Roger Dixon is right to highlight his concern about the reliability of data towards the ever-increasing focus on environmental, social & governance issues
Amazingly, I found myself warming to Roger Dixon’s comments about the credibility of climate change scientists, especially considering a recent article in Physorg entitled “More than 99.9% of studies agree: humans caused climate change” (“Will the real climate-change experts please stand up?”, October 30).
It states: “More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.” This article goes on to say, “In the study, the researchers began by examining a random sample of 3,000 studies from the data set of 88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020. They found only four out of the 3,000 papers were sceptical of human-caused climate change.” Interestingly, the naysayers include “economic geologists”.
Dixon rightly points out his concern about the reliability of data towards the ever-increasing focus on environmental, social & governance (ESG) issues, which are becoming a global mantra for governments and business and public interest groups. However, though ESGs has been around for a long time it is only in recent years that they have created an avalanche of interest to the extent that a whole industry has been created to advise on what principles and policies and commitments will be needed to address whatever the ESG objectives are. At this stage it seems that ESG commitments remain “principles based”, not rules based, because we don’t really know what the rules are, precisely because of Dixon’s concerns.
Read the full article in Business Day Earth
