There was a fiery exchange between professors Julia Slingo and Bill McGuire and audience member and meteorologist Piers Corbyn at the final panel discussion on Day 1 of the Global Reinsurance/Insurance Times Climate Change 2007 conference.
Climate change remains a highly controversial subject, and the exchange witnessed at the end of Day 1 helped to bring that home to delegates.
Having devoted a large chunk of their lives and often struggled to gain the required funding for their crucial research, scientists can understandably get a little tetchy when the whole premise of their years of labour is rubbished… by a TV programme, and a conference delegate (who also happens to be one of the scientists interviewed for said TV programme).
The Channel 4 documentary called the “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, and seen as the antithesis of Al Gore's documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, was aired in the UK just days before the conference. It argued, backed up by an impressive array of scientists and experts (one, a globally-acknowledged NASA atmospheric scientist), that carbon dioxide was not the cause of climate change. In fact, it was the other way around. Warming temperatures, argued the programme, were the cause of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And more importantly, this was a natural phenomenon. It proposed that sun spots and solar radiation, exacerbated by water vapour in the atmosphere, were the real drivers of climate change.
Professor Bill McGuire, director of Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, was clearly still peeved about the programme when he stood up to give his presentation. “Climate change is no joke but it still seems to be that way to some people at Channel 4,” he said. He went on to offer his view on the likely sea level rise as a result of climate change and polar melting over the next few decades, and the likely consequences.
But the stage had been set and come the Q&A session, and Corbyn's question to both scientists on the panel – McGuire and Professor Julia Slingo, director of climate, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, acting director, Walker Institute for Climate System Research, University of Reading and member, Willis Research Netowrk – were clearly unimpressed by his suggestion that CO² emissions were not the cause of climate change.
Corbyn, founder and managing director of the forecasters Weather Action, is considered by some to be a bit of a maverick due to his controversial solar-induced climate change theory. One thing he is definitely good at is airing his views at conferences, and starting a good debate.
Slingo was first to respond. “We are very confident that the global warming effect is physically robust,” she stated. “No assumptions go into physically-based models. We cannot twiddle knobs to support our assumptions.” Slingo said she was in no doubt that it was CO² emissions driving climate change. “We're the cause and we're watching the consequences now.” She accused the Channel 4 documentary of undermining all the hard work of many scientists, but realising her response was becoming quite passionate, she added: “I apologise for the tirade but I think this is a really serious issue.”
Bill McGuire was in complete agreement. “CO² levels of this magnitude have never happened before and it's entirely down to human activity.” He said the programme was “disgraceful” and that it had “confused a lot of people.”
