oil platform <br/>(credit: Ken Hodge)
Horizon really does deliver some exceptional science programmes and last night was no different. In the programme Sir Paul Nurse – President of the Royal Society and Nobel Prize winner – took a look at a claim that science is coming under attack. While it went under the title of Science Under Attack it really was a programme looking mainly at climate change.
Taking a look at climate change
Surprisingly, or possibly not, over a third of people in Britain do not believe in man made climate change. My own personal view is that we are certainly going through a period of climate change and warming but the evidence is not yet in to link that with human activity. I’m not a hardline man made climate change skeptic but with the evidence that is currently available I don’t accept the strong claims being made that we are to blame. If you just read climate change related periodicals then it’s very easy to fall into the current thinking that climate change is dominated by human activity. If you go outside that circle of scientist and read around geological and dendrological periodicals you can see a different picture.
Conflicting arguments on cause of climate change
The main argument used by human induced climate change scientists is the speed of warming. They claim that natural variations in climate is extremely slow and nothing on the speed of todays warming. That is not true. Look outside climate change literature and you will see that the earth climate has changed rapidly in the past under natural processes. There is strong evidence that natural warming and cooling happens on the same timescale as it is happening now.
You will not see these sort of studies in climate change related periodicals though as climate scientist who support the man made climate change theory prevent the publication of studies that go against their beliefs. When scientists stop others from putting forward their arguments then science stops operating and dogma sets in. At the moment climate research is dominated by dogma rather than science. If the science was strong then they would allow publication of conflicting evidence and be able to counter that evidence with argument and their own evidence. That is not happening, suppression of conflicting studies is the norm in a lot of journals and periodicals.
Does this mean that we can just go on burning fossil fuels without concern? Well quite simply no, there is a much more urgent issue that needs to be tackled to do with fossil fuels and that is air pollution. Today children in Britain will die because of the school run. Air pollution from car exhausts will set off respiratory diseases such as asthma attacks that will kill. Today people in the UK will die from heart attacks or cancer caused by emissions from cars, lorries and planes.
We have a much more urgent issue to deal with than climate change, one that is killing people today in Britain. The one thing that the climate change lobby has succeeding in doing is turning attention away from nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, particulates, benzene, carbon monoxide and the list of deadly emissions from fossil fuels go on. We have much more urgent and important reasons for breaking free from the petrochemical lifestyle that we currently have.
Scientists need to adapt to new era of information availablity
One of the conclusions that Sir Paul Nurse came to was that scientist have to tackle the new world of easily accessible information – delivered mainly by the internet. They can no longer assume that what they say or claim will be taken at face value. Scientists have to start being open and transparent with their data and start to take a more pro-active role in presenting those arguments to the people.
Climate change scientists had better be right in their arguments and be prepared to argue their case against opposing claims rather than just dismiss or oppress their opponents. If they expect people on minimum wages to find money to pay inflation busting price rises on fuel because of climate taxes or for people on basic state pensions and benefits to choose between eating and heating they had better be transparent with their data. They need to be sure that they don’t ‘massage’ their figures to get the results they want. There’s simply too much at stake for so many people for that sort of game-play to go uncontested.
