Saving the Planet by Killing It

A large group of Harvard and Yale students occupied the field during halftime of the annual Harvard-Yale game on November 23 to celebrate their virtue by demanding that the two universities divest all fossil fuel stocks. I assume that not one of the 40 or so students arrested by the police, who took an hour to clear the field, has any substantial knowledge of even one of the 20 or so disciplines subsumed under climatology or the history of climate change throughout human history. (That is also true, incidentally, of myself and well over 99 percent of those who write confidently about climate change.)

If pressed, the students would have simply cited the alleged “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming and shouted down anyone who challenged the existence of such a consensus.

No such consensus exists. In September, 500 scientists and professionals in climate-related fields sent the Secretary-General of the United Nations a “European Climate Declaration,” in which they noted, inter alia, that the computer climate models upon which the predictions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are based have consistently failed as predictive tools. They therefore “are not remotely plausible as policy tools” and further ignore that enriching the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2) is beneficial. A little over a decade ago, environmental scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch polled 530 colleagues from 27 countries and asked them to express their agreement with the statement “climate change is primarily the result of anthropogenic causes,” i.e., human behavior, on a scale of one to seven. The average, 3.62, came down almost exactly at the middle — not that scientific issues are determined by majority vote.

Such consensus as exists refers primarily to the IPCC and the allocation of university research funding. Guy Sorman of City Journal reports that in a 2005 conversation with Rajendra Pachauri, the director of the IPCC, the latter told him that he recruited only climatologists convinced of the carbon-dioxide warming explanation.