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   the free world. Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an example of a new   
   breed of science critic that the climate debate has spawned. With   
   little backing, and facing ostracism for her heresy, this talented   
   science journalist had abandoned any chance of a normal, lucrative   
   career and systematically set out to expose the way the huge financial   
   gravy train that is climate science has distorted the methods of   
   science. In her chapter in The Facts, Nova points out that the entire   
   trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a single   
   hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day   
   there is no evidence.   
      
   The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be   
   trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there   
   will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive   
   feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be   
   tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large   
   positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one   
   just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice   
   cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon   
   dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be   
   high if positive feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and   
   lower. Above all, the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by   
   the models.   
      
   Scandal after scandal   
      
   The Cook paper is one of many scandals and blunders in climate   
   science. There was the occasion in 2012 when the climate scientist   
   Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of the (sceptical)   
   Heartland Institute’s board of directors, leaked confidential   
   documents, and included also a “strategy memo” purporting to describe   
   Heartland’s plans, which was a straight forgery. Gleick apologised but   
   continues to be a respected climate scientist.   
      
   There was Stephan Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western   
   Australia, who published a paper titled “NASA faked the moon landing   
   therefore [climate] science is a hoax”, from which readers might have   
   deduced, in the words of a Guardian headline, that “new research finds   
   that sceptics also tend to support conspiracy theories such as the   
   moon landing being faked”. Yet in fact in the survey for the paper,   
   only ten respondents out of 1145 thought that the moon landing was a   
   hoax, and seven of those did not think climate change was a hoax. A   
   particular irony here is that two of the men who have actually been to   
   the moon are vocal climate sceptics: Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin.   
      
   It took years of persistence before physicist Jonathan Jones and   
   political scientist Ruth Dixon even managed to get into print (in   
   March this year) a detailed and devastating critique of the   
   Lewandowsky article’s methodological flaws and bizarre reasoning, with   
   one journal allowing Lewandowsky himself to oppose the publication of   
   their riposte. Lewandowsky published a later paper claiming that the   
   reactions to his previous paper proved he was right, but it was so   
   flawed it had to be retracted.   
      
   If these examples of odd scientific practice sound too obscure, try   
   Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for thirteen years and often   
   described as the “world’s top climate scientist”. He once dismissed as   
   “voodoo science” an official report by India’s leading glaciologist,   
   Vijay Raina, because it had challenged a bizarre claim in an IPCC   
   report (citing a WWF report which cited an article in New Scientist),   
   that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. The claim   
   originated with Syed Hasnain, who subsequently took a job at The   
   Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of   
   which Dr Pachauri is director-general, and there his glacier claim   
   enabled TERI to win a share of a three-million-euro grant from the   
   European Union. No wonder Dr Pachauri might well not have wanted the   
   2035 claim challenged.   
      
   Yet Raina was right, it proved to be the IPCC’s most high-profile   
   blunder, and Dr Pachauri had to withdraw both it and his “voodoo”   
   remark. The scandal led to a highly critical report into the IPCC by   
   several of the world’s top science academics, which recommended among   
   other things that the IPCC chair stand down after one term. Dr   
   Pachauri ignored this, kept his job, toured the world while urging   
   others not to, and published a novel, with steamy scenes of seduction   
   of an older man by young women. (He resigned this year following   
   criminal allegations of sexual misconduct with a twenty-nine-year-old   
   female employee, which he denies, and which are subject to police   
   investigation.)   
      
   Yet the climate bloggers who constantly smear sceptics managed to   
   avoid even reporting most of this. If you want to follow Dr Pachauri’s   
   career you have to rely on a tireless but self-funded investigative   
   journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise. In her chapter in The   
   Facts, Laframboise details how Dr Pachauri has managed to get the   
   world to describe him as a Nobel laureate, even though this is simply   
   not true.   
      
   Notice, by the way, how many of these fearless free-thinkers prepared   
   to tell emperors they are naked are women. Susan Crockford, a Canadian   
   zoologist, has steadfastly exposed the myth-making that goes into   
   polar bear alarmism, to the obvious discomfort of the doyens of that   
   field. Jennifer Marohasy of Central Queensland University, by   
   persistently asking why cooling trends recorded at Australian weather   
   stations with no recorded moves were being altered to warming trends,   
   has embarrassed the Bureau of Meteorology into a review of their   
   procedures. Her chapter in The Factsunderlines the failure of computer   
   models to predict rainfall.   
      
   But male sceptics have scored successes too. There was the case of the   
   paper the IPCC relied upon to show that urban heat islands (the fact   
   that cities are generally warmer than the surrounding countryside, so   
   urbanisation causes local, but not global, warming) had not   
   exaggerated recent warming. This paper turned out—as the sceptic Doug   
   Keenan proved—to be based partly on non-existent data on forty-nine   
   weather stations in China. When corrected, it emerged that the urban   
   heat island effect actually accounted for 40 per cent of the warming   
   in China.   
      
   There was the Scandinavian lake sediment core that was cited as   
   evidence of sudden recent warming, when it was actually being used   
   “upside down”—the opposite way the authors of the study thought it   
   should be used: so if anything it showed cooling.   
      
   There was the graph showing unprecedented recent warming that turned   
   out to depend on just one larch tree in the Yamal Peninsula in   
   Siberia.   
      
   There was the southern hemisphere hockey-stick that had been created   
   by the omission of inconvenient data series.   
      
   There was the infamous “hide the decline” incident when a   
   tree-ring-derived graph had been truncated to disguise the fact that   
   it seemed to show recent cooling.   
      
   And of course there was the mother of all scandals, the “hockey stick”   
   itself: a graph that purported to show the warming of the last three   
   decades of the twentieth century as unprecedented in a millennium, a   
   graph that the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it six   
   times in its third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC   
   chairman at his press conference. It was a graph that persuaded me to   
   abandon my scepticism (until I found out about its flaws), because I   
   thoughtNature magazine would never have published it without checking.   
      
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