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Christopher Booker is appalled that humanity has thrown its glimmering record of progress on the pagan bonfire of environmentalist superstition. He is shocked that the scientific community is helplessly in thrall to a cabal of corrupt hacks masquerading under theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s confected rubric. He is dumbfounded that ‘natural’ climatic fluctuations have been spun into some deranged ‘global warming’ conspiracy theory.
Booker’s quixotic attack on scientific orthodoxy features several prongs. For example: Can’t we blame the sun instead? No. Booker’s claim of a ‘striking correlation between quickening of sunspot activity’ and ‘rising temperatures’ glosses over the fact that solar activity has recently declined in inverse proportion to rising temperatures. A simple graph would have clarified this. It’s missing.
Isn’t the ‘Hockey Stick’ bunkum? Nice try. This graph, with its ‘terrifying upward flick of temperature’ tracking closely with CO2 levels, is Booker’s bête noir. He dismisses this as ‘smoke and mirrors’, yet the critique on which he relies was independently examined and rejected in 2007. The graph’s findings have been independently verified from multiple sources. You wouldn’t know this from Booker.
Have scientists failed to account for non CO2-related sources of warming? No. Tim Flannery, for example, discusses (and eliminates) these in The Weather Makers (2005). Presumably, Booker didn’t like his conclusions.
Are United States surface temperature measurements erroneously high? No. While Booker recycles the old chestnut that the figures have been ‘distorted by artificial heat sources’, an exhaustive review conducted in late 2010 revealed that the measurements were slightly too low.
The poor man just can’t take a trick.
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