Any lawyers out there?

Via here, I found this article in the Guardian by Dr Simon Lewis, who is a geographer working in the field of biodiversity.

In April last year a group of environmentalists shut down E.ON's coalfired power station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar. The goal: to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and, in their words, "save lives". Yesterday judge Morris Cooper presented a 20-page judgment accepting there was an "urgent need for drastic action", but convicted them of aggravated trespass, saying their defence, that their crime was necessary to save lives, could not be substantiated.

In the trial, for which I was an expert witness, crucial questions were how many people does climate change kill, and what proportion is the UK responsible for? I was surprised to discover that nobody knows.

This is a surprising thing to say, firstly because it's patently obvious that nobody knows - how could they? But secondly, if he had to go away and find out the answers to these questions it rather suggests that he's not actually an expert at all. Dr Lewis, as I've mentioned is an ecologist, not an epidemiologist. It makes the court system look rather silly to call someone as an expert on one thing whose expertise is in something completely different. 

So my first question for lawyers is this: do UK expert witnesses actually have to demonstrate some expertise in the relevant field? Or can the defence just put up some random green with letters after their name?

There's more about the trial here - this appears to be a site run by one of the defendants or perhaps one of their supporters. What intrigued me were the notes of Dr Lewis's testimony, and in particular this:

defence lawyer:  IPCC reports, how are they viewed in the scientific community?

 [Dr Lewis] IPCC - a consensus document, made up of thousands of scientists' reviews of the literature. That no scientist holding a position in an academic university who disagrees with on record.

Now this statement, as set out here, is manifestly untrue. Richard Lindzen, anyone? Professor of Meteorology at MIT? From his Wikipedia page:

Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them" and "I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions."

So my second question for any lawyers reading is this: if Dr Lewis gave evidence along the lines of the statements attributed to him above, has he committed perjury?

And question three is this: can anyone lay their hands on a copy of the trial transcript?.   

Comments

[Ben P]

You don't need to even find a sceptical academic to contradict the opinion that "IPCC [is] a consensus document, made up of thousands of scientists' reviews of the literature. That no scientist holding a position in an academic university who disagrees with on record."

James Hanson contradicts the IPCC at http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming--unless-we-act-now.html

[Frederick Colbourne]

Have a look at Senator Inhofe's site for a list of 400 scientists.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

Since around 1960 I have been interested in climate change and other environmental topics, so much so that I studied for a master's degree in Earth science, which I completed in 2005.

My supervisor was a full professor and a member of one of the INQUA commissions.

He held that climate warming during the 19th and 20th centuries represented recovery from the Little Ice Age (LIA) and that temperature has still not reached the level of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) which preceded the LIA. He does not accept that global warming is caused by humanly generated CO2 emissions.

Some scientists claim that the MWP only affected the temperate regions, not the tropics. If that were true, my professor might be wrong. The scientists making these claims produce temperature reconstructions that do not show either the MWP and the LIA. (The Hockey Stick graph is an example.)

For the last year or so, I have saved references to peer-reviewed papers that refer to the LIA and MWP signals in the tropics and subtropics. These papers suggest that in the tropics, it's precipitation that changes rather than temperature. Still, the MWP and the LIA are visible in the records indicating global climate change.

Quite apart from any statistical errors that may generate the "hockey stick" shape, the lack of a MWP and LIA tell me that something is wrong with the analysis.