Our new Wanker of the Week is one David Viner, who is a professor of climatology at the not-quite-a-proper-University of East Anglia, which is basically a collection of prefabs on the southern outskirts of Norwich (and you know what they say* about Norwich). For his charming wife and three enchanting little children Viner has just bought a four-bedroomed house in Stibbard, Norfolk.
But what attracted Viner was not the four bedrooms or the enormous kitchen, nor the large gardens and surrounding fields, but the elevation. Stibbard is 160 feet above sea-level, and Viner thinks this is going to be enough to render him and his family safe when global warming really bites and the seas rise by up to 30 metres. He plans to grow crops and livestock to sustain them when the rest of the nation is gripped with panic and chaos.
He has already started with a dozen chickens, and nearby with a group of neighbours he is setting up a 50-strong flock of broilers, although the recent bird-flu raging in Suffolk could make this plan look a little silly. Not only is Stibbard a mere thirty miles from Halesworth, but it's also to the north and we are warned by other "experts" that the bird population is moving slowly northwards and presumably bringing their diseases with them. Still, he can always kill the kids. There's good eating on one of those things.
Viner is quoted in the newspapers as saying "People still think the impacts of climate change are decades away but actually they are with us now. We're already getting the hottest summers on record. Over the time that I expect to live in this house, Britain and the world will undergo even greater changes. I wanted a home that was as protected as possible from future turmoil".
"Here," he goes on, "we are buffered against those changes. We could live here all the year round on locally produced food and I know that we won't be flooded by storms, rivers or the sea".
What a plonker. If this man really believed what he preaches, he wouldn't be fiddling around in Norfolk, which is not nearly far enough north to avoid the arid heat of the future summers we are predicted. If you believe some so-called authorities, the locally produced food is likely to be olives and African elephant grass. And does he know what Norfolk's made of? - any serious flooding would wash half of it away!
No, the reason Viner has bought a house in Norfolk is that he's got a job in Norwich, and that's in Norfolk. If he really believed the sh*t he is peddling and were really serious about protecting his family, he'd be giving up his cushy post as a salaried know-it-all and uprooting them to Northumberland at the very least, or some cute little isolated shieling in the Borders with several hundred feet of solid granite underneath it.
We learned about Professor Viner in the course of a newspaper report about the new pontification from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which under the Unesco umbrella has just issued the latest, most extreme and supposedly most authoritative warning that the world is in melt-down and it's all our fault. Again. Charitably leaving aside the IPCC's rather shabby past record (for many years it stubbornly ignored the facts about previous climate-change events such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, and may still be doing so for all we know) and assuming that they both know what they are saying and mean what they are saying, we find that by 2100 temperatures will rise by 1.8 and 4 degrees (nothing like hedging your bets, is there?). Sea levels will rise by between 11 and 17 inches, and there will be more hurricanes, typhoons and other storms.
And the IPCC have clearly been listening to the advice given by the Institute of Public Policy Research that global-warmers should speak and behave as though the argument is already won and that global warming is an undisputed fact, whether it is or not. The co-chairman of the IPCC, Susan Solomon, is quoted: "There can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases is dominated by human activity." Bold words, when it has been convincingly demonstrated that CO2 levels follow global temperatures rather than vice versa. Even bolder when you remember that it's only 30 years since these same scientists were predicting global cooling, with the climate in the UK becoming similar to that of Newfoundland; or that they were warning of the imminent demise of "all marine life" by the year 2000; or that they foresaw global crop failures and widespread famine with the attendant political and social breakdown also by the end of the century.
There is no question that our climate is changing - and there ought to no surprise about it, because it always has. We've just had the warmest January since 1916 - and they hadn't invented global warming in January 1916, had they, so what caused that? For a quarter of a million years until thirty thousand years ago there was no polar ice-cap at all, so why are so agitated about polar bears getting their feet wet? And yes, the Greenland glaciers may be melting a bit quicker round the edges, but on the other hand they're getting thicker in the middle so what's the difference?
As for the seas rising, why the hell isn't it happening already? Because it ain't, you know - measurements at various points round the Pacific show that the sea level has actually fallen a little in recent years, while in New Zealand it's been the same for 120 years. Yet apparently Norfolk is going to be inundated any minute. How's that going to work, then? Do they expect us to believe the oceans are going to slope?
Of course, all this has been welcomed by Sir Nick Stern whose recent report for the government on what we ought to be doing to ward off climate change was comprehensively panned by international scientists - "A biased British study that exaggerates costs, neglects science of climate variance, is fatally flawed and a microcosm of all that is duplicitous regarding global warming alarmists and their political propaganda", "Just another excuse for higher taxes", "has no basis in science or economics", and "very selective in the studies it quotes on the impact of climate change" (see here for sources).
Some of the so-called research quoted in the newspaper article is mere anecdote. We learn that one farmer has planted olive trees in Devon, and others are trying crops of lavender (which we believe has already been grown in some parts of the UK for many years) or elephant grass which is supposed to make good fuel for power stations instead of coal, though what difference this'll make to emissions they don't say.
The IPCC report is not so much the rational conclusions of a group of eminent scientists as a rag-bag of submissions from over 600 researchers from 40 different countries. It's inevitable that the media will pick up on the most extravagant claims, and the authors of those claims will win attention, enhance their reputations and improve their job prospects. This means that they'll compete to see who can make the most dire, and therefore media-worthy, predictions which is a pretty shoddy way to guide the world's governments.
And it's not just scientists who stand to gain from promoting panic and concern. The newspaper article featuring Professor Viner was written by Jonathan Leeke, the Sunday Times' "environmental editor". He has a job to secure, too. He won't do that by writing whole-page articles saying "World is working OK, no cause to worry".
So, Professor Viner, despite the nice photograph of you and your very nice-looking family in a very nice field of nice green grass, for leaping on the gravy-train by buying yourself a house near your work and pretending it's a scientific statement, you are our Wanker of the Week. At least you had the honesty to admit "I don't know what the future holds" - so why all the other garbage? And what are you going to say to your three children in thirty years' time when they ask "Daddy, you remember that global warming thing that was supposed to happen ….?"
* Variously, "God, what a dump!" or "You're going to live where?"
The GOS says: To see our previous pages on this subject, click here, here,here,here,here,here,here and here.
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