"Global warming scare-mongering.

Readers may recall my previously reviewing a highly readable science fiction novel by Michael Crichton, State of Fear, about "global warming" scare-mongering. (1) The book focused both on the massive scientific and political fraud involved and the motivations of those (particularly the media) responsible.

Since then the debate, as they say, has moved on. On the one hand, the global warming crowd has continued to propagate distortions to the point almost of frenzy over what (as Crichton pointed out) they nowadays prefer to call "climate change". (2) On the other hand, a small but devoted, and growing, band of skeptics has gradually built up an ever more convincing case questioning both the science and the economics of the Doomsday scenarios involved.

The climate change push has infinitely greater resources at its disposal with which to pursue its crusade (a term with appropriately religious overtones, as noted below). The skeptics, by contrast, appear to have only their own intellectual integrity and passion for the truth to sustain them.

Even as this is being written, a complicit media is publishing stories about the impending appearance of the fourth Report of the International Panel on Climate Change. (3) The IPCC is a United Nations body arising out of the so-called Rio Earth Summit (1992) that established the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. We learn also of the impending visit of Sir Nicholas Stern, coming here on a proselytisation tour to "sell" the hysterical conclusions of his report to the United Kingdom Government last November on the economics of climate change. (4)

The (considerably delayed) publication of the IPCC Report is presumptuous enough, given both the scientific and, more recently, the economic axes that have been laid to the roots of that body's flawed foundations. Stern's report, however, has been subjected to utter ridicule--criticism of the most damaging, authoritative and immediate kind, such as I cannot ever recall of any document of such allegedly high level provenance. Given that, for Stern even to show his face here is astonishing. But for the fact that he seems to be without shame, it could even be called shameful.

THE MEDIA

As to the media's role in this matter, consider the following quotes: (5)

* "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production--with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth". (Newsweek magazine).

* "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output". (New York Times headline).

* "As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval". (Time magazine).

Sounds familiar? If so, you are betraying your age, because the last of these quotes dates from 1974 and the two preceding ones from 1975. All three were then warning of a coming ice age.

As Michael Crichton pointed out, the media is quite shameless in these matters. Doomsday predictions raise circulations, at least until readers (or viewers/listeners) realise that they are being hoodwinked.

WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

A few basic facts may first be in order:

* The "greenhouse effect" is the process whereby Planet Earth, and those who dwell on it, are kept warmer than they would be otherwise by the layer of gases in our surrounding atmosphere. These "greenhouse gases" (GHG), while allowing heat from the Sun to fall upon the Earth's surface, trap (some of) that heat which would otherwise be radiated back into space. As a result, Earth's temperature, which without this greenhouse effect would average around -15[degrees] Centigrade, is maintained on average at around +15[degrees] C. (Averages here refer to the total surface of the globe, day and night and all year around).

* One constituent of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]), which is produced, among other ways, by burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and, increasingly, natural gas). Since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago or so, and particularly since the end of World War II, world standards of living have been rising, all based on the growing use of energy, mainly fossil fuels. As a result, C[O.sub.2] concentrations in the atmosphere have been gradually rising, from about 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in 1900 to about 375 ppmv today.

* According to the climate change adherents, this C[O.sub.2] build-up will (with some lag) cause global temperatures to rise dramatically, with adverse consequences whose extent and nature they portray as more and more alarming. These asserted consequences include the swamping of low-lying areas by rising sea levels, causing not only deaths but also huge flights of refugees; the spread of so-called "tropical" diseases such as malaria; huge changes in the nature and location of present world food production; the wiping out of wildlife habitats, particularly those of such photogenic animals as polar bears; increased frequency of natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes; and even the "shutting down" of the Gulf Stream, with incalculable consequences for those areas whose climate it currently affects. Any reader who has viewed former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, (6) will get the picture.

* On this basis, then, our only hope to "save the planet" is to stop, and reverse, the build-up of this C[O.sub.2] atmospheric "pollution", through international agreements to that end, of which the much-referred-to-but-rarely-analysed Kyoto Protocol (7) has been the first example.

There is much more, but that may be enough to go on with. However, there is another sense to that question, "What is it all about", and again, some facts may be helpful.

CUI BONO?

When one observes mass hysteria such as "climate change" has recently been generating, it is always wise to ask that old question, Cui bono? (Who benefits?). Here are a few suggested answers:

* On the global political level, the movement--and particularly the push for the Kyoto Protocol--has been led by the European Union, notably by France and Germany. (8) Since we can safely discount high-mindedness where the Europeans are concerned, the most rational explanation for this is that such an international agreement would severely disadvantage the USA (were the latter inveigled into joining it)--tying down Gulliver, so to speak. For decades now, U.S. economic progress has steadily out-distanced that of the economically costive EU economy, particularly that part of it that Mr Donald Rumsfeld once referred to as "old Europe". What better way to "level down" that vibrant economy's performance than to entangle it in leading strings devised by a jealous, and increasingly impotent, rival. (9)

* The United Nations, under whose aegis most of the global warming agenda has been driven forward for the past two decades, is clearly an intensely interested party. Indeed, given the progressive decline of its performance of the functions originally assigned to it, its attraction to the global warming cause might be compared to that of the drowning man clutching at a life-belt. For a body that still sees itself, albeit more and more distantly, at the core of the "world government" fantasy, utopian schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol, with their huge accompanying leap in international bureaucratic powers, hold out renewed hope. (10)

* At the national level, climate change fears have been manna from Heaven (if any of them believed in the latter) for the Dark Greens every-where. Just as it was always the object of the old Communist Party of Australia to destroy our economy (thereby, it hoped, laying the foundations for the down-under Marxist revolution), so today the CPA's successors, the Greens, have precisely the same objective. And while almost nobody would listen to them if they were to state openly that they wish to destroy our energy-based standard of living, even that objective may sound unavoidably necessary if it can be clothed in the rhetoric of "saving the planet".

* There are also all those "scientists" (11) who have crossed their hearts and signed up to this new, and hugely lucrative, gravy train. In many ways, this perversion of the very essence of the scientific method, which has underlain Western economic progress for the past four centuries or so, is an even more serious threat to our future than the silly policies proposed to reduce C[O.sub.2] emissions.

* Last but not least in this galaxy of interested parties, assorted chief executives of major corporations have now begun jumping on the climate change bandwagon. Of our four major national banks, for example, two chief executives (ANZ and Westpac) and a chairman (CBA) have all postured for the cameras on the topic in recent months. Ayn Rand may not have been a great philosopher, but in The Fountainhead she certainly depicted with great accuracy the venality of the major corporate world when government moneys were to be had by those declaiming appropriately.

PAGANISM

Beyond the ranks of these personally and institutionally interested parties there is, moreover, a more general cohort of quasi-religious devotees of the global-warming/climate-change thesis. Having ceased to believe in the Christian God, these people characteristically seek to fill the resulting void in their lives by adhering to some more or less pagan movement. Looking around them today, all these "doctors' wives" with too much money and too much time on their hands can (without even dirtying those hands) readily acquire moral virtue among their dinner-party acquaintances by signing up to "save the planet". As Cardinal George Pell said some years ago: (12)

  "... pagan emptiness and fears about nature have led to hysteric and
  extreme claims about global warming. In the past, pagans sacrificed
  animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and
  cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide
  emissions."

It may be added that, if their demands were met, these latter-day pagans would again be sacrificing humans, and animals also, through the effect that adoption of their demands would undoubtedly have on world standards of living, particularly among the poorer peoples of the world.

Yet even among these pagan ranks, perhaps the strangest aspect of the whole global warming movement is its sheer presumption. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, or even a believer in the Deity, to comprehend the sheer vastness and wonder of the world we live in. Think, for example, of the massive water volume of the oceans, or the ever-changing nature of the weather in the atmosphere above us. Consider the almost infinite complexity even of such everyday processes as cloud formation, or the even greater complexity of the interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere, which result in transporting truly massive amounts of energy from the equatorial regions to the polar ones. Into all this humbling and infinitely vast firmament a few extraordinarily arrogant climatologists--most of them, it seems, with limited knowledge of other relevant disciplines such as geophysics, geochemistry, the planetary sciences, marine biology and so on--have injected their hypothetical and entirely unproven speculations as to how, in detail, all this works. Even more arrogantly, they have thrust forward their computer-driven predictions to create such a tide of scare-mongering as has not been seen since mediaeval times. If it were not actually happening, one would never have believed it possible.

That said, among all the welter of claims and counter-claims, it may be worth noting a few more facts.

SOME FACTS

Consider the following:

* Is the atmospheric concentration of C[O.sub.2] increasing? Yes. Between 1900 and today it increased from about 280 ppmv to 375 ppmv.

* Has the temperature of the globe increased during that time? Yes, by about 0.7[degrees] C. However, this has not occurred steadily, as one might expect on the C[O.sub.2]-related thesis, but in a series of ups and downs, as follows: 1900-1920 (no change); 1920-1940 (+ 0.4[degrees] C); 1940-1975 (- 0.2[degrees] C); 1975-1998 (+0.5[degrees] C); 1998-2005 (no change). Moreover, the Earth has often been warmer than it is today, most notably in recent times during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (roughly, 800-1,100 AD), when the Norsemen were growing crops and grazing cattle in what they then accurately called Greenland.

* Does an increased C[O.sub.2] level matter? It is hard to see why it should. For one thing, C[O.sub.2] is an essential plant food, and increasing C[O.sub.2] concentrations tend to make for greater growth of vegetation. Moreover, although all the talk on climate change focuses on C[O.sub.2], in fact it only constitutes 2-4 per cent of total GHG in our atmosphere (water vapour making up most of the rest). This means that, say, doubling C[O.sub.2] atmospheric concentration (even if the effect of that were "linear") would imply much less than doubling the "radiative forcing" effect (13) of GHG taken as a whole.

* The fact is, moreover, that the radiative forcing effect of C[O.sub.2] is not "linear". That is, even if C[O.sub.2] were the only GHG in our atmosphere, doubling its concentration would not double its radiative forcing effect, which increases not in a straight line (linearly) but on a logarithmic basis, falling off progressively. Professor Richard Lindzen, who is widely acknowledged, even by the climate change camp, as one of the world's foremost authorities on these matters, (14) pointed this out some years ago. Astonishingly enough, given all the hysteria still being generated about the need to cut back C[O.sub.2] emissions, we have already long passed the point at which further increases in atmospheric C[O.sub.2] concentration make very much difference to the greenhouse effect.

* For this and other reasons, even if the Kyoto Protocol had been fully implemented (including U.S. ratification), it would "make little difference to future rates of warming" of the globe. (15) All those millions of words, and electronic media time, devoted to it in recent years have thus been (at the risk of a bad pun) so much hot air.

RISING SEA LEVELS?

Most readers will have seen those horrifying film clips about the asserted onset of rising sea levels as the great ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland melt, as the Arctic sea-ice does likewise, and as the glaciers around the world steadily recede. There is just one problem: none of these assertions is true. Here, again, are the facts:

* First, the Antarctic ice sheet, which makes up approximately 70 per cent of the frozen water in the world, is not melting. On the contrary, although a particular region of it (the West Antarctic ice shelf) appears to be very gradually diminishing, the volume of ice in Antarctica as a whole is increasing, not declining. That is, snowfall across the Antarctic landmass exceeds the rate of iceberg generation as the glaciers meet the ocean.

* Second, a scientific study in 2005 showed that the same is true of the Greenland icecap, which accounts for approximately 25 per cent of world ice.

* Third, the scientific record is that the Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than it is today--leading Time magazine then, incidentally, to warn that "weathermen have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer". (16) Fortunately, the outbreak of World War II soon provided Time magazine with other dramatic events to write about.

* Fourth, if the Arctic sea-ice (17) did melt (which incidentally would have the huge economic benefit of opening up the long-sought Northwest Passage across the top of Canada and Alaska), it would not raise the sea level. As Archimedes showed in his famous experiment more than two millennia ago, a floating body (e.g., ice) displaces precisely its own weight of water. The specific gravity (density) of ice is less than that of sea water (because of the salts dissolved in the latter), which is why the ice floats. So if the ice melts, the water level is essentially unchanged.

* As to glaciers (which in terms of the world's ice volume are insignificant anyway), they have been advancing and retreating for centuries, and will undoubtedly go on doing so, for reasons best known to Nature but quite unknown to climatologists. Some glaciers are presently retreating; others (e.g., in South America) are currently advancing. So what?

* To be fair, most global-warming climatologists do not usually cite any of the foregoing reasons to explain their prediction of rising sea levels, preferring perhaps to leave such disreputable "science" to the Al Gores of this world, or Greenpeace or the Australian Conservation Foundation. The reason they give is the thermal expansion of the oceans that would, indeed, eventuate if you believed in their prophecies about rising global temperatures. Does any commonsensible person really believe, however, that a rise in sea levels of (say) 50 centimetres over the course of the next 100 years would constitute any significant threat to mankind whatsoever? The very notion is preposterous; but of course, an imperceptibly gradual expansion of the oceans makes much less satisfying television than that well-worn file footage of a great iceberg falling into the sea off Antarctica.

But, you may say, all these detailed rebuttals are all very well, but after all the argument of recent years, isn't there now "an overwhelming scientific consensus" on the matter?

THE SO-CALLED "SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS"

If you were to rely on what you read, see or hear in the media, you would indeed believe in the existence of such an "overwhelming consensus" on the science of global warming. According to this "consensus", anthropogenic global warming (i.e., man-made global temperature increase arising from our use of fossil fuels to provide most of the energy that is fundamental to our present and prospective living standards) is occurring, and we must act to halt, and ideally reverse it.

As to that, Michael Crichton, in the concluding passages of State of Fear, said it all:

  "Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatsoever to do with
  consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the
  contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, (18)
  which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by
  reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What
  is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in
  history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus ..."

In opposition to that UN-manufactured "consensus" we have seen carefully researched and compellingly argued dissent by some of the most outstanding climate scientists in the world. Richard Lindzen has already been mentioned, but there is no lack of others. A number of them are listed in that speech by Senator Inhofe referred to earlier, and some also gave evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee mentioned above. Although that committee, which was considering the economics of climate change, did not inquire closely into the underlying science, it was clearly uneasy about the whole "consensus" approach to that question, saying, inter alia: (19)

  "We have some concern about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with
  some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently
  influenced by political considerations."

Given the assertion of "overwhelming scientific consensus", it is all the more remarkable that recently the climate change lobby seems to have become quite desperate in its attempts both to silence scientific dissent and to frighten the general public (and hence politicians) into accepting its thesis.

TELLTALE SIGNS

You can usually tell when one side in a debate is short of persuasive arguments. It resorts to personal denigration of the other side; ignoring its arguments; attempting to silence it; and exaggerating its own claims. All these telltale signs are manifest from the climate change side today:

* Reputable scientists who have dared to contest the claims of the climate changers have been personally denigrated as being "in the pay" of the coal producers, the oil companies, and so on--a classic case of playing the man rather than the ball.

* The IPCC has persistently sought to ignore the dissenters' arguments. In some cases it has found it impossible to do so: for example, some years ago work by Professor Lindzen on the cooling effect of sulphates (sulphur dioxide emissions from power station smoke stacks) was so scientifically compelling that even the IPCC had to incorporate it in its modeling scenarios. More generally, it has either ignored the dissenters entirely, or "buried" their views in the highly technical body of its reports while taking no account of them in its politically written executive summary (which is all that 99.9 per cent of readers will ever peruse).

* Among many other attempts to silence the critics has been the recent notorious case of the UK's Royal Society. It wrote to the media and industrial corporations to demand, in the strongest terms, that--now that the scientific debate, it asserted, was "over"--they should cease to provide either publicity or financial support for any contrary views. Fortunately, this created such a storm of protest that it effectively backfired.

* Exaggeration of the climate change lobby's own claims has been endemic from the outset. The "spread of tropical diseases" scare in the IPCC's 1995 report, for example, was referred to in a scathing submission to the House of Lords Select Committee. Paul Reiter, (20) commenting upon the claims about the likely spread of malaria, said:

  "... not one of the lead authors [of this section of the IPCC Report]
  had ever written a research paper on the subject! Moreover, two of the
  authors, both physicians, had spent their entire careers as
  environmental activists ...."

* Another example of exaggeration/scare-mongering/just-plain-lies is the claim, referred to earlier, that the melting of Arctic sea-ice is now putting polar bears under threat of extinction. Yet a recent study concluded that of the 13 major polar bear habitats in Canada, "11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present". Another study came to the same conclusion for 18 out of the 20 worldwide polar bear habitats.

* Following the 2005 U.S. hurricane season, with all its dramatic television footage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the climate change propagandists immediately claimed this as confirmation that "extreme weather events" (hurricanes, floods, storm surges, etc) were on the rise--thereby validating their climate change scenarios. Since then, study after reputable study has shown conclusively that there is no truth in these claims. (21)

THE IPCC'S ECONOMICS

Although the IPCC Reports are generally presented as "scientific" exercises, the projections/forecasts/predictions involved are also based on economic modeling of world economic growth over, say, the century ahead. Obviously, the greater the growth of world economic output over the period, the greater will be the growth in fossil fuel use, in C[O.sub.2] emissions, and hence (on the IPCC thesis) in the world's temperature.

Space precludes detailed examination of the figuring. However, the more that reputable economists have looked into the matter, the more "rigged" the economics has been seen to be. The work of Ian Castles (22) and Professor David Henderson, (23) in particular, has shown conclusively that the economic growth figures are simply not credible. This is partly because those producing the IPCC numbers have used market exchange rates, rather than purchasing power parities, to arrive at their starting point for the size of the world economy in 2000--an approach abandoned by the economics profession some 20 years earlier. It is also because the IPCC assumes rates of growth of developing world economies that bear no relation to reality. Both factors produce a much higher projection of growth of world economic output (and hence of C[O.sub.2] emissions) over the period to (say) 2100 than can possibly be justified. (24)

Significantly, the IPCC itself has simply sought to ignore the Castles/Henderson work. It remains to be seen to what extent, if any, it has accepted the need to take account of it in its new report, forthcoming as this is being written.

THE CHINA/INDIA FACTOR

The climate change push as a whole reminds me of an old saying, when someone was demanding something unattainable, that he "should save his breath to cool his porridge".

Let us assume that everything the climate changers are arguing is true. Let us assume, even more unrealistically, that the developed economies of the world (including Australia) were to adopt in full all the measures being advocated to reduce our own levels of economic production and, hence, standards of living. Would that "save the planet"? Not a bit of it.

The point can be graphically made with an example. The House of Lords Select Committee calculated that if the UK economy were to be shut down in this way, the resulting reduction in global atmospheric C[O.sub.2] would be offset in just over two years by the additional C[O.sub.2] put out in that time by Chinese economic growth alone. The Chinese have made it abundantly clear (including as recently as a few months ago at a meeting in Nairobi of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) that they have no intention of cutting back their rapidly advancing economic output or, hence, the growth in energy use inextricably associated with it. The other great population centre of the world, India, is wholly of the same mind. Both countries take the view that if the West chooses to set about destroying itself on the basis of some dodgy "science" (and some almost unbelievably bogus computer "modeling" of factors so complex that they cannot possibly be modeled), then that is up to us. They will not, however (and who could possibly blame them?) be emulating our stupidity. Yet unless they did, efforts by the West--even if you believed in the whole cartload of fantasies involved--would have no significant effect on outcomes. So save your breath, they might say, to cool your porridge.

CONCLUSION

It will be clear to readers that I do not accept either the dodgy "science" or the equally dodgy economics on which the climate changers base their push for some form of world governance. But even if I did believe that the world was likely to warm very gradually over the years ahead, I would not even begin to accept that rational human beings should be panicked into pursuing such nostrums as they advance.

Of course, it makes financial sense for businesses (and up to a point, people) to reduce their own costs by saving energy. But it makes no sense to do so by using so-called "renewable" energy (solar energy or wind power) instead of much cheaper energy produced from fossil fuels. Nor does it make any sense to raise the cost of the latter by so-called "clean coal" technologies (sequestering the C[O.sub.2] otherwise emitted by pumping it underground in one form or another). All that does is render more expensive the energy produced from power stations employing such technology, thereby whittling away at one of Australia's great international economic comparative advantages.

The Howard Government has been right to refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, not merely because the latter has been a failure even on its own terms, but also because of the UN-held strings attaching to it. But it has been wrong to accept, at first implicitly and nowadays explicitly, the C[O.sub.2] "pollution" scare-mongering that provides the basis for that international treaty in the first place. For example, its recent decision to spend $175 million to install a solar-powered electricity generator outside Mildura is bizarre.

The January ministerial reshuffle saw the previous Minister for the Environment, Senator Ian Campbell (a total captive of his Department and the National Greenhouse Office) lose his job, being replaced by Mr Malcolm Turnbull. This cannot help but be an improvement, but how big a one remains, at the time of writing, to be seen.

1. John Stone, "Michael Crichton on 'Global Warming'", National Observer, No. 64, Autumn 2005.

2. Since, although there may be argument as to whether the globe is warming, there can be no argument that global climate is always changing (after all, it always has been).

3. See, for example, Jo Chandler, "We're ruining Earth, scientists warn", in The Age (Melbourne), 27 January, 2007.

4. The Economics of Climate Change, Report to Her Majesty's Government by Sir Nicholas Stern, November 2006.

5. I am indebted for these quotes (and a lot of others, equally telling) to a speech in the U.S. Senate delivered by Senator James Inhofe, then chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, on 25 September 2006. He in turn acknowledged a Business and Media Institute publication, Fire and Ice.

6. For reasons that will, I trust, become clear, a more accurate name for this film (produced to bolster Mr Gore's fading chances for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination in 2008), would have been A Convenient Lie.

7. The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 and came into effect in February 2005, when Russia finally agreed to ratify it as part of a deal with the European Union whereby the EU, in return, agreed to support Russia's admission to the World Trade Organisation. If that sounds to you like politics, as distinct from any belief in global warming on the part of the Russians, you are right.

8. The recently installed (by rotation) President of the EU's Council of Ministers, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, has indicated that she proposes to place "progress" on climate change matters at the head of her agenda during 2007.

9. To judge by current birth-rates in most EU countries, which are seeing them in the process of literally dying as European nations (as distinct from components of the future Eurabia), their impotence may not be confined to mere economic performance.

10. In 2000 the French President, Jacques Chirac, said that the Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance". The French, of course, are much too hard-headed to actually believe in "global governance", but as noted above they see it as a means of effectively hobbling the USA.

11. I put the word "scientists" here in quotes because no true scientist has ever been prepared to sell him or herself, as these people have done, in order to revel in research grants, international conference travel and other such assorted pourboires.

12. Quoted by Paul Collins in The Australian, May 10, 2006.

13. Essentially, the effectiveness of the GHG concerned in trapping outgoing radiation.

14. Professor Lindzen is the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

15. The Economics of Climate Change, Report of the (UK) House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, July 2005, p. 8.

16. Time magazine, 2 January 1939.

17. The Arctic sea-ice, unlike Antarctica or Greenland, is of course not land-based but floating.

18. Galileo is perhaps the most famous example. He, of course, was up against an even more powerful "consensus" that time--the Catholic Church, which continued to insist that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and not, as Galileo had discovered, vice versa. A more recent example is given by Australia's two recent winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall. For 20 years these two "dissenters" battled to persuade the "overwhelming consensus" of the medical profession that gastric ulcers were the result of a bacterium (and hence could be treated with antibiotics), rather than "environmental factors", as that medical consensus insisted.

19. Op. cit., p. 6.

20. Reiter was formerly Chief of the Entomology Section, Dengue Branch, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is now at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He is a recognised world authority on malaria.

21. For example, in the opinion of Emeritus Professor William H. Gray, a recognised authority on hurricane activity, "global tropical cyclone activity over the last century and particularly over the last 30 years has not increased despite the global warming that has occurred" over those periods. Hurricanes and Climate Change, paper to Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, William H. Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, University of Colorado, 11 October 2006.

22. Ian Castles is well known to me personally, having at one time worked for me in the Treasury before moving to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Subsequently he became head of the Department of Finance and, later, head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He is not only a highly intelligent person, but also one of unchallenged integrity as well as professional competence.

23. Although Professor Henderson was never a colleague of mine, he is also personally well known to me. After having worked in the World Bank (at a time when that body could still claim some respectability) and the Economic Section of the British Treasury, he became head of the Economics and Statistics Division of the OECD. He, like Ian Castles, is a person of the highest professional competence as well as of personal integrity.

24. Castles and Henderson gave evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee referred to earlier. In its report, the committee said that "they have helped to generate a valuable literature that calls into question a whole series of issues" relating to the IPCC emission scenarios, and that in doing so "they have performed a public service".