Climate change – the undeniable truth
The crisis in the climate system is not merely an ecological crisis and cannot be resolved by technical means alone. There is a clear danger that environmentalism, shying away from the politics of climate change, will focus upon engineering solutions whilst ignoring the need to transform wider social relations and economic arrangements. This is to opt for a limited, piecemeal reformism at a time when nothing less than wholesale reformation will do.
The ecological argument has clear political and economic implications and there is nothing to be gained and plenty to be lost by evasion on this point.
Economic activity in a variety of forms - industrial production, agriculture, transportation, material consumption – causes greenhouse gas emissions which scientists are increasingly fingering as responsible for climate change leading to global warming. Climate change as such is not the controversial point. The people who call themselves climate change ‘sceptics’ are really deniers of human-induced climate change. All scientists are sceptics, they test theories and are led by the evidence. If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t merit the title scientist. Nicholas Stern gives these deniers short shrift in A Blueprint for the Planet, noting how they misuse evidence to divert attention from the main point: ‘the deniers deliberately miss the point’. At least Ian Plimer is a scientist, albeit a geologist and not a climatologist. But Plimer is a classic example of deliberately missing the point in order to mislead those who don’t have an understanding of science. He routinely points to climate change as a natural cycle, and others repeat the claim as though that falsifies the claims of climate scientists. The real controversy relates to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions leading to man made climate change. Plimer argues that climate change is caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions, therefore "CO2 cannot be driving global warming now.” That is such an obvious non sequitur that it can only be a political statement designed to shape popular perceptions of the science, not a serious scientific statement concerning reality.
The fact is that the Earth is heating, and is continuing to heat. This heating is not a continuation of warming that has been underway since the ice age. That warming ended some eight millennia ago. Plimer can offer no natural explanation for the heating that is happening now that matches observations. That is why characters like Plimer are not sceptics but deniers – because they deny the known facts. All scientists are sceptics in that they change their theories when the facts change.
Natural events and human induced events with respect to climate change are not mutually exclusive but are compatible. Plimer as a scientist must know that, so his statement is simply a case of deliberate misinformation. The claims that Plimer makes with respect to climate change have been checked and checked again. They are still being checked. Prof Richard Muller, himself a ‘climate sceptic’, has checked the claims made for volcanic eruptions and found their influence to be negligible. Until future research shows otherwise, that’s where Plimer’s claims remain. They are not alternative explanations of global heating, they are falsified theses. To overlook them as explanations of the climate crisis is not to silence contrary views, it is good sound science at work, eliminating failed theories as contrary to the known evidence.
Time and again, research fingers anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, hence the term anthropogenic or man made global warming. Or anthropogenic global heating – AGH for short.
The reason for controversy is not difficult to find. One might think that these passions are excited by a commitment to scientific truth. As one might guess, where there is a lot of bile, hot air and abuse, there is usually politics and vested interests at work. Plimer, for instance, has connections with Australia’s lucrative mining industry. That shouldn’t invalidate his science, of course. No more than a commitment to environmental politics makes an environmentalists’ science a pseudo-science. The methods of science are public, open and testable, available to all. What kinds in science is the evidence and the explanation, not who, what and how many present and support a proposition. A bad theory is a bad theory and is soon falsified by research and evidence and testing. Plimer’s suggestion that volcanic eruptions are responsible for global heating has been tested and shown to fall far short of being able to account for climate change in the past 250 years. That ought to have been the end of the matter. The fact that Plimer’s volcanic meanderings keep on erupting can be attributed to political reasons rather than scientific merit. The evidence is strongly against Plimer.
The contortions which many perform in the climate change ‘debate’ can only be explained by politics and vested interests. It shows the extent to which the ecological crisis is more than science but goes right to the heart of the way we arrange our social existence. To reduce carbon emissions to the level mandated by solid scientific evidence, it is clear that economic activity must be curtailed. That is the inescapable conclusion which vested economic interests seek to avoid, and lobby, pressure, bully and cajole politicians, press and public in their attempt to avoid what must be done.
The rearrangement of our material life basis requires that we move away from the model of endless economic growth. This is not just a scientific question, then, nor even a technical or engineering problem. It is not even just a question of government policy. The issue goes right to the heart of the way that we organise our interchange with nature and conduct our relationships with each other. Tackling climate crisis in a serious manner requires that certain economic interests be challenged whilst others are promoted, that social relationships be transformed to enable sustainable living, and that the world-view which induces individuals to pursue and expect constantly growing material wealth be replaced by an emphasis on well-being. Industries which damage and pollute nature’s life support systems must be dismantled. Social relationships which foster the isolation of rampant consumer-driven individualism must be replaced by more community-oriented relationships. The ecological crisis concerns not just the nature without but also the nature within; it is an existential crisis which can be resolved only when individuals re-evaluate their relationship with those around them and with the natural world. In the process, we come to rethink the purposes according to which we organise our lives. There must be more to life than working away to increase the size of GNP. At long last, we may get round to what Plato called the examined life, a life that is worthy of being called human, a life that is worth living.
When presented with this reality, and the need to shift to new modalities and mentalities, many find it easier to deny the existence of global warming outright. Dismissing AGW as a myth saves the stupid, the supine and the selfish from having to locate their long lost nerve and nous and actually do something. There are many within the system who are time servers, not thinking, acting, feeling beings, put people who perform functions. Max Weber characterised the modern bureaucratic world as operating ‘without regard for persons’. Well, here are the individuals shorn of personhood.
But there is another form of denial which is noticed much less. This is the kind of denial that goes halfway, that accepts AGW as a fact, but stops far short of the necessary changes. Instead, there is a pretence that a little environmental tinkering within the system, buttressed by new technologies and engineering, will suffice. One thing is clear about such techno-fixing and engineering – the solutions keep existing power relations preserved and intact, and require no substantial restructuring of power. This is the most sophisticated form of denial in that it forestalls the need for radical social transformation, employing new technologies and alternative energy sources to power the endlessly growing economic in perpetuity. Rather than a genuine ecological reformation, we get an energy efficient techno-urban industrialism. That might be better than carboniferous capitalism, but it falls far short of the democratic well-being economy that is possible.
Looks good, but it’s an illusion. The planet is already green and blue. The energy to power this techno-urban illusion will bring about global heating, not the ecological society. Or can we develop the appropriate technology and eco-architecture that allows us to integrate our technics within a liveable habitat?
One almost has some sympathy here for the hardball climate change deniers. In their crudity and stupidity, they expose the real issue here – economic interests and exploitative power relations. Christopher Booker complains that required cuts in carbon emissions amount to rolling back the industrial age. ‘The world's politicians .. are nevertheless proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history — cuts in carbon emission which, if implemented, would plunge our world back into the Dark Ages —to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway.’
The cuts in carbon emissions are required to give us a future. If Booker is wrong and if the climate scientists are right, then without drastic reductions in carbon emissions the world is going to Hell. But Booker has at least highlighted the principal concern of climate change deniers – vested economic interests. They are concerned to defend current economic arrangements against all-comers, socialists, environmentalists, scientists, the lot.
So the world of opinion goes round and round in the routine of assertion and counter-assertion, with nothing more substantial behind it other than prejudice, belief, fear, hatred of others and of self, wishful thinking and vested interests and the other assorted horrors that lurk in the swamp of the political Id.
Perhaps there is a reason why the debate quickly reduces to politics and name-calling, for the next step would lead still deeper into the region of knowledge, an area which is strictly out of bounds for those who infest the world of political opinion and vested interests. Of course, the great value of science is its ability to penetrate the illusions of politics and expose opinion for what it is, a belief not founded on proof, evidence, certainty or truth. Knowledge is not just power, it is a threat to power. Knowledge is subversive. Back in 1995, the scientists working for the Global Climate Coalition, representing ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers, reported that "the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied". No wonder there is an emphasis on interests, motivations, abuse and opinion – truth will out and cannot be denied. That didn’t stop the coalition spending millions of dollars denying the truth and attempting to fool the public in the process.
The scientists working for the Global Climate Coalition, representing the biggest of big business, argue that the scientific basis for global heating ‘cannot be denied’. Christopher Booker, defending the prevailing economic system, denies climate science. This is a good moment to recall what George Orwell wrote about the language of politics:
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs.
Orwell Politics and the English Language
As politics continues to down to its bad name, the worlds of physics, chemistry, biology and psychology have advanced at a remarkable pace. These disciplines are now speaking truths loud and clear which the apologists of industrial ‘civilisation’ prefers not to hear. Tough. Human beings are capable of far better than they are achieving at the moment, and are being held back by moribund modes of thought, action and organisation in politics and economics.
The knowledge that we now have shows clearly that both the flat-earth denial of AGW and the techno-fix denial of eco-reformation are fundamentally mistaken. The only sustainable solutions are those which proceed from the recognition of the obvious limits of the Earth as a closed, finite system and attempt to design a sustainable living which works within planetary boundaries. Much more than a technical or engineering solution, this is a thoroughgoing practical, cultural, psychological and spiritual reformation which, here and there, in the lifestyle choices of individuals, in various community activities and campaigns, in housing and energy initiatives, is already underway. As usual, the last people to get the message are those who obsess over politics and who waste their time in the exchange and reporting of worthless political opinions.
Professor emeritus Peter Gardiner exposes the way that climate change deniers use the inherent uncertainty of scientific data to suggest that risk is therefore equally uncertain and in some way balanced. But it isn't. ‘Acting unnecessarily on carbon reduction risks a few percent of GDP. Not acting risks catastrophe, global economic warfare, starvation and bloodshed. Not everyone understands Bernoulli's principle, or demands proof that aeroplane wings create lift. Planes are flying, after all. So why deny climate change?’
The deniers are akin to Buridan’s ass. Philosopher Jean Buridan showed the limits of reason by reference to an ass, in a field, equidistant from two bales of hay of exactly the same size. The ass is hungry but needs a good reason to choose one bale of hay over the other. But since the bales are of equal size, equal distances away from the ass, the ass has no good reason to choose one bale of hay over the other. So the ass fails to act and starves to death. By pushing scepticism to extreme, climate change deniers are acting like asses and will doom us all. Cognitive resources are limited, we have limited time and limited mental capacities. We can never know everything, and so much always act on good enough reasons. The overwhelming evidence for climate change is good enough reason to act.
Arctic sea ice has melted at record levels, after all. Each of 20 other streams of evidence is equally compelling. The argument that climate change also derives from natural CO2 sources begs the question, so what? That is no reason to exacerbate the problem, burning fossil fuels which will one day run out anyway, ruining the planet and destroying civilisation in the process. And it is no reason not to act.