By Miranda Devine
February 27, 2005
The Sun-Herald
· http://www.smh.com.au/news/Miranda-Devine/Tide-turns-on-the-greenmongers/2005/02/26/1109180160492.html
On the day the Kyoto Protocol came into force - 11 days ago - Greenpeace protesters tried to paralyse oil trading by storming the International Petroleum Exchange in London.
But a sign that irresponsible green antics have outworn their welcome came in a hilariously po-faced article about the protest published in The Times in London. (As reported by Bogs Doddy here last week scroll down for full report)
"What [the 35 protesters] were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement . . . Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan."
While breaking the jaws of Greenpeace protesters is not to be recommended, the story does illustrate that the good-natured, hear-them-out tolerance most of the world has afforded green hysterics for the past 30 years may be running out. After all, the dissent-crushing intolerance of the green movement is legendary.
The Greenpeace protesters described the traders, most of whom were under the age of 25, as "just Cockney barrow boy spivs", which reveals more about the protesters than it does about the defenders of the trading floor.
Another sign green-mongering is wearing thin is the bestseller success of Michael Crichton's latest thriller State Of Fear, a novel in which the bad guys are extreme greens who plot to create artificial environmental catastrophes, like a tsunami, to bolster support for their crusade.
Crichton, author of bestsellers such as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, which have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, has obvious popular appeal. But he is also a Harvard-trained medical doctor and he backs up the science in his book with a 21-page bibliography, a five-page appendix titled "Why politicised science is dangerous" and an "Author's Message" in which he states his position.
"Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made. Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century," he writes.
"Scientists know that continued funding depends on delivering results the funders desire. As a result environmental organisation 'studies' are every bit as biased and suspect as industry 'studies'. No faction should be given a free pass."
All of which seems reasonable. But, of course, Crichton has been dismissed as just another ignorant extremist.
Danish statistician and former Greenpeace member Bjorn Lomborg copped a similar beating from the environmental establishment and its enablers in the media when he questioned the benefits of the Kyoto protocol in his bestseller The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg concluded Kyoto would do little to reduce global warming, but would cost the global economy as much as $274 trillion by 2100.
What's more, he said the cost of one year's compliance with Kyoto "could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every human being on Earth".
The response was to liken him to a Holocaust denier and drag his reputation through the mud. The author of a book on climate change threw a cream pie in his face at a book-signing at Oxford.
Other dissenters have met similar fates. When Dr Fred Seitz, the past president of the US National Academy of Sciences, organised a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol, he had 20,000 signatories - 17,000 with scientific degrees, including physicists, geo-physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers and environmental scientists. But for simply stating there was no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases was causing catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of climate, they were dubbed "The Carbon Club, foot soldiers for the fossil-fuel industries".
Proof of just how free a pass has been given to the global warming doomsayers came in the recent demolition of a hitherto unquestioned mathematical cornerstone of their theory. The so-called "hockey stick graph" published in 1998 by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann became an article of faith, and underpinned the Kyoto Protocol. It purported to plot average surface temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere for the previous 1000 years. Temperatures appear to remain constant until 100 years ago when the graph takes a sudden upturn, supposedly showing the Earth heating up as the industrial revolution kicks in.
It took six years and several sacked scientific journal editors before doubt was thrown on the hockey stick. Last year Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick discovered a fundamental flaw in the computer program which produces the hockey stick. It seemed, whatever random data it was fed, the program almost always produced a hockey stick.
The Canadians couldn't get their work published by a scientific journal but they put it on the web for all to see.
"That discovery hit me like a bombshell," wrote Richard Muller in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review. "Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics." Eureka!
The voices of dissenters have been silenced for too long so all power to Crichton for bypassing the gatekeepers and going straight to the people. You can only suspect the pendulum of environmental thought might be swinging back towards the rational, collecting the odd Greenpeace jaw as it goes.
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