, Al Gore launched an unprecedented bid to project the threat of global warming to a worldwide mass audience. His screen version of An Inconvenient Truth raced up the charts to become the highest-earning documentary-film in history (going on in February 2007 to win two Oscars). The book version became a runaway bestseller.
The publicity-release for An Inconvenient Truth began:
humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced.As with everything Gore did, his presentation was heavily l arded with very personal autobiography, packed with pictures of his wife, children, parents and sister (who, he wanted to emphasize, had died of smoking-related cancer because she believed the lies told by tobacco companies). He recounted how he had first come to see global warming as by far the greatest threat mankind had ever faced when he attended those classes given by his hero Roger Revelle in the 1960s; the man who had first alerted mankind to the soaring levels of CO2.
With the aid of powerful imagery and dramatic graphs, Gore pulled out all the emotional stops. Beginning with shots of fragile Planet Earth from space, vanishing glaciers and those fastdisappearing snows of Kilimanjaro, he moved on to a cleverly redrawn version of the Mann 'hockey stick', allowing for the 'Mediaeval Warm Period' as a tiny 'blip', then showing temperatures suddenly shooting up at the end to levels never before known. He took a sideswipe at the 'global warming sceptics', a group 'diminishing almost as fast as those mountain glaciers', who had 'launched a fierce attack on the "hockey stick'''. But, fortunately, other scientists had since confirmed Mann's 'basic conclusions in multiple ways'. 62
Nothing was missing from Gore's recital: poignant images of polar bears struggling to survive, even drowning as the Arctic ice melted; penguin populations plummeting by 70 per cent as their Antarctic ice shelves crumbled; chilling shots of the tragedy which had engulfed New Orleans only a few months earlier when it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The horrors he used to illustrate his points fell into three main categories. The first was that the melting of all that ice, at the Poles, in Greenland, on the world's glaciers, would produce too much water. Sea levels would rise by 20 feet, inundating many of the most populous places on the planet. Computer-enhanced satellite images showed how part or all of many of its most famous cities would disappear, from Shanghai and Beijing to New York and San Francisco. Sixty million people would be displaced in Calcutta and Bangladesh alone; another 20 million in China. As the world's climate systems were thrown into chaos, there was already evidence of cyclones, tornadoes and floods arriving with an intensity never recorded before (cue for shots of New Orleans under water).
Elsewhere the problem would be too little water. The melting of the Himalayan ice sheet, on which seven major river systems depended, would eventually rob 40 per cent of the world's population of their water supplies. Lake Chad in Africa, once the world's sixth largest lake, had already, thanks to global warming, all but dried up: a significant factor in the tragedy wracking that whole region of Africa, from famine to the genocide in Darfur.
The third problem would be the massive disruption of nature wrought by the changing climate. This would lead to a mass extinction of species, already 1,000 times higher than the normal rate; and to an explosion in 'vector-borne' diseases, as mosquitoes and other carriers rapidly extended their range into once-cooler parts of the world where people and forests were already dying as a result.This apocalyptic vision, claimed Gore, was now endorsed by every climate scientist in the world (apart from that tiny handful of 'skeptics’, who were vanishing as fast as the glaciers). Citing a recent study by Naomi Oreskes, he presented a graphic showing that the 'number of peer-reviewed articles dealing with "climate change" published in scientific journals in the previous 10 years' was '928'. 'Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming', it went on, was 'zero'.
But all was not lost. What was called for was an unprecedented human effort to avert this catastrophe. Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut back by 60 per cent. And on all sides there was evidence of how this could be done: from the tens of thousands of wind turbines appearing in America and Europe to carbon emission trading schemes ('the European Union has adopted this US innovation and is making it work effectively').
Everyone, Gore exhorted, could make a contribution to this cosmic battle, by such means (he listed them) as using energy efficient light bulbs; insulating homes; walking or using a bicycle instead of a car; eating less meat; compo sting food waste; unplugging the TV and computers instead of leaving them on standby.Urged on by such a call to arms, it was not surprising that, for those who shared Gore's view, their impatience with anyone still daring to question it reached new heights. For a long time, like Gore himself, they had liked to claim that the only scientists who 'denied' global warming were those who were in some way funded by energy companies or 'Big Oil'. But in April 2006, they had been given a new term of abuse for all these 'deniers', when a long-time media crusader in the cause, Scott Pelley of CBS, was asked why his two latest reports on global warming on 60 Minutes had not featured a single contribution from a scientist who was skeptical. 63 'If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel,' replied Pelley (referring to the concentration camp survivor who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1986), 'am I required as a journalist to find a holocaust denier?'
This attempt to draw a parallel between global warming skeptics and those who denied the historical facts of Hitler's murder of six million Jews quickly caught on. By September, the Guardian's George Monbiot (in the words quoted at the head of this chapter) was writing that 'climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial'. He may well have been inspired by the contributor, two days earlier, to an American 'green' blog, praising Monbiot's latest book, who had carried this even further, exclaiming (in words that were themselves to win wide currency):
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate Nuremberg.64'Holocaust deniers' or not, the chorus of media acclaim given to Gore's film had already begun to arouse some very different responses, from scientists such as Professor Bob Carter, an outspoken Australian exp6rt in palaeo climatology. So shocked was Carter by Gore's cavalier approach to the facts that, shortly after the film's launch, he exploded to a journalist that Gore's 'propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science'. 'His arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is incredible that they and his film are commanding public attention. ,65
Over the following months, other academics began to subject the claims in Gore's film to rather more measured analysis. In general they agreed that he had produced nothing but a caricature of the familiar case for global warming. He had picked over the literature for almost every extreme projection h