Aah, do you mean the one organised by climate change sceptics/deniers "The Independent Committee on Geoethics" set up the previous year by Christopher Monkton (ex ukip politicain) and Nils-Axel Mörner and whose guests included well known climate change sceptic Piers Corbyn? That conference?
I understand this perspective. I used to have it myself. I used to be convinced that we were all going to hell in a hand basket, and that “climate deniers” were intent only on speeding up our arrival there. I was convinced that these “deniers” were totally evil, had nothing but bad intentions, and that anyone who gave them the time of day was a total ignoramus.
I’m rather embarrassed by my earlier opinion now. I’m also much more questioning of where terms like “climate denier” come from, why they are used (to shut down debate) and how they found their way into our national vocabulary to the point that nobody questions them. We’ve all been conditioned to put our fingers in our ears when anyone attempts to suggest that there might be evidence that contradicts the apparently prevailing viewpoint.
My opinion changed when I started working in academia. That helped me to undersand how research careers were built, and the enormous amounts of money at stake - especially in the area of climate change research. Working alongside scientists also helped me understand that science isn’t, and can never be, settled. To frame the climate change discussion as having been decided by scientific consensus, and those who disagree as “deniers”, is completely dishonest. (A quick dig into the methodology behind the “97% of scientists agree” study will reveal just how dishonest these figures are.) Worse than that, it’s not science! Science isn’t about deciding by consensus. It’s not about getting scientists into a room and taking a vote. It’s about facts and evidence, and it changes continually as new experiments are conducted and new evidence comes to light.
For example, one of the researchers at the 2016 conference is an oceanographer whose area of study is looking at volcanic activity on the ocean floor. He is investigating the extent to which this volcanic activity may be responsible for increasing temperatures in the ocean, something which the climate change models don’t take into consideration. His work will contribute towards understanding natural climate variability, over which humans have no control. (This is an extremely important part of the overall picture of how climate works, but it’s an area that receives dramatically less funding than research into human impact on climate change - but that doesn’t make any sense, because without understanding one, how can you fully assess the impact of the other?). Does this make him a “climate denier”? No, it makes him someone who is following a scientific line of enquiry, extrapolating data and presenting the evidence.
Working in academia also helped me understand the difference between computer models and scientific experiments. There now appears to be a growing disparity between the computer models which predicted a rapid rise in temperatures, and what has actually been observed (a far slower and gentler increase in temperatures, with little or no warming between 1998 and 2015). We have to at least consider the possibility that those models were wrong, and that we’re actually not on the catastrophic path originally predicted by, for example, Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick graph.
Why does this matter? It matters because bad science is influencing decision-making and that leads to bad policy decisions at an international level. And these decisions can have unforeseen consequences. Why are we all driving diesel cars? Because of the CO2 panic. What happened as a result of the increase in diesel? Our air is now much more polluted. A terrible policy decision, based on flawed data, that’s landed us with another problem to sort out.
This is such a complex, nuanced and (now) politicised field. It’s really impossible to draw any hard and fast conclusions.