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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 8 June 2017
I
N THE decade or so that I’ve been writing and report-
ing on climate-related issues, real progress has
always felt like a chimera that, once you tried to
grasp it, seemed always to slip tantalisingly beyond
reach.
This same ten-year time frame has seen publication
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, both massive syn-
thesis documents drawing together the many
physical-science strands of climate change, with scien-
tists working alongside policymakers and politicians to
try to snatch the pearls of critical information from the
ever-gathering tsunami of data.
Here in Ireland, the publication of the 2007 report in
particular was accompanied by a flurry of earnest news
-
paper editorials and levels of ongoing coverage never
before focused on an ‘environmental’ story. While inter-
est had waned significantly by the time the Fifth
Assessment Report was issued in 2013, this had more to
do with media ‘climate fatigue’ and limited attention
span with than anything truly sinister.
In the US in the same period, attitudes to climate
change underwent a complete metamorphosis, quickly
degenerating from a largely science-based dialogue to
an intensely polarised ideological
litmus test. Those describing them
-
selves as Republican slid from mild
climate scepticism to outright denial
in the space of just a few years.
It is hard to now believe, but during
the 2008 presidential election, a TV
ad issued on behalf of Republican
candidate John McCain praised him as
the candidate who had stood up to
George W Bush and “sounded the
alarm on global warming”. Roll the
clock forward nine years, and the
same McCain stood with his fellow invertebrate Senate
colleagues and cheered Trump’s moronic, spiteful with
-
drawal from the Paris Accord to the hilt.
In the US politics changes even faster than the climate,
and with the Citizens United ruling pushed through the
Republican-controlled US Supreme Court in 2010, there
was no longer any limit to the dark money that could be
poured by energy conglomerates into contaminating the
political process by buying or bullying politicians into
publicly adopting positions completely hostile to climate
action, however mild.
Back in Ireland, however frustrating it has been in
trying to get media space to push serious engagement
on climate issues, or however anodyne the panellists
George Hook, Matt Cooper or RTE’s Late Debate unearth
to argue the 1-3% contrarian position, and however end-
lessly frustrating is it to witness blatant bias-in-balance,
somehow at the end of it all, you can sense that, apart
from it boosting ratings, nobody is taking this guff too
seriously.
In 2017 so far, the people in Ireland who have garnered
the most media time regarding climate change have
been buffoons and blowhards like Danny Healy-Rae,
Michael O’Leary and Michael Fitzmaurice, men who wear
their wilful ignorance like boy scout merit badges. Yes,
it’s deeply frustrating that the only sound our media
respond to on climate change is the loud braying of jack-
asses. Still, it’s all a game and these attention-craving
boyos don’t even pretend to make sense or to have a
coherent philosophy; they are content just to make noise
Trump spawns
subtler climate denial
In which Ireland gets an unthinktank, the self-styled Irish
Climate Science Forum (ICSF) founded by Professor Ray
Bates and sponsoring talks by discredited contrarians
attended by a few from Met Éireann
John McCain sounded the
alarm on global warming
in 2007 but stood with his
fellow invertebrate Senate
colleagues and cheered
Trump’s withdrawal from
the Paris Accord
by John Gibbons
ENVIRONMENT
Professor Ray Bates, founder of
Irish Climate Science Forum
June 2017 5 9
and lap up the media time.
Absent almost entirely from Ireland’s on-
again-off-again coverage of climate and
environmental issues have been the bona fide
emeritus nutjobs supported by well-funded
think tanks to spew out a steady stream of anti-
facts that are such an ugly feature of the US
political landscape.
The UK too has had a secretly-funded sceptic
tank called the Global Warming Policy Founda
-
tion (GWPF) marinating mendacious
pseudo-policies for the last several years, and
getting excellent media traction into the
bargain.
The GWPF even managed to get staffer, Dr
Benny Peiser (background in sports and exercise
science) onto an RTE PrimeTime ‘climate debate’,
in 2014, a format the station has, time and
again, proved so singularly inept at grasping.
While Ireland lacks the rabid right-wing media
that incubate true climate extremism in the US,
Britain and Australia, the emergence from the
swamp of the execrable Trump regime has ener-
gised even the most forlorn of deniers in
otherwise unpromising territories like Ireland.
And so it has come to pass. In early May, the
inaugural meeting of the self-styled Irish Cli-
mate Science Forum (ICSF) took place in Dublin
– behind closed doors and with mystery sur-
rounding its funding and membership. Its first
guest speaker set the tone for this new grouping.
They chose septuagenarian Richard Lindzen, a
once-famed MIT meteorologist and long-time
contrarian, who has taken to the trail with gusto
to peddle the standard denier play-book of
cherry-picked data and outright misinformation
about climate change (he remains equally ‘scep-
tical’ about the long-established links between
tobacco and cancer).
Having chosen to represent the minority non-
consensus view with its first speaker, clearly, if
the ICSF want to be seen to have even a shred of
intellectual integrity, its choice of second
speaker would have to be someone from the
mainstream scientific community.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of highly
qualified, currently publishing experts they
could have called upon to present the main
-
stream science, having already given the
contrarian view a full evening. Instead, the ICSF,
founded by retired UCD meteorologist and cli-
mate contrarian, Ray Bates, doubled down and
went for another emeritus crank, this time Wil
-
liam Happer, a once-famed physicist from
Princeton.
In an especially deranged TV interview on
CNBC in 2014, the interviewer challenged
Happer about an earlier assertion of his where
he equated climate scientists to Nazis. His
response is worth recalling in full: “The demoni-
sation of CO2 is just like the demonization of the
poor Jews under Hitler…CO2 is a benefit to the
world and so were the Jews”.
In the same interview, Happer directly com-
pared the criticism his wacky views attract with
the persecution of Galileo. “When Galileo had
his tilt with the church, he got flak too”, said
Happer. It is no coincidence that Lindzen also
used the ‘Galileo clause’ in his Dublin talk in
May. It is standard denier protocol to invoke per-
secution and conspiracy when criticised or even
challenged, and preferably, to smear their critics
as being religiously or ideologically motivated
into the bargain.
When RTÉ’s Philip Boucher Hayes asked Bates
to name any other actual climate scientists who
were part of his ICSF, he replied as follows: “No,
I’m not giving any names. I’ll tell you Philip, in
this area, if you put your head above the parapet
and expose yourself to the NGOs and the cam-
paigners in this area, you’ll be harassed and
threatened, and not everybody wants to put
themselves in this position”.
It would have been far less edifying for Bates
to have had to admit that not a single Irish scien-
tist of repute – not one – was standing with him
in his Quixotic crusade against climate reality.
Rather than admitting his new ‘colleagues’ were
people with zero affiliation to any credible scien
-
tific institutions or research centres, Bates
instead played the Victim card.
There were a number of senior Met Éireann sci-
entists, including Evelyn Cusack and Ray
McGrath in attendance as invited guests at both
the Happer and Lindzen talks. Met Éireann, for
the record, is Ireland’s primary climate science
facility. Its Head of Forecasting, Dr Gerald Flem
-
ing was also invited to both of these ICSF
meetings, but attended neither. He told me of his
deep concerns when reviewing Happer’s slide
set, much of which, he said, “is not science”.
Fleming is equally unhappy about the secre
-
tive nature of the ICSF, which in his view flies
completely in the face of the open, enquiring and
questioning nature of genuine scientific debate.
I can only wonder if the staff who did attend
are also aware of the unscientific nature of much
of both Lindzen and Happer’s presentations.
Also, were they truly aware of the low opinion
Happer holds of practising scientists?
“There’s a whole area of climate so-called sci
-
ence that is really more like a cult. It’s like Hare
Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-
eyed and they chant”, he told the Guardian
newspaper in February. It is probably no surprise
that the patently unhinged Happer is considered
a favourite for the role of Science Advisor to the
Trump regime, a position now most akin to Eng
-
land’s seventeenth-century Witchfinder
General.
Happer certainly fits in well with the profile of
the misfits and mischief-makers who have coa
-
lesced around the nascent ICSF, which is coming
to resemble ever more closely a poor man’s ver-
sion of the morally impoverished GWPF in
London.
Climate denial, in common with xenophobia,
bigotry and ‘fake news’, is enjoying an unex-
pected hour in the sun thanks to the
reality-distortion field that has sprung up around
the authoritarian Trump regime.
Lousy ideas, peddled by mostly elderly,
mostly white, mostly once-respected retired aca-
demics are elbowing their way into the public
square, ahead of rigorous peer-reviewed mate-
rial from bona fide practising experts in the field.
Leaving them unchallenged subverts democracy
itself.
John Gibbons is a specialist
environmental writer and commentator
and tweets @think_or_swim
In Ireland, apart from the
panellists George Hook,
Matt Cooper and RTE’s
‘Late Debate’ unearth to
argue the 1-3% contrarian
position, nobody is taking
it too seriously
Older, white men at inaugural meeting
of Irish Climate Science Forum
