Public Responsibility - Time To Share The Burden Of Proof
Jan 2010
An unsubstantiated claim predicting the meltdown of Himalayan glaciers has been trumpeted as a great victory for the gainsaying cause of climate change denial.
However, the controversy has changed nothing with respect to climate science. The deniers lack a scientific case against human made global heating that can withstand serious scrutiny. So rather than engage with the science, they adopt a wrecking tactic. By seizing upon a single error, the deniers are trying to do change public perceptions of climate science. It may work. As Marx argued, the dominant ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class. Those who own the means of production also own the means of communication. Behind climate change denial and deceit is an increasingly powerful set of lobby groups with vested interests in making money out of people and the planet.
UN climate scientists have admitted that a key report they published contained a claim that overestimated the chances that the Himalayas' glaciers would melt as a result of global warming.
There’s no denying that this is a serious error, given how many millions of Indian and Chinese families depend upon melt-water, tilling the land washed by waters that pour from the glaciers. The lack of water would mean major drought, loss of farmland and food shortages.
But the error was corrected. For years, climate change deniers have asserted that climate science is a politically driven bogus science and that climate scientists suppress or ignore contrary evidence to stay on the climate change ‘gravy train’. As though a) an error can have a long shelf life in science and b) scientists of this calibre would be short of work with government and industry. And there is a logical flaw in the deniers’ claim. Here is an example of climate scientists admitting and apologising for a mistake, something that nails the deniers’ snit that scientists cover up contrary evidence and errors.
Not that the admission of error satisfies the deniers. In a wild overreaction, the climate change deniers claim that one single solitary error is sufficient to invalidate the whole of climate science, hundreds of thousands of research papers, articles etc.
It’s easy to understand the outburst of joy on the part of deniers. Backed by lobbyists with a vested interest in claiming that the planet is too large to be affected by humankind's profligate burning of fossil fuel, the deniers have been waiting for years for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to make an error. The IPCC is the UN body that has promoted the idea of human-made global heating.
It’s been a long time coming but last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the panel's chairman, apologised for the inclusion in the organisation's fourth assessment report of 2007 on the impacts of climate change, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. The offending paragraph reads: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."
In IPCC terminology a "very high" likelihood has a specific meaning: more than a 90% chance of coming true. The truth is that at the current rate of global heating it will take 300 years for Himalayan glaciers to melt. That’s a big error, and a surprising one.
There’s no mystery as to why the climate change deniers are pleased with themselves. The IPCC panel shared the Nobel peace prize with Al Gore for its 2007 report. Those reports have been widely credited with convincing the world of the dangers of a global heating caused by human activity. For a long time, the deniers have poured over the output of the IPCC in search of any error that would allow them to rubbish the whole of the science behind human-made global heating. The IPCC has continually warned that the billions of tonnes of carbon that are pumped into the atmosphere as a result of human activity has a deleterious impact on the climate. There’s an awful lot of money to be made out of such activity, and the rich and powerful are not going to give up that opportunity without a fight. So they organise in defence of their right to keep hitting the planetary till. From the beginning, the work of the IPCC has been closely scrutinised by these deniers in their search for any errors that may be made by climate scientists. Amongst countless thousands of facts checked, the deniers may uncover one or two errors. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the research findings of the climate scientists are overwhelmingly sound. It may merely point to the lack of scientific competence on the part of the deniers. But it is worth balancing the handful of errors uncovered over the years against the countless thousands of facts contained in the IPCC reports. And it is worth pondering the extreme reaction provoked by the odd error in climate science against the relentless gainsaying of solid, sound evidence for human made global heating.
There are problems with the IPCC approach. Science is not something that can be done by committee. In digesting a wealth of research, the IPCC has an impossible task and invites lazy evaluation and generalisation. The only surprise is that many more errors have not been uncovered. The case for a total reorganisation of the IPCC is strong, ending the publication of comprehensive documents that achieve breadth at the expense of depth. Instead, specific pieces of research should be published. But, of course, there is the problem of the relation of science to government. The criticism that the IPCC is politically motivated is disingenuous in the implication that climate science is not a real science but a bogus science. The wealth of research on climate change is such that it needs to be distilled and digested for political consumption. Governments the lack time, resources and expertise required to wade through the research findings on climate change. If the climate scientists are right, and human made global heating is as serious a problem as they claim, then it is the responsibility of government to act. Here, the deniers backed by industrial lobbyists, pounce in an attempt to break up the connection between science and politics. The strategy has two parts, the denial of the science behind climate change and the obstruction of government intervention and action to deal with climate change.
The reaction to the 2035 claim on the Himalayan glaciers has been extreme. The report’s only quoted source for the claim was a 2005 campaigning report from the environmental group WWF, which, in turn, based its case on a single remark made in 1999 by a leading Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, to journalists at two magazines, New Scientist in London, and Down to Earth in New Delhi, concerning the perilous state of Himalayan glaciers. For Hasnain, the claim of an early demise was ‘speculative’ and had never been submitted to a scientific journal. It should never have made it to the august pages of the IPCC report.
So the problem is not just that the claim is wrong or exaggerated – the Himalayan glaciers will melt eventually at the current rate of heating – but that the claim ended up in a report whose authors are supposed to scrutinise "every statement in every sentence." That would imply that methods of scrutiny and evaluation are not as rigorous as they should be. And then there is the evidence of suppressing or ignoring contrary evidence. The author of the part of the panel's report, Indian glaciologist, Murari Lai, defends the inclusion of the 2035 claim, saying "the error if any lies with Dr Hasnain's assertion". That’s not the view that Pachauri now takes. In an IPCC statement, IPCC chairman Pachauri admitted that in this case "the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by the IPCC procedures were not applied properly", and "poorly substantiated estimates" of the speed of glacier melting had been published.
Pachauri's statement here is a reprimand for those IPCC scientists involved in the error and its publication. Any error by the IPCC is damaging. Critics of the panel never miss an opportunity to undermine the reputation of climate science in general and the IPCC in particular. So, against the deniers, it needs to be emphasised that the evidence for human-made climate change remains compelling and that if they have scientific reason to say otherwise, they should demonstrate it in the normal way. They have yet to do so. Pachauri "regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance", the implication being that this error is a one-off and that IPCC procedures are sound. If deniers have evidence to the contrary, then they should cite other errors. That they have not done so can only mean that Pachauri’s claim to sound scientific procedures is valid and that the case for human made global heating is solid.
It should further be noted that the 2035 claim did not appear in the more widely read "summary for policymakers". So the deniers are really making a mountain out of a mole-hill. And one needs to ask why.
The problem is that Pachauri has previously defended the report in the most strident terms when its conclusions about Himalayan glaciers were called "alarmist" by India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh. Pachauri dismissed the work of the geologists who first questioned the panel's glacier claim as "voodoo science" and called the minister "extremely arrogant", saying that Ramesh's claims were "not peer reviewed". It is now clear that it is the IPCC panel's report that has not been properly peer-reviewed. The Guardian also discovered that other scientists as well as the Japanese government had questioned the claim before publication.
Fred Pearce, in the New Scientist, points out the implications. ‘At that point, the glacier claim ceased to be an appalling cock-up and looked more like a systematic failure on the IPCC's part. Deniers will now be on a hunt to find more errors like these and if they get them, Pachauri will be in real trouble."
Well, deniers have been after errors such as this for some time. It’s been a long and lonely pursuit. But now they’ve got one. And they have wasted no time in alleging fraud and cover-up in the cause of politically motivated science. It’s time to take the point about systematic failure seriously and change the way that IPCC promotes climate science.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up by the United Nations in 1988 to deliver a scientific consensus on climate change. It publishes assessments of research every five or six years. There are four assessment reports, covering the physical science of climate change, its impacts, the economics of tackling climate change and a synthesis report. The most recent set appeared in 2007.
If the deniers can get this much mileage on a single error, imagine how much more damaging a series of such errors would be. The IPCC process is too large and unwieldy and further errors as a result of systematic failure cannot be ruled out. The reports are written by hundreds of scientists, but signed off by governments after meetings with officials from most of the world's governments. This often involves compromises over language. The scientists are not expected to do their own science specially for the IPCC, but to assess existing science with a view to reaching consensus positions on scientific issues of importance to policymakers. The authors work in the main with scientific papers that have gone through a process of anonymous peer review by other experts. This peer review is considered the gold standard for research. They are, however, allowed to use non-peer reviewed "grey literature" where appropriate and with proper assessment of its reliability.
In other words, the job of the authors of the IPCC reports is to distil the latest scientific research and deliver it in a form that is politically digestible. The emphasis on peer review and compromise and consensus results in an inbuilt bias towards the most conservative positions. This should be born in mind whenever we come across a climate change denier shouting eco-alarmism and eco-fanaticism. It is very rare for the IPCC to exaggerate a position. In the main, the body underestimates the dangers posed by climate change.
Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, is one of a number of climate researchers who argues that it is time for a change at the IPCC. ‘The panel was set up in 1988, in a previous century. There was no internet then, yet emails have transformed climate science. They get hacked and uploaded on to servers for all the world to read. People can follow the trail of an idea or argument in a way that was impossible 10 years ago. Climate science - like science in general - is being democratised and the IPCC needs to reflect that."
Rather than publishing large, voluminous reports every six or seven years, there is a need for a lighter touch which highlights the findings of specific pieces of research. But there is a real problem concerning how to translate scientific evidence and knowledge into public policy and effect. Distilling the results of tens of thousands of climate studies into a few paragraphs may be necessary to inform governments, but it also invites systematic failure and error. It also exposes an organisation to internal chicanery, for whatever reason. The philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that the man who generalises generally lies. The generalisation can never be the same as the sum of the single discrete facts – something goes missing in the process. It makes more sense, then, for the panel in the future to respond quickly to new studies and critiques as they come out and produce briefer reports on particular climate topics each year. It is for government and the people they purportedly represent to decide on how the science is to be assimilated, since here is another example of scientists being put in an untenable position as a result of political failure. And there is also a case for dismantling the intergovernmental nature of the panel. Such an invitation to political horse-trading bodes ill for the reputation of science. Instead, national academic bodies, like Britain's Royal Society, should have controlling roles at the IPCC, not governments.
But the link between science and government must remain. Climate change deniers are specifically trying to break that link in order to depoliticise science and keep the political realm safely under the control of money-making forces. To break the link and to deny the political implications of climate science is precisely what the climate change deniers are out to achieve.
It should be emphasised that the claim with respect to the Himalayan glaciers is one single error, on one page of one volume of a mammoth three-volume report of 3,000 pages that itself is the distillation of tens of thousands of research papers.
Put in that context, and the excited reaction of climate change deniers gives the game away. They are having to make a single, solitary error carry a weight that it cannot possibly bear for a simple reason – the climate change deniers have to make so much out of so very little precisely because they lack a scientific case that holds water. It is also worth pointing out that the error was highlighted not by the deniers but by the scientists themselves, a classic example of how self-cleansing science is. Science is self-policing. Unlike politics, where victory goes to those who shout the loudest and lie the longest, bad ideas don’t last long in science, which is why the gauntlet can be thrown down to the deniers whenever they allege that climate science is ‘bogus science’, that the case for human made global heating is made up – put up the science that backs these claims. They have yet to do so.
Something else that is worth pointing out is that whilst the claim with respect to the Himalayan glaciers exaggerate the impact of climate change, the fact remains that, on current trends, the glaciers will be gone in three hundred years, no time at all in evolutionary terms. Further, the problem of science by committee issues in a tendency to conservatism, playing down the risks of climate change. This is evident in many parts of the 2007 IPCC report. ‘We should also remember the overwhelming evidence still shows global warming is real and manmade,’ argues Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. "Arctic ice sheets are shrinking and droughts are spreading while nine of the last 10 years have been the hottest on record. Only rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can explain that."
It is time for responsibility in science and politics to be shared in public. At present, climate change deniers backed by the resources of powerful lobbyists, are taking a free hit against climate scientists and eroding the capacity of governments to act on the scientific evidence. The deniers have power without responsibility and such a position breeds licence. The deniers have licence and they are exploiting it to the maximum. It is not only the IPCC that is to be made fit for purpose for addressing the problems of the 21st century – business and politics need to be brought up to scratch. For too long climate scientists have been making all the running on the problem of global heating. Governments have dragged their feet and sections of business and industry have been positively hostile, organising and financing campaigns of misinformation and downright lies. The time has come for the burden of proof with respect to global heating to be shared. Currently, scientists are at the mercy of ideologically and politically motivated groups funded by rich industrial lobbyists. They are being abused, harried at every turn, subject to massive and constant requests that they hand over their research, and are being asked to justify every statement with respect to the overheating planet. It is a systematic assault that is designed to waste the time and sap the will of the scientists. The surprise is that this situation has been allowed to go on for so long. It has long been time for the deniers and their industrial backers themselves to be subject to the same publicity and burden of proof and responsibility that scientists and politicians attempting to address the problem of global heating are subject to. At present, they are professional gainsayers, facing no comeback if they get things wrong and call things incorrectly.
One way or the other, by design or by necessity, human life is going to change dramatically. The deniers put pressure on the work of climate scientists and seek to constrain government action since, giving up our fossil fuel dependence entails a drastic change in our economic way of life. ‘Back to the Stone Age’ many cry. Actually, the case has been made that the transition to the low carbon economy could be the next phase of industrial development, boosting a capital economy that looks on the brink of collapse in any case. But, of course, the lobbyists are not interested in economic growth in the long term interests of all, only their own short term, private gain. They will sacrifice the global economy and ecology just so that they can continue hitting the planetary till. But, no question, the transition to the low carbon economy will require changes in energy patterns, a scaling back of consumption, better designed homes, the creation of eco-towns. Of course, far from being ‘disastrous’, such changes could be instrumental in the creation of a flourishing habitat. But the point is that changes of such scale require that the scientists can justify their work.
Fair enough. But this works both ways. If climate scientists have to justify their science on account of the dramatic changes implied by acting on the science, then it should be pointed out that the changes implied by not acting on the climate science are nothing short of alarming. And here is where the deniers need to justify their case scientifically. Gainsaying is easy, it is the specialism of every tupenny-hapenny cynic. Such people do little enough damage if they remain where they belong, in the saloon bar nursing a pint for an hour or two. But the gainsaying of industrial lobbyists and the deniers they fund is of an altogether different order. They now need to be called upon to back their claims. If deniers claim that there is no connection between rising carbon levels and global heating, they need to be asked for the scientific research and evidence that supports their claim. When deniers claim, for the umpteenth time, that climate science is a ‘bogus science’, then they need to show us what the real science is. And that means real science, backed by research and evidence that can explain what needs to be explained, not some kite flying in the sky. Time and again when deniers are given the opportunity to present the alternative explanation, all we get is it could be this, that or the other and we need to do more research. The problem is that volcanic eruptions, solar activity, urban heating etc have all been checked over and again and their impacts have been shown to be insignificant. The question is how far are we prepared to push scepticism.
We need significant research and evidence, not gainsaying. Because if the changes implied by acting on climate science are dramatic, those implied by doing nothing are disastrous. If the climate scientists are correct about carbon emissions and the deniers are wrong, the planet will face eco-catastrophe. Temperatures could rise by 4C or by 2100. The Earth will be hotter than at any time in the past 30 million years. Coastal cities will be submerged, deserts will extend over vast areas, crops will fail and billions will be displaced.
So when deniers argue against the case for human made global heating, pointing to the dramatic changes implied by acting on the science, then the disastrous consequences of not acting on the science needs to be highlighted. The case both for and against action needs to be backed by solid, sound science. The scientists working for the IPCC argue that the emission of greenhouse gases poses a direct threat to planetary health and their claims are transparent and backed by scientific research and evidence. Climate change deniers confidently assert that greenhouse gases pose no risk to the planet, that the danger of doing nothing is negligible whereas acting to transform our economies is not only costly but unnecessary. My point is that this gainsaying needs to be firmed up by some genuine scientific research and evidence. There needs to be a sharing of the burn of proof in public debate, as opposed to climate scientists making all the running, only to be accused of being zealots on the gravy train by deniers who have never done a turn in their lives when it comes to real science. The arguments of climate change deniers need to be subject to the same rigorous examination to which all scientific theories are subject. The voice of climate change deniers has not been silenced. Indeed, the debate on climate change is dominated by contrary voices who claim to have been ignored and silenced. The simple truth is this, that the deniers of the science behind human made global heating lack a scientific case. At no point in this long, long debate have the deniers of man-made climate change put together a case that has been able to withstand proper scientific peer review. The fact that bad theories don’t last long in science is not evidence of suppression of contrary views, it’s just good, sound science operating the way that it should. And the simple truth is that climate change deniers just offer bad theories, rank bad theories at that. How many more times is the theory concerning urban heating going to be resurrected as an alternative to carbon emissions? Really, if the deniers want to stall till kingdom come, they should come and search my magic garden for those invisible pixies that leave no trace.
Of course, they won’t waste their time. And neither should we let them waste ours.
It is evidence that counts, research that offers explanations of processes that can withstand proper scrutiny and testing. As Bob Ward insists. "Unless climate sceptics can demonstrate there is a negligible danger, then most sensible people will insist we should take careful, cost-effective measures now to avoid the possibility of disaster in future."
It’s time to call upon the deniers to share the burden of proof and assume responsibility in public, instead of carping and gainsaying from a safe distance – put up the science or shut up.