The science – and politics – of climate change

Matt Ridley, well known to Spectator readers, is giving the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Annual Lecture on 17 October, at the premises of the Royal Society. The venue has annoyed New Scientist magazine. How dare the great home of science give house room to ‘those who deny climate science’, asks the paper’s ‘biology features editor’, Michael le Page. He hates the ‘false balance’ which presents opposing views. Revealing his own opinions to be more political than scientific, he cites the example of the US presidential election, where ‘the media’s abject failure to tackle Trump has let him get within spitting distance of the presidency’. Perhaps I am biased, since I am a board member of the GWPF, but Ridley does not ‘deny’ climate science. He studies it, and questions some of the conclusions advanced by some ‘warmist’ zealots. In doing so, he adroitly distinguishes between the scientific method and the tendentious assertion.