THE PICTURE USED ON THE SPECTATOR ARTICLE IS EITHER DESIGNED TO REPRESENT THE CRAPPY SPECTATOR VIEW ON GLOBAL WARMING OR TO STIR THE POSSUM. GUS THINKS THAT THE SPECTATOR VIEWS ARE BROUGHT FORTH TO SLOW DOWN OUR EFFORTS TO MITIGATE WHAT IS CHANGING CLIMATE INDICATORS OF PLANET EARTH, INCLUDING UNDENIABLE RISING TEMPERATURE. HERE IS THE ARTICLE:

It’s not science if you can’t question it

The Spectator

22 November 2025

Follow the Science. The Science is settled. Two phrases which invoke the power of open inquiry to close down open inquiry. Science is not a body of unalterable doctrine, a chapter of revealed truths. Science is a method. It is a means of arriving at the best possible explanation of phenomena through thesis, testing, observation and revision.

Science depends on a culture of doubt, as one of the greatest scientists of the last century, Richard Feynman, continually argued. Its conclusions, by definition, are provisional models which are subject to future revision as new data and better explanations arrive. The story of science is a chronicle of old models being superseded and new theories seeking to make sense of our world.

The claims of certainty about future consequences of global warming deserve particular scrutiny

Throughout its history, science has been misunderstood, sometimes deliberately, often to serve political purposes. Genetics and evolutionary biology are areas where a specific and partial understanding of scientific findings has repeatedly been annexed by ideology. Climate change is another.

The best available evidence we have strongly indicates that man’s economic activity contributes to the warming of the planet. That is undoubtedly the prevailing scientific consensus. But it is not unscientific to question how conclusions have been drawn from that theory to dictate human action. It is not, as Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, would have it, ‘denial’. It is the scientific method at work.

A properly scientific approach to global warming must consider not just the impact of man’s activities, including carbon emissions from fossil fuels, but other factors that bear on the hugely complex system which is the Earth’s climate. The theoretical work behind the warming effect of emissions is robust, yet the claims of certainty about future consequences deserve particular scrutiny.

Campaigners and politicians have predicted terrifying consequences with a level of pessimism that sounds more like the utterings of a millenarian cult than the scientifically literate offering a judgment on likely probabilities. Those same people have weaponised the precautionary principle, taking what is a possible future risk and elevating it to a certain apocalypse that justifies the most drastic action. Nations have been asked to arrest economic development, desist from the use of efficient sources of energy, distort market signals and throw the pace of growth into reverse in order to slow global warming.

A series of international conferences – the latest of which is COP30, taking place in Brazil this week – require participants to commit to energy policies that depend on state direction, legal compulsion, taxpayer subsidy and thermodynamic legerdemain. Britain’s Labour government is leading the crusade, which is why we have the highest energy prices in the developed world. Other countries affirm the importance of these policies but take, at best, a more Augustinian approach: make me net zero but not yet. Brazil is driving ahead with the exploitation of its fossil fuel resources – planning to invest $100 billion in oil and gas production over the next five years, increasing production by 20 per cent – and China is manufacturing solar panels for us while building new coal power stations for itself.

It is not in any way immoral or illegitimate, let alone unscientific, to ask if the commitments we are making are justified. That is precisely the question Bill Gates is now asking. Britain is set on a course that requires us to leave efficient energy sources in the ground, which countries like Norway are happy to exploit. We rely on our neighbours for our energy supplies. We subsidise wind and solar power which, because of their intermittency, still require us to have fossil fuel infrastructure as a back-up. We are giving up productive farmland and risking environmental damage to install yet more renewable energy infrastructure. And we are accepting de-industrialisation and the weakening of our sovereign defence capacity along the way. As the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove explains, we are giving the Chinese Communist party effective control over more and more of our economy, further compromising our national security in the process.

These costs are certain. They are rising too, unlike the sea levels that climate alarmists predicted would have submerged several island nations by now. It is still true that future climate change is likely to bring significant challenges for poorer societies – but we are unlikely to be in a position to help those nations adapt if we ourselves are weaker and poorer.

It is because debate is needed on energy and climate policy – all the more so because of the vehemence with which some try to shut it down – that The Spectator is committed to publishing a series of articles in the coming weeks that will examine the costs of our current approach and the assumptions underlying it. The first essays in this series are Sir Richard’s analysis of the security risks of energy policy and Matt Ridley’s exploration of the possible benefits from investment in fusion research. We welcome as wide a range of views as possible in reviewing these questions. Science is not served by the hunting down of heretics but by the opening up of inquiry.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2025/11/its-not-science-if-you-cant-question-it/

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WE WELCOME THE SPECTATOR TO THE DEBATE — A DEBATE THAT HAS BEEN GOING ON SINCE 1897... ABOUT A SITUATION THAT IS GOING TO SHAPE OUR FUTURE… Er, not mine but yours — you the people born this century. 

This unspectacularly doubtful article about the science of GLOBAL WARMING, like many sceptical writings before it, has a few errors and a few bold statements that could be construed to be misleading (or deliberately false). For example, contrarily to what it seems to assume, China installed more wind turbines and solar panels in China last year, than in the rest of the world combined. China’s clean energy boom is going global... 

Yes China builds more coal-fire power stations and, guess what, Australia supplies some of that coal we are happy to sell. 

Storing electricity has been a major stumbling block for humanity and guess what: China invents new batteries that last longer and hold more charge, nearly every week. To push the anti-Chinese caper away, China is also developing thin flexible perovskite panels with higher longevity and efficiency — and cheaper.

At this level we also need to clarify CO2 emissions per capita, rather than by whole countries. China emits less (9.24 T per person — albeit rapidly climbing) than Australia (14.21) for example.

As well, in most of the SERIOUS “scientific method” assessment of present global warming, the other plus or minus influencers on climate are included in the observation/computation models. The question isn't "is global warming happening due to human activities" but "what are we going to do about it?"

At this level, one could also expect some gardener with no scientific experience and dirty hands to solve the task by pointing a finger in the wind and fart. Or one could expect a magazine publication to sow doubt again and again for us to reevaluate the platypus strange features as a joke... 

What the spectator is ignoring is that there has been some MEGA scientific research, computation and continuous OBSERVATIONS that point to one major source of global warming: this source is mostly three pronged — EXTRA CO2, methane and NOx gases PRODUCED BY HUMAN ACTIVITIES. We say EXTRA, because "natural" warming CO2 balances out at around 300ppm in the atmosphere. At present it can be calculated ACCURATELY that human activities have added 125ppm. We KNOW the wavelengths of sunlight that warm these gases, like microwaves-oven warm up water. If my microwave-oven theory did not work, then there would be nil global warming… Unfortunately, the microwave theory works in many kitchens of the world...

Yes, the sea levels have not risen as much as predicted, but they have nonetheless and the temperature gradients of the oceans have changed. Predictions on timelines cannot be precise, but present global warming is happening on a few human generations scale (say 200 years), while previous climatic changes, even the “rapid” ones, happened over several millennia…

The “carbolic*” acidity of the oceans has also changed. In the days of Svante Arrhenius — the person who “discovered” (by calculation) the CO2 relationship between ice ages and warm periods — scientific inventions and comprehension was still searching for many pointers. No semi-conductors, just a hint of relativity and quantum mechanics by the 1920s. Since then, the dinosaurs that we thought became extinct 6 million years ago (journal from 1922) we have analysed many rocks and other stuff to come to the conclusion they were wiped out around 65 million years ago… when a bolide (comet or meteorite) hit the earth in Cancun. Some scientists estimate that the “complete” wipe-out of the dinosaurs took around one million years… We do not have that long.

By now we have catalogued ten of thousands debris floating in various arrangements in the Solar system.

We also know about the theory of evolution which is still contested in some flat-earth god-fearing American corner of this round planet that trod around the sun.

We also had to downgrade Pluto from a planet to a Dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. And we know that Pluto (smaller than our moon) has a satellite (Charon) that greatly distort its rotation…

Sure, we could go back to the days when we philosophically assumed before we started to observed and make measurements, but this would be crap.

So, yes, science is a method to explain stuff, and one can contest the origin of the present warming of the planet. good luck. 

The choices are 

— that burning fossil fuels do not warm the planet…

— that burning fossil fuels contribute largely to the warming…

— decide that the sun is the culprit, which in some way is true since it warms up “our” gases….

— that we can do something about it

—that we’re too late to do something about it.

— what we do now will only have an impact on warming mitigation in 50 years from now ( Gus’s position).

— Bill Gates is god and knows best: help the poor to become consumer of energy — thus save and burn the planet.

— Bill Gates is wrong…. We should help the poor to be smarter than us (the fossil fuel petrol-heads}.

Yes, science is never settled, but it is refined to crunching better microchips — now nano-chips. 

The theory of global warming due to fossil fuel usage (plus land-use and cattle husbandry) by humans is 99.9 per cent correct. The Spectator can fiddle with the 00.1 per cent if it wants to. You’re welcome.

GUSNOTE: AS NOTED ON THIS SITE, ACCORDING TO GUS OWN RECORDS OF TRENDS, NET ZERO SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED IN 1996 (noted in 1994) IN ORDER TO BE AROUND 2 DEGREES CELSIUS ABOVE AVERAGE BY 2050. AS WELL CLIMATIC CONDITIONS COULD (will?) CHANGE DRAMATICALLY BY 2032.

BEING A GARDENER WITH DIRTY HANDS, GUS COULD BE A LOONY OR CORRECT.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/33287