[R-G] The Problem with Idle Egocentricity

[Anthony Fenton]

  The Problem with Idle Egocentricity  	
6 February, 2008
http://www.spinwatch.org/content/blogcategory/248/30/
Twice over the last month we have received emails from people who say  
they just happened to be surfing the web searching their name and  
found something that we had written that they disagree with.

  Now I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon where there are  
millions of people at work and home happily “googling” their name to  
see what happens. If this is true I hope your name is not something  
like “John Smith”, otherwise you are going to get repetitive strain  
injury.

Anyway one of the emails was from Richard D North who, in an “idle  
egocentric moment,” had been trawling on line and found a letter I  
had written to the Evening Standard concerning one of his articles.

Now for those of you who do not know Richard, he has become something  
of a bete noir of the British environmental movement, a bit like the  
Canadian corporate lackey, Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore still labels  
himself a founder of Greenpeace, as he sells his services to various  
polluting industries, over twenty years after he left the organisation.

North may not be able to claim such kudos on his CV, but does rake up  
being an ex-environmental correspondent for the Independent to beef  
up his credentials. But that was a long time ago too and he is now a  
fellow at two right-wing think tanks the Social Affairs Unit, and  
Institute of Economic Affairs.

I had written a letter responding to an article by North in the  
Evening Standard in June last year in which North had argued against  
pursuing targets on reducing carbon emissions. “May I ask you not to  
directly misreport my views?” North wrote to me last month, “I have  
never been a [climate] denier and nor have I ever disputed the value  
of much of the work corralled by IPCC. I have become more sceptical  
rather than less over the years. So you couldn't really have got it  
more wrong.”

In my defence, I hadn’t said that North had got more sceptical over  
the years, rather that generally “as the weight of scientific  
evidence has accumulated, the sceptics have had to modify their  
position as their previous one became untenable. Some now admit that  
the Earth is warming slightly, but argue it is too expensive to take  
action. Others claim it is too late to do anything or there is no  
point unless China acts, too.”

So let’s pick up on two points North makes. Firstly he says he has  
never been a climate denier. He may not be, but I had called him a  
“contrarian” and climate sceptic. He certainly continues to take a  
sceptical view:

On a website that North runs he asks: Is Global Warming really  
happening? “Almost everyone accepts that the globally averaged world  
temperature has risen in the past century. But almost everything  
which flows from that “fact” is disputed” he argues, without  
mentioning that the majority of the leading climate sceptics who  
continue to dispute the science are funded by Exxon or linked to  
right wing think tanks that are industry funded, and ideologically  
opposed to environmentalists.

North does go on to mention the World Climate Report as “a very good  
site trawling information which challenges the consensus,” but  
conveniently forgets to say it is edited by Patrick Michaels. One of  
the worlds most renowned climate sceptics, Michaels is fossil  
industry funded and linked to right-wing think tanks, such as the  
Cato Institute, and the Cooler Heads Coalition, (itself a coalition  
of right wing think tanks, and coordinated by the Competitive  
Enterprise Institute).

Elsewhere on the site he says about climate that “we may be watching  
the beginning of a long-running or pronounced change (or we may  
not).”  This is certainly not the view of the leading climate  
scientists who argue that rapid change is occurring now.

Secondly North argues that “nor have I ever disputed the value of  
much of the work corralled by IPCC.” The slight problem with this one  
is that North’s website does attack the IPCC, which he says “has  
produced what looks like a consensus that global warming is real,  
big, bad, mankind’s fault and merits concerted action. But the  
“consensus” is not as strong as you might suppose ....There is also a  
good deal of argument about whether the IPCC process is as open- 
minded as it ought to be. In particular, there is a widespread belief  
that the summaries of the IPCC process don't capture the  
uncertainties of the bulk of the work.” If this is not disputing the  
work of the IPCC I don’t know what is.

At the top of the Living Issues website is a flashing warning  
declaring: “This site has a bias against bullshit. We unravel spin.”

I am afraid North has got that one wrong as well.