The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson, delivered a devastating put-down of the global warming scam in a lecture last night to the Centre for Policy Studies. Rightly dismissing the Stern report as ‘scaremongering’ based on a ‘battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases’, he took apart the whole bogus case for man-made global warming piece by piece.

Thus: the most important greenhouse gas was not carbon dioxide but water vapour; far from a consensus, reputable climate scientists differed sharply over why the climate had warmed slightly; uncertainty derived from the poorly understood but critical science of clouds, and from the possible distorting effect of urbanisation; that while carbon dioxide emission had increased consistently during the 20th century, the global mean surface temperature had risen only in fits and starts; that the earth’s climate has always been subject to natural variation, wholly unrelated to man’s activities; that a thousand years ago, temperatures were probably at least as high as, if not higher than, they are today; that the crucial ‘hockey-stick’ research which underpinned Kyoto, and which purported to show that the earth’s temperature was constant until the industrialisation of the 20th century, has been comprehensively discredited; that the famous glaciers are not just retreating but are also advancing, and the equally famous seas are not just rising but also falling; that extreme weather events such as hurricanes have been occurring as long as records have existed; and that it was ‘hard to imagine a more absurd response’ than cutting carbon emissions which would ‘would do virtually nothing to reduce future rates of global warming’.

This splendid blast follows on from the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on the economics of climate change, which was published last year and which, unlike the Treasury-hyped Stern report, received next to no attention. Lord Lawson was also a member of this committee, which produced an even more devastating demolition of the ‘science’ of climate change. Over and over again, it stressed the extreme uncertainty and deeply flawed analytical techniques used to produce the most apocalyptic forecasts of global warming. It said, for example, that:

Serious questions have been raised about the IPCC emissions scenarios, and
a reappraisal of the scenarios exercise is urgently needed (para 60)…We consider the convergence assumptions in the IPCC scenarios to be open to some question. In our view, political factors should not be allowed to influence the scenarios, whether over the issue of convergence or indeed in any other context…

We received a significant amount of evidence on the realism of the IPCC emission scenarios, and doubts were raised, particularly about the high emission scenarios. The balance of this evidence suggests to us that the high emissions scenarios contained some questionable assumptions and outcomes. While errors do not translate into equal magnitude errors in concentrations or warming, it seems to us important that the IPCC emissions modellers give serious attention to adopting the correct procedures…

Research suggests that, in terms of percentages of world GNP, monetised damage is relatively low, even for warming of 2.5oC. The damages are not evenly spread. In general, developing countries lose more than developed economies. Some models suggest no real net damage to rich countries…

The evidence presented to us indicates that the estimates of monetised damage are highly controversial within IPCC deliberations… We can see no justification for an IPCC procedure which strikes us as opening the way for climate science and economics to be determined, at least in part, by political requirements rather than by the evidence. Sound science cannot emerge from an unsound process…

The IPCC Summary for policy makers says that economic studies underestimate damage, whereas the chapter says the direction of the bias is not known… We are concerned that there may be political interference in the nomination of scientists to the IPCC. Nominees’ credentials should rest solely with their scientific qualifications for the tasks involved.

The key point made by Lord Lawson in his lecture is, as he says, the flight from reason that all this represents. We are looking here at a situation in which the essence of scientific rationalism, that conclusions are arrived at only by the application of reason to evidence which is clearly ascertainable, has been systematically overturned by pseudo-science whose methodology is demonstrably flawed, whose conclusions contradict accepted facts and which is clearly not science at all but politicised, ideological propaganda. This bogus science is then used as a political stick with which to beat up opponents through campaigns of vilification, abuse and professional intimidation.

One of the many distinguished scientists who are outside this alleged ‘consensus’ on climate change makes the point today in an impassioned letter in the Telegraph. Professor Paul Reiter, of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, writes:

I have seen Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, read the book, and read the Stern report. As a scientist, I am appalled. Both authors present myriad dangers as truth – no doubts, a 100 per cent consensus. Yet a glance at the professional literature on glaciers, hurricanes etc. confirms that this consensus is a myth. Besides, consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science.

I am reminded of Trophim Lysenko, who used pseudoscience and myth-making to establish ‘scientific proof’ of Marxist genetics. Lysenko dominated Soviet science for more than two decades by propaganda and ruthless liquidation of his opponents. When he was finally discredited, the Soviet Nobel Laureate Nicolai Semyonov wrote: ‘There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science, and… to inflicting great injury on the country’.

Popular knowledge of scientific issues is again awash with misinformation. Alarmists use the language of science to manipulate public perceptions by judgmental warnings. Scientists who challenge them are branded as a tiny minority of ‘sceptics’. One of the few geneticists who survived the Stalin era wrote: ‘Lysenko showed how a forcibly instilled illusion, repeated over and over at meetings and in the media, takes on an existence of its own in people’s minds, despite all realities.’ To me, we have fallen into this trap. A genuine concern for mankind demands the inquiry, accuracy and scepticism that are intrinsic to science. A public that is unaware of this is vulnerable to abuse.

The point about reason is not a passing curiosity. It lies at the very heart of our present malaise, going far beyond the issue of climate change. We are living in the most advanced age of reason known to mankind, in which our worship of rational thought, our belief that the only truths are those which can be empirically demonstrated and our scorn for what we deem by these lights to be irrational have led us progressively to junk religious faith and embrace secularism. And yet, at the very same time, we have abandoned reason for belief in irrational claims that correspond to certain prejudices or obsessions or ideologies; we have deconstructed the very idea of truth itself, that lies at the heart of reason, and as a result display daily credulity before an avalanche of lies and ideological propaganda from a host of different quarters, with the further outcome that those who vainly attempt to point out the facts are themselves dismissed as irrational, cranky or mad. It is a paradox; and at the heart of it, I suspect, lies the collapse of religious faith itself, whose eclipse has destroyed the very quality of reason that its secular destroyers claim to uphold.