Hot air on global warming

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Dr Chris de Freitas is a very annoying fellow. I know this because he told me so, and he knows this because his wife tells him so.

He has certainly managed to irritate the hell out of a fair few of his scientific peers with his unpopular and controversial views on global warming. De Freitas has annoyed his way into what has been described as a political storm in the United States.

He has been attacked in a Senate committee for publishing - in the rivetingly entitled Climate Research journal - a study that challenged the widely held idea that human beings are significantly altering global climate.

He has been named by radical campaigning magazine the New Internationalist as one of the Top Six "Toxic Sceptics", the "climate-change deniers who have shot to fame for their views - and for their talent for attracting publicity".

He is our own Bjorn Lomberg, the greenie turned eco-Judas. This is the sort of sweeping statement guaranteed to irritate De Freitas.

Lomberg "is a much more competent and accomplished person than me. He's an international figure. I'm not."

De Freitas seems to be well on his way.

He writes for the "popular press", an activity which, he says, causes "a lot of people to look down their noses at you".

His motivation is his belief that it is the role of the scientist to act as the "conscience of society". Scientists are the people who have "time to assess things critically".

To that end he has published research challenging the accepted scientific wisdom that the temperature changes of the 20th century were unprecedented. Research based, says de Freitas, on nothing more than a mathematical construct.

His minority view is that "although the future of global climate is uncertain, there is no reason to believe that catastrophic change is underway".

His argument is scientific. His objection is, partly, humanitarian.

"That pissed me off a lot about the global warming thing. Look at all the money they're spending: millions globally, yet tens of millions of people are without clean water or sanitation. It's absolutely immoral."

Oddly, given the accusation that he chases publicity, nobody seems to know much about him.

A colleague told me that in the late 1970s de Freitas was very cool. He sported that surfy chic beloved of junior lecturers. He wore his hair long and at one stage possessed what he now describes as a "grotesque" pair of sideburns.

Actually, he is far more radical today at the age of 55.

Because, says de Freitas, he was never particularly bohemian. He was never a hippy - although he did like surfing. He was "never into drug culture. Not because I despised it. I come from a conservative background".

A CONSERVATIVE, Catholic Trinidadian background. He grew up in the communities around oilfields, where his father was an engineer.

His ancestry is Portuguese on his father's side and English on his mother's.

He met his wife when she was 16 and he almost 18. They married when de Freitas was 21 and are still married.

As a student in Canada, he did not protest against the Vietnam war; he did protest against a Toronto motorway.

He is still, in his own way, protesting about matters environmental.

"I've been lobbying on one of the things that incenses me, and should incense you and everyone else in Auckland: the lack of emission controls."

Emission controls, as he well knows, are not sexy. Global warming is sexy.

"It's like trying to save a weta. No one wants to save wetas but everyone wants to save koala bears and kiwis because they're cuddly."

Global warming is cuddly "for several reasons and the list goes something like this: We've lost our affinity for religion, so environmentalism is a substitute for religion.

"It's a global issue, it's a grand issue: you save the whole world, and politicians like that."

De Freitas is not cuddly. He is argumentative and, yes, "annoying. I think it's a character trait".

He has a difficult-to-pick accent. People say he sounds Welsh or South African. He has been in New Zealand for nearly 30 years. You don't hear it in his voice.

"Some people are more capable of changing their accent," he says, "I've never tried. I'm actually not good at that sort of thing."

No, you can see that he would not be good at that fitting-in thing - the reason most people, consciously or not, change the way they speak to better blend into their environment.

In every other way, though, you might easily overlook the man who causes regular conniptions in his scientific field.

He has a pleasant, forgettable face. He is not given to wildly expressive movements - he spent much of an hour and a half with his arms crossed, leaning back in his standard-issue chair in his office at the University of Auckland. (He is an associate professor at the School of Geography and Environmental Science.)

"I don't have charisma," he says, sharing this without hint of humour, although this does not necessarily mean he is not joking. De Freitas does a very good poker face.

What he means is that, despite his notoriety, he does not particularly enjoy publicity - at least not public speaking, or interviews. Partly this is because he likes to communicate through the written word, and in large part that is because he can control the result.

HE CAN'T control what people write about him - he threatened legal action against a Canadian paper and he is a bit of a pain to write about because he is given to asking for a right of reply.

But he has made sure that he is, as he puts it, "squeaky clean" in terms of not taking money from anyone who might have a vested interest in those dire global warming warnings being proved to be wrong.

He says he has had his background thoroughly investigated by the "left-wing eco-guerrillas". His politics, by the way, are "left of centre", although, because he is a scientist, "you can be left on some things and right on others".

You might imagine that de Freitas would be embraced as the harbinger of good news.

He is the guy who writes letters to the papers quoting from a petition signed by 17,000 US scientists against the Kyoto accord: "There is no convincing evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disrupt the Earth's climate."

He is the guy who writes in to say that, actually, a story reporting that more than a million plants and animals could become extinct within decades because of global warming might be "just another case of climate alarmism".

Science has always been political, "more so than people realise," says de Freitas. There is what he calls the "climate change industry".

He rather enjoys being known as the "prominent contrarian". Science is about being contrary. Consensus is, to de Freitas, "a red rag to a bull".

Anyway, he started all of this. It is, I put to him, all his fault. He was, after all, the guy who wrote articles in the mid-1980s saying that global warning is a reality and should be treated seriously.

"By way of apology, I guess, or excuse, I would say that what we were trying to do was to heighten awareness. You know I could warn you about the dangers of swimming at Piha, but I don't need to traumatise you and keep you out of the water. I just want you to treat the beach sensibly."

HE'S changed his mind because the facts have changed, he says.

Still, "things that are controversial always appeal to me".

His idea of a successful night out might include a good argument.

At a party recently he began a debate with an author in which he "made the mistake of interpreting her book. I could see she was becoming annoyed".

His wife "always says, she doesn't use these words, but she means I'm a Philistine and I should just shut up".

Did he shut up? "I guess I continued."