The Age of Global Warming: A History
Page 56
[7] IISD, Earth Negotiations Bulletin Vol.12 No. 459, 22nd December 2009, p. 8.
[8] ibid.
[9] John Vidal and Jonathan Watts, ‘Copenhagen closes with weak deal that poor threaten to reject’ guardian.co.uk, 19th December 2009.
[10] Earth Negotiations Bulletin Vol. 12 No. 459, 22nd December 2009, p. 8 and James Hansen, ‘Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them’ in the Observer, 15th February 2009.
[11] Richard Ingham, ‘After gruelling summit, a contested deal emerges on climate’ AFP, 19th December 2009.
[12] Vidal and Watts, ‘Copenhagen closes with weak deal that poor threaten to reject’.
[13] Ban Ki-moon, ‘Remarks to the UNFCCC COP-15 closing plenary’ 19th December 2009 http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/search_full.asp?statID=686
[14] ‘Copenhagen climate accord “essential beginning”: Ban’ AFP, 19th December 2009.
[15] UNFCCC, ‘Copenhagen Accord’ (18th December 2009), para 2.
[16] ‘Merkel defends Copenhagen climate compromise’ AFP, 20th December 2009.
[17] ‘Europe laments ‘lack of ambition’ in climate deal’ AFP, 19th December 2009.
[18] Nicolas Sarkozy, ‘Press conference given by Nicolas Sarkozy after the Copenhagen summit’ 18th December 2009 http://www.ambafrance-us.org/climate/press-conference-given-by-nicolas-sarkozy-after-the-copenhagen-summi/
[19] Ed Miliband, ‘The road from Copenhagen’ in the Guardian, 21st December 2009.
[20] ‘China hits back at Britain in escalating climate talks row’ in the Guardian, 21st December 2009.
[21] Gordon Brown, ‘Transcript of the PM’s podcast on Copenhagen’ 22nd December 2009 http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21870
[22] Benjamin Sportouch, ‘France, China sign aviation, nuclear deals’ AFP, 21st December 2009.
[23] Benjamin Sportouch, ‘”Misunderstandings” with China are bygones: French PM’ AFP, 21st December 2009.
[24] ‘China’s role in Copenhagen “important and constructive”: PM’ AFP, 21st December 2009.
[25] Simit Bhagat, ‘Can’t settle for less than Kyoto: PM’ in the Economic Times, 20th December 2009.
[26] John J. Tkacik Jr, ‘China’s imprints all over Copenhagen talks fiasco’ in the Washington Times, 14th January 2010.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ‘Opposition flays govt on climate “accord”’ in the Economic Times, 21st December 2009.
[30] Mary Kissel, ‘Climate Change “Quagmire”’ in the Wall Street Journal, 10th March 2010.
[31] ibid.
[32] Tania Branigan, ‘Record snowfall brings Beijing and Seoul to a standstill’ guardian.co.uk, 4th January 2010.
[33] Tania Branigan, ‘Mongolia: How the winter of “white death” devastated nomads’ way of life’ guardian.co.uk, 20th July 2010.
[34] Bill McKibben, ‘Washington’s snowstorms, brought to you by global warming’ in the Washington Post, 14th February 2010.
[35] Charles Onians, ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’ in the Guardian, 20th March 2000.
[36] Branigan, ‘Mongolia: How the winter of “white death” devastated nomads’ way of life’.
[37] NOAA, ‘The Facts About Snowstorms & Climate Change’ http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/snowstorms.html
[38] Martin Williamson, ‘Snow stopped play’ in Cricinfo, 22nd May 2010 http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/462037.html
[39] Phil Jones email to Mike Lockwood, 7th May 2009.
[40] Sid Maher, ‘Business calls for carbon plan rethink’ in The Australian, 21st December 2009.
[41] Kevin Rudd, 6th August 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq
ZvpRjGtGM
[42] Kevin Rudd, ‘The PM’s address to the Lowy Institute’ in The Australian, 6th November 2009.
[43] Christian Kerr, ‘Aussie footprint at 1817 tonnes, and counting’ in The Australian, 11th December 2009.
[44] John Howard interview with author, 28th November 2011.
[45] ‘Brazil points finger at US over climate failure’ AFP, 21st December 2009.
[46] BBC News, ‘Canada to withdraw from Kyoto Protocol’ 13th December 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16151310
[47] PTI, ‘BASIC countries slam Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol’ 14th February 2012 http://ibnlive.in.com/generalnewsfeed/news/basic-countries-slam-canadas-withdrawal-from-kyoto-protocol/963616.html
[48] ‘Copenhagen climate accord “essential beginning”: Ban’.
34
Reflections
It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind … Be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good.
Lord Acton, 1895 Inaugural Lecture
For most cities which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.
Herodotus[1]
On 4th February 2010, Stephen Schneider gave one of his last lectures at Stanford, where he was professor of interdisciplinary environmental studies and of biology. Six months later, he died at the age of sixty-five. ‘No one, and I mean no one, had a broader and deeper understanding of the climate issue than Stephen,’ Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton professor of geosciences, told the Washington Post. ‘More than anyone else, he helped shape the way the public and experts thought about this problem – from the basic physics of the problem, to the impact of human beings on nature’s ecosystems, to developing policy.’[2]
Schneider’s lecture showed why. He mixed a conversational style with an easy authority. No one could doubt who was the smartest person in the room. In ninety minutes, Schneider – who had been involved with the IPCC since 1988 – addressed issues rarely, if ever, ventured by other leading proponents of global warming. For this reason, Schneider’s talk can claim to be the most important presentation by a climate scientist since James Hansen’s congressional testimony.
Thomas Kuhn thought scientists were little better than laymen at characterising the established bases of their field.[3] Schneider made a similar point. ‘Very few people learn about the basic philosophy of science and how it works.’[4] Universities were handing out a Ph.D. in science with no ‘Ph’ in it. ‘OK guys, now we’re doing epistemology,’ Schneider would tell his freshmen class – and spoke of his frustration that many of his colleagues did not study it.
Other climate scientists showed how they could have benefited from attending Schneider’s class. One such was Kevin Trenberth, a senior physicist at Boulder, Colorado’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, IPCC lead chapter author and one of the world’s most cited geophysicists.[5] Trenberth’s foray had been provoked by a Climategate email of his that had gone viral.
Responding to Schneider’s request for help in rebutting a BBC report suggesting that there had been no warming since 1998, Trenberth emailed Schneider and Michael Mann. ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’ People in Boulder were asking where the heck global warming was. The previous two days had smashed all previous cold records. ‘This is January weather,’ Trenberth wrote on 12th October 2009.[6]
In a January 2011 paper to the American Meteorological Society in tribute to Schneid
er, Trenberth argued that the null hypothesis test should be stood on its head. For there to be a relationship between two variables, the null hypothesis – that there is no relationship – should first be shown to be false.
Trenberth took the opinion expressed by the IPCC as foundational truth. Because the Fourth Assessment Report had declared global warming ‘unequivocal’ and ‘very likely’ due to human activities, ‘the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence’.[7]
It is an axiom of the null hypothesis that it cannot be proven. By reversing the test, Trenberth set critics an impossible task. Even so, he mis-specified the problem. It is not whether humans might influence the climate, but by how much. Here Trenberth’s viral email pointed to the real difficulty. It wasn’t so much a travesty that Trenberth and other climate scientists were unable to reconcile rising carbon dioxide concentrations and flat global temperatures, for Trenberth might have been on a fool’s errand. ‘For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause,’ Richard Lindzen wrote in 2009. ‘The earth is never exactly in equilibrium.’[8]
Schneider was too smart to make such elementary mistakes on the null hypothesis and knew the obstacles he had to navigate around. Science subject to test by falsification should be distinguished from system science. ‘Is the science of anthropogenic climate change settled?’ he asked. It was a dumb question, which the class fell for. Why? ‘Climate science is not like test tube science. You don’t falsify. Eventually you do, but not right away,’ Schneider explained. ‘It’s system science.’
Schneider characterised system science as built on a base of well-established components, then a layer of competing explanations and finally a layer of what he called speculative components. ‘Every single complicated system science, whether we’re talking climate science, healthcare, security, education, always is going to be in this category,’ Schneider said, illustrating the convergence of natural science with economics and social sciences.
The convergence enables scientists to stake their claim to formulating government policy, traditionally the province of the social sciences, enhanced by its reputation as a hard science, even though system science was diluting it. Now natural scientists were trading the rigour of knowledge derived from experimentation and falsifiability for a lead role in determining public policy.
‘Opinion’ perhaps better describes its output. ‘Knowledge’ implies what is known whereas opinion indicates a statement of belief. In the physical sciences, what is determinative is not what scientists think or believe, but what can be demonstrated by formulating hypotheses and testing them against nature.
In forsaking falsifiability, climate scientists kept a problematic feature of scientific practice – the strong collective tendency to operate within an unquestioned, dominant paradigm. Whereas arguments between economists of different schools of economic thought (and often within them) created scepticism about any claim made by an economist, the adherence of scientists to a dominant paradigm creates the opposite impression.
This makes even more problematic the form of system science falsification permitted by Schneider. ‘We do not falsify by single experiments. We falsify on the basis of accumulated numbers of papers and numbers of bits of information.’ Determining the relative credibility of each was not simple. It took assessment groups like the US National Academy of Sciences, with their multiple disciplines arguing out the relative merits of various competing or speculative components. Yet the process described by Schneider could be applied to any field of learning. The process of institutional oversight, peer review of papers and so forth, sometimes mistakenly described as the scientific method, is not unique to science.*
Schneider returned to the subject of falsifiability towards the end of his lecture. ‘There are still some people who think [climate science] operates on the basis of falsification.’ In the case of system science it does – by ‘community action over decades’. Thus the ‘scientific community’ is accorded the determinative role formerly given to experiments conducted on nature.
What defined this community? By scientific community, ‘I’m talking about those people who actually do the work,’ not non-climate scientists who drop in opinions from the outside. The release of the Climategate emails had made scientists ‘very, very angry about their critics’, Schneider said. The critics almost never showed up at scientific meetings.
They just write blogs and screeds and do ‘audits’ without really being members of the community. So they’re not welcome. That’s absolutely true because they’re not part of the debate. That’s cultural. That’s not a matter of who’s right and who’s wrong.
Climate science, Schneider continued, gave plenty of scope for those with ideological agendas to fasten on to particular elements to prosecute their case. Their arguments might be technically correct, but they would neglect others in what Schneider called ‘selective inattention to inconvenient components’. Schneider dubbed this ‘courtroom epistemology’; in other words: ‘It’s not my job to make my opponent’s case.’ Scientists, Schneider went on, would view that as an ‘immoral philosophy’. Schneider was more robust. ‘I don’t agree with that because if I were accused of something, I don’t want my lawyer dwelling on abstractions of truth. I want him to get me off.’
Schneider was particularly exercised by the role of the media. In reporting both sides of the debate, the media presented a spurious balance of the extreme ends of the bell curve of the possible outcomes of global warming.
It is inconceivable that debate polarised between ‘end of the world’ and ‘good for you’ – which for me are the lowest probability outcomes – can possibly be properly communicated through that kind of advocacy dichotomy.
The job of climate scientists was to evaluate risk and the role of ‘the community’ was to winnow out the relative probabilities. For the media not to report the middle of the bell curve was to ‘miscommunicate’ the nature of science.
This, Schneider suggested, raised a further question: can democracy survive complexity? The media focus on points of contention and its alleged neglect of the mainstream view had created public confusion about the science. This, Schneider argued, led to policy paralysis.
The view that public confusion about the science – sowed by malign fossil fuel interests – stalled global action is only plausible if the history of global warming is ignored. The 1992 climate change convention had written the scientific consensus into a treaty signed by over one hundred and sixty-five nations. It had been swiftly and unanimously ratified by the United States Senate. The most consistent finding of opinion surveys is not scepticism about the science, but that tackling climate change came way down the list of voters’ concerns. It was a convenient community myth to blame the West, when the true block on global action was the refusal of India and China. But then, what pull do climate scientists – or NGOs for that matter – have in New Delhi and Beijing?
Schneider’s second problematic claim was to suppose that nature would conform to a bell curve of climate scientists’ expectations of the future. In an unusually candid description, Schneider characterised scientific judgement as an objective set of issues with subjectivity buried when it’s about the future, because there’s no data about the future. In projecting the future, ‘It’s always subjective by definition.’*
In 1957, the scientists Hans Suess and Roger Revelle wrote of human beings carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is bad scientific practice to prejudge the outcome of a unique experiment. The laws of physics can’t be used beforehand to determine the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide, so no one knows if the climate sensitivity assumed by the IPCC will turn out to have been correct.*
Global warming involved a second experiment – not a geophysical one
, but a political experiment of a scale and ambition surpassing anything before it. Because fossil fuels are the principal source of energy of industrial civilisation, attempts to decarbonise society affect virtually every facet of government policy: energy policy, but also economic policy, land use planning and housing, transportation, agriculture, industrial policy and international relations – successive G8 summits and the largest gatherings of world leaders were devoted to solving global warming. Never has the impact of scientists on how societies are governed been as great. During the age of global warming, the West came closest to realising Francis Bacon’s ideal of a republic governed by a body of scientists that he made nearly five centuries ago.
For leading scientists, the political elevation of science was its due. In April 2010, the presidents of the Royal Society and the National Academy of Science, Martin Rees and Ralph Cicerone, wrote: ‘Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy,’ seemingly oblivious to the fact that at Copenhagen four months earlier, the world had failed to agree steps to decarbonise their economies.[9]