Climatology isn’t ‘drivel’
From Helen Johns
Sir: I am a bit fed up with people like Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 15 April) who admit they are totally ignorant of the science behind climate change, and yet feel qualified to inform us that it is ‘drivel’. Often this is simply because they don’t like the stereotyped personalities of those supposedly concerned, be they millenarians, Cassandras, wearers of hairshirts, pathological miserabilists, researchfunding junkies or ex-Marxist, red-green anti-industrialists. None of these were in evidence when I studied in the atmospheric physics department at Oxford; the only political opinion I ever saw expressed was a slogan on a senior academic’s mug declaring, ‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative’, accompanied by a picture of a sheep. There are plenty of rational, sane people who are concerned about climate change and have more than a basic grasp of the science; it is not our fault if the media exaggerate and distort to the point of incredibility.
In the meantime, instead of merely sneering, the sceptics must make constructive proposals on how to make the scientific process more reliable in future, if the opinions of thousands of (allegedly) venal and hysterical experts are worth so little.
Helen Johns London SE1
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