exceedingly rigorous review process that represents an almost insurmountable barrier to anyone who proposes research that does not meet the highest prevailing standards, both in terms of scientific/technical quality and ethical considerations.[51]
Success in getting funding ‘clearly places Dr Mann among the most respected scientists in his field’.[52] The committee found only one ground for criticism of Mann’s conduct. Sharing someone else’s manuscripts without their permission had been ‘careless and inappropriate’.[53]
Nearly five decades after President Eisenhower had spoken of the baleful prospect of the domination of America’s scholars by federal employment, the investigatory criterion used by Penn State provides evidence of his prescience. There was another consequence of taxpayer-funded science. Since James Hansen’s 1988 testimony, the single individual who has had the most impact on the course of the debate on the science of global warming was not drawn from the legion of government scientists, but the solitary Stephen McIntyre.
Dissenters such as Richard Lindzen, who disagree with the consensus about the physical processes and likely effect on atmospheric temperatures of rising levels of carbon dioxide, were sidelined. Unlike them, McIntyre’s disagreement was not about the physical mechanisms of global warming. His work focused on the methodological and procedural mistakes underpinning the findings adopted by the consensus. His demonstration that Mann’s one-thousand-year temperature record was flawed forced the IPCC to change direction. Thus the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report retreated from the 2001 Third Assessment Report to a position closer to the 1995 Second Assessment Report – a shift from empirical evidence derived (by flawed means) from nature to justification based on theoretical computer modelling.
The impact of McIntyre’s work in undermining public confidence in the scientific consensus was magnified by the reaction of the IPCC and the national scientific elites, particularly those in Britain and America. Rather than acknowledge there had been a problem, the IPCC embarked on a strategy of denial. So the Fourth Assessment Report was stitched up to avoid undermining the credibility of the IPCC’s previous pronouncements, an exercise in which the British side took the lead.
It turned out to be a disastrous misjudgement. When the cover-up was blown open with the release of the Climategate emails, more than climate scientists’ credibility was called into question. Their integrity was, too.
[1] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q 198, Ev 59.
[2] David Holland (2008), Submission to the Garnaut Review: Deficiencies in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report of the Scientific Basis of Climate Change, p. 4.
[3] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q 194, Ev 59.
[4] ibid., Q 195, Ev 59.
[5] ibid., Q 198, Ev 59.
[6] ibid., Q 207, Ev 60.
[7] ibid., Q 207, Ev 60.
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid., Q 130, Ev 31.
[10] ibid., Q 130, Ev 32.
[11] http://www.jonathanlynn.com/tv/yes_minister_series/yes_minister_episode_quotes.htm
[12] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q 85, Ev 13.
[13] ibid.
[14] Muir Russell et al., The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review (2010), pp. 78–9.
[15] ibid.
[16] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q 121, Ev 18.
[17] ibid., Q 129, Ev 31.
[18] ibid., Q 4, Ev 2.
[19] ibid., Q 17, Ev 3.
[20] Ronald Oxburgh et al., Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit, (2010), p. 5 www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP
[21] ibid., p. 4.
[22] Graham Stringer interview with author, 21st June 2011.
[23] Oxburgh et al., Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit, (2010), p. 2.
[24] ibid., p. 3.
[25] ibid., p. 5.
[26] Muir Russell, ‘Emails Report Launch – Notes for MR Introduction’ para 23 www.cce-review.org/pdf/MR%20Launch%20intro.pdf
[27] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Report, together with formal minutes (2010), para 137.
[28] ibid., para 54.
[29] James Renderson, ‘Climate researchers’ “secrecy” criticised – but MPs say science remains intact’ in the Guardian, 31st March 2010.
[30] Ben Webster, ‘Climate-row professor Phil Jones should return to work, say MPs’ in The Times, 31st March 2010.
[31] Renderson, ‘Climate researchers’ “secrecy” criticised – but MPs say science remains intact’.
[32] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Report, together with formal minutes (2010), para 38.
[33] ibid.
[34] Michael E. Mann email to Tim Osborn, 31st July 2003.
[35] The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Report, together with formal minutes (2010), para 38.
[36] HMG, Government Response to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee 8th Report of Session 2009–10: The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (September 2010), Cm 7934, para 6.
[37] ibid., Cm 7934, para 13.
[38] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2009), p. 33.
[39] John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1980), p. 120.
[40] Prince Charles, ‘A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the opening of Atmosphere, The Science Museum, London’ 3rd December 2010 http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/a_speech_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_at_the_opening_of_atmosp_897061599.html
[41] The Reviews into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit’s E-mails First Report of Session 2010–11, Volume I (2011), Q 102 & 103, Ev 14.
[42] Information Commissioner’s Office, ‘Decision Notice: FER0282488’ 23rd June 2011.
[43] PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Assessing an IPCC assessment: An analysis of statements on projected regional impacts in the 2007 report (2010), p. 24.
[44] ibid., p. 43.
[45] ibid., p. 44.
[46] Harold T. Shapiro et al., Climate change assessments: Review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC (2010), p. vii.
[47] ibid., p. viii.
[48] ibid., p. 8.
[49] ibid., p. xv.
[50] ibid., p. 23.
[51] Clive Crook, ‘Climategate and the Big Green Lie’ in the Atlantic, 14th July 2010 http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/07/climategate-and-the-big-green-lie/59709/ and Pennsylvania State University Investigatory Committee, ‘RA-1O Final Investigation Report Involving Dr Michael E. Mann’ 4th June 2010, p. 15.
>
[52] Pennsylvania State University Investigatory Committee, ‘RA-1O Final Investigation Report Involving Dr Michael E. Mann’ 4th June 2010, p. 16.
[53] ibid., p. 19.
24
Time’s Wing
è d Chariot
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Andrew Marvell
Anyone who believes in indefinite growth of anything physical on a physically finite planet is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
Time. The measurable aspects of science and civilised life of the more fundamental passage of nature, A.N. Whitehead defined it.[1]
Time Present could play tricks. ‘Global warming is happening’ as a statement of physical reality in the one hundredth of a second that constitutes the psychological present is not verifiable. The most that can be said is global warming has happened between two dates in the past.*
Time Past tripped up climate scientists, intent on re-writing climate history.
Time Future poses an insuperable problem. We cannot know it until it has happened. The expected impacts of global warming occur at a glacial speed compared to the quick march of human cohorts across the plain of terrestrial existence. The differential tempo led advocates of action on global warming to speed it up to accommodate it to humanity’s timescales, the IPCC notoriously bringing forward a melting of the Himalayan glaciers by over three centuries.[2]
Ancient civilisations moved so slowly as to be barely perceptible to the modern eye. The Egypt of the Pharaohs lasted around twenty-six centuries. In one hundred and twenty paces, the British Museum’s Egypt gallery traverses more than two thousand years of artefacts bearing the stamp of a way of life that barely changed over centuries and millennia.
Adjacent galleries portray the explosive growth of a younger civilisation. Ancient Greece developed from its archaic to its classical period in a couple of centuries. Small, unstable city states, dialogue with other cultures and a culture that prized innovation gave Greek civilisation a dynamism that made it impossible to know where it was going next. The accuracy of long-range forecasts – or prophecy as it was once called – depends on the assumption that societies don’t change; a valid assumption in the case of the Egypt of the Pharaohs but invalid for ancient Greece, or our own.
It fell to economists to systematically bring together the geophysical and human timescales. In doing so, they risked the mockery of nature and of future generations because it depends on assumptions of determinism and causality for the global climate system and the development of human civilisation.
‘Time is the ultimate constraint on mortals,’ British economist Charles Goodhart has written.[3] ‘If time were unlimited and costless, wealth could always be augmented by more work.’[4]
Time is money. It plays a central role in the Austrian school of economics’ theory of capital. The time from production of intermediate goods to the final sale to a consumer is a factor that accumulates in the cost schedule of consumer goods. It’s a small step from this nineteenth-century insight to valuing capital investments as a discounted stream of expected returns underpinning modern financial theory as a way of recognising the cost of time.
The practical consequences of not including the value of time can be seen in the economies of the pre-1990 Soviet bloc. As disciples of Marx’s labour theory of value, capital had no value other than the labour embodied in it. Time was excluded. As a result, communist economies squandered capital on a colossal scale, destroying their economies in the process.
The middle years of the first decade of the twenty-first century saw concern about global warming reach a fever pitch. Participants at the January 2007 Davos World Economic Forum voted climate change the issue with the greatest global impact in the coming years.
Twenty months later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The world was condemned to a different future. ‘A fall in the pit, a gain in your wit,’ China’s premier Wen Jiabao told the 2009 Davos Forum, ‘Shaping the Post-Crisis World’.[5]
Why had none of you predicted it, the Queen asked an economist in 2009? Like natural scientists, economists are – or were – believed to be gifted with special powers to pierce through the inscrutable character of the future. Unlike them, economists have a reputation for arguing with each other. Whereas the history of the natural sciences is characterised by successions of dominant paradigms, economics is typified by clashing schools – classical economists against Keynesians, neo-Keynesian against neo-classical schools, Austrians and Marxists and neo-Marxists.
Schumpeter explained why he thought economists were so disputatious compared to scientists. Arguing was endemic in economics. ‘Nature harbours secrets into which it is exciting to probe; economic life is the sum total of the most common and drab experiences,’ he wrote. ‘Social problems interest the scholarly mind primarily from a philosophical and political standpoint.’[6] An economist needed to have a vision designed to give expression to certain facts of the world in which we live and different visions give rise to different interpretations of economic processes. Keynes was the pre-eminent example, a vision derived from the special characteristics of England’s ‘ageing capitalism’ as seen by an English intellectual, Schumpeter thought.[7]
British-born economist Kenneth Boulding had vision in abundance. Economics was too narrow to understand what it was trying to describe, Boulding, the founder of evolutionary economics, argued. What was needed was an approach that unified natural and social sciences: systems science or systems analysis. Boulding’s brilliance was recognised by Keynes, who published a paper of his in 1931, when Boulding graduated from Oxford. Boulding then settled in the US. In 1949, he became the second winner of the American Economic Association Bates Medal awarded to the most distinguished young economist, the first being Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman the third.
With his white shoulder-length hair and Liverpudlian accent, Boulding became something of a visionary and guru in later life. ‘Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?’ he asked four years before Silent Spring popularised ecological issues.[8] A committed pacifist, in 1965 Boulding helped organise the first anti-Vietnam War teach-in. The following year, Boulding was the star at a Resources For Freedom forum in Washington, DC, when he picked up Adalai Stevenson’s Spaceship Earth and spoke of the open ‘cowboy economy’, and the closed economy of the spaceman.[9] ‘The shadow of the future spaceship, indeed, is already falling over our spendthrift merriment,’ Boulding warned. ‘Oddly enough, it seems to be in pollution rather than exhaustion that the problem is first becoming salient.’[10]
This raised a further question. Why conserve, Boulding asked? What has posterity ever done for me? Unless the individual identified with some inter-generational community, ‘conservation is obviously “irrational”’.[11] Even if it were conceded that posterity is relevant to present problems, ‘we still face the question of time-discounting’ – that is, the price put on the value of time, ‘and the closely related question of uncertainty discounting’.[12] It could be argued that the ethical thing to do is not to discount the future at all – this would be the approach taken by the British government’s Stern Review forty years later – that putting a cost on time was ‘mainly the result of myopia’ and was ‘an illusion which the moral man should not tolerate’.[13]
Such reasoning did not satisfy Boulding. Time-discounting might be ‘a very popular illusion’ but it had to be taken into consideration in the formulation of policies.[14] So conservationist policies almost always had to be sold under some other pretext which seemed more pressing, Boulding told the forum.[15]
Of recent economists, Yale’s William Nordhaus – ‘about the most reasonable person I know’, according to fellow
economist Jeffrey Sachs – has the longest professional interest in the economics of global warming.[16] As the first environmental wave was cresting in the early 1970s, Nordhaus wrote an eviscerating critique of Jay W. Forrester’s ‘World Dynamics’ model used in the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth. ‘Can we treat seriously Forrester’s (or anybody’s) predictions in economics and social science for the next one hundred and thirty years?’ Nordhaus asked in his review, ‘Measurement without Data’.[17] Forrester’s lack of humility in predicting the future was not warranted when placed beside economists of great stature who had also got the future badly wrong, Nordhaus wrote. Marx had predicted the immiserisation of the working class under capitalism; Keynes guessed that capital would have no net productivity in 1973; Galbraith, that scarcity was obsolete. ‘And now, without the scarcest reference to economic or empirical data, Forrester predicts that the world’s standard of living will peak in 1990 and then decline. Sic transit Gloria.’[18]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 39