...body international bureaucrats and scientists which, among other things, produces a report every four or five years on the science of global warming. The reports are enormously influential. They form the platform for much of the world's activism on the greenhouse issue.

The experts at the meeting discussed in particular a new proxy record of the world's temperature over the last 1000 years. The record was given prominent treatment by the IPCC, and was perhaps the most talked-about aspect of its report. It was based mainly on the analysis of tree rings at a number of sites in the northern hemisphere. It became famously known as the "hockey stick". This was because the rise in measured temperature over the last 100 years seemed, by comparison with the proxy record, to be much greater than any changes over the previous 900 years. The graph looked to have the shape of a hockey stick lying down with its blade turned up at the end. Here (at last?) seemed to be good experimental evidence that the world is rapidly warming as a result of man's profligate use of fossil fuel.

But the hockey-stick analysis has problems. One of them concerns the matching of the instrumental record of the last 100 years with the proxy record of the previous 900. Changing an instrument in the middle of a series of measurements is always a dubious procedure, and is infinitely more so when the change corresponds exactly with an apparent change in the quantity being measured.

Then again, it is extraordinarily difficult to detect the rise in global temperature over the last 100 years, even though there have been continuous measurements during that time by many thousands of calibrated thermometers all around the world. Scientists and statisticians are still arguing about it. How much more questionable must be a 900-year record based on measurements at only a very few places--much less than a dozen for a lot of the time. And tree rings are scarcely calibrated thermometers. While ring thickness may be governed by temperature in a rough sort of way, it is also influenced by lots of other things such as rainfall, disease and local topography.

It seemed reasonable at the meeting to point out some of these problems, and to suggest that perhaps the IPCC had gone a little overboard in its reporting of the matter.

It was like stirring a hornet's nest. One after another the global warming experts rose to condemn me for questioning in public the conclusions of an IPCC report which had been compiled and endorsed as the consensus opinion of a large number of knowledgeable scientists. What right had I to make negative comments when I was not an expert in that particular aspect of climate science? If I wanted to question the science then the proper procedure was to write my thoughts in a formal scientific paper which could be subjected to peer review. And so on and so forth. The verbal spat was quite out of proportion to whatever crime I had committed. Through it all the bemused audience sat quietly. Lord knows what they thought about it all. The condemnation continued for some days afterwards with a rash of fairly rude e-mails demanding that I apologise for bringing disrepute to the IPCC process and to the scientific personnel associated with it.

All of which is fairly petty stuff. It would not normally be worth repotting except that it is a small example of how difficult it can be these days for the ordinary scientist to question the official beliefs of the apparatchiks...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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