The Age of Global Warming: A History (54 page)

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 4
th
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 12
th
October 2009.
[6]

In a January 2011 paper to the American Meteorological Society in tribute to Schneider, 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]

No one questioned the role scientists had acquired. Based on their collective record, natural scientists would be among the very last people to involve in government policy. During the First Environmental Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, they had predicted the imminent collapse of civilisation and called for the abandonment of economic policies designed to satisfy humanity’s material needs and generate rising prosperity. Their dire predictions turned out to be completely wrong and their recommendations disastrous – had any government been foolish enough to have acted on them.

And so it proved in the era of global warming. Across every dimension, global warming policy has been a costly fiasco. Unsustainable commitments to solar and wind energy in Germany and Spain; the morally abhorrent diversion by rich countries of resources from growing food into making biofuels; the collapse of the EU’s carbon market; the transformation of the UK’s liberalised energy market producing some of the cheapest electricity in Europe to become Europe’s most expensive electricity producer; the scandals associated with the Clean Development Mechanism; the destruction of tropical rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations – all provide material for students of policy folly.

After the West pushed its demands to breaking point, global warming has been a story of defeat and retreat. Its failure at Copenhagen is a milestone in the deterioration of the West’s prestige and the ascendance of China and India.

The implications of Copenhagen on the efficacy of global warming policies are nothing short of disastrous. Whatever the predictive merits of the science, the absence of a regime capping global greenhouse gas emissions rendered the West’s global warming policies completely pointless. The results of global warming’s political experiment already provide a definitive verdict: global warming policies have made the world unambiguously worse off, a conclusion which holds irrespective of the outcome of the geophysical experiment.

In addition to the higher cost of producing electricity from renewables (their capital costs alone are estimated to total $160 billion a year before the 2008 recession) over the most efficient conventional means – there are hidden costs.
[10]
Energy accounts for a higher proportion of poorer household spending, so those on lower incomes are disproportionately hit by higher energy prices. For social democrats such as Tony Crosland in the 1970s, concerns about the welfare of the working class and poverty reduction trumped the claims of environmentalism, the opposite of the situation today.

Then there are the opportunity costs of global warming policies – the valuable activities that the world has foregone. These include the innovation and productivity boost from Silicon Valley venture capital dollars diverted into green tech investments. Because alternative energy projects depend on government support, entrepreneurs and energy utility executives are turned into government lobbyists maximising their take from global warming policies.

Perhaps the biggest casualty is science. The rapid growth of climate science was not for the sake of pure knowledge, but because it is the leading branch of global therapeutics. Scientific knowledge can be of immense therapeutic benefit. Medicine is the outstanding example. The desire on the part of the physician or medical researcher to cure the sick is one of the finest of all human qualities. A similar motive drove Schneider, whose decision to become a climate scientist was, he once said, ‘a marriage of convenience and deep conviction’ – a decision he had made on Earth Day 1970 at the age of twenty-five to devote himself to the environment.
[11]

In medicine what matters is not the motive of the practitioner but the efficacy of the therapy. A century ago, Professor Lawrence Henderson of Harvard drew attention to the remarkable advances in medical science, technology and therapy. 1912, Henderson claimed, marked a ‘Great Divide’ when ‘for the first time in human history, a random patient with a random disease consulting a doctor chosen at random stands a better than fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from the encounter’.
[12]

In his book
The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis?
medical historian and demographer Thomas McKeown wrote that ‘the notion that treatment of disease may be useless, unpleasant, and even dangerous has been expressed frequently and vehemently, particularly in French literature’, notably by Montaigne, Molière and Proust.
[13]
‘Remarkably, considering the eminence of the critics, such views had little effect on medicine or the public’s estimate of it,’ McKeown observed.

‘The fashionable doctors … stood as they do now, in admiration of their own science. As now, they talked as if illness and death were mastered … The learned, magic, meaningless words, the grave looks at each other, the artful hesitation between one worthless formula and another – all are there,’ Nancy Mitford wrote in her biography of Louis XIV.
[14]