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This was published by The Daily Maverick in response to a column by Ivo Vegter. He has expressed his noxious views before. He has since  responded with a nasty ad hominem attack and a few valid points.

Vegter is no maverick

David Le Page and Eduard Grebe

Ivo Vegter has jumped on the public disclosure of emails taken from a hacked server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, suggesting that it vindicates those who argue that “alarmism about athropogenic global warming was at least distorted, and probably an outright fraud”. It does no such thing.

Vegter concedes his own vested interests in the “climate change debate” when he worries that “a veritable fountain of subject matter will dry up”. After all, one who writes for “the Daily Maverick” has a professional interest in being contrarian. But peddling dangerous nonsense based on distortion and vague innuendo is surely not the work of a true maverick.

Clearly, he has not picked through the (massive) archive himself. Nor have we, in detail. But nothing that has been published reveals any attempt to manufacture evidence, much less a conspiracy of the scale that Vegter’s suggestion of “outright fraud” demands. For if he and his fellow sceptics are correct, and global warming is a “fraud”, then it would have to involve not just Vegter’s “close-knit group”, but also the no less than 2500 scientists who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and countless others in literally hundreds of universities and research institutes.

Instead, the archive seems to hold merely a catalog of vanities and mostly petty errors proving only that climate scientists are mortal humans with mortal failings. The attacks by climate sceptics, which have largely relied on taking quotes out of context and distorting the meaning of their authors, actually reveal more about the methods of climate change denial than about climate science. Some of the scientists who appear in the emails have attempted to provide context and explain the quotes that have been most widely cited. But this is all rather besides the point, since even if some of them have acted questionably, this does not discredit the vast body of evidence built up over decades of research (and subjected to both peer review and public scrutiny).

Never pausing to question the timing of this hack, mere days before the beginnings of what many believe are the most important negotiations in human history in Copenhagen, Vegter tells us that these revelations will prick “the bubble of hot air promoted by a close-knit group of prominent climate scientists”. But far from being “close-knit”, there are and always have been furious debates and disagreements within this huge science community over the precise nature, extent and pace of global warming and its effects – as the archive itself reveals. But on the basic science of global warming, including that it is caused by human activity, there is no real disagreement.

So Vegter clearly has a poor understanding of how real science works – and of the scientific method, or he would not refer to the likes of Viscount Monckton or Lord Lawson as “peer reviewers”. Peer reviewers, in climate science, need to be qualified climate scientists, specialists in the fields in which they review the work of others. Monckton and Lamont are neither of them scientists of any description, and between them, have never published a single piece of original peer-reviewed science in a reputable journal. Being exemplary upper-class twits does not make them peer reviewers, only peers.

Most of the organisations working to refute the climate science consensus are linked to conservative political organisations in the US. Many have been and are still funded by big oil: BP and Shell openly contribute funds to the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies against climate change legislation. Most of the scientists who deny the human contribution to climate change are not, in fact, climate scientists.

Vegter also repeats the tired old suggestion that we should distrust predictions of global warming because of some predictions made in the 1970s of global cooling. Of course, he neglects to mention that those predictions were made in just seven papers by scientists who later changed their minds – as real scientists often do – and joined the overwhelming and comparatively massive consensus – thousands of papers – that now chart existing, and predict further, global warming. (Also see this debunking of the “global cooling myth” on RealClimate.)

Real mavericks would question the fossil fuel consensus that has us heading for a likely massive global economic crisis when oil supply peaks, as a UK industry group including Virgin and Yahoo! has concluded it may do by 2013. Real mavericks would question the consensus that has us building new coal power stations more expensive than investments in energy efficiency. Real mavericks would ask why it is apparently acceptable to South Africans that we should passively watch India and China as they innovate and take care of their people with massive investments in clean technologies that produce none of the other forgotten nasty pollutants besides carbon dioxide that Eskom is content to foist on us. Real mavericks would ask why our government is not better preparing our economy for a future in which our exports are likely to be taxed according to the carbon dioxide created in their production. Real mavericks would be looking to an energy future that is fundamentally different to the present, which is dirty, exploitative, insecure and unsustainable even if one ignores CO2 emissions. Real mavericks would be worried about the extraordinary suffering already starting to affect the poor of Southern Africa, which will be one of the regions most hard hit by global warming.

Vegter, clinging to old energy and in deep denial about climate change, has adopted a deeply conservative position. He’s no maverick: fire him.

David Le Page is a freelance journalist. Eduard Grebe is a graduate student at the University of Cape Town.