The Lord of Blaby

Dear Lord Lawson of Blaby,

I saw you on Newsnight last night, denying the existence of rapid human induced climate change, saying that "the whole science is extremely uncertain". We have been through this before, where for decades the connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer was denied by a vocal and well-organized lobby whose job was to mislead the public about the data -- a not too difficult task.

The truth eventually got out, although many people had to die prematurely before it did. We haven't got time to play games with climate change.

As a very experienced politician, I thought you would have seen it all before; the dirty tricks, the secretly funded PR efforts by industrialists, fake scientific reports based on cherry-picked data.

You mentioned the letter of 6 April by "60 scientists" to the Prime Minister of Canada asking him to cancel the Kyoto process, which you were pleased he had effectively done. The letter you chose to refer to was answered two weeks later by a letter on 19 April from "90 scientists", all of whom were Canadian, all of whom were actively working in the field of climate science, and who gave detailed accompanying documentation backing their claims up.

The "60 scientist" letter -- the one you chose to report -- is signed by people throughout the world, including retirees, economists, geologists, statisticians, climate scientists who have been caught making errors in their papers and can't get them published, people who work at institutions funded by Exxon, and at least one person who was tricked into signing it (he made up for it by signing the other one which was backed up by science).

It's not that non-climate scientists don't have a right to a point of view; it's that only the climate scientists are collecting the data, so everyone else can only be referring to their work. Otherwise, they're just making stuff up.

I beg you, if you bring this letter up as evidence on television, you owe it to us to go back and consider the story behind it carefully. You can start with this article.

You seem to have a fall-back position, where you said that "sometimes, the majority of scientists can be wrong." Indeed, this does happen occasionally, usually when they are not testing their theories against results, as happened in medical science for hundreds of years before the development of the clinical trial. It's also routine in the field of economics, where no one seems to give a damn when the theories turn out to fail to work as advertised.

There is no reason to believe that circumstances currently persist that would enable this body of science to be flawed to the degree necessary. There is too much data being collected through ice cores to confirm the calculations of the direct relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and global climate. That's what everything relies on.

Let's put it this way: after they succeeded in landing a man on the moon, you'd be a fool to assert that the scientists might have got the mass of the earth or the equations of gravitation somehow wrong in their models of orbital trajectories. That's about how sound and well-tested the climate models are becoming.

But there's nothing for you to see with your own eyes. So, you can be quite content to allege that the science is "extremely uncertain". It is not. Please go look at it. Talk to actual scientists about it, not only to economists who find the whole story too inconvenient for their tastes.

Yours,

The Myron Ebell Climate.


For your viewing pleasure, please see Earth to America by the Blue Man Group. As you can see, there are no emergency exits from planet Earth