The Heretic – a climate sceptic fantasy
“The Heretic” is a fascinating play, because it gives us a view of the world that many would like to believe is true. It’s a climate sceptic fantasy, full of scientific errors and the rewriting of reality, writ large as absurdist comedy and given respectability by a run at the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square.
In the world of the Heretic, global warming really is a worldwide conspiracy orchestrated by climate scientists. The play comes bristling with oft-repeated sceptic arguments, voiced by feisty maverick climate scientist Diane (says ‘fuck’, cracks jokes about lesbian nuns). With expertise in sea level rise, her wholesale disbelief that climate change is happening is sparked off by a discovery that sea levels are not rising around the Maldives.
In the real world, this ‘finding’ has been fairly comprehensively debunked – see the science blog Deltoid here, or a relevant scientific paper here, which concludes ‘The analysis clearly indicates that sea-level in this region is rising. We expect that the continued and increasing rate of sea-level rise and any resulting increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme sea-level events will cause serious problems for the inhabitants of some of these islands during the 21st century.” In the Heretic there’s nobody to point this out, and Diane quickly becomes a mouthpiece for a fairly standard batch of arguments – she pulls apart ‘the hockey stick‘ in a lecture, sets her students exercises to teach them that warming will stop when the atmosphere becomes saturated with CO2, and argues that the medieval warm period shows climate change is all just natural cycles.
Diane makes a very good climate sceptic, but she’s not a very convincing scientist. We’re told her views have arisen because she thinks “the science isn’t good enough”, and the play makes a lot of this, including a section where she ‘debunks’ some climate science live on stage. This raises a slight problem, because many of Diane’s own scientific pronouncements are factually incorrect.
Take sea level rise – ostensibly her specialist area. In the real world, sea levels have risen about 10-20cm in the past hundred years. In 2007 the IPCC suggested another 18cm – 59cm by 2100, with the potential for more if ice sheets melt rapidly. But when asked to give an estimate of sea level rise in 100 years time, Diane replies ’10 centimetres plus or minus fifteen.’ Not only does she get to say this without losing her credibility as a scientist, her colleague – a ‘normal’ mainstream climate scientist – happily agrees with her.
Later, Diane dismisses the IPCC’s projections of sea level rise by claiming that they’re all based on one tide gauge. Again, there is no challenge to this, although needless to say, it’s not true. Later on still, Diane claims in an interview with Jeremy Paxman that there’s no evidence CO2 has caused warming in the 20th century. But there’s lots of evidence. We’re asked to cheer Diane on as she busts the ‘pseudo-science’ of the climate mainstream, while ignoring the awful howlers she keeps coming out with. Maybe we’re not supposed to care – it’s a comedy, after all – but it does make the whole thing pretty awkward.
Not content with rewriting scientific reality, the play also repackages recent history to make it fit more closely with its worldview. Diane finds herself at the centre of lightly fictionalised versions of ‘climategate’ – the UEA email hack – and ‘glaciergate‘ – the IPCC mistake over when Himlayan glaciers were likely to melt by. The real ‘climategate‘ resulted in five inquiries, which criticised the scientists for not being open enough about their work, said they were ” unhelpful and defensive” and that they mishandled FOI requests – but found no fundamental flaws in the fabric of climate science.
The fictional email hack, however, carried out by one of Diane’s students, does reveal fundamental flaws. ‘Glaciergate’, rather than being a terrible failure of fact-checking and peer review, becomes a deliberate lie inserted into an IPCC chapter by a scientist in order to benefit the ‘poor people of the Himalayas’.
There’s a slightly bemusing sub-plot about radical environmentalists issuing death threats against Diane and trying to kidnap her. It may be rather distasteful for those climate scientists, like Phil Jones, who have received death threats in real life.
But mostly, it’s just ridiculous. In the play, the bar to getting a scientific paper into Nature is to have it reviewed by your ‘best friend’, and scientists write IPCC chapters on their own. Throughout, climate scientists are shown to believe their work is all a con, but carry on regardless.
The Heretic is a sceptic fantasy, and will probably increase the sum total of human confusion. But on the other hand, all of the things the Heretic throws at climate science are genuine articles of faith for many. This vision of reality is what a part of the climate sceptic lobby believes the world to be like. And when you actually see it on stage, it all looks completely, utterly ridiculous.