Just who are these global warming conspirators?

Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Mention climate change and human contributions to global warming and the electronic in-box invariably overflows with e-mails from dismayed conspiracy theorists.

How, how, how could any serious journalist allow himself to be so easily duped?

Apparently there's this gigantic hoax being foisted upon the public by a vast international cabal of crooked, or stupid, or just plain "bad" scientists who are cooking the data.

True, the lead scientist for the 2,000 climate experts from around the world who will bring down the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Monday the evidence that human activities are accelerating global warming is now much more robust than it was in 2001 and many uncertainties have been dispelled but then, why should anyone listen to him when he's supposedly part of the doom-crying conspiracy?

Thus, it's my duty as a crusading reporter to expose all this "junk science" -- just as Michael Crichton, (whose oeuvre includes stories about time travellers visiting the middle ages and intelligent dinosaurs gobbling up dim scientists on remote islands) did so adeptly in his most recent science fiction novel -- or I will stand exposed as a pathetic fake.

Precisely who are these charlatans, or frauds, or incompetents? Well, they appear to have entrenched themselves in the earth sciences departments of most of our major universities and national research institutes throughout the developed world.

What would motivate them to deceive the public about climate change and its causes? A lust for grants? A delight in malicious mischief? A secret hatred of market capitalism? All the above?

Whatever the reasons, they certainly appear a cunning bunch. They turn up advising the British, Canadian, U.S., Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Australian, Italian and just about every other government that has the resources available to investigate climate change phenomena.

They have wormed their way into teaching positions at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill, the Sorbonne, Queens, Cambridge, the University of B.C., the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, Stanford, the University of Victoria, even, gasp, the University of Calgary.

To make things worse, the global warming conspiracy has infiltrated even the World Bank. As those who read the newspapers now know, its chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, has just produced a 700-page assessment of the science behind the global warming theory.

Forget the recent fuss over the hockey stick graph that still gets up the conspiracy theorists' collective nose. The debate's over, Stern says. The verdict is in.

His conclusions: The planet's temperature is rising rapidly; the predominant cause is a change in the atmosphere's composition as a result of greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels, deforestation and other changes in land use.

Furthermore, the science is overwhelming that all those claims that the world is warming up because of changes in solar intensity or volcanic eruptions simply cannot explain the spike in global temperature over the last 50 years, Stern says. The conspiracy theorists argue that we should do nothing because attempting to curb carbon dioxide emissions is a chimera. Damage to economic growth would go right to the bottom line.
Stern has an answer for that, too. You want to damage economic growth, just keep right on pumping crud into the atmosphere. He says the consequences of doing nothing will be to see massive incremental costs from sea level rise, extreme weather events, loss of arable land, the displacement of hundreds of millions of people by flood, drought, desertification and the expansion of disease-bearing pests -- British Columbia's pine beetle infestation is but a harbinger of worse to come -- will wind up triggering a contraction of the global economy on the order of 20 per cent.

On the other hand, the report points out, there's still time to address the climate change file and the cost, if we act immediately and aggressively, will be about one per cent of the global economy. But the longer we wait, the more it will cost and we risk reaching a tipping point beyond which an accelerating process become irreversible.

Given a choice, I know which odds I'd prefer to gamble upon.

Meanwhile, those who want to read the Stern report in full can find it on Her Majesty's Treasury website at: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_econo mics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm