The Age of Global Warming: A History (37 page)

Meanwhile, the IPCC’s standing was dealt a further blow in January 2010 with media uproar about its claim, recycled from a WWF report that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 – centuries earlier than the most pessimistic forecasts. A second claim, that fifty-five per cent of the Netherlands lay below sea level (the correct figure being twenty-six per cent), led to a storm in the Dutch media. The Dutch legislature stated that the previously accepted reliability of the IPCC was now at issue and instructed the government to carry out a review.
[43]

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published a report in July. It focused on the Working Group II report on impacts. Seven of the thirty-two conclusions in the summaries could not be traced to the main report.
[44]
It also found that the Working Group II summary focused only on potential negative impacts of climate change, rather than presenting policymakers with a complete picture.
[45]

Such was the damage to the IPCC’s credibility that in March 2010 the UN secretary-general and chair of the IPCC asked the InterAcademy Council (IAC) to review IPCC procedures and management. The panel, chaired by an economist, Princeton’s Harold Shapiro, delivered a carefully worded report. Scientific debates always involve controversy, Shapiro wrote, describing climate science as ‘a collective learning process’.
[46]
In Shapiro’s judgement, whether the IPCC remained ‘a very valuable resource’ was conditional on it highlighting ‘both what we believe we know and what we believe is still unknown’ – a fine-grained description of the epistemological issues at the heart of the debate on the science of global warming.
[47]

The IAC also highlighted the problematic relationship between science and politics. Although scientists determined the summaries for policymakers, the final wording was negotiated with government representatives ‘for clarity of message and relevance to policy’.
[48]
At the same time, the panel warned that ‘straying into advocacy’ could only harm the IPCC’s credibility.
[49]
When chapter lead authors are sitting next to their government representatives, it could put the author in the position of either supporting a government position at odds with the working group report or opposing their government. ‘This may be most awkward when authors are also government employees,’ the panel suggested.
[50]

The effect of dependence on government patronage for policy-driven research can be seen in Penn State’s investigation into allegations of misconduct by Michael Mann following the Climategate emails. The report exonerated Mann and showered him with praise. Since 1998, Mann had received research funding from two government agencies. In a description of Mann’s work and conduct on the Hockey Stick that the
Atlantic
’s Clive Crook said defied parody, both agencies had an

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.

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]

In 1979, Nordhaus was one of the first professional economists to raise the issue of global warming.  There was ‘widespread evidence’ that combustion of fossil fuels, in causing the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, ‘will be the first man-made environmental problem of global significance’.
[19]
But the conclusions he drew were tentative and circumspect. Climatologists thought that a 0.6
o
C rise over the previous hundred years had led to major, but not catastrophic, results. Such temperature changes were ‘rather trivial’, according to Nordhaus. ‘Mean temperature changes of this size are not economically significant.’
[20]
He qualified his recommendation about the desirability of policies to slow down the consumption of fossil fuels as

deeply unsatisfactory, from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view.
I am not certain that I have even judged the direction in the desired movement in carbon dioxide correctly, to say nothing of the absolute levels.
[21]

Nordhaus also grappled with the problem of future time. In a 2007 paper, he challenged economists’ assumption that generations living many years from now would have the same tastes and preferences as people today, when they would be consuming goods and services largely unimagined in a vastly different world. Future generations might come to love the altered landscape of a warmer world. Perhaps, Nordhaus suggested, economists should incorporate uncertainty about future preferences, an approach that was ‘largely uncharted territory’ in economic growth theory.
[22]

From the late 1980s, more economists became interested in global warming. In 1991,
The Economic Journal
carried a special issue on the subject. The American economist William Cline, a specialist in trade and capital flows, endorsed the science. ‘Overall, greenhouse science holds up well to scrutiny,’ Cline wrote. ‘Its logic and physics are compelling. Although warming to date is less than predicted, the shortfall is within the range of natural variability.’
[23]
The principal shortcoming in the scientific and policy debate, Cline thought, had been the failure to extend the time horizon of the analysis to two hundred and fifty to three hundred years. ‘For purposes of planetary management, a horizon of thirty-five years is woefully inadequate.’
[24]

In his contribution, Nordhaus wrote that climate change was likely to produce a combination of gains and losses – ‘with no strong presumption of substantial net economic losses’.
[25]
This wasn’t an argument in favour of climate change or a laissez-faire attitude, but rather for a careful weighing of costs and damages ‘if we are to preserve our precious time and resources for the most important threats to our health and happiness’.
[26]

The vast majority of economists expressing a view followed Cline in taking the consensus on the science as given and not to be questioned. As Nordhaus put it in a 2007 seminar, ‘We social scientists are downstream: we collect the debris from science as it comes by us, the good models, the bad models, the good studies and the bad studies.’
[27]
This attitude of uncritical acceptance came under sustained challenge in a series of papers and articles by David Henderson, the former OECD chief economist. Henderson argued that it was ‘unnecessary and imprudent’ for economists to arrive at such confident and sweeping conclusions.
[28]
There was ‘pervasive uncertainty’ and ‘sheer lack of knowledge’ in relation to the climate system. It was ‘misleading’ to speak in general terms of ‘the science’ in a way that suggested there were ‘no significant doubts, queries or gaps’.
[29]
A study of the contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report found that the terms ‘uncertain’ and ‘uncertainties’ appeared more than one thousand, three hundred times.
[30]
 

As the rhetoric of alarmism ratcheted up in the first decade of the new century, Henderson criticised received opinion as ‘seriously over-presumptive’ characterised by a ‘lack of awareness of today’s prevailing over-statement, over-confidence, and ingrained bias’.
[31]
The IPCC assessment reports, Henderson cautioned, were far from being models of ‘rigour, inclusiveness, and impartiality’.
[32]
Economists were inadvertent in ignoring issues of professional conduct that had come to light over the Hockey Stick. The strong commitment to the official consensus led its upholders to react to any form of criticism or dissent as undermining established science, non-subscribers being portrayed as members of a ‘denial lobby’ and treated as Thought Criminals.
[33]

Should economists, as Nordhaus suggested, simply take whatever natural scientists decided to float down the river or follow Henderson and, as he put it, exhibit the lack of credulity economists would deploy in analysing any other policy issue? Economists should be in a better position than others to make their own assessment of the science because much of it is about statistics and modelling.

To Australian economist Ross Garnaut, the answer was a no-brainer. ‘The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change,’ Garnaut wrote in his 2008 government review for the states and Commonwealth of Australia.
[34]

Canadian economist Ross McKitrick is critical of the credulity of professional economists in accepting the claims of climate scientists when they are generally better trained and equipped in the handling of statistics. ‘The typical economist has way more training in data analysis than a typical climatologist,’ McKitrick told the author. ‘Once they start reading climate papers they start spotting errors all over the place.’
[35]

In a 1939 review ‘Professor Tinbergen’s Method,’ Keynes wrote a scathing attack on the shortcomings of multiple correlation analysis to quantify the effect of a single factor. Suppose a model takes account of three factors. It is not enough, Keynes argued, that these should be causal factors: ‘There must be no other significant factor.’ If there were ‘then the method is not able to discover the relative quantitative importance of the first three’.
[36]
For carbon dioxide to be the only possible explanation for heightened global temperatures, as a matter of logic, scientists must first be able to quantify every single feature of the changing climate. Yet large-scale changes in the climate, such as the causes and timing of ice ages, are still not well understood.