at each stage of the process, substantial judgment on the part of the scientist(s) is required; a judgement formed through dialogue, dispute and compromise rather than through detached and disinterested truth-seeking.[19]
There was little alternative to relying on such procedures, Hulme argued. ‘In complex and uncertain areas of knowledge “objective methods” alone are rarely adequate to establish what is known.’[20]
The purpose of consensus is to gain agreement with a view to taking collective action. Here, an altogether larger claim is being made: consensus can transform belief into knowledge. This requires us to accept that there is no fundamental difference between belief and knowledge, so long as there is collective agreement on it by those whose opinions count – the experts who don the mantle of scientific authority. In this way today’s scientists have become modern day alchemists transforming the lead of subjective belief into the gold of objective knowledge.
Such a claim has profound implications for the nature of science itself. It permits scientists to slip the bounds of what had traditionally been understood as science into pseudo-science, to adopt Popper’s term, and into the realm of futurology. For sure, eminent scientists can make more of an impact on the popular imagination with their essays in futurology than with their scientific research. In 2006 the physicist Stephen Hawking made headlines with his prediction that humans would have to leave Earth to avoid the risk of the species being wiped out by an asteroid or a nuclear disaster.[21] In 2003, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and future president of the Royal Society Martin Rees wrote a book, Our Final Century (Our Final Hour in the American market), which estimated that mankind had only a fifty per cent chance of surviving the century thanks to threats even more dangerous than global warming.
The historian must accept a definition of science as being what scientists do. However, the historian can make two claims. The first is that the predictive record of scientists on the future of mankind is rather worse than a random selection of people off the street. The scientists who put their names to the Blueprint for Survival in 1972 – predicting civilisation would come to an end in the lifetimes of people then living – proved spectacularly poor guides to the future. The actions of ordinary people who maintained their commitment to the future, the most important one being the decision to have children, have been vindicated.
Second, the nature and purpose of science has undergone profound change in recent decades. Until around the middle of the last century, science was about making discoveries and solving problems by refining and modifying theories so that they better conformed to what had been found in laboratory experiments and seen through telescopes. The purpose of these activities was the advancement of scientific knowledge.
Bridgman for one rejected the idea of a purpose beyond the pursuit of knowledge. ‘To attempt to broaden the concept of science to include social responsibility, as appears to the popular temper at present can result only in confusion,’ he wrote in 1959.[22] Three years later, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi said much the same thing in an article extolling the republic of science: ‘I appreciate the generous sentiments which actuate the aspiration of [society] guiding the progress of science into socially beneficent channels, but I hold [this aspiration] to be impossible and indeed nonsensical.’[23]
The role of science became like medicine. The point of acquiring knowledge is to diagnose and cure malady. Thus climate science, particularly after 1988, developed as the most important branch of what might be called global therapeutics. The principal justification for climate science is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but diagnosing the world’s ills and defining the parameters of the therapy required by the patient.
With the irruption of global warming into world affairs, scientists mounted a radical extension of Polanyi’s republic, in the process turning it upside down. Scientists were now directing science into what they decided were socially and environmentally beneficent channels in a project that required governments to implement the prescription scientists and like-minded experts had devised. The justification for governments to do so was not subject to objective verification, because global warming precluded this. Henceforth, the word of scientists was to be taken on trust.
The rigorous methodology developed by Popper and the verification standards required by a physicist such as Bridgman were now replaced. This did not happen because of the emergence of a superior epistemological standard; that is to say from the development of a new and sharper theory of knowledge. The explanation is quite different. Far from becoming obsolete, they had become inconvenient. Dependence on consensus made it all the more important to ensure that the consensus continued to prevail, especially as the future of the planet was at stake.
This provided strong incentives to sustain the consensus and maintain the world’s interest; otherwise, the action which the consensus required would not be taken. For exactly the same reasons, those who expressed their doubts represented a threat. Dissenters needed to be crushed and dissent de-legitimised. They were stooges of oil companies and fossil fuel interests, free market ideologues, or climate change deniers. In the years after 1988, much reputational capital of prestigious scientific bodies and of governments was sunk into global warming, further reducing the incentives for being open to debate and criticism.
For Popper, intolerance and lack of respect for dissenting opinions were antithetical to the precepts of an open society. Dissent is also linked to the success of science in expanding scientific knowledge because criticism is the engine of the growth of knowledge. ‘What is called objectivity consists solely in the critical approach,’ Popper wrote in 1963.[24] The growth of scientific knowledge came not from the accumulation of observations, Popper argued, but from the repeated overthrow of scientific theories and their replacement by better or more satisfactory ones. This marked science out from virtually all other fields of human endeavour. Since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, the West left far behind all past civilisations – surpassing even the brilliance and originality of the ancient Greeks. Scientific advance represents the supreme intellectual accomplishment of Western civilisation.
A precondition for the Scientific Revolution was the freedom to question orthodoxy and the rejection of authoritarianism. Scientists based their claim to progress by pointing to the standards later distilled by Popper. Global warming’s inability to meet the verifiability and falsifiability standards set by the Scientific Revolution constitutes a reversion to pre-modern modes of defining what should be accepted as knowledge based on appeals to authority.
The significance of global warming in the history of science is not that it represented a change of paradigm within a branch of science. It was a change in the paradigm of science itself.
* In a 1991 paper, Canadian mathematician Christopher Essex demonstrated that the effect on global surface temperature of increased levels of carbon dioxide could be less than zero. Christopher Essex, ‘What Do Climate Models Tell Us About Global Warming?’ in Pure and Applied Geophysics PAGEOPH, Vol. 135, Issue 1 (1991), pp. 125–33.
* Coal-fired power stations occupy a unique place in the demonology of global warming, being held responsible as the main culprits of global warming and the cause of the cooling in the third quarter of the last century. In 2008, Hansen compared trains carrying coal to power stations to those that carried Jews to the concentration camps. Thus a speculative view of the future has been accorded the same evidential status as historical fact, moreover the fact of the greatest crime of all time, and doubters about the former are subliminally bracketed with deniers of the latter (James Hansen, ‘Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near’ www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TwentyYearsLater_20080623.pdf).
[1] Richard Reeves, President Kennedy (1994), p. 555.
[2] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (2002), p. 293.
[3] P.W. Bridgman, The Way Things Are (1959), p. 69.
[4] ibid., p. 239.
[5] ibid., p. 62.
[6] ibid., p. 70.
[7] H.H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World (1982), p. 6.
[8] ibid., p. 186.
[9] ibid., pp. 188–9.
[10] ibid., p. 52.
[11] ibid., p. 12.
[12] ibid., p. 14.
[13] ibid., p. 330.
[14] Bridgman, The Way Things Are (1959), p. 56.
[15] Karl Popper, ‘Science: Problems, Aims, Responsibilities’ in The Myth of the Framework (1997), p. 110.
[16] Bridgman, The Way Things Are (1959), p. 55.
[17] ibid., p. 129.
[18] ibid., p. 56.
[19] Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), pp. 51–2.
[20] ibid., p. 95.
[21] ‘Move to new planet, says Hawking’, BBC News, 30th November 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6158855.stm
[22] Bridgman, The Way Things Are (1959), p. 129.
[23] Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009), p. 77.
[24] Popper, ‘Science: Problems, Aims, Responsibilities’, in The Myth of the Framework, ed. M.A. Notturno (2006), p. 93.
13
Green Warrior
The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy – with a full repairing lease.
Margaret Thatcher, 14th October 1988[1]
In 1988, climate scientists put global warming onto the international political agenda. In the three and a half years to the Rio Earth summit in June 1992, politicians joined scientists. In signing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, they committed themselves to the convention’s objective of stabilising greenhouse gases at a level that would avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’. After Rio, debating the science of global warming became superfluous. Politics had settled the science.
The speed with which the rhetoric of alarm was ratcheted up is astonishing. A March 1989 article in the Financial Times on the Green Revolution in international relations spoke of heightened concern about the environment, ‘rising panic is scarcely too strong a phrase’.[2] A conference the previous month in New Delhi warned of apocalyptic scenarios. ‘Global warming is the greatest crisis ever faced collectively by humankind,’ its final report claimed.[3] The next month saw an international conference at The Hague organised by the French, Dutch and Norwegian prime ministers. Twenty-four governments signed a declaration suggesting that human life was under imminent threat. ‘The right to live [sic] is the right from which all other rights stem,’ the Hague Declaration began. ‘Today, the very conditions of life on our planet are threatened by the severe attacks to which the earth’s atmosphere is subjected.’[4]
In addition to the three sponsoring governments, signatories included Canada, West Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India and Zimbabwe, whose oppressed citizens had more reason to fear their ruler than the composition of the atmosphere. News of global warming reached Buckingham Palace. In her 1989 Commonwealth Day message, the Queen spoke of threats to the environment so far-reaching it was difficult to grasp them. ‘We hear, for example, of the possibility of radical changes in our climate leading, among other things, to a rise in the sea level, with all that would mean for small islands and low-lying regions.’[5]
For some, the second environmental wave came just too late. A rival accused Al Gore of running for national scientist in his 1988 presidential campaign. ‘I started to wonder whether the issues I knew to be important were peripheral after all,’ Gore wrote in Earth in the Balance, ‘I began to doubt my own political judgement.’[6] Global warming barely registered in the presidential election that year. True, the Democratic party platform called for regular world environmental summits to address global threats such as the ‘greenhouse effect’, but its presidential candidate Michael Dukakis framed the environment as a law enforcement issue. ‘We’re going to have an Environmental Protection Agency that is more interested in stopping pollution than in protecting the polluters,’ he told the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.[7]
Not to be outdone, Vice President Bush told the Republican Convention a month later that he was going to have the FBI trace medical wastes and infected needles dumped into America’s lakes and rivers.[8] At a campaign stop in Michigan, Bush said he would use the ‘White House effect’ to tackle the greenhouse effect and pledged to convene a global conference on the environment at the White House during his first year as president.
James Baker, the new secretary of state, was quicker off the mark. His first speech was to the IPCC’s Working Group III on developing response strategies, ten days after taking office. ‘We face the prospect of being trapped on a boat that we have irreparably damaged, not by the cataclysm of war, but by the slow neglect of a vessel we believed impervious to our abuse,’ Baker told representatives from forty countries.[9]
The World Resources Institute, one of Washington’s leading environmental pressure groups, praised Baker’s speech. It was ‘a positive shift in commitment’ compared to the Reagan administration. Bolin thought otherwise. Baker had not realised the scope of oncoming climate change or the scale of the response required.[10]
Things weren’t so positive in a closed door session at which the US officials proposed a plan to collect more data before acting. Some observers blamed the call for delay on mid-level staff held over from the Reagan administration.[11] They couldn’t have been more wrong. Opposition came not from remnants from the previous administration, but from the most senior White House staff.
Responding to international pressure, in May the Bush administration conceded that it would support the negotiation of a framework convention. At the G7 summit in Paris, host President Mitterrand observed that environmental issues had never before been the subject of as many conversations and so many decisions.[12] The G7 leaders agreed that ‘decisive action’ was urgently needed to understand and protect the Earth’s ecological balance. This included ‘common efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which threaten to induce climate change, endangering the environment and ultimately the economy’, adding that they strongly supported the work of the IPCC.[13] Protecting the environment required ‘early adoption, worldwide, of policies based on sustainable development’.[14]
Risking international isolation, the Bush administration maintained a clear line: it would not agree to anything that legally bound the United States to targets or to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide by a specific time. This led to fierce criticism. William Nitze, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan and Bush administrations until he resigned in 1990, charged that the eventual outcome had been a success for American diplomacy, but a failure of presidential leadership. (He went on to serve in the Clinton administration at the Environmental Protection Agency.) Al Gore compared Bush’s policy to the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Versailles Treaty that prepared the way for the Second World War. By not providing the world with leadership in the face of what Gore called the ‘assault by civilisation on the global environment’, Bush was ‘inviting a descent toward chaos’.[15]
That the Bush administration’s position was not a function of some hard-line ideology can be seen with the Reagan administration’s response to fears about depletion of the ozone layer. In 1974 two American chemists alerted the world that stratospheric ozone could be destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) being broken down to release chlorine, increasing the amount of ultra-violet radiation reaching the surface of the planet. In the 1970s, countrie
s began unilaterally to cut their consumption of CFCs. In 1985, two months after the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer had been agreed, the British Antarctic Survey found a hole in the ozone layer (which had thinned by forty percent in eight years). The Reagan administration played a key role in negotiating the 1987 Montreal Protocol binding signatories to steep cuts in CFCs, which came into force at the beginning of 1989. President Reagan and George Shultz hailed it as a magnificent achievement. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan described it as perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.[16]
US support was a product of hard-headed calculation. According to Richard Benedick, the US lead negotiator, a major breakthrough came with a cost-benefit analysis by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Despite the scientific and economic uncertainties, the monetary benefits of preventing future deaths from skin cancer far outweighed the costs of CFC control as estimated either by the industry or by the Environmental Protection Agency.[17] However, if the US acted alone, there would be little long-term benefit. It was better for the US to get as many countries to join in as possible. At Reagan’s insistence, US negotiators lowered the participation threshold at which the agreement would come into force.
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 19