Matt Ridley Interview
[RH:
= Roger Harrabin
MR:
= Matt Ridley]
RH:
Matt Ridley, thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed for a
combination of the Open University and BBC. It’s a great pleasure to talk to you. We’re asking everybody, for the
first question, when their interest in energy was first
kindled. I suspect your story may be slightly different to everybody else’s.
MR:
Well, yes and no. I got very interested in the climate story when I was covering it for
The Economist
in the late eighties, early nineties.
RH:
I’m thinking way back from then, because very few people have a coal mine on
their land!
MR:
Yes, although the coal
mine’s relatively recent, but I grew up in a coal mining area, and I’m descended from a long line … well not recent
ly, but in the eighteenth century one of my ancestors was pioneer of coal mining in Newcastle and indeed put the first steam engine into a coal mine on the north bank of the Tyne so was right there at the beginning of the industrial revolution. So yes
–
I have a
–
RH:
So that’s there in your family history. Do you –
MR:
I have an affection for what coal did for humanity and I occasionally feel like standing up for it. I try and be dispassionate about it, I always declare that I have, currently, an interest
in coal mining. It doesn’t actually last for very much longer,
another couple of years and then I get no money from coal mining and then I can say what I
really
think, which is that coal is wonderful!
RH:
OK, well
–
MR:
<Laughs>
RH:
Let’s get back onto that in a moment, because I’d like to start, if you would, with your history on climate change, because you’ve moved about a bit, can you just talk
us through your journey?
MR:
Well I first came across the climate change debate in 1987 or so, working for
The Economist,
and I was alarmed. I looked at the numbers people were saying, I looked at the increasing carbon dioxide levels, looked at the Jani equation for how
Commented [CB1]:
Transcription error. This should read
“Charney equation”. It
refers to the findings of a National Academy of Science report in 1979 on carbon
dioxide and the climate, chaired by Jules Charney.
Carbon Brief [1]:
much warming this was likely to produce, and reported it straight, as it were, as a very alarming prospect. I became a little more sceptical in the nineties when I began to look into the science a bit more closely, but then I kind of drifted off and went off
and wrote about genes for a number of years and didn’t pay any attention; then the
hockey stick graph hit me between the eyes. When I first saw that I can remember I
was at a farming conference, someone showed this hockey stick graph, Mann et al. 1999, and I thought wow! I was wrong to be sceptical, this is
really
scary, because it’s
clea
rly unprecedented, it bears no relation to what’s happened at the
Medieval warm period
and that kind of thing, and so when in the following years I’ve discovered –
RH:
So you wrote about it at that point?
MR:
No I didn’t, I wasn’t writing about climate
change either way much at that point,
but when I did touch on it, I didn’t demure from the consensus.
RH:
Intellectually you were convinced.
MR:
I thought I’d made a mistake by being sceptical, put it like that. But then I came
across
Steve McIntyre’s work
on the hockey stick, and the further I dug into that and
Andrew Montford’s distillations of it –
RH:
I should say these are two bloggers, and very well-informed bloggers.
[Cont…]
MR:
Exactly, well Steve McIntyre’s a Canadian mathematician who had the hockey stick put through his letterbox by the Canadian government and thought, ‘Hang on –
this graph doesn’t look right’, and
the more he looked into it the more he dug up
that’s wrong wit
h it. And basically now
there’s very few people who think that graph
is correct i.e. that the rate of change today is dramatically different from anything in the past, and that the level of temperature is dramatically different from things in the past 1,000 years
, we’re talking about. So the undermining of the hockey stick was
therefore all the more important, because it had been the thing that had persuaded me to take this issue seriously. But it was simply the beginning of going on looking into more and more of the climate story and finding that more and more of the
Commented [CB2]:
The
‘Hockey Stick’ refers to a graph
of temperature over the past 1,000 years, reconstructed from tree rings, ice cores, corals and other proxy records. The graph was first published in a paper by
Mann, Bradley & Hughes in 1999 (hereafter referred to as MBH99).
Commented [CB3]:
‘Medieval Warming Period’
or
‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’
refers to a time between 950-1250AD during which the IPCC says temperatures
in some regions, but not globally, were as warm as in the late 20
th
century (WG1 SPM p3).
Commented [CB4]:
Commented [GS5]:
Actually, the issues raised mainly only impacted the last step in the procedure (1400-1450) and were clearly shown in Wahl and Amman (2007) not to make any substantive difference to the form or substance of the Mann et al. results.
Commented [GS6]:
Ridley is creating a strawman. The original Mann, Bradley & Hughes paper only covered 600 years, and made no claim that the rate of change now is 'dramatically different from anything in the past'. The MBH99 extension to 1,000 years also did not make this claim (obviously since these are just reconstructions for a small part of the past). The best updates since then - which include both methodology improvements and expanded data sources - do not show anything dramatically different to the basic picture shown in MBH.
Commented [GS7]:
I can't comment on what led to Ridley's supposed conversion, but since better papers have come along with more or less the same results I cannot follow his logic, even if he thinks the absolute worst about the MBH papers themselves.
Carbon Brief [2]:Carbon Brief [3]:Carbon Brief [4]:
G Schmidt [5]:G Schmidt [6]:
G Schmidt [7]:
alarming … stories didn’t seem to add up; that actually the evidence for a
gentle warming as a result of carbon dioxide produced by man was very good, but the evidence that this would accelerate or turn catastrophic was not good.
RH:
Can you just talk me through which bits of the mainstream climate story you agree with? The fact that the earth is warming, that humans are largely or predominantly responsible, talk me through that.
MR:
Yup. We are increasing carbon dioxide levels.
We’ve increased them from
0.03% to 0.04% of the atmosphere
. I don’t have any problem with that. I’m pretty sure it’s to do with industrial activities, possible that something natural’s going on but
I thi
nk it’s highly unlikely.
That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas
–
yes, no problem with that. That carbon dioxide on its own would produce a degree of warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide
–
that’s basic physics, completely accept that.
RH:
Well you
say that, but there were some sceptics, you wouldn’t put yourself in this
camp presumably, who have resisted each one of those facts along the way and slowly, slowly moved along?
MR:
There are certainly some sceptics who’ve resisted those facts all along, but I’m
not convinced that there are some who started out resisting those facts and gradually accepted them, there might be some.
RH:
So you
–
MR:
So the people, for example,
who think that the warming we’ve seen is all to do with the sun, I don’t think some of those have come over to the view that it’s partly
man made.
RH:
And you don’t agree with that, so what is your position now? You call yourself
now a lukewarmer, what exactly does that mean?
MR:
That means that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a forecast
that we’re going to see between
1.5 and 4.5 degrees of warming over the next century
, roughly speaking, and I’m at the bottom end of that range. I’m p
robably within that range. I think we probably will see 1.5 degrees of warming
–
this is above
preindustrial levels, so some of it’s happened already so essentially the full carbon
Commented [8]:
A 1C warming is very significant for the globe and it has occurred rapidly. Ridley does not like the original hockey stick graph. It is ok to be critical of this original graph, but the science was new at the time of its construction. The science has moved on since then and much-improved equivalent graphs show warming is unprecedented in at least 2000 years (see Fig 5.7 WG1 Chp5 p409).
Commented [GS9]:
T
his is just wishful thinking and confirmation bias at work. Given that the Pliocene was only about 3C warmer than pre-industrial, and sea level was ~20m higher, where does he think the temperature threshold is for the eventual collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets? Or does he not think that would be a problem?
Commented [10]:
Although correct, this plays down the role of carbon dioxide (CO2). 99.9% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, which are not greenhouse gases. For a greenhouse gas, CO2 concentration is high, only exceeded by water vapour in the lower atmosphere.
Commented [11]:
Not clear what "on its own" means. Assuming the Earth responds as a physical black body, a doubling of CO2 would lead to 1.1 or 1.2C of warming - this is probably what he refers to. However, the Earth does not respond as a black body: the Earth responds to amplify this initial warming. In particular, atmospheric water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas increases and adds to the warming. Overall, the warming is higher and the IPCC estimates this warming
as the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS). Ridley’s
number is lower than the ECS estimated by IPCC. The IPCC AR5 likely range for ECS is 1.5 to 4.5C (WG1 SPM p14).
Commented [12]:
This is not true. Ridley is confusing equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the temperature change you get for a doubling of carbon dioxide, with the warming projection out to 2100. In fact, the IPCC does not make a forecast for 2100 as it depends on societal choices. If we continue to burn fossil fuels as we are, IPCC shows projections could go well beyond 4.5C. If we cut emissions to zero before 2050, we might just keep within 2C.
P Forster [8]:P Forster [10]:G Schmidt [9]:
P Forster [11]:
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