Climate Denial
Yesterday evening I attended an event at the Abbey in Bath called ‘Climate Change: A Public Debate’ to which over three hundred and fifty people from Bath and the surrounding areas also turned up to listen.
Yet, for the organisers to call the speaking event a debate was incredibly (and probably purposefully) misleading because in fact all members on the panel of so-called ‘experts’ were in complete agreement and therefore there was no actual debate of any kind at all. Not once did they disagree.
This point was starkly illustrated within the first five minutes of the ‘debate’ fully beginning. The first question put to the panel by the Chairman of the event, Roger Nunn, was something along the lines of ‘where are we in the Climate Change debate’ and could the panel briefly explain Climate Change.
This was put first to Professor Anil Markandya who is, it should be noted, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Bath (ie. not an environmental scientist) and also a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor Markandya proceeded to tell the assembled audience that Climate Change was caused by human activity in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that there was a consensus among the scientific community on this supposed ‘fact’. The other three panellists unsurprisingly agreed entirely.
Yet, how exactly can something firstly be called ‘fact’ when it is scientifically disputed, and secondly where is the consensus when many scientists still profoundly disagree with the theory (for it is only a theory) that man-made CO2 production is the main component of global warming?
