So, the end of June and start of July sees new record-breaking temperatures in a heatwave that has visited the UK and Europe earlier in the season than ever before. Surely this is a clear and stark warning of global warming obvious to all and sundry?
But is it? Even if this summer is both the hottest anyone in Europe has ever experienced and the hottest since records began, it is not conclusive proof of unprecedented global warming, just of temperatures rising in our own experience and in accordance with the records.
The first anecdotal aspect of people failing to remember a summer as hot as this before is perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. History has delivered periods of global warming – and global cooling – before. In the 5th century, Yorkshire boasted vineyards. There was also a marked medieval global warming phase that lasted for centuries. There then followed global cooling until circa 1800: witness all those 17th-century frost fairs on the frozen Thames, and all those Dutch paintings of the same period, an endless proliferation of skating scenes. Might it not make sense that temperatures should be climbing steadily higher since then?
The record-breaking nature of our temperatures is another possible bone of contention. These records go back perhaps 150 years at most; they are anything but uniform in their siting, recordings and data collecting, throwing up any number of possible anomalies. When we go back centuries and even many millennia, using ice cores and other methods, we encounter a different picture of temperature fluctuations to the one presented by climate alarmists.
What are we non-scientists – the vast majority of the world’s population – to make of all this? Can we not just accept “the Science”? Well, with swelling ranks of physicist, geographer and other scientific Noble Laureates challenging the consensus imposed upon us, and after the shameful consensus distortions over Covid (which facilitated draconian anti-liberty measures) – perhaps we shouldn’t. These sceptics may be right, but they may not be.
Personally, with my limited layman’s understanding (which many readers of this piece will have quickly alighted on), I can totally believe that man’s massively increased industrial output of the last century, with an exploding energy-consuming global population that is growing richer by the day and thus demanding more fuel and goods, will have contributed to much greater pollution and our current higher temperatures. But by how much? Is it a major, minor or even an inconsequential contribution?
Reservations abound. Working in academia, I know how the system works. There is a multi-trillion eco-economy out there waiting to be exploited. Some scientists in university departments are eager to get their hands on the astonishingly lucrative research funding that flows incontinently from a politically approved agenda across the West. What proportion of funding goes to scientists who have reservations about the global-warming consensus? The Climategate scandal and cover-ups at the University of East Anglia in 2009 and thereafter rather points to the importance of distorting or suppressing scientific data in order to secure funding into global warming.
The ruthless cancellation of critics; the religiously dogmatic rejection of any heterodox views; the arrogant and alarming groupthink that “the Science” is forever settled; the vast reserves of trillions being thrown at defending the consensus: all these do not necessarily mean that the consensus is wrong, but they certainly raise important issues of not only the process of scientific research, but also of the mantra we have come to expect. And to pay for, both in personal cost and, even more worryingly, personal liberty.
