Here is the truth about global warming: it is an anti-capitalist agenda, a Machiavellian political plot and a convenient rumour started by bungling Japanese pineapple farmers. It is a front for paranoia about immigration, an incitement to civil war, and the reason that the world’s attention was distracted from the risk of a tsunami. And it hasn’t killed as many people as Hitler or Stalin.
Welcome to Britain’s first meeting of climate-change sceptics, where the consistent message is that global warming will not have a catastrophic effect, and if it does there is little the world can — or should — do about it.
The meeting, held last week at the Royal Institution in London, was billed by organisers as ”a valuable opportunity for debate on a topic frequently obscured by angst and alarmism”. Climate change, they said, was a topic ”that has been subject to widespread misrepresentation and politicisation”.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, said catastrophic climate change was falsely blamed for everything from the fall of the Mayan civilisation to extreme weather events such as Britain’s 2003 heatwave. ”It’s important for people to know there are eminent scientists who don’t share this viewpoint,” he said, adding famine, war and disease were bigger threats to civilisation.
Fred Singer, a former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, told the conference that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had overestimated the risk posed by carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that scientists think warms the atmosphere by trapping heat.
”Carbon dioxide is plant food and makes them grow faster,” Singer said. Global warming would increase levels of fresh water as it evaporated more sea water and led to it falling as rain.
Nils-Axel Morner, the head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University said: ”I want to break the IPCC link between global warming and sea-level rise. It’s nonsense.”
Some tales of sea-level rises, he said, could be attributed to the Japanese pineapple industry, which caused land to subside by drilling for too much fresh water. Several at the conference compared themselves to Galileo, who was persecuted when he said the Earth orbited the sun.
Other scientists dismissed their arguments. ”There is a very clear consensus from the scientific community on the problems of global warming and our use of fossil fuels,” said David King, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. ”It’s very important to know where these sceptics are coming from and to identify lobbyists as distinct from scientists.”
The Scientific Alliance recently published a joint report with the George C Marshall Institute, a group funded by ExxonMobil, which it claimed ”undermined” theories of climate change.
Bob May, the president of Britain’s Royal Society, said the sceptics were a ”denial lobby” similar to those who refused to accept that smoking caused cancer. But John Maddox, a former editor of the journal Nature, who attended the meeting, said the sceptics might have a point. He did not dispute that carbon dioxide emissions could drive global warming, but said: ”The IPCC is monolithic and complacent, and it is conceivable that they are exaggerating the speed of change.” — Â