The Age of Global Warming: A History

THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMING

A HISTORY

Rupert Darwall

First published in 2013

Published in 2013 by Quartet Books Limited

A member of the Namara Group

27 Goodge Street, London W1T 2LD

Copyright © Rupert Darwall 2013

The right of Rupert Darwall to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted

by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form or by any means without prior

written permission from the publisher

ISBN 978 0 7043 7314 3

Typeset by Josh Bryson

Contents

1

The Idea

It is ideas that make history … Human society is an issue of the mind.

Ludwig von Mises
[1]

The orthodoxy produced by intellectual fashions, specialisation, and the appeal to authorities is the death of knowledge, and that the growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement.

Karl Popper
[2]

Polar bears or swallows?

The two symbolise the dilemma posed by global warming.

A male polar bear’s desperate struggle for food was captured in the 2006 BBC television series
Planet Earth
. Eventually the exhausted animal finds a pod of walruses. Three times he attacks. Each time he fails, retreating to lie down and die. The burgeoning number of polar bears has replaced the giant panda as the icon of a species on the verge of extinction and of fragile nature endangered by man.

Swallows crossing the Sahara can lose up to half their bodyweight as they fly from Northern Europe to Southern Africa burning hydrocarbons, one of the highest density sources of energy found in nature. For the same reason, mankind has come to depend on hydrocarbons.

Global warming’s entrance into politics can be dated with precision – 1988; the year of the Toronto conference on climate change, Margaret Thatcher’s address to the Royal Society, NASA scientist James Hansen’s appearance at a congressional committee and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

By then, the world was ready.  

Rounds of international climate change conferences and treaties followed – the Rio Earth summit and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – culminating in the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, interspersed with periodic pronouncements from the IPCC with four assessment reports (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007) sounding a crescendo of alarm.

The global warming idea is composed of three propositions which proceed from two facts.  The first fact is that carbon dioxide is one of a number of so-called greenhouse gases (the most abundant being water vapour). The second is that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by around thirty-five per cent from pre-industrial times.
[3]
  

The first proposition is about the past. Increased carbon dioxide, together with other greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, has caused global temperatures to rise.
*
In the words of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, ‘It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past fifty years over each continent (except Antarctica).’
[4]
  

The second is about the future. Left unchecked, rising global temperatures will cause immense damage to the environment and humanity. 

The third proposition is political. Developed countries should lead the world in making deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, preferably by substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

Why was the world ready for this new idea? 

Global warming did not make itself evident like a solar eclipse. People had to be told it was happening. An event of such historical magnitude does not come out of nothing. It can be understood in terms of ideas, which in turn reflect particular values and visions.

The British mathematician and philosopher A.N. Whitehead said that the spiritual precedes the material; philosophy works slowly before mankind suddenly finds it embodied in the world. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone.
[5]

So it is with global warming.

During the course of the twentieth century, mankind’s relationship with nature underwent a revolution. At the beginning of the last century, human intervention in nature was regarded as beneficent and a sign of the progress of civilisation. By its end, such interventions were presumed harmful unless it could be demonstrated they were not.

The entry of nature into politics was of very different character on either side of the Atlantic. In the US, it was healthy. Unlike the European versions, it was not defined by opposition to democracy or capitalism. 

In Germany and Britain, to the degree that the British variant was influenced by German thinking, it emerged from the same swamp in which Nazi doctrines festered. Accordingly, only the American variant was viable after the Second World War. 

The pivotal year was 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
. Within a decade, the notion that mankind’s pillaging of the planet was leading to an environmental catastrophe – risking man’s extinction – had taken hold.

If all man can offer to the decades ahead is the same combination of scientific drive, economic cupidity and national arrogance, then we cannot rate very highly the chances of reaching the year 2000 with our planet still functioning and our humanity securely preserved

− words written by Barbara Ward, the other seminal environmentalist of the era, in
Only One Earth
.
[6]
It had been commissioned for the first major UN conference on the environment at Stockholm in 1972.

Malthusian ideas had enjoyed previous bouts of popularity. The first was at the end of the eighteenth century, when Thomas Malthus predicted disaster as population growth would outstrip food production. In 1865, the foremost economist of the day, William Stanley Jevons, shifted the focus from food to resource depletion. Britain’s economic demise was inevitable with the exhaustion of cheap coal. Similar scares afflicted the US before and after the First World War.

What was new in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the pervasiveness of doomsday predictions. 1972 also saw publication of the Club of Rome’s
The Limits to Growth
and
A Blueprint for Survival
, signed by leading British scientists of the day, predicting the end of civilisation. 

At Stockholm, the West’s environmental awakening had to contend with another force of the post-war era – the ambition of newly independent Third World nations to industrialise. A Third World boycott was averted by Maurice Strong, the UN conference organiser, and Ward formulating a political compact between First World environmentalism and Third World development aspirations. Under it, economic growth was deemed double-edged. When rich countries got richer, it harmed the environment; when poor countries grew, the environment benefited.

Sustainable development – the link forged by Strong and Ward between environmentalism and the Third World development agenda – was pushed onto the international agenda by the 1980 Brandt Report and the 1987 Brundtland Report. Whatever its accuracy as a description of reality, sustainable development was the political fiction environmentalism needed to buy developing nations’ neutrality, a fiction that broke down when the increase in developing countries’ greenhouse gas emissions overtook those of the developed world.

Then, as Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’

Marx and Engels condemned Malthus and his population theory. In turn, their labour theory of value put no value on pristine nature. The timing of the demise of Marxism as a living ideology meant that global warming never had to contend with opposition from the Left of the political spectrum. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global environmental treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during a strategic race to bury the West.

Viewed as an ideology, environmentalism took the Marxist concept of the alienation of the working class from the means of production and applied it to the rich man’s alienation from nature. In doing so, environmentalism triumphed in developed societies, dominating the mainstream politics of the West where Marxism had entirely failed. ‘By losing sight of our relationship with Nature, and its interdependent and holistic characteristics, we have engendered a profoundly dangerous alienation,’ the Prince of Wales stated in 2009. Poorer societies were, in many ways, ‘infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities.’
[7]
  

That’s not how those societies viewed their level of economic development. The corollary of environmentalism’s success in the West is its limited appeal in poorer countries. Communism, based on a doctrine of scientific materialism, had much greater success for most of the second half of the twentieth century. 

Thus the West and the East (or North and South) took different approaches to the climate change negotiations. The West, particularly the Europeans, viewed global warming diplomacy as about persuading other countries to be virtuous, like themselves. The stance of countries such as China and India was driven by their economic interests.

The comparison with Marxism also illuminates an important dimension of environmentalism – its relationship with science. Environmentalism exists in a similar relationship to its scientific base as communism did to the economics of
Das Kapital
. Science and ideology become so deeply entwined that in practice it is difficult to separate the two, the scientist and the environmentalist becoming one and the same person.

In his 2002 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Peter Raven (a botanist) argued that human society had outstripped the limits of global sustainability (a key tenet of environmentalism). ‘Simply appropriating as much as possible of the world’s goods and processing them as efficiently as possible can never be a recipe for long-term success,’ Raven asserted. ‘Success’ was about finding ‘new ways of thinking about our place in the world and the ways in which we relate to natural systems’ – a clearly ideological construct.
[8]
 

Similarly the response to adverse evidence is often an ideologue’s denial rather than a scientist’s questioning of their hypothesis. In 1968, the American zoologist Paul Ehrlich’s
The Population Bomb
declared that the battle to feed humanity was over. It was inevitable that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Ehrlich specifically predicted that India was doomed. 

Yet the falsification of Ehrlich’s prediction led him to make only trivial changes to his thesis. Forty years later, Ehrlich was comparing humanity’s ability to feed itself to fruit flies living off rotting bananas. ‘Our problem is we only have one pile of bananas.’
[9]
The remarkable technological accomplishments of modern human beings had merely delayed the timetable of doom.
[10]
 

When a Danish statistician (and an environmentalist to boot) decided to debunk the arguments of American economist Julian Simon that received views on the worsening state of the environment were mistaken, he found that, by and large, the evidence supported Simon’s view. Would the evidence change minds? As Bjorn Lomborg recounts in
The Skeptical Environmentalist
,

to begin with, I was surprised that the only reaction from many environmental groups was the gut reaction of complete denial … but I would have thought as the debate progressed that refusal would give place to reflection on the massive amounts of data I had presented.
[11]

Lomborg’s optimism was misplaced. The hostility he encountered wasn’t because he had changed his mind. It was because he was an apostate.
*

Unlike the discovery of the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, with carbon dioxide and global warming there was a pre-existing structure of ideas about the incompatibility of industrial society and nature to co-exist in harmony. Environmentalists were predisposed to anticipate harmful consequences from industrial societies’ reliance on hydrocarbons. Because global warming is the most powerful argument in the environmentalist armoury and because science provides its source code, global warming occasioned a profound and subtle shift in the nature of science.

According to Karl Popper, the twentieth century’s leading thinker on the theory of science, the essence of the scientific method is critical argument and genuine attempts to refute theories with empirical tests yielding reproducible data. We cannot be sure of what is truthful. We can know what is false. Truth is therefore approached by discarding what has been proved false. 

What hardened into the scientific orthodoxy of global warming does not meet the threshold of being a scientific theory because its predictions are not capable of being tested against nature and therefore refuted by evidence. Thus it would be more accurate to describe global warming as a speculation or conjecture. Instead, global warming must depend on the preponderance of scientific opinion in order to maintain its potency.

Popper’s view of scientific theories as being provisional, only valid until they’ve been refuted, conflicts with the political need to characterise the science of global warming as settled. Science advances through challenge but maintaining the consensus subverts the needs of genuine scientific enquiry. Politicisation of climate science and the de-legitimisation of debate – risks inherent in the idea of global warming – led to a retreat from the standards that emerged during the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century to pre-scientific norms; principally, reliance on consensus, peer review and appeals to authority.

In contrast to the overstatement with respect to the science is the downplaying of the likely costs and the adverse consequences of adopting policies designed to delay the rise in global temperatures.  This is the opposite of what can be reliably said about the science of global warming on the one hand and the economics on the other. The state of the climate in one hundred years’ time and its impact on the environment are not just uncertain. They are unknowable. The impact on food prices of policies that divert corn into car fuel is not. We can be fairly certain that if more wind farms are built, more birdlife will be destroyed. 

Yet the political imperative of global warming means that it is more important for governments to be seen to be doing something than assessing the likely consequences of their policies.

This licence leads to the logical outcome of the global warming idea: policies ostensibly designed to deal with global warming bring about the very outcomes as if global warming was left unchecked – rising food prices, instability caused by food shortages, reduced biodiversity, and, with their threat to the international trading system, a poorer and more dangerous world. These are all examples of the Global Warming Policy Paradox – the therapy causing the malady it was designed to avert. The logic of collective action leads to collectively harmful outcomes but, for individuals and interest groups advocating such action, potentially advantageous ones.

Global warming now affects almost every aspect of our lives. Where and how we travel; the amount we pay for power; the way houses are built; the lights we read by; the food we eat (no lamb please, they burp methane), and how much it costs; the destruction of local habitats to make way for wind farms, palm oil plantations and tidal barrages; what children are taught in schools.

It has re-defined what constitutes ethical behaviour.  Virtue is being seen to tread with a small carbon footprint – offsets being offered for sale to obtain one – and changes how people behave towards each other. Being kind to the planet appears to involve being less kind to other people. A Canadian study found that people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products.
[12]
 

To explore global warming is to journey through the mind of contemporary Western man. Cultivating the habit of thinking what we are doing was much over-rated, Whitehead observed. ‘Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them,’ Whitehead argued.
[13]
Could it be that in an age when so much mental activity is automated and so much information is available instantaneously that it is harder to reason from first principles, making it more susceptible to global warming? 

‘Operations of thought,’ Whitehead went on, ‘are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.’

It is time to mount the cavalry.