Last month, 1,000 emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The institution is more important than it sounds: for decades, it has been at the centre of the global warming debate, keeping in touch with the close-knit group of scientists who guard the various projections about global warming. Or, as the emails showed, the lack thereof. ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,’ said one scientist. Another said: ‘We can have a proper result — but only by including a load of garbage.’
As the world leaders gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto treaty it is unlikely the subject of these emails will be raised. This is not a forum for debate, but for the preaching of gospel. Already the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is hinting that the ‘fossil fuel lobby’ is responsible for the leaks — as if this made them any less damaging. They have hardly disproven global warming, but have exposed the way some scientists and academics see themselves on a crusade against the wicked deniers. Hysteria has taken the place of rational debate.
The truth about global warming is that the debate has many levels that can broadly be divided into four categories: 1) that global warming is happening; 2) that mankind is largely responsible; 3) that we are reaching a crunch point; and 4) that only a crash course of carbon reduction can avert it. All too often, the British press report people who believe — or reject — all four parts of this catechism. The debate is thus caricatured: shades of grey are airbrushed out.
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