Experts on climate change must be heard

IN his recent letter, Gareth Jones complains that people ‘promoting’ the scientific paradigm of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) receive large amounts of money in research funding but ‘offer no solution’. My advice to Mr Jones is to follow the injunction in Matthew 7:7-8 which says ‘Seek and ye shall find’.

Given Mr Jones appears to be familiar with the IPCC publications, I am surprised he has somehow overlooked the 1,453-page document entitled Mitigation of Climate Change, which is the Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If Mr Jones would like something a bit shorter, I can thoroughly recommend Professor Mark Maslin’s recent book entitled How to Save Our Planet. The Facts.

May I also point out to Mr Jones that the experts from a very wide range of disciplines who write the IPCC reports give their time freely. The UN does not pay them for their work and conducts no research of its own.

I would also venture to suggest that it is ignorant to describe the study of AGW as a ‘pseudo-science’, given that very many of those involved are highly qualified in mathematics, the natural sciences or the biological and earth sciences.

It is puzzling why Mr Jones thinks people who are expert in the climate sciences are being used to ‘impress and bamboozle’ lay people. I presume that Mr Jones is not a climate scientist, so why doesn’t he respect people who have spent long years gaining experience and expertise in a field in which he is not qualified? Is it a case of arrogance that he thinks he knows better than experts, or perhaps he believes the many thousands of scientists in different disciplines, countries and organizations studying the Earth’s climate are engaged in a dastardly, but unspecified, conspiracy against the public?

Maybe it is just the case that the message from scientists about the deleterious effects of human activity on the climatic system is one he doesn’t want to hear, and it is easier to take the unpleasant and unchristian step of attempting to deprecate those conveying it?

Professor Bruce Webb Exeter, Devon