Peter Taylor, environmentalist, scientist and author of Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory, speaks to Tim Black in this provocative article for spiked!The science around climate change is not as settled as it’s presented as being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 – and then, feeling that the remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the science...
I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there’s no real consensus among the scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example is presented as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas, therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn’t settled. There’s a huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted that carbon dioxide on its own is not a problem. So, you can double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50 years from now at the current rate of emissions.
The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning...
The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about 2005. (In the last 10 years it’s actually plateaued.) That period of 25 years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and cloud cover – that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind of energy that’s coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy that heats water – infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.
In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before I published my book, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory. Since then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight, with the ocean transferring that heat to the land...
So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then you will see that they believe that ‘global warming is not due to known natural causes acting alone’. This is clever wording. It means that the door is open to an unknown mechanism driving the warming. So although it is well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.
Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with processing this debate is already committed – financially – to focusing upon carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to backtrack...
So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by certain journalists and environmentalists as ‘denialists’ and ‘sceptics’ funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as it were, set up a straw man. ‘These people’, they say, ‘think carbon dioxide has no effect’. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.
The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide’s effect is small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by 2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force of climate change by 10 per cent. That’s because the natural driving force will determine the climate...
What’s really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I’ve helped to prevent nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I’ve helped change emergency planning for nuclear reactors, and I’ve also helped develop biodiversity strategy. I’m as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is environmental groups and major NGOs – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – which have allied themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying themselves with ‘Big Oil’, but they have fallen into the arms of big government. They’ve allied with disreputable prime ministers; they’ve allied with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives; they’ve allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led on any of these environmental issues.
If you write something, as I have done with Chill, which is a rational, critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven’t had a single invitation to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all of their experts to the table and hammer it out.
We’re seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental career.
