The God of Celsius

“She: The night is young!
He: I’m not”.
From Simply Naatak by Bachchoo

The confession may come as a surprise to those who know me as an accommodative, broad-minded, inclusive human being, but I was argumentative and stubbornly dogmatic as a child. My mother would often say, “So you think you are right and the whole world is wrong?” My answer would, since the argument was about the existence of God or perhaps whether karela cooked in the Parsi style is really purifying for the blood, would always be, “Er …yes!”

I admit I have mellowed with age and some of the dogmatic certainty has softened into strong scepticism — not, I might add, on the issues of the existence of God, virgin births, heaven, hell, ghosts, books dictated by the Almighty, burning spheres of gas in the cosmos determining human fortunes (I am still certain that I am right about these and very many people in the world are wrong) — but about political movements and the new orthodoxies such as global warming! I call myself a “strong sceptic”, though others who express the scepticism I am talking about are often labelled “global- warming deniers”.

The word “deniers” comes from or echoes the phrase “holocaust deniers”, a justifiably pejorative description of neo-Nazis who maintain that Adolf Hitler and his Reich didn’t systematically kill millions of European Jews. I insist I am not a denier, just a questioner who finds it difficult to arrive at the facts.

It is not a singular perplexity, there are others. I recently encountered a young documentary maker and saw his film about the children of Darfur. I have read a hundred news items and articles on the issue. I have “googled” Darfur in an attempt to find out who is doing what to whom and why. The answer comes there is none. The Janjaweed ride camels, dark-skinned villagers flee from their guns. Children die. The United Nations protests — to whom? Is it about oil, uranium, religion, racial feuds? The answer comes there is none. I ask my friends, reporters, television makers who have been to Darfur. To date I know more about why the banks collapsed than I do about Darfur.

And back to global warming: The big scandal in Britain today is the leaked emails from the environmental scientists of the University of East Anglia who are connected to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

The emails imply that these scientists, key to the accepted orthodoxy that the earth is getting warmer through the activity of humans burning fossil fuels and that this warming will lead to apocalypse, have fiddled their data, suppressed evidence which contradicts their theory and predictions and are determined to pass off “conclusions”, which are far from conclusive, as the indisputable truth. They obviously know that this science and research are in their infancy. These “scientists” on whom the world’s politicians, commentators and population rely, know that the data they undoubtedly have demonstrates that the planet has experienced global cooling for the last seven years after a graph of decades of warming. Carbon dioxide emissions have not shown any parallel dip in the graph. Emissions grow, temperature rises and then falls. The “science” is struggling to explain the anomaly and, apart from calling it a temporary blip in the process, has come up with no convincing explanation for it.

I am willing to believe that the planet, the environment and even everything we call civilisation are in danger from certain collective human beliefs and activities. For a few centuries now the collective rational activity we call “science” has been the torch in the tunnel. Man-made global warming, from the evangelical and faulted appeals of Al Gore, to the petty mendacity of the East Anglian scientists, is taking on the attributes of a religion. It sounds like faith, it seeks to generate faith: it describes sin, it creates guilt, it demands penance and sacrifice and it has its own heaven of wind farms and hell of melting ice caps, stranded polar bears, flood, famine and slaughter of the innocent generations to come.

The world has enough religions. The truths about and remedies for global warming should remain in the realm of science and that means dispassionate enquiry and allowing the debate between flat-earth-wallas and dissenters to proceed. Leave aside the inconvenient truth that the globe has been cooling for the last six years, what of the meteorologists who say the temperature of the globe is principally determined by the nuclear activity on the sun and not by greenhouse effects? What of the Americans Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt who observed that after the volcanic explosion of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, tonnes of sulphur dioxide were shot into the stratosphere and mingled with water vapour to create a sun-shield that caused global cooling for a period? Mr Dubner and Mr Levitt advocate the pumping of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, as the volcano did, and control global temperature by imitating nature at a very low cost. Do they have a place at the debating table? They are not freaks. Mr Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago where he has worked on the economics of eco-solutions; Mr Dubner is an award-winning journalist. I guess they believe in man-made global warming, only they present an alternative remedy.

There are other arguments, other contentions which the dominant orthodoxy and its followers treat as heresy. What of the fact that animals, including humans, put out hydrogen sulphide at both ends of their alimentary canals and that this is a very potent greenhouse gas?

If the world is warming up because I drive a car and that’s going to kill my great-great grandchildren’s global generation — or NOT — then it is time we suspended this new religion and returned the debate to the realm of science.

Last word from Prof Richard Lindzen, the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and climate scientist in 2007, “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

Try telling a congregation of Bishops that there is no God.

(Declaration: I am not in the pay of petrol companies, coal mines or, alas, anyone else.)