‘Catalina, are you crazy? Everybody knows this stuff. It’s settled science.’
She shrugged. ‘So they say. And like lots of people, I passively accepted it for a long time. While I got on with the business of helping advance our knowledge of helioseismology, I trusted my fellow scientists in their own specialised disciplines to get on with their bit. If the climatologists said we were getting warmer, then okay, we were getting warmer. If they said it was because we were pumping too much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, fine. I accepted that too. Until, one day, I opened my eyes.’
‘Thanks to Herschel?’ Ben said.
A little smile tugged at the corner of her lips. ‘Wow, maybe you are a genius. That’s right, thanks to Herschel. Before I got the job on the TV series, he was just a name to me, one of a long, long list of historical astronomers. Discoverer of Uranus and its moons, along with moons of Saturn. The first to realise the existence of infrared radiation, and a lot more besides. As well as being rather a good classical composer. A very clever man. But I had no idea at the time how much he would influence me. That was my epiphany. Everything snowballed from that moment onwards.’
‘Maybe not such a good thing, as it turned out,’ Ben said.
Catalina shook her head fiercely. ‘Knowledge is always worthwhile. Always. No matter what.’
‘Even if it gets you killed?’
‘But humans are destroying the world,’ Raul said. ‘Who can deny that? Look at the pollution. The rivers, the oceans. Look at the deforestation. The heavy industry. Oil. Mining. Tearing fossil fuels out of the ground. Wrecking our environment everywhere you turn.’
‘It’s true,’ Catalina replied. ‘In so many ways, humans are extremely bad news for this planet. You don’t have to persuade me of that. In fact, I’d consider myself just as much of an ecologist as anyone. Somewhere down the line, our species fell completely out of tune with nature. From prehistory to modern times we’ve gone from being just another animal species, to being the single greatest biological scourge of the Earth. We proliferate, we consume, we pollute, we destroy. No other living creature fouls its own environment in this reckless, insane way.’
‘So what’s the argument?’ Raul said.
‘The argument is one that people should actually be very thankful for,’ Catalina told him. ‘Because, for all our malignant destructiveness, human beings are simply too small and insignificant to be able to wreak the kind of fundamental planet-altering harm that could bring about a lasting and catastrophic effect on Earth’s climate. The belief that our species is capable of wielding power on that scale is like some kind of Freudian God complex, a delusion of grandeur. It’s like when they talk seriously about terraforming Mars for the human race to colonise, as if our technology gave us the divine means to wave our wand at another planet and create some kind of new Genesis.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s pure Star Trek fantasy. Even if we could figure out a way to convert the atmosphere of Mars to support human life, and then raise the temperature above an uninhabitable minus fifty-five degrees centigrade, you then have the minor challenge of developing a technology that could prevent Martian radiation from cooking the astronauts who tried to settle there. That’s just for starters. And that’s only our next-door neighbour in the solar system. Who do we think we are? Even more insane was the plan that a bunch of NASA engineers hatched a few years ago to use asteroids to shunt Earth into a different orbit, further from the sun, to stop the planet from overheating. Simple science, they called it. No problem, boys, let’s get out the cosmic tug boats and just tow her over here a few thousand miles where it’s cooler. Oh, and possibly render the planet uninhabitable while we’re at it.’
‘Okay,’ Raul said. ‘But what about the CO2?’
Catalina shrugged. ‘What about it? It’s the stuff humans breathe out and plants breathe in. It’s not poison.’
‘Well, according to everything I’ve read and heard, it’s the greenhouse gas that creates global warming. And we’re pumping it out like crazy.’
‘CO2 is a greenhouse gas,’ Catalina said. ‘It’s not the greenhouse gas. In fact, its effects are pretty inconsequential compared to those of, say, water vapour, which is naturally given off by our oceans. CO2 is really not a big deal. If it were such a warming influence, then how come Mars, whose atmosphere is almost entirely composed of CO2, is such a freezing cold planet?’
‘Because it’s further from the sun?’ Ben ventured.
Catalina cocked an eyebrow and pointed at him, clicking her tongue.
‘Wait a minute,’ Raul said, unconvinced. ‘I thought all this had been proved. CO2 emission levels are rising to unprecedented levels on Earth, along with our temperatures. That’s a clear and obvious correlation. If we don’t cut our output and change how we live, we’ll continue to heat up the planet. Right?’
‘Fine,’ Catalina replied. ‘By all means, let’s change the way we live. Let’s all become less reliant on electricity and oil, for a start. That definitely gets my vote. God forbid that we should contemplate drastically cutting the birth rate as a means of curbing galloping overpopulation, while we’re at it. The planet can only benefit from that, but not in the way everybody has been conned into thinking. Why? Because cutting CO2 emissions won’t change the climate one iota, due to one slight flaw in the theory.’
‘Which is?’
‘That it’s the wrong way round,’ she said. ‘Back to front. Upside down, whichever way you look at it. Claiming that high atmospheric CO2 levels lead to high temperatures is what’s known, scientifically speaking, as confusing correlation with causation. Put simply, CO2 levels rise as a result of heat, not the converse. When the planet is warmer, carbon dioxide is released from the oceans into the atmosphere, as an after-effect. Like when a bruise appears on your flesh a few days after a knock. Can we say that the bruise caused the knock?’
‘Of course not,’ Raul said irritably.
‘There’s another element of the equation that’s been largely ignored, which is the time dimension. The process doesn’t happen instantly. As we know from ice core research, it takes between about eight hundred to a thousand years for warmer temperatures to show up as raised CO2 levels in the atmosphere. In other words, the levels we measure now are nothing more than a record of something that happened many centuries ago.’
‘But—’
‘I know it’s not easy, hearing the truth,’ Catalina said. ‘Not when your head has been filled with lies from every direction.’
‘You’re saying it’s all wrong?’
‘Not all,’ she said. ‘Some of it is true. Nobody disputes that atmospheric CO2 levels are currently quite elevated, for instance. Not that they’re doing any harm. On the contrary, our plant friends are loving it, and pumping out lots of nice oxygen in response. But if we trace those high CO2 levels back eight hundred or so years to see where they originated, what we find is a neat echo of the Medieval Warm Period.’
Raul looked at her. ‘The what?’
‘I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it,’ Catalina said. ‘There are people out there doing all they can to bury it, play it down, even erase it from the history books. You might say it’s an inconvenient truth. But we have clear evidence that for five centuries, from around the year 800 to 1300, the world entered a cycle of climate warming that brought about tremendous positive change in Europe and elsewhere. After struggling through a long and bitter period of glacial climate, they suddenly found themselves enjoying a time of idyllic summers and largely mild winters that brought with them rich agricultural harvests, rocketing food production, booming trade, expanding populations and a new era of optimism that generated an explosion of arts and culture, from painting to architecture. It was so warm in England that vineyards flourished and merchants started exporting enormous amounts of wine to France, of such good quality that the French viniculture industry tried to have it legally blocked as it was undercutting their own product. Can you imagine that happening now? They
were even producing wine in Norway, and in Prussia as far north as fifty-five degrees. The Black Forest had vineyards up to two thousand five hundred feet above sea level, much higher than today. Crops were growing in Alpine valleys that we wouldn’t be able to grow there now.
‘Did you ever wonder how Greenland got its name?’ Catalina went on. ‘After all, the place is a vast freezer. That’s why Dougal Sinclair was carrying out research there, because Greenland ice core samples are so dense that they offer even better resolution for analysis than samples from Antarctica. How could one of the coldest, iciest countries on Earth ever be called green? Is it some kind of a joke? Not at all. Greenland was so named by the Viking chief Erik the Red, for the fertile and lush valleys that his people were able to settle and farm for three hundred years during the Medieval Warm Period, as far north as Upernavik. It wasn’t until after about the year 1300 that the climate changed again. The Vikings’ crops began to fail and their livestock starved or froze, forcing them to subsist on fish and seal meat until even that became impossible because of growing sea ice. The Norse settlers soon died out completely, as Greenland reverted back to what it is today.
‘So the big question is,’ she went on, ‘what caused the warming cycle? Where were all the cars back then? And where was all the industry, burning fossil fuels and churning out carbon emissions? How could such a thing possibly happen without humans causing it? Surely, it couldn’t have been a natural cycle?’ Catalina let out a humourless laugh.
‘But it couldn’t have been warmer than it is in modern times,’ Raul protested. ‘Right now is the warmest century on record. Isn’t it? That’s what we’re always hearing.’
‘Depends on which records you look at,’ Catalina said. ‘The accurate ones that don’t reflect anything of the sort, or the ones that have been cherry-picked and distorted to fit with the lie of anthropogenic climate change. All kinds of tricks are used to manipulate the data to show warming trends where there simply aren’t any. There have been plenty of exposed cases where deliberate “adjusting” – read “tampering” – of temperature figures from weather stations has produced an apparent rise, while the original readings show an actual decline. For instance in New Zealand, where unadjusted data showing no warming trend at all between 1850 and 1998 was fixed, suddenly giving a warming trend of 2.3 degrees for the same time period.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Raul said. ‘They wouldn’t do that.’
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ Catalina replied. ‘They do it all the time. Take the Arctic. It warmed up rapidly in the 1930s and ’40s, before temperatures there dropped again in the ’60s and ’70s. The record has been “adjusted” by lowering past temperatures so that today’s can look higher, giving the impression that it’s warmer now. Whereas in fact it was warmer eighty years ago.’
‘That’s insane,’ Raul said.
‘Insane is one word for it. Blatant fraud might be a better description. In 1999, official records showed that the years 1921, 1931, 1934 and 1958 were all much warmer than 1998, when those figures were compiled. In the case of 1934, it was actually a whole degree Fahrenheit warmer. But if you consult those same records now, they’ll tell you that 1934 was 0.1 degrees cooler than 1998, in line with the warming agenda. Which can only mean one thing. Somebody went in there and altered the figures to make them fit the theory. Does that sound like good science to you?’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Raul said, staring at her.
‘It gets even better,’ she replied. ‘What most people don’t realise is that only about twenty percent of the world’s surface is even monitored by weather stations. Around 1990, the number of stations worldwide was more than halved, with the remaining ones tending to be concentrated in built-up areas affected by the urban heat island effect.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘The term refers to the fact that cities and other densely inhabited places tend to be slightly warmer than less populated rural or wilderness areas. The difference can be considerable, up to two degrees Celsius even within just a few miles. In other words, by decommissioning the temperature monitoring stations in those more remote locations, the results were actively skewed in favour of the warming hypothesis. To make matters worse, many of the active stations are in places like airports, in close proximity to large areas of asphalt and concrete that soak up the sun’s warmth and radiate it back upwards, further exaggerating the readings. Not to mention all those massive jet engines passing by every few minutes, giving off enormous heat. Don’t tell me that can produce an unbiased temperature reading. Computer “infilling” is then used to plug the massive gaps in the data generated by so few thinly scattered stations, to give the false impression that the information has been thoroughly and authoritatively assimilated.’
Raul said nothing.
‘The same cherry-picking of data happens with polar glacier research,’ Catalina explained. ‘You see, at any given time, some glaciers are always growing, while others are receding. If the studies and temperature readings all focus on the melt zones, you can easily see how that could be used to twist the data. Hence, “Hey folks, didn’t you know the Arctic sea ice is all melting away to nothing and all the cute polar bears are drowning and it’s all our fault?”’
‘Watch it,’ Raul warned her. ‘That’s a really shitty thing to say about the polar bears.’
Stepped on a nerve there, Ben thought.
‘It would be, sure,’ Catalina replied coolly. ‘If it weren’t for the fact that polar bears are doing nothing of the kind, and their numbers have actually increased by up to five thousand or more in the last fifteen years, the same time period we were told would see the total disappearance of the polar icecaps.’
Raul fell silent again.
Catalina raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Basically, a whole area of science has fallen prey to fraudulent practices. You see it everywhere. Rising sea levels? False data measured on coral atolls that are slowly sinking due to the increasing weight of expanding human habitation. Storms and hurricanes worsening because of climate change? Not according to the proper graphs from NOAA, which show that hurricanes were much stronger in the 1940s and ’50s than they are today. It’s largely human mismanagement and poor wealth distribution that lead to so much devastation and death as a result of severe storms. Global warming causing fires that destroy swathes of real estate in Australia? Only because someone went and built new housing estates in arid areas where bush fires have been known to occur for generations. And on and on it goes.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Raul said. ‘I wouldn’t even be listening to it, from anyone else but you.’
‘If you prefer to believe in a pack of lies, I can’t stop you.’
‘But why would they be lying to us?’
‘Not a very original reason,’ she said. ‘It’s all about money. What else? Green taxes. Carbon credits. Electric cars. Solar power. Wind power. So-called “clean” nuclear energy, which they’ll start pushing more and more as fossil fuel technologies are increasingly demonised.’
Raul snorted. ‘You’re beginning to sound like that guy Mike McCauley. I never realised you were so cynical.’
‘Raul, you have no idea of the vast business interests behind all this. For instance, in 2008 General Electric, part of the giant multinational corporation NBC Universal and coincidentally America’s biggest producer of wind turbines, purchased the Weather Channel, thereby neatly becoming the owner of the best-positioned purveyors of images of so-called climate-related disaster in order to persuade the public of how indispensable their products were. Climate change has become a gigantic industry that has generated fortunes for its leading proponents. Have you checked out the Forbes list of Green billionaires lately?’
‘Fine, fine. That being the case, I can’t understand why this isn’t all out in the open. If the truth is as clear-cut as you say it is, then why aren’t other scientists saying so?’
Catalina smiled darkly. ‘I’m afraid that many of them buy
into the global warming propaganda, just like everyone else. For some in the environmental branches of science, it’s the revenge of the Greens. They’re not marginalised hippies any more. After being disparaged and embattled for years, they see this as their big moment, and the political environment has given them the power to grow militant. And to attract enticing cash payouts for their research, of course. It’s become virtually impossible to secure funding for any kind of project that doesn’t support the prevailing political trend. You say you want to study the procreative behaviour of horseshoe bats? Forget it. You won’t get a penny. Say you want to study the procreative behaviour of horseshoe bats in the context of anthropogenic climate change, and they’ll shower you with gold. This thing has spread like a cancer through the education system as well. I’ve been hearing more and more reports of the better students of environmental sciences dropping out of their courses when they realise the degree of unscientific propagandising that’s going on. Lesser students, or ones with less of a conscience, soon discover that going along with the lies is a convenient way to get good grades. As a result, many or most of tomorrow’s climate scientists are likely to be the kind of second-rate academics who toe the line, ask no questions and are good little mouthpieces for the new establishment.
‘Then, as if all that weren’t enough, there’s the simple and sorry fact that a lot of scientists just don’t know what’s really going on. They don’t talk to one another about their research, as often the degree of specialisation and jargon can make it hard for a specialist in one discipline to understand a scientific paper in the other discipline.’