Gratifyingly daft attack on me and others by George Monbiot in the Guardian, for our view that global warming theory is just a load of hot air. Poor Monbiot, a green catastrophist and conspiracy theorist of the first order, has obviously been brooding over what I have written about the global warming scam. Judging from his reaction, my remarks obviously hit home. Those who don't know what all the excitement is about might like to read what I wrote in the Mail on an earlier occasion. It is always revealing when an attack merely comprises insults rather than a reply to the arguments, and Mobiot's eruption of spleen is a classic of that genre.

He claims that, having referred to thousands of scientists who oppose global warming theory I was able to refer to only one who, he claimed, 'receives his funding from the fossil fuel industry'. He doesn't give his name (might that be because his claim is untrue?) The scientist I quoted in my Mail article was Dr Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. one of the foremost experts on atmospheric science. He described the Kyoto protocol -- whose political summary misrepresents the science of the actual report by imputing certainty and blame to highly speculative findings -- as ‘very much a children’s exercise of what might possibly happen’ prepared by ‘a peculiar group’ in the IPCC almost all of whom have ‘no technical competence’.

Prof Lindzen is author, or co-author, of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers on climatology. I have no idea about his sources of funding. His MIT biography, however, describes him thus:

'Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other. He is currently studying the ways in which unstable eddies determine the pole to equator temperature difference, and the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere. He has developed models for the Earth's climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. In cooperation with colleagues and students, he is developing a sophisticated, but computationally simple, climate model to test whether the proper treatment of cumulus convection will significantly reduce climate sensitivity to the increase of greenhouse gases. Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, and AGU's Macelwane Medal. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and a Fellow of the AAAS1. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)'

What's Monbiot ever done, except write drivel for the Guardian?

Monbiot suggests we should be presented with what he clearly considers to be a killer argument:

'If ever you meet one of these people, I suggest you ask them the following questions: 1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide? 2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures? 3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide? 4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide? It would be interesting to discover at which point they answer no - at which point, in other words, they choose to part company with basic physics.'

If Monbiot ever read anything beyond green propaganda, he would begin to understand that to reduce the issue to these questions betrays a hopeless scientific illiteracy. The limitation of his thinking has been implicitly demonstrated by another scientist I named in an article for the Sunday Times on April 12 2001. Prof Jan Veizer is a renowned geologist, who has produced a definitive reconstruction of the world’s climate history. His citation for winning the Bancroft award for geology in 2000 said he was 'one of the most creative, innovative and productive geoscientists of our times. He has generated entirely new concepts that have proven key in our understanding the geochemical history of Earth. For the past seven years, he has been the director of the Earth System Evolution Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIAR). He has brought together a diverse group of geoscientists and led them in the study of quantitative evolution of the Earth System on geological time scales'.

In December 2000, Prof Veizer published an article, referred to in this account, in which he said that carbon dioxide was not the main driver of climate change.

' “What most people don’t understand,” says Dr.Veizer, “is that there is a natural greenhouse effect of 33°C, without which the Earth would be a frozen wasteland. About two-thirds or more of this temperature enhancement is due to water vapour, not CO2. And how much of the superimposed 0.6°C temperature rise over the last century can be attributed solely to the 70 ppm (or 30 %) CO2 rise believed to be of anthropogenic origin is an open question. The situation is very complex.We are not saying that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. It is. But so is water vapour. How much each contributes to the greenhouse, let alone to climate change is something that we have yet to figure out.One of the media’s misconceptions was in thinking that a climate driver and a greenhouse gas are the same thing, which they are not. Nor are the climate agenda and the environmental agenda the same thing. The climate system is an extremely complex system in which water vapour and carbon dioxide act as temperature amplifiers, without necessarily driving it".

'The problem, according to Dr. Veizer, is that the political agenda of climate change is predicated on the assumption that “CO2 equals warming equals climate change equals disaster.” He does not dispute that the first step in this equation is warming, but he feels that there is a need to understand the relative role of greenhouse gases, particularly water vapour, in the process of global warming. “The deafening silence about the role of water in the climate debate is regrettable...." Finally, Dr.Veizer suggests that, until more data is collected, it is irresponsible to speculate that we are headed for a disaster. “In the end,”he says, “this approach may be counterproductive. It is like the boy that cried wolf. If it happens too many times without proof, people will stop listening. I would rather have all the facts before rushing to any conclusions.” '

That, of course, is a proper scientific approach and one that is anathema to global warming proagandists such as Monbiot. But then, not just atmospheric science but the way the world works is so much more complex than the cartoon stereotypes promulgated by the global warming industry and its ideologically twisted promoters.