William Shepherd

I just about survived Monday but it was a close run thing. I was meandering along quite well until two o'clock when I came out from the changing rooms at Rye Swimming Pool, switched my mobile on and found a rather panicky voicemail message from the Rye Harbour Master telling me that he didn’t want Vemara on The Strand. So I called him back to let him know I had got the message and to find out what had caused this change of mind.

As I was getting nowhere I changed tack and asked where there were vacant berths in Rye…reminding Carl that Vemara had been berthing in Rye for 20 years. The Harbour Master gave me the phone number to Ryepartnership who collect the fees for boats on Rock Channel Point. So I spent the rest of the afternoon organising to move Vemara onto Berth 15 at midday on Thursday. If Vemara likes her berth payments start the beginning of May. At 2030 in the evening I ran the engine for a quarter of an hour. It started with the starting handle…but as it’s seven months since the engine was last fired in anger I was pleased that it started at all. So all's well that ends well.

Global Warming was invented in 1988 by a prominent climatologist James Hansen. At the time he was giving testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee headed by Senator Wirth of Colorado. Hearings were scheduled for June so Hansen could deliver his testimony during a blistering heat wave. This would be fair enough for a Press Conference but Public Science should be beyond such ploys. However this was no isolated incident of media manipulation. Global Warming is awash with dodgy dossiers. Dossiers about Weapons of Mass Destruction are paragons of integrity by comparison.

In the late 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which comprises a huge group of bureaucrats…and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats. The idea was that since this was a global problem the UN would track climate research and issue reports every few years. The first assessment report in 1990 said it would be very difficult to detect a human influence on climate although everybody was concerned that one might exist. But the 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now ‘a discernible human influence’ on climate…echoes of the 45-minute claim when Alistair Campbell sexed up the WMD Dossier.

Much the same happened to the 1995 IPCC Dossier. Originally the document said scientists couldn’t detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn’t know when they would. They said explicitly, ‘we don’t know.’ The statement was deleted and replaced with a new statement that a discernible human influence did indeed exist. It was a major change…and one that caused a stir among scientists at the time with opponents and defendants of the change coming forward. If you read their claims and counter-claims you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth. But a review of the actual text changes makes it crystal clear that the IPCC is a political organisation and not a scientific one.

Back to James Hansen. In the summer of 1988 he accompanied his global warming announcement with a prediction that temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. The actual increase was 0.11 degrees and this prompted him to state…along with his fellow authors Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen and Elaine Matthews…in a 1998 article Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (127533-58) that ‘the forcings that drive long-term climate change are unknown with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.’ arguing for scientists to use multiple scenarios in future.

The problem is that climate is very complicated…so complicated in fact that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy…even though billions of dollars are being spent and hundreds of people are trying all around the world. Nobody is trying to predict weather more than ten days ahead but computer modellers are predicting what the temperature will be one hundred years in advance…sometimes a thousand years…three thousand years. And they are probably doing worse than the weathermen. The biggest events in global climate are the El Niños. They happen roughly every four years. But climate models can’t predict them - not their timing, their duration, or their intensity. Climate science simply isn’t there yet…not by a long chalk. It may be one day. But not now.

As for David Cameron’s trip to Norway, like Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas and Mount Kilamanjaro, Norway has nothing to contribute to the scientific case for Global Warming. 94% of all the ice in the world is elsewhere…4% in Greenland and 90% in Antarctica where the ice is 5 to 6 miles thick in places. This merely reinforces the need for an impartial forum for Public Science. What Cameron is doing is media manipulation.

The irony is that Cameron’s key adviser on environmental matters is Zac Goldsmith who took over the editorship of his uncle’s scientific journal The Ecologist and to Edward Goldsmith’s horror has destroyed everything that Teddy had built up over the years. The impartial and respected scientific journal that once reported scientific facts and the considered opinions of leading scientists in the new field of Ecological Science is now no more than a glossy purveyor of ethical chic for the chattering classes. With The Ecologist Zac Goldsmith has done for ecology what Satish Kumar has done for politics with Resurgence.

Thirty years ago Lake Nakuru had a pink flamingo population. Their pinkness came from the lake...they were what they ate. Flamingos are sensitive to water quantity and quality...and tourists think they’re pretty. So flamingos equals tourists equals foreign currency equals economic benefits. The way Classical Economics works is that if there are benefits then money can be spent off-setting them with costs...but only if you really have to...or you have someone you know (like your own contractors or even consulting company) to give the money to.

Then there are a few hitches in the economic method. For starters it is assumed that there is someone willing and able to pick up the tab for these benefit off-sets and someone else with the know-how to solve the matter costs are being lavished upon. Then there is the manner in which dollar signs are attributed to these costs and benefits.

Cost-Benefit Analysis has nothing to say about the distribution of costs and benefits and takes no position on whether or not there is any money available to invest in any capital works from which the benefits and costs are deemed to flow over time. Then there is Net Present Value theory which I won't go into here. Taken together these makes a nonsense of Economic Appraisals.

As for the fluoride, economics could not begin to grapple with this because any benefits depended upon a complex function that at the low end might be positive but at the high end was very very definitely seriously negative. Bones start breaking, mice get nasty things happening to them, teeth start mottling…and no scientist was willing to risk his or her neck about the long term consequences. The New Zealand Pure Water Association and Fluoride Action Network have links casting doubts on the veracity of fluoridation’s healthiness.

In Imperial Times the Kenyan Colonial Authorities sunk boreholes around the town of Nakuru to supply the town with water. The water came from the groundwater of the Rift Valley and was high in all sorts of chemicals…including fluorides. So it was diluted with surface rainwater flowing off the Aberdares to make sure it was drinkable. The Turasha Dam was to be built high in the Aberdares. Its size…and any staged development programme…depended upon forecasts of the growth of Nakuru and of its water needs…not necessarily the same thing.

The phased development of the groundwater sources also entered the equation along with the appropriate water mix…surface and aquifer…at different times of the year. In those days the Kenyan Ex-Patriots worked with the notion that rain came twice a year…a long rains and a short rains. This complicated matters…and was only a little bit true.

So the scene is set. I was interested in how high fluoride levels could be allowed to rise…while along the corridor the Sewerage Project was concerned about increasing water levels in the lake and its chemical composition because they didn’t want the pink flamingos to turn blue or fly off to the film set of The Constant Gardener up at Lake Rudolf.

In 1944 DuPont was producing weapon-grade uranium for the Manhatten Project. A major by-product of the process was the pollutant fluoride, which was producing death and disease on nearby farms. The farmers set out to sue DuPont, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture and Justice departments, the Manhatten Project, the US Army and the War Department. While the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service undertook fluoride testing round New Jersey, Manhatten Project directors convinced farmers, including those suffering from fluoride poisoning, of the government’s good faith, before the government spiked their lawsuit by concealing how much fluoride DuPont had let fly. ‘Disclosure would be injurious to the military security of the United States.’ You ain’t kidding!

It gets worse but let’s go back to 1941 for another strand in this twisted tale. In 1991 Covert Action Quarterly put out an article entitled Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?. Fluoridation was simply the aluminium industry dumping toxic waste at a profit. The villains of the piece were the Mellon Institute, the Mellon Family’s cash cow Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and one-time Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

Both these accounts of the hidden history of the push for fluoridation are pretty dark tales of industrial companies seeking to spin their toxic dumping into a profitable health benefit. But you can’t fool all the people all of the time. In the US, 60% of voters have been against fluoridation of their water supplies…and a third of American cities have managed to resist the contamination of their tap water. In the UK, water companies were permitted to fluoridate for the first time in 1985. But in 1995 Yorkshire Water refused to do so, not because they thought anti-fluoridators were a bunch of cranks but rather because they said, ‘we know which way public opinion rides’. We will see if this attitude survives the take-over of Yorkshire Water by the Essen-based power and utilities conglomerate RWE. But meanwhile the independent Welsh Water remains fluoride-free and refers to fluoride as a ‘toxic and potent chemical’.

In 2002 the Medical Research Council reported to the Department of Health that while fluoridation benefited teeth ‘much of the current evidence on benefits of fluoride comes from research conducted several decades ago’. By 2003 only five million of England’s population of sixty million had fluoridated water. There are better ways to cut down on dental caries without exposing 80% of the population to fluoride poisoning. Ralph Nader says that...and has done so for years.