‘Post-normal science’ is perfect for climate demagogues — it isn’t science at all

No it’s OK, I didn’t mind one teeny tiny bit that Matt Ridley wrote an entire Spectator cover story on Climategate and the blogosphere last week without once mentioning the name of the brilliant Spectator journalist who broke the story on his Telegraph blog, and popularised the name Climategate, and got 1.5 million hits in one week, and whose anti-eco-fascist bulletins now have a massive following from readers all around the world who keep sending him emails like ‘Thank you for saving us from the horrors of ManBearPig’ and (I’m not making this up) ‘Someone should put up a James Delingpole statue in Trafalgar Square’. Because if I did it would be really petty, wouldn’t it?

What does bother me, though, is the number of people who imagine that Climategate was only ever just a little local difficulty involving a few men in anoraks at some grim fenland redbrick. Or that the ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ still stands that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) represents the greatest danger of our time. Or that the integrity of institutions like the Royal Society, the Met Office and the Hadley Centre is not in doubt. Or that there’s nothing wrong or scary or downright suicidal about the Cameron Conservatives’ lunatic green agenda. Or that there must be some truth in this man-made global warming thing — or why else would so many scientists believe in it?

Let me deal with that last assumption first, because it embodies the most basic and perhaps the most dangerous misconception in the entire global warming debate: that there is this thing called ‘the science’. And that it is ‘settled’.

Science is never settled. That’s not how it works. ‘The science’ is no more nor less than a series of hypotheses, none of which lasts any longer than it takes some impertinent, iconoclastic upstart to come along, prove it wrong, and replace it with some fancy new improved hypothesis of his own.