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It is often said that some of the world’s sharpest minds – our best and brightest scientists – discovered the problem of climate change. The green lobby argues that their own ideas carry scientific authority. So why is it that when anyone objects to climate policies, they get presented with the likes of John Prescott, the barely literate, inarticulate and hardly comprehensible MP for Hull East? Does he represent “science”? Does he speak for “scientists”? Perhaps they ought to appoint someone a bit more coherent.
Here’s a clip from the Yorks and Lincs edition of the politics show I appeared in a few weeks ago. Prescott makes an appearance at the end.
When asked about his reply to sceptics, Prescott says,
Well the sceptic you’ve given me is Godfrey Bloom. He was telling the women to clean behind the fridges, says you can’t get these agreement (sic). We got that over the problems of CF gasses (sic) in the ozone lane (sic). We cleared that [???] global problem by changing the gasses in the fridges. So you can have global solutions to global man made problems. That’s the first point.
Paul’s on about the cycles and whether that’s true, but you don’t take the twenty thirty years, they’ve gone back thousands of years and the UN has a thousand scientists meeting every year in the IPCC committee and their reporting from when I was at Kyoto it’s got far worse, there’s no doubt about it. I’ll take the thousand scientists’ interpretation and I’ll listen to those other voices, but I will not make my judgement on them.
Well, so far, so gibberish. But let’s be fair to Prescott – who seems more preoccupied with fridges than with grammar – and try to make sense of his mutterings.
Well, I don’t know what my views on women and domestic chores have to do with my views on climate science.
On agreements, my concern is not that we cannot get an agreement. My concern is very much that we can, but that it is a bad idea, with flawed premises and disastrous consequences. The fact that an inarticulate oaf who can’t tell the difference between an ‘ozone layer’ and an ‘ozone lane’ is charged with creating these agreements does nothing to soothe my concerns.
Onto Prescott’s second paragraph – a cascade of such gibberish that it beggars belief that this man was ever the country’s deputy Prime Minister. Blair might as well have appointed a donkey to be his number 2 for all the sense Prescott makes. Only that a donkey would perhaps have more charm. The IPCC do not meet every year. Nor do the IPCC’s contributors ever even meet, as Prescott claims, a ‘committee’. Prescott needs a bit of a refresher on what the IPCC is.
The IPCC publish reports every few years. These reports are an attempt to gather the current knowledge on climate change into one document. The last report was published in 2007. It was the fourth such report, and therefore goes by the name “Fourth Assessment Report”, or AR4 for short. The Third Assessment report was published in 2001, and goes by the name TAR. The second was published in 1995, and the first in 1990. The IPCC also publish occasional intermediate reports on specific topics.
The IPCC is divided into three working groups. The first group looks at the physical science of climate change – models, atmospheric physics, climatology, the behaviour of glaciers, that sort of thing. Working Group Two (WGII), looks at how vulnerable society is to climate change, and what the consequences might be. The third group (WGIII) looks at how we might limit or mitigate climate change. These groups work largely independently.
Each working group produce their part of the report by dividing its contributing authors into groups, each working on a chapter, headed by one or more lead author. So in the latest IPCC report, Working Group I, which concentrates on the physical science consists of eleven chapters. Chapter one – The Historical Overview of Climate Change Science – was coordinated by Hervé Le Treut, and its lead authors were Ulrich Cubasch (Germany), Yihui Ding (China), Cecilie Mauritzen (Norway), Abdalah Mokssit (Morocco), Thomas Peterson (USA), Michael Prather (USA). You can see for yourself here. A further 26 authors contributed to the chapter. Between them, these authors review the research that exists on the topic in question. As they are doing this, they produce a draft document which is read by reviewers, who are able to submit comments to the authors.
The authors from chapter one don’t necessarily ever meet or talk to the reviewers from chapter two. And the authors from WGI don’t necessarily ever meet the authors from WGII or WGIII. The reviewers of each chapter may have said nothing at all. An author of chapter 1 of WGI, might disagree completely with what is written in chapter 4 of WGII. And many – if not most - of the contributing authors to the IPCC are not climate scientists at all. They are also economists, social scientists, psychologists, medical researchers, geographers, insurance industry experts, and political activists. Prescott thinks there are a thousand such authors, but in fact there are just 800.
Yet Prescott seems to believe that all of the IPCC’s authors are climate scientists, and that they all meet once a year to decide what they agree on. He is very much mistaken. He doesn’t appear to know what the IPCC is, and what they do.
Isn’t his ignorance a bit worrying, given that he is charged with negotiating deals for the UK and EU? Shouldn’t he be just a bit better informed? Shouldn’t he be just a bit better at explaining why the UK government has decided that ‘we’re all green now’? Perhaps he is too busy eating pies to do any research.
Asked about the recent lack of global warming, Prescott replies.
Of course you do. Of course you get cycles of clueling... coaling (sic) but if you look at the IPC (sic) report, your [???] over the long period of time. This is something different. It’s shooting off. They have up and down in climate. But in these last few years it’s taken off. Why are our glaciers melting? Why is the evidence on the television extreme weather? It’s associated with carbon emissions. And if we’re find an agreement. The science is clear as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got to do something about the emissions. That’s the challenge for us, but also we’ve got to recognise that some more pollute than the others. If you look at China and America they’re 25 per cent each on emissions. But if you look at the populations of [???] per head America’s 20 tonnes per head. China is 5. Europe is 10. So Copenhagen has got to address itself to justice and equity and poverty in this country... in the world and put them together. That’s what Capenhagen (sic) is about. It won’t be easy, but we’ve got to get that agreement ‘cos it will affect every one of us and 187 nations. And finally China and India are coming together China and America to talk about how they can balance out this problem of climate change. They’re convinced about it and I’m delighted an agreement between China shows that [Xiang Xin?] a city of 30 million has lined up with Yorkshire to look at how we can clear up our... they can clean their rivers up, learn our lessons and at the same time bring in carbon sequestration, look at the clean coal technology, and let’s recognise coal will still a part and that conference is taking place in Sheffield University. So Yorkshire’s doing its bit. Whereas in [ruse?] the wind turnpipe people are complaining about the picture from their window. For God’s sake, grow up and think about your children.
Prescott was asked about the lack of warming. But his answer was about China, America, India, and agreements, and Yorkshire and Sheffield University and clean coal and emissions per head, and people complaining about ‘turnpipes’.
Why didn’t he just say, ‘I don’t know’? Instead, he says something about something ‘shooting off’, and then shot off himself, on a rant about god knows what. Here are some graphs showing global temperature since 1998, from the four main sources of data used by scientists.
Precott says that “in these last few years it’s taken off”, but quite clearly, in the last few years, there has been no warming. It is true that if we look at a longer view, we see warming.
But as we all know, there was, until 1850, a ‘Little Ice Age’, from which the world has recovered. Before that, we know that there was a ‘Medieval Warm Period’. This much used to be in the IPCC reports. Here’s an image used by the IPCC in one of their earlier reports.
But this was an inconvenient graph. It showed that our current temperatures weren’t unusual in the planet’s recent history. So a small team of scientists in the USA, rather like Stalin’s photographic artists, began airbrushing history to suit the present. They produced this graph.
This was included in the next IPCC report, not as Prescott would like to think, because thousands of scientists agreed with it. But instead, because a small group of scientists who know each other, work with each other, and who refuse to criticise each other’s work, all worked on the same chapter. The scientist who produced this graph – Michael Mann – was one of the chapters lead authors, meaning he didn’t have to listen to any criticism from reviewers. This is like taking an exam, and then marking your own answer sheet, giving yourself an official grade. Welcome to climate science, ladies and gentlemen.
That is just one reason among many, many reasons why the ‘hockey stick’ graph is perhaps the most controversial graph in history. It has been debunked time and time again, and shown to be a fraud. Yet it remains at the centre of political arguments that will affect our future, and our children’s future, not because it has any scientific value whatsoever, but because it is useful to blockheads like John Prescott.
For more about the criticism of the graph, read the excellent blogs by Anthony Watts, and Steve McIntrye.
In answer to my constituents’ concerns about widnfarms, Prescott says this.
For God’s sake, many changes are coming, and I ask them, two-thirds of this world, five billion people, live on less than two dollars a day. It isn’t only political it’s also environmental. But above all it’s a moral issue. This of our responsibility. After all, we polluted the world to have your nice little home in East Yorkshire.
Did you catch that? If you live in a nice home in East Yorkshire, you polluted the world. It’s all your fault. And it’s all your fault that “five billion people live on less than two dollars a day”.
What Prescott doesn’t explain is how wind farms in Yorkshire will make life better for these billions of people.
Prescott isn’t just any old Labour Party worker – we can excuse them for having s*** for brains. He was deputy Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007. He has responsibility for negotiating in our interests. Yet he can barely string a sentence together, and whatever sense can be made of those strings are inconsistent with the facts about climate change.
This is a troubling state of affairs. Senior politicians who don’t know what they’re talking about – who don’t understand the science, and don’t understand the institutions they take authority for their arguments from – are creating the international agreements and regulations that will change our future.
That is why our countryside is being littered with huge, expensive, and pointless machines. They are the mirror of Prescott and his comrades: huge, expensive, and pointless. That is why our fuel bills are rising, and will continue to rise. That is why our industry and economy is failing. Prescott, like the majority of the political posers in Westminster, badly needs an education.
