Pay no attention to the scientific pontiffs
T_ he emotional tirade against President Bush published by Sir David King is an excellent example of Churchill's maxim that experts should be 'on tap' but not 'on top'. This chemist from South Africa, as the government's chief scientific adviser, is employed to give advice in private, not to conduct political propaganda in public. Did he get No. 10's clearance for his article in the US journal Science? If not, heads should roll. The journal is notorious for its headline-catching material — witness its assault on the salmon-farming industry, which will have devastating effects on the Scottish Highlands, where jobs are scarce, unless it is speedily refuted. What struck me about King's argument is how unscientific it is. To state that climate change is a greater threat to the world than terrorism is to compare two totally different things, each impossible to quantify. The US has done more research on so-called 'global warming' than the rest of the world put together, and Bush's refusal to comply with the Kyoto Protocol reflects the conclusion of such research: there is no definite proof that man-made emissions have any appreciable effect on world temperatures. On the basis of a near-hysterical belief among some (mainly left-wing or third-world) scientists, America is expected to deliver a body blow to its economy, scarcely emerging from recession. It would be madness, which might well plunge first the US, then the world, into the most serious economic crisis since the Thirties. The ultimate victims would be the world's poor. And, though King may well not know it, poverty kills, in colossal numbers.
It is frightening to think that King, with his strident and wrong-headed views, is the principal source of scientific advice to the government. By trying to play down the importance of terrorism (including presumably state terrorism), he ignores the risk — I would say, near certainty — that unless Bush and his allies, such as Tony Blair, wage a vigorous war against it, we will be exposed not only to constant huge explosions in our cities, but small, possibly large, A-bombs, even H-bombs and, equally horrible, 'dirty bombs', as well as a full range of chemical gases and biological plagues. I do not believe that human beings can change the earth's temperature. Compared with Nature, we are still puny. After all, the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 generated more destructive energy than man has done in the whole of his existence. The paroxysmal climax, lasting only eight hours, propelled five cubic miles of mat
ter over 50 miles into the stratosphere, plunged south-east Asia into darkness for three days, scattering ash over 300,000 square miles and producing tidal waves which reached South America many thousands of miles away. A single wave, 120 feet high, killed 36,000 people. The explosion was heard 2,200 miles away in Australia. lithe paroxysm had occurred in Europe, tens of millions would have died. As it was, re-establishment of plant and animal life in the vast affected area did not even begin for five years. King does not say what we ought to do to prevent another natural disaster on this scale, though there is evidence that Krakatoa is preparing for one. The 1883 paroxysm occurred when its highest cone reached 2,667 feet above sea level. It is now growing again and has reached about 1,000 feet.
We cannot match Nature, but we are adept at killing each other. In the 20th century, more than 150 million people were killed by statesponsored violence, two thirds of them by communist states. Terrorists, if allowed by the inactivity of the civilised states to acquire capital weapons, could well destroy human life on this scale. With Bush waging war on them, their victims will be numbered in thousands at most, certainly far fewer than the victims of Nature. The 20th-centuty holocausts were less than 2 per cent of the world population: the mid-14th century Black Death alone, in under two years, killed between 40 and 50 per cent of Europeans (those who died in Africa and Asia may have been a higher percentage). But of course you can't expect scientists to know much, if any, history, or indeed anything outside their expertise. Henry Kissinger told me that when President Mitterrand held a jamboree of all Nobel Prize winners in Paris, the worldly ignorance of the scientific eminences was astonishing, exceeded only by their innocence in allowing themselves to be manipulated by the peddlers of progressive clichés. The fantasy of man-made global warming is the most successful exercise in left-wing mystification of our time. But, as anyone who studies history knows, science-fiction hysteria is easily generated by so-called experts. Consider, for instance, the panic started by the Revd T.R. Malthus's 'Essay on the Principles of Population' in 1798. Or the hysteria about coal supplies c. 1850, when experts argued that man was using up coal faster than it could be mined. In my own time, during the Silly Sixties, a group of eminent experts calling themselves the Club of Rome warned that we were using up the earth's resources at an unsustainable
rate, and that catastrophe loomed. Their views seem ludicrous now — as do similar expert predictions of the Seventies that we were running out of crude oil — hut they were taken with deadly seriousness at the time by exactly the sort of people who argue we must reduce emissions at any cost. It is no coincidence that global warming became a crusade of the Left just at the time the last Marxists lost their faith and world communism collapsed in ruins. Clever opponents of capitalism will swallow any lie, however blatant, to further their cause. After all, Marx called himself a scientist and insisted that his entire oeuvre was scientific.
The notion that scientists, as opposed to the rest of us, are totally objective in their assessment of the world, and therefore to be believed and trusted, is nonsense. Huge knowledge in a chosen but narrow field often exists alongside instability of character, irrational behaviour and sheer bloody-mindedness. When I was an Oxford freshman in 1946, the president of my college, Magdalen, was the eminent boffin Sir Henry Tizard, the brains behind Britain's 1930s rearmament programme, who was taking a rest from in-fighting in Whitehall. He struck me as bitter and unreasonable — as well as philistine, which one would expect. His great opponent Professor Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), who had rooms in Christ Church, also seemed to me a man propelled more by emotion and personal factors than by a cool appraisal of the evidence. Tizard preferred to work through the Civil Service and brass hats, Lindemann through the politicians. This was the real source of their rows. Meeting such eminent chaps, and spotting the human weakness behind the scientific masks, was an eye-opener. My eyes opened still wider when I came across J.B.S. Haldane, probably a better scientist than either, but the most bad-tempered and uncontrollable human firework it has ever been my delight to know. Intolerance is a characteristic of the men who get to the top of the scientific tree. Witness the behaviour of the Darwinian fundamentalists, the ayatollahs of academic science, who hound out independent minds and who control not only university faculties and labs but virtually all the specialist journals. Witness also the case of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish boffin who has dared to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of the environmentalists and has been hounded by the Holy Scientific Inquisition in consequence. By all means let us keep the scientists at work on their specialised duties. But leave the global thinking to more civilised and educated people.
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