I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?

Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous. The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.

Yet most politicians go straight to the top of the IPCC’s range and call climate change things like “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction” (John Kerry), requiring the expenditure of trillions of dollars. I think that is verging on grotesque in a world full of war, hunger, disease and poverty. It also means that environmental efforts get diverted from more urgent priorities, like habitat loss and invasive species.

The policies being proposed to combat climate change, far from being a modest insurance policy, are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment: we are tearing down rainforests to grow biofuels and ripping up peat bogs to install windmills that still need fossil-fuel back-up. These policies are failing to buy any comfort for our wealthy grandchildren and are doing so on the backs of today’s poor. Some insurance policy.

To begin with, after I came out as a lukewarmer, I would get genuine critiques from scientists who disagreed with me and wanted to exchange views. I had long and time-consuming email exchanges or conversations with several such scientists.

Yet I grew steadily more sceptical as, one by one, they failed to answer my doubts. They often resorted to meta-arguments, especially the argument from authority: if the Royal Society says it is alarmed, then you should be alarmed. If I want argument from authority, I replied, I will join the Catholic Church. “These are just standard denialist talking points” scoffed another prominent scientist, unpersuasively, when I raised objections — as if that answered them.

David Fuller's view

Thanks for the article and also your good point in the comment above. 

Without any scientific background but plenty of curiosity and sense of wonder about what goes on in our world and far beyond, I would also describe myself as a climate lukewarmer. 

Decades before global warming became a serious topic, I remember being alarmed on seeing data about how little earth’s average temperatures had varied over the last 10,000 years or so, a couple of minor ice ages excepted.  For many centuries prior to that evidence showed alarming extremes of temperature.  Additionally, some scientists said we were in danger of sliding into another ice age, approximately 20 to 40 years ago, as I recall.  I was more concerned about that possibility than global warming, although obviously no significant climate change is desirable.  We all want our descendents to live at least as comfortably as we have.

For over a decade, I have though it inconceivable that we humans with our fuels, cities and livestock could not be contributing to a warmer climate. While I agree that the evidence is very gradual, there is no certainty that the long-term trend will remain equally gradual, rather than increasing somewhat.  Moreover, I do not think that our contribution will decease anytime soon, since our global population is still growing and our economic development is expanding.

Therefore we need some luck, as I have said before, to keep global warming at a very gradual pace.  This does not mean that we are helpless in terms of affecting the outcome, at least in terms of our contribution to climate change.  Draconian measures advocated by some climate change extremists would cause far more hardship in terms of economic decline, suffering and unnecessary deaths than the current rate of global warming, which arguably has some benefits in addition to downsides.   

I have long maintained that technology will be able to lower the human contribution to global warming.  Arguably, it is already helping and has the long-term potential to do a great deal more.  Nevertheless, fossil fuels will remain our main source of energy for at least several more decades.  Therefore we still need some luck in terms of very gradual warming.