Christopher Booker squares up to Sir David King, the former Chief Scientist, whose knowledge of chemistry does little to underpin his crusading rhetoric as a green campaigner
One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue, however remote it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the government Chief Scientist. In 2001, when he was appointed by Tony Blair at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface chemistry’. Yet immediately top of his agenda was the need to fight an animal disease.
The man he called in to tackle the epidemic was Professor Roy Anderson, a computer modeller specialising in the epidemiology of human diseases but without any experience in veterinary matters. Shutting their ears to the pleas of the world’s leading veterinary experts on foot-and-mouth that the only effective way to stop the spread of the epidemic was vaccination, the two men flouted the law by launching their ‘pre-emptive cull’, the mass-slaughter of animals which never had any contact with the disease. As many as eight million healthy animals were unnecessarily destroyed, at a colossal social and financial cost which vaccination might have reduced to a fraction.
The next big issue to put King in the headlines was global warming, which in 2004 he described as ‘a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism’. At a press conference with Blair, he claimed that global temperatures were higher than they had been for 60 million years, predicting that by the end of the 21st century Antarctica would be the only habitable continent left on earth.
Top of the politicians’ global warming agenda at that time was the need to win ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by Russia, which would at last bring the treaty into force. On behalf of the EU, King led a team to a key international conference in Moscow, where their behaviour astonished those present. They demanded that scientists critical of Kyoto should not be allowed to speak. They frequently interrupted other speakers, or overran their own time at the rostrum. When King was floored by evidence from the tropical disease expert Professor Paul Reiter that the melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro was not caused by global warming, he stormed out.
At the end Alexander Illarionov, President Putin’s chief economic adviser, was withering about the EU team’s conduct. Their pressure on Russia to ratify Kyoto, he said, ‘was equivalent to a war on truth, science and human welfare’. Russian scientists could not accept the link between CO2 levels and global warming, or that present temperatures were higher than those during the mediaeval and Roman warmings. When, in a startling U-turn, Putin then agreed to ratify Kyoto, this did not reflect any change in Russia’s scientific position. As King himself now confirms, it was merely the result of a political deal, whereby the EU agreed to support Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation on favourable terms.
King then remained fairly quiet on the public stage until he recently used his status as retiring Chief Scientist to help the government by supporting various of its new policies, ranging from the need for a nuclear power programme to that for a mass cull of TB-infected badgers to combat the epidemic raging through our cattle herds. And now, in conjunction with a popular journalist, Gabrielle Walker, he has published a mass-market paperback entitled The Hot Topic: How To Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights on (Bloomsbury, £9.99).
As might be expected from the polar bears on the cover, beneath a glowing tribute from Al Gore, the book yet again rehearses the familiar global warming orthodoxy, set out in a somewhat coy, Janet-and-John style which one suspects owes more to King’s co-author than himself. On those famous polar bears it naturally ignores the studies which show that their numbers have in most areas actually been increasing. An even bigger giveaway is a two-page temperature graph adapted from the notorious ‘hockey stick’. This is the now wholly discredited rewriting of history which became the warmists’ supreme icon because, Winston Smith-like, it suppressed the evidence that in the Middle Ages global temperatures were higher than they are today — showing temperatures running in a flattish line for 1,000 years before suddenly curving exponentially upwards.
The rest here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/540061/beware-the-politician-posing-as-a-scientist.thtml