Former cabinet secretary Sir Andrew, now Lord, Turnbull has launched an unprecedented attack on his fellow mandarins for what he sees as their failure to challenge the political consensus on global warming.
In a paper [published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation] entitled The Really Inconvenient Truth, Lord Turnbull gives a passionate critique of “warmists”. After a lifetime of murmuring “on the one hand and on the other, minister”, he lets rip.
He lays into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC – which believes man-made carbon emissions are the main cause of climate change. He says their view is “oversimplified” and their work “shabby”, with too many “dramatic claims” about rising sea levels, melting glaciers, crop yields and the extinction of polar bears.
Insisting that our climate has always fluctuated, Lord Turnbull claims that “by and large humanity has prospered in warmer periods”. As you might expect from a former top official at the Treasury, his paper has plenty of facts and figures as well as rhetoric. Yet as a former Whitehall insider, it is his questioning of establishment motives that catches the eye.
Great figures of the past such as Galileo and Darwin, he says, “did not receive large government research grants and were not showered with honours”. Driven “by curiosity”, they were prepared to challenge conventional wisdom.
In contrast, today’s environmental scientists “have jobs and research ratings to protect as well as celebrity and airmiles”. There has been a “shameful failure” by the grandees of the Royal Society who “should have been the guardians of scientific integrity”. Instead, scientists have become campaigners, trying to close down debate. As for politicians, he says “uncritical adoption of the green agenda” by the Tories has been designed to help them escape “the nasty party image”.
Then comes his unkindest cut. Calling for “an end to alarmist propaganda”, Lord Turnbull says: “I am disappointed that so many of my former colleagues in the civil service seem so ready to go along unquestioningly with the consensus.”
So is he right? “It’s simply not true – Andrew’s got it wrong,” protested one senior figure. He added that officials covering transport, business and energy were being “very forceful” about curbing the greener instincts of Chris “Nul Points” Huhne, the climate change secretary.
Let us hope he is right that some senior officials are taking a sceptical view of the green agenda. Whether Lord Turnbull’s suspicions about his former colleagues are misplaced or not, he is right to call for more open-mindedness in Whitehall and less reliance on the prevailing orthodoxy.
