A Cambridge professor whose doomsday predictions of Arctic ice melt have been proved consistently wrong by reality has found an exciting new way to draw attention to his shaky scientific cause: mysterious, unnamed figures are trying to murder him and have already assassinated three of his colleagues.
There were only four people in Britain who were “really leaders on ice thickness in the Arctic”, Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has told the Times. Three of them are now dead.
He said: “It seems to me to be too bizarre to be accidental but each individual incident looks accidental, which may mean it’s been made to look accidental.”
He named the three as Seymour Laxon of University College London, Katharine Giles, a climate change scientist who worked with Professor Laxon at UCL, and Tim Boyd of the Scottish Association for Marine Science.
According to coroners and police, Professor Laxon died after falling downstairs at a New Year’s Eve party; Dr Giles was killed by a lorry while cycling to work; and Dr Boyd is believed to have been struck by lightning while walking by a loch in Scotland.
Professor Wadhams has been unable to explain how these “accidents” were staged – especially the last one, acts of nature being notoriously hard to replicate, even by dark sinister, well-funded groups of assassins – but he suspects it may have something to do with Big Oil or climate change deniers.
He said: “If it was some kind of death squad, you don’t expect that with something like climate change. I know oil companies have been giving lots and lots of money to . . . climate change denialist organisations but you don’t expect them to kill people.”
Professor Wadhams himself claims only narrowly to have escaped these death squads himself, when the “driver of an unmarked lorry tried to push his car off the M25”.
But his theory has met with scorn from the widow of one of the alleged assassination victims:
Fiona Strawbridge, Professor Laxon’s partner, said that she had seen similar claims by “ridiculous conspiracy theorists” on the internet but she was certain his death was an accident. She said that she knew Dr Giles and it was clear that her death was also an accident.
Another possible weakness in Professor Wadhams’s theory is his inability to provide a plausible motivation for his mystery, would-be death squad.
For a period, it’s true, Professor Wadhams’s extravagant predictions of imminent, catastrophic Arctic ice melt were reported assiduously by the media because they provided apparent high-level scientific credence to the fashionable doomsday narrative.
However, more recently, Professor Wadham’s theories have been recognised as extravagantly, risibly wrong even by his alarmist peers, who have openly derided his “science” on social media.
A letter by Professor Wadhams to the Royal Society protesting about his disrespectful treatment was greeted with short shrift. The Royal Society, a bastion of climate alarmism, issued the following statement last year:
‘Climate scientists are often accused of not being critical of work presented by “their own”.”we re-iterate that climate scientists have long been criticized for not speaking against those who some may consider “extremists” within our community.’