20091203_NN
Source: YouTube (originally BBC TV: Newsnight)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALVx_NYsS_M
Date: 03/12/2009
Event: Andrew Watson and Marc Morano - a heated debate
People:
- Martha Kearney: BBC Newsnight presenter
- Marc Morano: Communications Director, U.S. Senate Env. Cttee. 2006-09
- Professor Andrew Watson: School of Environmental Sciences, UEA
Martha Kearney: So we're joined now from Norwich by Professor Andrew Watson at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and from Washington by Marc Morano, who until April this year was the Communications Director for the U.S. Senate Environment Committee, and who's a leading climate change sceptic. Professor Watson, let me begin with you first of all, and the email that in a way has caused the most controversy, if I just read a bit from it, it says: "I've just completed... [the] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years... and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Now, hiding the decline, tricks - it sounds appalling, doesn't it?
Andrew Watson: It does absolutely sound awful. You're invited to believe that what he's saying is: the world is actually cooling but this trick will try to convince the whole world that it's actually warming. And of course it doesn't mean anything like that. It's been taken completely out of context. They're talking about one line in a diagram in a relatively obscure report in which they are looking at temperatures over the last thousand years, trying to reconstruct them. And they use a particular method with tree rings. And it works well up until about 1960. And then it goes wrong, for reasons which - there are lots of papers on, which we don't need to go into...
Martha Kearney: What about the other email, which talks about deleting some emails?
Andrew Watson: I don't know about questions of deletion and Freedom of Information, and I can't really comment on that - I don't work in the Climate Research Centre - but I can comment on the science issues.
Martha Kearney: Now the review set up by your university is - one of the questions in it is whether the data is going to be - has been manipulated or suppressed. Can you guarantee to us that it hasn't been?
Andrew Watson: I am absolutely confident, firstly that no data - raw data - has been lost, and secondly that my colleagues would not have manipulated the fundamental data. They have not done that. They have occasionally, um, tweaked a diagram, so that in the case of the decline thing, they plotted real temperature data from thermometers along with their tree ring data.
Martha Kearney: Okay. Well, let's hear whether those explanations satisfy Marc Morano. It's just - it's a question of tweaking.
Marc Morano: Yeah, Professor Watson's been all over, saying this doesn't affect the case of global warming. Here he's admitting, on your programme tonight, he's not even aware of all the specific issues, necessarily, and has no comment on the Freedom of Information Act. His colleague Mike Hulme, at the University of East Anglia, is saying this is authoritarian science, is calling for - is suggesting this IPCC should be disbanded, based on the Climategate revelations. George Monbiot is saying that many of his friends in the environmental - in the climate fear-promoting business, as Professor Watson is, are in denial. You have to feel sorry for Professor Watson, in many ways here. The bottom line -
Martha Kearney [interrupting]: Professor Watson, are you in denial?
Andrew Watson: Absolutely not. [Marc Morano is laughing.] My excited colleague in the States is, I'm afraid, you know, just way, way over the top. You've got to look at this - you've got to look at this rationally. What's happening here is because the sceptics can't attack this particular - this science, they are attacking [Marc Morano is laughing] the character - they are using character assassination on the scientists who are doing it.
Martha Kearney: And in fact, Marc Morano, the Climate Change Secretary here said today that one string of emails doesn't undermine the science.
Andrew Watson: Of course it doesn't.
Marc Morano: No, but it exposes the manufactured consensus. So, Professor Watson, what do you think of Mike Hulme's call, saying this is authoritarian, that this is partisan, that it exposes it, suggesting the U.N. has run its course? What do you think of Eduardo Zorita [sounds like "Edward Zouato", but I think he must mean Zorita], U.N. scientist who says that now he can't believe what's happened here, and he's also saying - he is saying, along with Hans von Storch, that [everybody is speaking at once] -
Martha Kearney: Let's get an answer from Professor Watson.
Marc Morano: - that Jones should be banned from the process. Sir?
Andrew Watson: Um -
Marc Morano: You can't act as if this is sceptics. Your fellow colleagues -
Martha Kearney: Hang on a second, Marc Morano -
Marc Morano: - are saying this.
Martha Kearney: - let him answer your question.
Andrew Watson: Will you stop shouting? Um - I...
Marc Morano: Sir, I'll stop shouting.
Andrew Watson: Oh, good. I don't agree with Mike Hulme, that the IPCC has run its course, And I don't agree with a number of those people. The thing - but what I would agree with [Mark Morano is saying something] is that the science - will you shut up, just a second? Um -
Marc Morano: Oh...
Andrew Watson: That the only thing, the only thing that science has got going for it is that it must be absolutely and totally open. And we have to look at the important issues -
Martha Kearney: Okay -
Andrew Watson: - not the issues -
Marc Morano: Wow.
Andrew Watson: - of character assassination.
Martha Kearney: Marc Morano, I want to ask you -
Marc Morano: Sure.
Martha Kearney: - what effect do you think this is going to have on the Copenhagen summit? And presumably the timing of all of this wasn't coincidental.
Marc Morano: Well, first of all, Copenhagen was going to be a wake anyway. President Obama had said the U.S. wasn't going to do anything. European environmentalists -
Martha Kearney [interrupting]: President Obama has just said he's attending, not just the start of the summit but the climax of the summit, which Gordon Brown believes is going to add weight to the negotiations.
Marc Morano: He's probably attending because they're circling the wagons, because of the magnitude of this scandal. You've U.N. scientists turning on U.N. scientists. This is the upper echelon of the U.N. and it's been exposed as the best science that politics and activists can manufacture.
Martha Kearney: Finally -
Marc Morano: Professor Watson's whole argument is trust me, take my word for it.
Martha Kearney [speaking over him]: - this is a disaster, isn't it, for the people campaigning on climate change.
Andrew Watson: It's, it's a real setback, not because there's anything wrong with the science, but because the character assassination and the temperature of the debate, which you can just see from our colleague in America, is just obscuring the important issue, which -
Martha Kearney: Okay.
Andrew Watson: - is: has the world warmed in the last hundred years [Marc Morano is laughing] or not?
Marc Morano: And warming proves - warming does not prove -
Martha Kearney: We'll have to leave this - as you said, a very, very heated debate, literally. We'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much indeed, Marc Morano and Professor Andrew Watson from the UEA.
Andrew Watson: What an arsehole.