The Monbiot/Spectator row over that magazine’s ludicrous coverage of the greatest challenge facing mankind this century — that of anthropogenic climate change — rumbles on. Monbiot used his Guardian column this week to accuse the Speccie of publishing a cover story (“Relax: global warming is all a myth”) “grounded in gibberish”. The Spectator’s resident controversialist, Rod Liddle, responded to Monbiot’s claim, on his new blog, in a typically reasoned and reasonable manner: “You pompous, monomaniacal jackass.”
So where does the new Speccie editor, Fraser Nelson, stand on the row, inherited from his “mischievous” predecessor Matthew d’Ancona? In a recent post pointing out a “spectacular U-turn” by the magazine on a critical climate-related issue — the level of Arctic sea ice — Will Straw’s new Left Foot Foward blog asked: “Are we witnessing a new editorial line on climate change . . . ?”
Judging by Nelson’s post on the Coffee House blog yesterday — “An empty chair for Monbiot” — the short answer is “no”. He refers to climate-change deniers as advocates of “global warming realism”. He also poses the following question:
I wonder what he [Monbiot] makes about this US Senate list of 700 scientists who dissent over man-made global warming — are they all bonkers?
They’re not “bonkers”, Fraser, they’re simply wrong, in a tiny minority and not even qualified to proffer an opinion on the subject: the vast majority of them are not climate scientists, nor have they published in fields relevant to climate science. The list of “700 scientists” Nelson refers to has been subjected to extensive examination by the Centre for Inquiry think tank in the United States, and it reported in July:
After assessing 687 individuals named as “dissenting scientists” in the January 2009 version of the United States Senate Minority Report, the Centre for Inquiry’s Credibility Project found that:
Give a gift subscription to the New Statesman this Christmas from just £49– Slightly fewer than 10 per cent could be identified as climate scientists.
– Approximately 15 per cent published in the recognisable refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
– Approximately 80 per cent clearly had no refereed publication record on climate science at all.
– Approximately 4 per cent appeared to favour the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not have been on the list.
The report also adds that some of the scientists “were identified as meteorologists, and some of these people were employed to report the weather”.
The author of the report, Dr Stuart Jordan, retired emeritus senior staff scientist at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre, concluded that the much-vaunted Senate list “is one more effort of a contrarian community to block corrective action to address a major — in this case global — problem fraught with harmful consequences for human welfare and the environment”.
It is a “contrarian community” which, sadly, now includes the educated and intelligent journalists of the Spectator. But there is a bigger question here. “Why is this issue,” as Monbiot asks in his column, “uniquely viewed as fair game by editors who tread carefully around other scientific issues for fear of making idiots of themselves? And where is the mischief in doing what hundreds of publications and broadcasters have already done — claiming that man-made climate change is a myth?”
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