A Climate Change Heretic

Time to warm up the Green auto-da-fe:

Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.

A major Climate Change scientist, straying from Al Gore's ZOMG we're all gonna diiieee Cap-And-Trade shakedown bandwagon? He must be a denier!

Hulme despairs over the comments made to the Copenhagen climate conference in March by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish Prime Minister. Rasmussen told delegates that "science should be the basis for decision-making in this field", and asked scientists to keep it simple, "not to provide us with too many moving targets...and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”

“That's just classic,” says Hulme. “Here's this politician telling the scientists ‘we can't do this without you. Give us the numbers. But by the way, make them simple, and make them precise.’”

Perhaps Dr. Hulme will forgive me a snarky observation, that what Herr Rasmussen meant to say was the numbers should be in small, unmarked bills. Simple, and precise.

But the good Doctor makes an important point that I've made here a number of times: the science has become ideologized, and therefore nasty:

After all, much of the abuse that is hurled across the climate divide comes from those who like to believe that it is they who are dealing in a currency of proper science - bias and ideology is what the opposition does. Hence the vitriol aimed at Bjørn Lomborg over the years.

“It was interesting as to why he received such hate-mail from very well respected academics rather than simply engaging in the arguments,” says Hulme. “It became very very heavily and easily personalised, when actually Lomborg's position is an entirely defendable position. I mean, you can disagree with it, and you can find flaws in his argument, but let's find those flaws and let's have a disagreement, rather than suddenly becoming reactionaries overnight. And I think there's too much of that. And it's an interesting question as to why it is that people feel that climate change is somehow is the issue beyond all other issues today that one has to stand on shoulder to shoulder and not allow any chink in because it would allow the powers of darkness to somehow gain the upper hand."

In other words, it's become religeon. Nice to see one of the world's most prominent climate scientists discussing this, though.

Even money the Obama administration forces Cap And Trade through with little or no debate, no understanding of cost, and in an emergency panic. The Democrats had better think this one through, though, because there will be no blaming the eeevil Republicans for $3.50 a gallon gasoline.

And anyway, Hulme is a splitter! The science is settled! Settled, I say!

Hey you deniers! Get the heck off my lawn!