EXPERTS have debunked a declaration from climate sceptics who have defied scientific consensus by claiming “there is no climate emergency”.
The declaration has reached 1107 signatures, many of which come from individuals who have ties to the oil and gas industries or dubious scientific credentials.
It was released by the group Global Climate Intelligence, which was founded by former geophysics professor and Shell engineer Guus Berkhout.
Signatories include Ukip peer the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a number of scientists with past and current links to the fossil fuel industry, including a former vice president of operations for BP based in Aberdeen.
Delphine Gray-Fisk, the Ukip and Brexit Party candidate, also signed the declaration.
Many signatories are scientists, though few have expertise in climate science, while others appear to have no scientific credibility at all.
Dr Simon Cook, a senior lecturer in environmental science at Dundee University, said the group’s claims, including that CO2 is good for the environment and not causing global heating, were “anti-science” and recommended the group was “ignored”.
Dubious credentials
One signatory, Wolf Doleys, from Germany is listed as being a retired teacher who also writes poetry, novels and essays.
Another is Alexandre Krivitzky, from France, who is a psychoanalyst and appears to have no scientific background.
Dr Cook said: “It’s quite a lazy declaration. It doesn’t really have any supporting information. I would regard these views as fringe.”
Other claims include the assertion that global warming is not man-made but a natural reaction from the “little Ice Age” of 1850.
“They play on a veneer of credibility,” he added.
“You take that example – we’re coming out of an ice age, we’re in an interglacial period where it is definitely warmer than during the glacial period.
“But it’s the rate at which that warming is taking place and it’s going well beyond the temperatures experienced during the last interglacial period.
“What climate science denialists do, is they put their titles like professor so-and-so and say these sort of things like ‘CO2 is plant food – it’s not a pollutant’.
“Well, yeah, kind of but that’s not really what the situation is – the situation is that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 is a known greenhouse gas – we’ve known about that literally for hundreds of years.”
“What they’re saying just flies in the face of what we can observe and measure as scientists – it’s anti-science.”
'Heads in the sand'
Professor Alistair Jump, dean of the faculty of natural sciences at Stirling University, said: “This declaration wilfully overlooks, over-simplifies and misrepresents basic facts, as well as the vast breadth of scientific knowledge on the interaction between atmospheric composition, climate and living organisms.
“The small group behind the foundation rails against the economic cost of action – but the economic cost of inaction is far, far, greater.
“People sticking their head in the sand won’t make the global climate emergency go away –it will just remove the chance that we have to mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis and prepare economically and socially for the profound change that it is already bringing to individuals, communities and ecosystems across the globe.”
The declaration was hailed by the editor in chief of the Daily Sceptic Toby Young, who said: “First we had the Great Barrington Declaration, challenging the 'settled' scientific consensus about lockdowns. Now comes the World Climate Declaration, challenging the computer models predicting environmental catastrophe.”
