Last week we learnt from a study co-authored by Grubb in the impeccable and neutral source Nature Geoscience that we have all been taken for a costly ride by the climate change people. The Earth is not heating up anything like they all told us it was.
If you find a spare moment this weekend, check out the online biography of Professor Michael Grubb. He is a busy and hitherto (one would hope) important man.
Professor of climate change policy at University College London. Editor-in-chief of something called Climate Policy — hurry, hurry while stocks last. Adviser to the energy regulator Ofgem. Member of the government’s climate change committee. Adviser to the Germans on something to do with climate and to the European parliament’s exciting “progressive economy initiative”. And more, much more besides.
It’s a wonder Mikey even has time to step outside and see how the weather is looking, so feted has he been on account of his unquestionable knowledge about what is happening to our climate. Unquestionable, because climate change is a “settled science”, and those who question its reality or impact are “deniers”, like those who would deny the Holocaust ever happened.
Early one morning last week, as the dawn chorus began in what has been a colder September than usual, Mikey was roused from his slumbers by his wife, holding the report he’s just written, shrieking in his ear: “Professor Grubb, Professor Grubb, you have to know this: your entire life is a lie. Ha ha ha! All a terrible lie!” OK, I cannot be entirely certain this happened. I don’t even know if Grubb has a wife. But it should have happened, even if it didn’t.
Last week we learnt from a study co-authored by Grubb in the impeccable and neutral source Nature Geoscience that we have all been taken for a costly ride by the climate change people. The Earth is not heating up anything like they all told us it was. For years they had been telling us we will very soon burn to a crisp, accompanied by the howling of polar bears.
Grubb himself suggested in 2015 that we would need to abandon democracy to address the rapid and calamitous rise in the Earth’s temperature. Politicians were dragooned to the cause. Billions were spent in this country alone, subsidising useless wind farms and taxing ordinary people on their energy bills. People who opposed these strictures — the deniers — were called antediluvian and climate change activists demanded that those who challenged their views should not even be allowed to express their opinions. Only they had the truth. Except, it wasn’t the truth.
So what went wrong? Take a look at Prof Grubb’s CV and you might get an inkling. Science is supposed to be neutral, but it is never so when co-opted for political reasons. Call it “settled” and it becomes a kind of anti-science, an article of faith deeply resistant to investigation. Call a university department “climate change” and you immediately sign up to it as an indisputable fact. And suddenly a huge and lucrative industry is born, with panels and intergovernmental committees, transnational policy initiatives, world summits and swingeing taxes on the poorest. And the climate change proponents are required to hype up the rhetoric, to provide politicians with suitably scary predictions.
Even after last week’s revelations in Nature Geoscience, the mentalist wing of the climate change lobby was still shrieking — in The Guardian, natch. It will all lead to “the collapse of civilisation”, one daffy woman reported, while a bloke called John said those who disagreed with him were “elderly white male climate-deniers”.
Ah, John. I am white, male and getting elderly. I don’t deny the climate. I can see it, doing its stuff, outside my window. And as a layman I would guess that we have probably contributed to the warming of the planet. How much? I don’t know — and nor do you, for that matter. You haven’t a clue. It’s just an article of faith. And, as Karl Popper might tell you, that ain’t science.