From the Telegraph, no less.

Rocks hold the truth about climate change

Geologists are the only scientists who can look back to the last time greenhouse gases warmed the Earth – and it wasn’t pretty

Not again: global warming occurred 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs

Photo: Science Photo Library

By Ted Nield

8:36PM GMT 18 Nov 2013

Over the coming 12 months, everyone who has not been locked away in a Trappist monastery will be made aware that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now entertains no significant doubt that the climate of the Earth is changing, and that we are mostly to blame.

The IPCC has said this in the first of the three reports it intends to release this year and next. Its attitude is unequivocal. The world is warming, sea levels are rising, ice caps are shrinking, there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years, and even the most optimistic computer model shows more of the same in the near future. The IPCC says it is “95 per cent certain” – which is the same as saying that the odds are 19 to one that the science is right. Science is rarely surer of itself than this.

You might think that the conclusion would cheer people up but, curiously, it hasn’t. Think about it. If we are responsible for global warming, then we stand a chance of doing something about it. If it’s all down to changes in the Sun, or in the Earth’s orbit, or any of the other things that climate-change deniers assert, then we are in serious trouble.

Some business and political interests wish to encourage our base instinct to do nothing by casting unreasonable doubt around science’s near-unanimous verdict. It is a tactic well rehearsed by Young Earth creationists, for example, whose goal is to plant suspicion in as many minds as possible around undeniable truths they find uncomfortable, be it the age of the Earth (4,567 million years) or evolution. Under cover of this mist of uncertainty, unreason flourishes.

On the day the IPCC’s latest report was released, September 27, the presenters of Radio 4’s Today programme informed listeners that they had failed to find a British scientist prepared to challenge the IPCC’s conclusions. However, to achieve what it calls “balance”, the BBC will, if necessary, go to the ends of the earth; and by the time The World at One aired, a sceptic had been found – in Australia.

His name was Prof Bob Carter, a retired geologist speaking on behalf of the jocularly named “Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC), a ragtag band of doubting Thomases partnered with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank in Chicago whose previous campaigns included working with a tobacco company to cast doubt on research linking cancer to second-hand smoke.

Carter argued that climate is always changing naturally (which is true), and that our attempts to alter its course are therefore misguided. Claiming that the NIPCC is independent, he also averred that having “around 47” contributing scientists (against the IPCC’s 800-plus) made its opinions “widely held”.

Reaction to Carter’s performance and the BBC’s decision to use him was negative. John Ashton, a Fellow at Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change, cited the 2011 report from Prof Steve Jones to the BBC Trust, in which the academic and science communicator (and Telegraph columnist) had complained of the corporation’s tendency towards “false impartiality” – the “distinguished professor vs Swampy” problem. Jones had urged the BBC not to give undue prominence to individuals who give the appearance of authority but who in fact have none. Carter was such a person because he was a geologist, Ashton implied.

This conclusion, while superficially true, is also misleading. Carter may be wrong when it comes to climate science but that doesn’t mean geologists, the vast majority of whom agree with the IPCC conclusions, do not have a great deal to contribute to the debate. While climatologists deal in models that predict the future – models that are always uncertain – we deal with the hard reality of the past, a past locked up in the rocks. And we have some insights into changing climates that are denied to anyone studying today’s atmosphere.

Insights from the past: fossils from that era (ALAMY)

How? Well – you might think that 800,000 years – the longest interval mentioned in the IPCC report – is a long time; but it is a short and unrepresentative eye-blink in the history of the Earth (less than one 5,000th of its history), consisting mostly of glacial-interglacial cycles.

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