As the doomsday cult frets about the planet, Peter Day mourns the decline of institutional science in Australia.

From the hills over Hobart’s Sandy Bay, the lights from at least one house will be blazing even more brightly than usual during Earth Hour on Saturday night.
That would be the family home of emeritus professor Garth Paltridge, former chief research scientist of the CSIRO’s division of atmospheric research, visiting ANU research fellow, and fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

Paltridge, an Australian Enlightenment man to his bootstraps, will most likely be upstairs in his study, working on some new learned paper on climate change. He will also be plotting new ways to help arrest what he sees as the continuing sad decline of institutional science in Australia, under the pressures of the global warming ‘doomsday cult’ whose followers will be turning out their lights for the hour.

This week I phoned Paltridge to hear what he had to say about the CSIRO’s new six-page publication, ‘The State of the Climate’, produced with the Bureau of Meteorology.

This, of course, is the leaflet that has been seized upon eagerly by the warming alarmists at the ABC and elsewhere for some desperately-needed reassurance that all is not lost in the wake of the Climategate and IPCC scandals. To Paltridge, it’s just another sad indication of the decline in scientific objectivity. ‘This is a slipshod, slippery little document,’ he tells me. ‘It looks as if it’s been hastily thrown together by some committee. They don’t even tell you from what data they’ve drawn their conclusions.’

He points to the assertion that Australian average temperatures ‘are projected’ to rise by 0.6 to 1.5 degrees by 2030. ‘Projected from what?’ he asks. ‘From their own past observations? Or from climate models? They don’t say.’

It’s a fair point. A couple of years ago, the formal Australian Academy of Science response to the Garnaut report on climate change included the comment — made in relation to some CSIRO-BoM projections cited therein — that ‘economic modelling based on one scenario that does not consider the recognised uncertainty of climate models… has the risk of reaching incorrect conclusions’. CSIRO-BoM appears to have forgotten this.

Paltridge notes that the new CSIRO-BoM publication also asserts that the mean rainfall over south-east Australia has decreased significantly over the past 50 years, and that it will continue to decrease in the future. So perhaps they’re projecting the future directly from the 50-year trend line? ‘But if that’s what they’re doing,’ he says, ‘you have to ask, why choose the 50-year period?’

Why indeed? Given that the half-century period offers a decrease in rainfall, compared with the 100-year record, which effectively shows no decrease at all, the choice looks like a fairly obvious case of cherry-picking in order to maximise the projected future changes in rainfall.

Another CSIRO-BoM claim is that there is a ‘greater than 90 per cent certainty that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have caused most of the global warming since the mid-20th century’. This produces a barely disguised snort of derision down the phone. As Paltridge says, that 90 per cent figure seems awfully precise, but they don’t even tell you where they get it from. ‘I can tell you though,’ he adds. ‘It’s drawn directly from an IPCC report, and is based on nothing more rigorous than a group of guys sitting around a table saying how good they think their models are.’

Then there is the straw man wherein CSIRO-BoM triumphantly concludes: ‘Our observations clearly demonstrate that climate change is real.’ Well, you don’t say: Paltridge, like virtually all scientists, has no doubt that temperatures have been rising, and also that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere makes the temperature higher than would otherwise have been the case. But how much higher is unknown, as is what the temperature might ‘otherwise’ have been.

‘The more important questions are whether any future change in the climate is likely to be big enough to matter,’ he points out. ‘And if it does matter, whether it will be worth doing anything about.’ To such questions, CSIRO-BoM currently offers the impartial inquirer little useful guidance.

As Paltridge wrote in a wicked little book that he published last year (disarmingly entitled The Climate Caper): ‘Even accepting for the sake of argument that some significant degree of global warming may be observed in the future, it is certainly not the consensus of the majority of scientists that the actual impact on humans will be significant — or indeed that it will be detrimental.’

To Paltridge, a more puzzling — and disturbing — question concerns the origins and organisation of the doomsday cult that has developed around the whole global warming issue. For as he says, it’s in the name of this cult that we are on the brink of wasting ‘mind-numbingly large’ amounts of public money and other resources.

Paltridge tends not to buy the idea that ‘it was all planned 30 years ago by some small, shadowy, secret organisation bent on destruction of the world’s social order’, preferring the view that the answer lies rather in ‘the human addiction to tales of collective guilt’.

I wonder about this also. The religious impulse is clearly part of the story. But close observers as bright and experienced as the Czech president Václav Klaus argue that for many dry-eyed political movers and shakers, the appeal of the cult lies precisely in its potential for unprecedented power.

The history of medieval apocalyptic movements in the West — as narrated for example in Norman Cohn’s old classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium — also suggests that power machinations and doomsday cults do not have to be mutually exclusive. Indeed, they have often gone together.

Cohn is still very much worth reading. As he shows, the forerunners of our own doomsday cults — the millenarian (‘end-of-the-world’) revolutionary movements that infested the Middle Ages in Europe — would typically be sparked by some prophet-like figure of a type which has become wearily familiar to us. ‘Sometimes,’ writes Cohn, ‘they were petty nobles; sometimes simply imposters, but more usually they were intellectuals or half-intellectuals…’ The bizarre image of some medieval Al Gore comes to mind.

But what next would emerge was never in the least amusing: a ‘restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognised no claims save that of its own supposed mission. And finally this group might — though it did not always — succeed in imposing its leadership on the great mass of the disoriented, the perplexed and the frightened’.

Not a pretty thought. Like Garth Paltridge, keep those lights burning bright.
 

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This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal online on 12 June 2010.

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