Throwing stones in the glass greenhouse

Closer in time and distance, Garth Paltridge, emeritus professor of the University of Tasmania and a former director of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, says that when he was setting up the centre in the early 1990s he made the mistake of saying to the media there was still a lot of doubt about the science of global warming.

In an article in the Australian Financial Review (February 22, 2006) he says he was quickly told by executives at the “highest levels” of the CSIRO - a partner in the centre - that he should keep such doubts to himself or see the organisation withdraw from the centre. At the time the CSIRO was trying to get tens of millions of dollars of funding from the newly formed Australian Greenhouse Office.

Any attempt to rein in greenhouse scientists, on the other hand, results in endless expressions of horror in the media and programs expressing outrage on the ABC. In that atmosphere (another intended pun) it is little wonder that mid-career scientists shut up. Those free to speak their minds are the retirees such as Brian Tucker, a former chief of the CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Research, and Dr Brian O'Brien, a strategic and environmental consultant, who was the foundation Director and Chairman of the WA Environmental Protection Authority. There are more.

There is some evidence that this peculiar attitude to scientific debate also seems to occur, in different forms, among the scientists themselves. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alleges that the main scientific journals Science (US) and Nature (UK) commonly refuse, without review, papers that raise questions about accepted climate wisdom as being without interest. Writing last year in the Wall Street Opinion Journal he says that even when such papers are published, standards shift.

“When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an ‘Iris Effect,’ wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as ‘discredited’.”

That is another common tactic when faced with an inconvenient piece of scepticism, pointing to a hastily-contrived counter-argument, no matter how flimsy, and claiming that it “discredits” the scepticism. But logic is never the aim in this debate. The aim is to push the opposition to one side and get on with the politics.