Drawing from history, both recent and not so recent, Ridley begins by formulating "six lessons" which we should bear in mind about scientific controversies:
- The media is incredibly gullible.
- Facts are like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.
- Heretics are sometimes right.
- Some great scientists, like Newton, dabbled in pseudo-science.
- Be careful of your own confirmation bias.
- Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future.
Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.The case Ridley amasses in the remainder of his speech is devastating, or at least it seemed so to me. It may be that climate change is indeed the imminent threat some climatologists say it is, but the evidence that that is so seems exiguous at best. Moreover, the harm that's being done by government policies in an effort to mitigate CO2 emissions is extremely high in terms of both lives and treasure, especially given the paucity of empirical warrant.
Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a ‘denier’. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible.
When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists ‘believe’ in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word ‘believe’ about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.
I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.
I was not always such a ‘lukewarmer’. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening.
I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
Read his speech. It could be a game-changer for you. Thanks to Scott for calling it to my attention.