Climate change numpties: Simon Singh's guide for the perplexed

What is a climate change numpty? What should you do if you come across one? Here are some simple guidelines

Simon Singh
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 April 2009 13.52 BST

Having been a fan of Franny Armstrong's previous film, McLibel, I was keen to see her latest documentary, The Age of Stupid. While Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a rather dry and semi-academic look at climate change, The Age of Stupid is an emotional attempt to rally the troops. The fact that it preaches largely to the converted is not necessarily a bad thing if it encourages those who believe in climate change to become more vocal and more active.
But what about those who still do not believe in climate change? Who are they and how can they be persuaded to see sense?
I suspect that climate numpties (numpty (noun): a reckless, absent-minded or unwise person) are far more common than we might think, and they can be found in the most surprising of places.
This became apparent to me when I was having lunch one day with five physics undergraduates from a London college. They were clearly bright, devoted to physics and fully paid-up fans of the scientific method. However, not one of them was committed to the notions that climate change was happening, that it was largely caused by human activity (eg the burning of fossil fuels) and that there would be trouble ahead unless something changed.
I was baffled – why would little versions of me (for I was a physics undergraduate over two decades ago) not accept manmade climate change when it was backed by overwhelming evidence and endorsed by the vast majority of climate experts, Nobel Laureates and even David Attenborough?
Some of the students were simply suspicious of the media and seemed to think that the most sensible option was to take a contrary view to everything that appeared in the press. After all, the same press caused distress and spread misinformation about the MMR vaccine. Other students were suspicious of the government, believing that ministers always have an ulterior motive, such as finding a pretext to raise taxes.
In short, these students believed that it was smart to take the opposite view being pushed by the press, the government and the establishment in general. I suggested that the truly smart approach would be to examine the science and base their conclusions on the best available evidence, at which point I was astonished to learn that none of the students had seriously looked at the evidence for and against climate change.
After a short speech of admonishment that started with 'When I was your age …', I urged them to get up to speed on arguably the most important scientific issue of our age and pointed them to a few sources of information. My recommendations included The Hot Topic by Sir David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government) and Dame Gabrielle Walker (well, she should be a dame, and she is certainly a brilliant science journalist). I also pointed them towards the New Scientist's special issue 'Climate change: a guide for the perplexed'.
And, as they were part of the YouTube generation, I encouraged them to devote nine and half minutes to watching Greg Craven's Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See, which is much more reasoned than it sounds. In fact, Craven, a high school physics teacher from Oregon, has created an entire library of witty and informative videos discussing climate change, which have been watched by millions of people around the world. I am now looking forward to his book What's the Worst That Could Happen? which will be published in the summer.
If these students looked at the evidence from these and other reliable resources, then I assume that they would see that severe manmade climate change is indeed a reality.
However, those who continue to deny this conclusion (confirmed climate numpties) may wish to consider my revised version of an observation made by the technology journalist Kenneth Cukier in a different context. I would suggest that people who take part in the climate change debate are all intelligent, honourable and reject manmade climate change, but they never possess more than two of these qualities at once.
For example, columnists who regularly reject climate change possess the third quality, which means they cannot be both intelligent and honourable. Next time you read a climate numpty columnist you might want to think about whether he or she is dishonourable or unintelligent. The divide is probably 50/50.