Matt Ridley
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary
history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show
that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at
any time in the past thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked
me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it
persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate
change and return to the “alarmed” camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve
McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as
confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States,
that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily
reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate
statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction
to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a
flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists
apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being
published, get journal editors sacked and evade
freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been
alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been
told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the
prediction of rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of
rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as
evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No
prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly
understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated
as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually
nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is
absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the
Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible? "
No comments:
Post a Comment