I have always been suspicious of unanimity considering that we live in a world of duality where everything has its opposite.  Loud alarm bells go off in my mind when pundits assert that 97% of scientists support the Climate Change predictions.  It brings to mind the 2002 Iraqi parliamentary elections where President Saddam Hussein claimed to have won 100% of the votes beating his previous record of 99.96% votes in 1995.

Considering human nature such a consensus most commonly occurs only in an authoritarian society be it communist, theocratic or autocratic.  A real democracy rarely, if ever, manages to achieve any level of consensus be it Brexit referendum or the 2016 US presidential elections both having been called on very thin majorities.

So, is science different?  Yes – science never works on the basis of consensus and it has always progressed mainly on the backs of people with the courage to stand alone and challenge the majority view.

But even if we accept the claim for consensus, isn’t the history of science replete with examples of universally accepted theories routinely being repudiated.  Aether, static universe and the absolute nature of time and space being some of the more well-known examples of widely believed theories having been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Is Climate Change an example of such a theory?  Well, nobody knows.  Anybody who claims otherwise is either ignorant, lying or intentionally trying to mislead.

The only thing we can be certain about is that everything in the universe is constantly changing including our climate.  We can safely bet our bottom dollar on the fact that this change will continue for ever with or without human beings.

Defining Climate Change

For the purposes of this blog let us define Climate Change in context of its most widely used form as – change in our planetary climate mainly attributable to human activities.

History of the Climate Change Debate The debate about climate change has been going on for at least 200 years and its modern version can be traced back to the middle of 1970’s with the following news stories.

Global Cooling

Science Digest in 1973 in an article titled Brace yourself for another ice age concluded that “At this point the world’s climatologists are agreed…. Once the freeze starts, it will be too late”.

The 1975 New York Times news story titled Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing stated that “There are specialists who say that a new ice age is on the way – the inevitable consequence of a natural cyclic process, or as a result of man-made pollution of the atmosphere.”

In his 1975 article in International Wildlife Magazine, Nigel Calder former editor of New Scientist and producer of documentaries for BBC, wrote that “The threat of new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind”

Time magazine in its 24 June 1974 article published an article titled Another Ice Age? The author of this article claimed that “meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades.”

This was followed by an 28 April 1975 article by Newsweek titled The Cooling World.  The author of the article claimed that “Meteorologists were almost unanimous in the opinion that our planet was getting colder”

The reason I know these articles were taken seriously globally at the time is because I distinctly remember how in the 70’s we used to joke about welcoming the cooling of the planet in the extreme heat of Indian summer with the temperature climbing up to the highs of 46 – 47 degrees centigrade. This combined with the fact that there were almost no Global Warming stories during this time proves that the consensual opinion of the scientific community at the time was in support of Global Cooling.

Apologists for this phase of climate debate, in their embarrassment at their past association with what is now almost considered a heresy, have tried to dismiss these articles on Global Cooling as insignificant, poorly researched and of no consequence.  The difference the wisdom of hindsight makes!

Global Warming

The change from Global Cooling to Global Warming narrative was kicked off mainly by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen who in 1988 presented a testimony to the US Senate stating that “Global warming is now large enough that  we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect and the observed warming”  This was one of the main contributory factors that resulted in the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to study Climate Change.

However, the gentle Climate Change debate went into overdrive with the release of 2006 Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth which was a huge box office success.  Its apocalyptic and persuasive message, cleverly cloaked in scientific language, succeeded in its aim of frightening people into submissive belief.  The unabashed certainty and the messaging style of the movie was reminiscent of yesteryear prophets of doom who created and exploited similar fears with their “The End is Nigh” pronouncements.

As a sceptic, I was struck by the fact that a scientific theory on a hugely complex issue like Climate Change was being sold as “settled science”.  Where was the acknowledgment of uncertainty about the numerous unknown variables and assumptions used to create the computer models for predicting climate change?  Why wasn’t the unsuspecting public made aware that the change in even one of the hundreds of key assumptions swung the predictions dramatically either ways?  Most importantly, why was this scientific research being promoted by a politician? Where were the Einstein’s or Darwin’s of Climate Science?  Since when did science need a political spokesperson to validate and promote its theories?

Climate Change

To cover their tracks the promoters of the Climate Change agenda discreetly redesignated Global Cooling to Global Warming when the supporting data showed that the temperatures showed a clear trend for rising temperatures.  This was subsequently renamed Climate Change when the temperatures were found to be fluctuating both ways without any direct or proportional link to carbon emissions.

If carbon emissions were the main culprits for Global Warming how do the scientists explain the fact that the warmest period on earth, known as the Holocene Optimum, occurred between 7000 – 4000 BC?  Speculative explanations offered to fit in with the current Climate Change belief system definitely do not qualify as science.  Climate Change propagandists are left with the inconvenient fact that there are numerous poorly understood factors that influence the fluctuations in earths climate resulting in periodic swings from the ice age to warmer interglacial periods.  It is one of these interglacial warming period, which began about 11,700 years ago, that we are living through today.

Any challenge to the infallibility of Climate Science on the grounds of its inability to accurately predict weather over a couple of days is dismissed as uninformed while it makes confident predictions on far more complex phenomenon with a trend line of thousands or millions of years? The explanation that weather and climate are different is obviously a smokescreen since the unknown variables in climate sciences are of a significantly higher magnitude than those required for forecasting weather.

Is Climate Change being dealt as Science?

One of the most important pillars of the scientific method is its ability to make predictions.  Al Gore on the back of his An Inconvenient Truth made a lot of predictions most of which proved to be utterly false.  Some examples of these predictions are

• Prediction – Africa’s tallest peak Mount Kilimanjaro will be snow-free “within the decade.”
  Fact – There have been some loss of ice due to sublimation but NOT Global Warming and the Kilimanjaro glacier still survives with plenty of ice.
• Prediction – Storms would become more frequent and intense as man-made emissions warmed the oceans.
  Fact – Storms aren’t more extreme since 2006. In fact, not even findings from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) support Gore’s claim.
• Prediction – Warned that Polar Ice may be ice free during the summers within five to seven years and Arctic animals would be threatened.
  Facts –  Arctic ice coverage has shrunk in recent decades, but it’s not likely we will see even a summer where the North Pole is completely ice-free.  Latest data shows polar bears are thriving, despite shrinking ice coverage

Any real scientist worth his salt would withdraw his claim to “settled science” in light of such embarrassing failure of their predictions.  But we know that politicians are made of tougher stuff and they never let mere inconvenient truths come in the way of their ambitions!

History is full of people claiming divine foresight into the future which allowed them to confidently proclaim similar doomsday scenarios with absolute confidence.  Like Gore they just knew. David Berg is a good example of a serial prophesier whose predictions of apocalyptic events in 1974, 1989 and 1993 all came to pass with a BIG nothing.  Unfazed he explained away the failure of each one of his predictions almost in the same way as Al Gore did with the predictions made in his movie.

Where Gore scored over other fake messiahs is by achieving far greater level of success, wealth and fame along with a Nobel Prize thrown in.

While Pope Leo X had some justification in cashing in on his perceived power to grant indulgences for the worthy goal of reconstructing St. Peter’s Basilica, Al Gore’s attempt to similarly exploit the pathology of human fear is cynical and beyond contempt. This is the same politician who in an interview on 8 March 1999 with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer also claimed “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet”.

So, is Climate Change Real?

Undoubtedly and human activity is having a big impact on it.  However, the scare mongering and solutions offered by the vocal and self-righteous peddlers of Climate Change are all grounded in politics of personal gain, influence, power and ideology, which while creating a lot of hot air (further warming the climate!) never produce any results.

Climate Change is an important issue for humanity and we should carefully try and understand it without being carried away by any propaganda, false claims of consensus or our limited perspective like the Blind men in The Belief Elephant.

We will cover other important issues on Climate Change in future blogs.

Muse

1. Have we seriously examined the Climate Change issue?
2. Could there be some vested interests in the propagation of current Climate Change narrative?
3. Who are the winners and losers in the solutions being offered to deal with Climate Change?
4. Why are the scientists missing from those leading the debate?

Coming Next Week – The God Question