Debate at last

May I just thank all those people who have taken the time and trouble to post their comments on here. It looks like we might just be having a debate at last, this is what I write the blog for, to get people to come up and give their opinions and views.

First off I think Paul was being a bit disingenuous saying that I was comparing Gordon Brown to Hitler, what I said was "Gordon Brown gave a perfect example of this kind of fanaticism the other day when, almost frothing at the mouth in fine Hitlerian style, he proclaimed anyone who didn't accept his point of view as being 'Flat Earthers', which means I was comparing his style to Hitler's not the man. However if I did cause a misunderstanding I apologise.

Richard has made some valuable comments in his posts, especially about how the IPCC work.

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) does exactly this: it looks at all the studies that have been done, from people who's (sic) research has found man is not to blame, and from those that believe we are. They review the body of evidence and look at the overall picture."

If only that were true, unfortunately it is a matter of record that they did not do this. The IPCC relied heavily on information gathered by Working Group 1 under the chairmanship of Dr John Houghton (later Sir John Theodore Houghton FRS CBE bio here: www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Biography.php?ID=17) who was at that time Chief Executive of the British Met office. He founded the Hadley centre which later became very involved in selecting which scientists should be invited to contribute.

At first everything seemed above board and one passage in the Working Group 1 report read as follows.

"a global warming of larger size has almost certainly occurred at least once since the end of the last glaciations without any appreciable increase in greenhouse gases. Because we do not understand the reasons for these past warming events, it is not yet possible to attribute a specific proportion of the recent, smaller warming to an increase in greenhouse gases"

In other words greater warmings have happened before, we don't know why, but we can't blame greenhouse gases. A perfectly fair and balanced assessment of the situation. However when the report was issued all mention of not knowing why warming had occurred was removed. Prof R S Lindzen (bio here: www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm) writing in 1992 wrote:

"largely ignores the uncertainty in the report and attempts to present the expectation of substantial warming as firmly based science"

In other words "Hey hang on a minute this has changed from we don't really know to this is definite"

Lindzen went on to quote Houghton himself admitting that:

"whilst every attempt was made by lead authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus"

In other words if you don't agree with us you will not be heard. Shades of Copernicus and Galileo!

Professor F Seitz (obituary here: http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/index.php?page=engine&id=724)

Commented in 1996:

"in my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events which led to this IPCC report…if the IPCC is incapable of following its most basic procedures, it would be best to abandon the entire IPCC process"

Professor Seitz, distinguished physicist and educator who held key government posts for over three decades, received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award in science, in 1973 for his contributions to the modern quantum theory of the solid state of matter, presumably had a fair knowledge of the process of 'peer review'.

Whatever happened to Dr John Houghton for his starting the global warming ball rolling? Well the fact that he later received a knighthood might be seen by some as payoff, but of course I couldn't possibly comment! Two of his publications make interesting reading, Does God Play Dice? 1988, Intervarsity Press and of course the ever popular, The search for God; can science help? 1995, Lion Publishing.

The point is the fix was in, right from the start the IPCC made it quite clear that any scientist not agreeing with them would not be listened to.