Poet, Broadcaster And, More Importantly, Climate Sceptic
James Delingpole
Breitbart London
Clive James, the Australian wit, critic, journalist, broadcaster and poet has died. His artistic virtues will, I’m sure, be widely celebrated and memorialised in the mainstream media. But of more interest here is the fact that he was an outspoken climate sceptic.
In an essay for the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2017, he ripped into the hysterical exaggeration and scaremongering which constitutes ‘climate science.’
They came out of the grant-hungry fringe of semi-science to infect the heart of the mass media, where a whole generation of commentators taught each other to speak andwriteahyperbolicdoomlanguage(‘unprecedented’,‘irreversible’,etcetera),which you might have thought was sure to doom them in their turn. After all, nobody with an intact pair of ears really listens for long to anyone who talks about ‘the planet’ or ‘carbon’ or ‘climate denial’ or ‘the science’. But for now – and it could be a long now – the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit.and
Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such a complex issue that no ‘science denier’ can have an opinion about it worth hearing. For most areas of science such an insistence would be true. But this particular area has a knack of raising questions that get more and more complicated in the absence of an answer to the elementary ones. One of those elementary questions is about how man-made carbon dioxide can be a driver of climate change if the global temperature has not gone up by much over the last twenty years but the amount of man-made carbon dioxide has. If we go on to ask a supplementary question – say, how could carbon dioxide raise temperature when the evidence of the ice cores indicates that temperature has always raised carbon dioxide – we will be given complicated answers, but we still haven’t had an answer to the first question, except for the suggestion that the temperature, despite the observations, really has gone up, but that the extra heat is hiding in the ocean. It is not necessarily science denial to propose that this long professional habit of postponing an answer to the first and most elementary question is bizarre. Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist.
He once wrote a poem on the subject for the Times (of London)
