Yesterday, during my lunchbreak, I read a transcript of a recent lecture given by the former British politician Nigel Lawson at the University of Bath, UK. The subject was 'climate change,' the catch-all phrase that seems to be increasingly used to describe weather events that do not conform to our expectations of a generally benign climate. The person that recommended the article was Robert McCaffrey, the Editor of Global Gypsum Magazine and, as regular readers of this column will be aware, something of a climate 'sceptic.' The content of the Lawson article was therefore not a surprise.
It turns out that Lawson is a climate 'sceptic' too. Having founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a non-affiliated UK-based climate think-tank, in 2009, his Bath lecture transcipt is a large and thoughtprovoking body of work that attempts to turn the climate debate on its head. He attempts to slay a number of those 'sacred cows' that he feels are held dear by the 'climate change establishment,' claiming that even attempting to discuss the validity of the current consensus (that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic climate change) amounts to all but heresy. How can we discuss our effects on the planet sensibly, he asks, when those in power appear to not even want a discussion? To try to start this discussion, Lawson sets out to be controversial but clear. Among his topics are:
1. CO2 is plant food.
"Climate alarmists have done their best to obscure the basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as pollution," he says. Lawson claims that the benefits of increased CO2 levels has been more rapid plant growth, providing more rapidly-growing crops and even enabling plants to move into areas not previously hospitable.
2. Traditional fuels have been mislabled as 'dirty.' Developing the point above, Lawson suggests that, if CO2 doesn't constitute pollution, CO2-emitting power sources are necessarily not dirty. (Even granting his rebranding of CO2, this is clearly false - power plants emit NOx, SO2, mercury, dust, PM and many other nasties).
3. Renewable energy sources are not green or clean.
Extending from the second point, is it fair to make this comparison, he asks?
4. How do we explain the current 'warming hiatus?'
Citing temperature changes that we know about (eg: the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period), Lawson asks how fair it is to extrapolate trends seen in the latter part of the 20th Century, when warming was very rapid.
5. Is a warmer climate actually bad?
This, claims Lawson, is something that the 'climate change establishment' fails to even address. Coupled to having more CO2, more areas where plants can grow and technological advances, would this not create more food?
6. We should not write a blank cheque to stop warming.
Some groups, says Lawson, argue that we should not limit resources for dealing with climate change because we cannot tell how bad it will be. "This is an extreme case of the precautionary principle," says Lawson. "I have often thought that the most important use of the precautionary principle is against the precautionary principle itself, since it can all too readily lead to absurd policies."
7. Fossil fuels provide a route out of poverty.
Lawson slams the subsidy of European landowners that install wind-turbines, "so that the poor can be supplied with one of the most expensive forms of electricity known to man." Stopping the use of fossil fuels amounts to 'selfharm' he says. In developing nations, this is clearly a policy that prolongs suffering, malnutrition and other ailments, alongside a country's general development.
At one point Lawson says, "Climate scientists take refuge in the weasel words that any topical extreme weather event... is consistent with what we would expect
from climate change."
He throws down a challenge to these groups, by asking what sort of weather would not be consistent with climate change. Can you think of such an event? When a concept is so loosely defined, as Lawson argues is the case with climate change, is there anything that can't be fitted into the theory?
If the climate scientists in his cross-hairs cannot give details of such weather, Lawson says we should do well to remember Karl Popper: "Any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific."
Read the full lecture transcript here: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5541/full.
