Extreme Weather by Peter Bunyard (Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2007,
256 pages, ISBN: 0863155685, £16.99)
Reviewed for
The
global debate on climate and energy appears to be driven by the concerns of
green liberals but Michael Crichton in his 2003 novel State of Fear and
in his appearance before last year’s Republican-controlled Senate Committee
on Global Warming believes matters are more complicated. Indeed a Senate
Committee investigation found a number of the scientists behind the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) driving the Kyoto Treaty process to
be guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the American public. The senators were
persuaded that a group of IPCC scientists had deliberately set out to
cover up evidence of the medieval warm period during which many wondrous
historical events took place including the circumnavigation of
As
powerful global players deploy their forces in a War Against
Global Warming honest scientists find themselves on the horns of a dilemma.
If like Peter Bunyard they are a Fellow of the Linnean Society of
London and a former science editor at The Ecologist with a strong
public stance against nuclear power it is not easy knowing which way to jump
when your publisher commissions a glossy coffee-table book about what global
warming and climate change mean for the future of our planet and the human
race. How to square the circle of personal integrity with your scientific
credentials? Peter Bunyard knows that the only sane, humane and ecological
(SHE) energy policy is for national and international energy grids to be dismantled.
But in a
world gone mad the world of science has become its own art form. Peter
Bunyard’s Extreme Weather is cleverly written and beautifully produced and I take my hat
off to him for the way he emerges from his labours with his personal integrity
pretty well intact. The Guardianistas will love all the disaster
pictures while the Carbon Theologians will delude themselves into
believing Peter Bunyard is ‘one of us’. He is not. ‘What if we were to get away
from the concept and operation of an all-dominating central grid system with
large power stations transmitting electricity all over the country,’ Bunyard
asks in the concluding chapter. What indeed? And he goes on to point out that
‘isolated central grid power stations, including nuclear reactors, lose as much
as two-thirds of the energy generated in the cooling systems’. Bunyard knows
that the energy used and the carbon emissions generated in constructing nuclear
power plants high on the Yorkshire Moors makes a nonsense of the idea of
building more radioactive steam kettles because he wrote about it in a series
of articles in The Ecologist last year. Why the
NB. The following paragraphs were not
included by the editor in the published review in FWR 142 in March 2007.
But now
the Guardianistas have their coffee table book I wonder why Peter
Bunyard does not publish an anonymous polemic that discusses his private views
about the real local options available to address legitimate scientific
concerns about future climate uncertainties and new energy infrastructures. How
much does a 67-year old scientist really have to lose? The real scientific
consensus is that whenever any scientist comes up with data proving mankind’s
impact on climate change other scientists come up with at least four plausible
alternative explanations…data measurement anomalies, local conditions,
planetary dynamics (sun, moon, earth and planets) and terrestrial dynamics
(volcanic action and ocean currents). Correlation is not causation and new
global climate mechanisms are being discovered almost every week with very
little sign of any let-up in the pace of discovery. This is very good news
because it means that eventually we will actually start to understand the
interconnections. At present nobody has a clue about climate and the computer
models are no more than bold stabs at modelling a few aspects of our climate
futures.
On 3rd December 2004 just days before the
start of a United Nations Conference on Climate Change, Science
Magazine published a study by Naomi Oreskes providing ‘empirical evidence
for a unanimous scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of global
warming’. However when Dr Benny Peiser of