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1 Introduction: ‘A cruel and absurd delusion’
The climate change story is now 100% political.[1]
Hardly a week goes by without another lurid
prediction of impending doom.[13] What is alarming in such claims, of course,
is not their obvious silliness, but the fact that they can be made without
either any pretence at objectivity, or any requirement to demonstrate a basis
for the claim in empirical science. For
example, one would expect that the existence of the Loch Ness Monster would
have to be established in fact before its demise could be attributed to any
cause, “global warming” included (perhaps it is merely the first of the million
or so species that are expected to be at or near the point of extinction by
2050 as a result of “global warming”).[14]
Regrettably, the state of the climate
debate is such that assertions of this nature, no matter how apocalyptic or
flatly bizarre they may be, are met with resigned acceptance rather than the scepticism
that they so clearly deserve. We have
reached the point where calm, temperate, scientifically-grounded
counterarguments simply cannot be heard over the cacophony of climate alarmism. In such circumstances, reasoned discourse
leading to the development of sound, scientifically justifiable policy is all
but impossible.
The dread with which the spectre of global
warming has come to be regarded is depressingly reminiscent of another shadowy menace
that gripped European and North American populations not that long ago.
An epidemic terror seized upon the nations; no man thought himself
secure, either in his person or possessions, from the machinations of the devil
and his agents. Every calamity that
befell him he attributed to a witch. If
a storm arose and blew down his barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of
a murrain – if disease fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly and
snatched a beloved face from his hearth – they were not visitations of
providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag…
The consequences for European society – and
especially for those accused of witchcraft – were severe. “Thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons,”
Mackay laments, “fell victim to this cruel and absurd delusion.”[15]
One need only replace the references to
supernatural forces in Mackay’s passage with the words “global warming” to
recognize that we have been here before.
The witch mania of the Middle Ages – one of the “extraordinary popular
delusions” described by Mackay in his eponymous book – is uncomfortably analogous
to the present debate over the sources and consequences of climate change. One of those consequences is the extent to
which ideology and moral panic have been permitted to displace science and reason
as the basis for debate. Given the
potential economic impact of the billions likely to vanish via carbon taxes,
emissions trading schemes, “green jobs” programmes and the conversion of
cropland to biofuels production, the great climate panic – our generation’s
answer to the witch mania – is on course to outdo its medieval predecessor in
terms of the number of humans likely to be adversely affected, probably by
several orders of magnitude.
The predisposition to charge every conceivable ill to the account of global
warming – or “anthropogenic global warming”, to give the demon its proper name
– is the inevitable result of giving a theory primacy of place over observed
data, in direct contravention of the principles of scientific inquiry. The theory in question is, of course, that
the Earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases – principally
carbon dioxide – are largely to blame. The
shorthand version of this theory was best expressed by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report – Summary for Policymakers
(2007): “Most of the observed
increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very
likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.”[16] To expand this into a more useful
form, the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) thesis proposes, first, that the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the key factor driving
global temperatures; second, that the observed increase in average global
temperature since the onset of the Industrial Age in the late 18th
Century was driven primarily by carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by human
activities, in particular, the consumption of fossil fuels; and third, that
unless draconian measures are immediately taken not only to curb, but vastly to
reduce, human emissions of carbon dioxide, temperatures will rise rapidly over
the coming century, and environmental catastrophe will ensue.
The nature and extent of the predicted catastrophes, of course, varies
widely; depending upon the source, “climate change” is expected to produce, for
example, a rise in sea levels of eight to twenty-four inches over the course of
the 21st Century (according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, or IPCC);[17] of twenty feet or more (according
to former US Vice-President, Nobel Laureate, Oscar winner, and celebrated
global warming lobbyist, Al Gore);[18] or of 246 feet (according
to Gore’s outspoken mentor in climate science, Dr. James Hansen).[19] Such extraordinary predictions illustrate both
the susceptibility of the climate debate to the most egregious hyperbole, and
the eagerness with which its prophets divorce themselves from historical
observations. The average global sea
level in fact rose a grand total of eight inches during the whole of the 20th
Century.[20] Moreover, according to observed data – satellite
measurements maintained by the University of Colorado – it has not risen at all
since the beginning of 2006.[21] At this rate, it will be quite some time
before Al Gore will have to sell the waterfront condominium that he purchased
in San Francisco in 2005, the same year he predicted that sea levels would rise
by 20 feet.
The vast uncertainties inherent in the
predictive methodology employed by the proponents of the AGW thesis are an
unavoidable result of attempts to model a coupled, interdependent, non-linear
system like global climate, and lends itself to concomitant imprecision in
argumentation by the theory’s principal spokesmen. If you don’t understand how a phenomenon
works, you cannot model it. Uncertainty
and imprecision lend themselves to exaggeration, which can serve as a useful
political tool for individuals who may stand to gain, politically or otherwise,
from openly subscribing to (if not actively promulgating) the climate
panic. On 29 December 2008, the
aforementioned Dr. Hansen, an employee of NASA (and therefore of the US federal
government), published an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama alerting
the incoming Chief Executive to, inter
alia, the “urgent geophysical fact” that “burning all the fossil fuels will
destroy the planet we know” – which, according to Hansen, is “the planet of
stable climate in which civilization developed.”[22] Apart from the unverified (and inherently
unverifiable) nature of the “facts” Hansen cites – including his argument,
which flies in the face of all archaeological evidence, that human civilization
evolved in anything even remotely resembling a “stable climate” – what is remarkable
about his letter is its apocalyptic tone.
Outrageous hyperbole may be a routine tool of politics, but it is
anathema to sound science.
Hansen’s missive was published worldwide by
countless mainstream media outlets, accompanied by the sort of headlines one
associates with chiliastic cults rather than the sombre halls of academe. One especially memorable example was, “Barack
Obama has only four years to save the world.”[23] Obama has himself encouraged such language,
having famously said that the world would look back upon his nomination as
Democratic candidate for the Presidency as “the moment when the rise of the
oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”[24] One would have thought that King Canute’s
demonstration to his earls a thousand years ago would have settled once and for
all the question of whether political leaders – even divinely anointed ones –
are able to command the rise and fall of the waters.
When scientists, public servants and
journalists – all of whom are supposed to demonstrate professional objectivity
– use language indistinguishable from that employed by ideological activists, politicians,
and millenarian prophets, then one may reasonably conclude that the discussion
has departed the realm of science.
The extreme politicization of the climate
change debate has little precedent in modern scientific endeavour or discourse
– and yet it is the credibility of the
science underlying their arguments to which the theory’s advocates
repeatedly appeal when attempting to pressure governments to act in accordance
with their recommendations, or face calamity.
James Hansen is only one offender among many in this regard, and he is
hardly the most intemperate of the lot.
Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, made innumerable
references to the “science” underlying the AGW theory, all the while systematically
distorting and misrepresenting it. Gore’s
distortions were so pronounced that his film is the only Oscar-winning
documentary ever found by judgement of a court to be riddled with errors and
misrepresentations on the key points it purports to convey.[25] The end result was a masterpiece of
propaganda more reminiscent of the work of Leni Riefenstahl than of a genuine
endeavour to explain complex and highly uncertain science to a scientifically
incurious, and often scientifically illiterate, public.
Extremist oratory is a feature of religious
or political movements, not science. History
is replete with examples of demagogues prophesying catastrophe in order to
convince people to take one course of action and eschew another. As I will demonstrate over the course of this
paper, misrepresentation and hyperbole, while deeply corrosive of science, have
historically been invaluable tools for confidence men, hoaxsters, and seekers
of power. In these enlightened times, of
course, overblown rhetoric tends to resonate poorly in populations of free and
reasonably literate citizens – except in this one regard: when those
pronouncements are cloaked in the language and trappings of science.
Because
the proponents of the AGW thesis ground their arguments in science, the
scientific credibility of their arguments is subject to review. This, after all, is one of the founding
principles of scientific inquiry: that any scientist announcing a discovery
must make his data and methods available to all, so that his results may be
independently verified. This challenge
function is what separates science from politics and theology, neither of which
offers the possibility of independent confirmation, and it is what gives the
scientific method both its remarkable investigative power, and its credibility
– earned over the course of the centuries since the Enlightenment – as a method
for interrogating nature.
Science is
not, however, a search for “truth” (inconvenient or otherwise); this is too
nebulous and non-quantifiable a goal.
Science is designed to ferret out and explain facts. This is the basis of
its simple and powerful method, which consists of four distinct steps:
·
observation, in which the scientist notices a
hitherto unexplained phenomenon;
·
theorization, in which the scientist postulates
a mechanism to explain the observed phenomenon, and, ideally, makes non-obvious
predictions based on his hypothesis;
·
experimentation, in which the scientist designs
and executes a practical exercise to test the robustness of his theory,
preferably against non-obvious predictions; and,
·
synthesis, in which the scientist determines, on
the basis of the results of his experiments, whether his thesis has succeeded
(so far) in explaining the observed phenomenon; has partially succeeded, and
must be modified; or has been falsified, and must be abandoned.
The
scientist then publishes his work – including his observations, thesis,
experimental design, methodology, data and conclusions – as an invitation to
other scientists to reproduce his results in order to test their validity, and
thus evaluate the credibility of his conclusions. This process might best be characterized as
‘evolutionary’ – a ‘survival of the least unfit’, as it were, through which
theories endure repeated scrutiny and testing, and are considered
“corroborated” only for so long as they are not undermined by – to borrow
Huxley’s phrase – an “ugly fact.”
This is
the point at which the AGW thesis stands today.
The cornerstone of the theory is that atmospheric concentration of
carbon dioxide is the key driver of global temperature, and that as the former
increases, so will the latter.
Successive iterations of IPCC reports have unswervingly predicted that
average global temperatures will rise in lockstep with atmospheric CO2.[26] This
has not happened. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere has increased steadily since the middle of the 19th Century,
while global temperatures rose and fell cyclically, following a slight upward
trend. More recently, despite a
continuing increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, global temperatures
peaked in 1998, levelled off for several years, and have, since 2002, steadily
declined. Global temperatures have been
falling for the past seven years. This
is not opinion; it is not the output of an elaborate computer model; it is observed data, gathered using the most
accurate global temperature-measuring equipment ever devised.[27] And it directly contradicts the predictions
of the AGW thesis.
At this
point, any scientist who respected the strictures of the scientific method
would return to the drawing board and attempt to devise a new theory that
better explains the observed, cyclical nature of climate. But the proponents of the AGW thesis have
instead retrenched, clinging to their theory, indulging in increasingly
fantastic rhetoric, offering ad hominem
arguments in place of sound science, appealing to public hysteria, and even, in
some cases, appearing to play fast and loose with results and the statistical
interpretation thereof – all in an attempt to firm up the rapidly dissolving
ground upon which their “beautiful theory” rests.[28]
These tactics have been combined with
unprecedented political pressure, both at the national level and in
international fora, aimed at convincing politicians to take quick, radical and
irrevocable action to respond to the alleged climate crisis. Qui
bono – who stands to gain? – is a vital question in any legal
proceeding. Politicians being pressured
to enact costly measures to respond to something that does not appear to be a
crisis at all owe their constituents the courtesy of asking it.
This paper
does not purport to offer an overview of the multifarious aspects of the AGW
thesis; these have been well-publicized in recent years, and ought to be
familiar to all readers (indeed, supremely familiar; no movie about Maxwell’s
discovery of the displacement current, or Einstein’s work on relativity, or
even Newton’s invention of the calculus, has ever won an academy award for
“best documentary”). Rather, it aims to
enumerate the principle objections – largely scientific, but also historical,
economic, political and strategic – to that thesis, and their implications for
the Western countries that are preparing to cripple their economies in
obedience to the demands of the alarmists.
This is
not, in short, an examination of the relative merits of two equally meritorious
points of view. By the standards of
empirical science, the AGW thesis has been proven to be devoid of merit, and
lies dead at the hands of data it is unable to explain. This paper enumerates and discusses the “ugly
facts” that killed it.
The first
four chapters of this paper discuss scientific observations and analyses that demonstrate
that the AGW thesis has been falsified.
These are:
·
first, that it is not unusually warm;
·
second, that it is in fact getting colder;
·
third, that there is no significant correlation
between either atmospheric carbon dioxide or human industrial activity and
average global temperature, and therefore no evidence that anthropogenic CO2 emissions play a significant
role in driving climate; and,
·
fourth, that there is a significant correlation,
suggesting a causal relationship, between solar activity and global temperatures,
suggesting that the Sun, not human-produced greenhouse gases, is the principal
driver of the Earth’s climate.
The last four
chapters discuss historical, strategic and analytical interpretations of the
sources, content and implications of the “global warming” debate, in order to
provide a broader and deeper understanding not only of where the climate panic
comes from, but also of what may be at stake if the Western world continues
down the path urged by the alarmists.
These are:
·
fifth, that if history is any guide, attempts by
governments to regulate carbon are an invitation to speculation, fraud and
economic catastrophe;
·
sixth, that ‘climate change’ is not a ‘threat’
in any sense of the word;
·
seventh, that the climate panic is the result of
the systematic betrayal of science, for which its proponents ought, by their
peers and by the general public that they have misled, to be held accountable;
and
·
eighth, that attempts by governments to regulate
and reduce “carbon emissions” are likely to be both costly and damaging to the
economies of their states; and that to persist in such attempts in the face of
scientific evidence that human-produced carbon dioxide plays no significant
role in determining climate would constitute impardonable folly.
This paper
does not discuss policy implications for individual government
departments. This is because the
potential consequences – economic, societal, strategic, political – of
governments continuing to act as though the AGW thesis has not been falsified
are of national, and indeed international, import. Moreover, internal departmental policies are
rarely internally evolved, but tend instead to derive from federal legislation,
regulations and policies. It is
therefore at the national level that a change of course is required. Readers
are of course free to apply my arguments and conclusions to other activities and
policies below the Federal level as they see fit.
It is
hoped that the following discussion of the “ugly facts” about the great climate
panic will serve to shed a little long-overdue light onto a debate that has
been almost entirely subsumed in political manoeuvring, pecuniary interest, ideology,
and base emotion. No good can come of
allowing a fundamentally scientific question to be decided on the basis of anything
other than robust empirical science.
NOTES
[1] Roger Pielke, Jr., during a Q&A
with the Centre for Environmental Journalism, 8 January 2009
[http://www.cejournal.net/?p=607].
[2] “No matter what happens, someone
will blame global warming”, Fox News, 23 December 2008 [http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,472084,00.html].
[3] Patrick White, “Global Warming to
hit nether regions”, Globe and Mail, 15 July 2008 [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080715.wlstones15/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20080715.wlstones15].
[4] “Beer lovers told to beware of
global warming”, MSNBC.com, 8 April 2008 [http://www.msnbc.msn. com/id/24011745/].
[5] Richard Luscombe, “Surge in fatal
shark attacks blamed on global warming”, Guardian.co.uk, 4 May 2008 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/04/wildlife.climatechange].
[6] David Adam, “Whales losing blubber,
claims controversial Japanese study”, Guardian.co.uk, 26 August 2008 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/26/whaling.conservation].
[7] Josiah Ryan, “Global Warming led to
‘Blackhawk Down’, Congressman Says”, CNSnews.com, 11 July 2008 [http://www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/Article.aspx?rsrcid=32291].
[8] John Roach, “Penguin Chicks Frozen
by Global Warming?”, National Geographic News, 2 July 2008 [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-endangered-penguins.html].
[9] Elizabeth Wise, “Pythons could
squeeze lower third of USA”, USA Today online, 21 February 2008 [http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-20-burmese-pythons_N.htm].
[10] “Killer stingray found off British
coast as experts warn of mass invasion due to global warming”, Mail Online, 19
June 2008 [http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1027624/Killer-stingray-British-coast-experts-warn-arrive-global-warming.html].
[11] Bob Dow, “Veteran Loch Ness Monster
Hunter Gives Up”, DailyRecord.co.uk, 13 February 2008 [http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2008/02/13/veteran-loch-ness-monster-hunter-gives-up-86908-20317853/].
[12] Ted Turner, during an interview with
NBC’s Charlie Rose [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= mys_AQjM4U0&feature=related].
[13] For a far more comprehensive list of
the projected deleterious impacts of ‘global warming’, see
[http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm].
Among the many things likely to result are reduced crocodile sex, a
downturn in the haggis industry, more earthquakes, an increase in
witch-killings in Tanzania, a higher probability of nuclear war, and childhood
insomnia (presumably caused either by the higher probability of nuclear war, or
by being hectored about the size of their ‘carbon footprints’).
[14]
Robert Davis, “Cost of Global Warming: 1 Million Species”, USA Today, 1 July 2004 [http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2004-01-07-global-warming_x.htm]. In a remarkable example but highly revealing
of cognitive malfunction, one environmentalist recently told Time magazine that
global warming will cost the planet “hundreds of thousands to millions of
species, many of which we haven’t even
discovered yet.” Bryan Walsh, “The
New Age of Extinction”, Time.com, n.d. [http://www.time.com/ time/specials/packages/
article/0,28804,1888728_1888736,00.html].
[15] Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,
originally published in 1841 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1980), “The Witch
Mania”, 480.
[16]
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate
Change 2007 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers (Valencia, Spain:
12-17 November 2007), 5.
[17]
IPCC, “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report – Summary for Policymakers”,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 [http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
],Table SPM.1, 8.
[18] In his 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims that
sea levels could rise by up to twenty feet “in the near future.” This was one of nine claims subsequently
found by a British court to have been a misrepresentation of sciene.
[19]
“Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know.
Carbon dioxide would increase to 500 ppm or more. We would set the planet on a
course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 meters higher.” James Hansen, “The Sword of Damocles”, an
article submitted to the Observer, 15 February 2009 [http://www.sccsresources.org.uk/?p=1423].
[20] See J.A. Church et al., “Estimates
of the regional distribution of sea-level rise over the 1950-2000 period”, Journal
of Climate 17 (2004) p. 2609-2625;
and S.J. Holgate, “On the decadal
rates of sea level change during the twentieth century”, Geophysical
Research Letters 34: 10.1029/2006GL028492.
[21]
The data charts may be found at the University of Colorado sea level change
website [http://sealevel. colorado.edu/results.php].
[22] James Hansen, “A Letter to Obama”,
Guardian.co.uk, 1 January 2009 [http.www.guardian.co.uk/world/
2009/jan/01/letter-to-barack-obama].
[23] Robin McKie, “President ‘has four
years to save Earth’”, The Observer,
Sunday 18 January 2009,
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama].
[24] Barack Obama, accepting the
Democratic nomination for President, St. Paul, Minnesota, 3 June 2008
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/03/obamas-nomination-victory_n_105028.html].
[25]
The court ruling can be seen here [http://www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/gore/pdf/Al%20Gore%20ruling%20-%2010%20Oct.pdf];
the errors are detailed at pages 8-9. For a comprehensive but not
exhaustive overview of the film’s weaknesses and outright fabrications, see
Christopher Monckton, “35 Inconvenient Truths: The Errors in Al Gore’s Movie”,
Science and Public Policy Institute, 18 October 2007
[http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/ goreerrors.html].
[26]
See, for example, figure SPM.5 in the 2007 Summary for Policymakers, which show
all model projections predicting increased temperatures in response to
increasing CO2 concentrations.
IPCC, “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report – Summary for Policymakers”,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 [http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
].
[27]
Proponents of the AGW thesis tend to cleave to land-based thermometer records,
which show more warming over the past 150 years, and less cooling over the past
seven. Satellite temperature
measurements are far more accurate, cover the entire globe (including the 70%
that is not land), and are not contaminated by the Urban Heat Island (UHI)
effect – which, according to a recent study, can result in warming amounting to
as much as 1°C per century. This is
significant given that, according to the IPCC, the total warming experienced
since 1850 is only two-thirds that (0.6°C) – and given the fact that, until
now, the IPCC has maintained that the impact of the UHI effect on large area
temperature data is “an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a
century timescale”. P.D. Jones, D. H.
Lister, and Q. Li, “Urbanization effects in large-scale
temperature records, with an emphasis on China”, Journal
of Geophysical Research 113 (2008) D16122, doi:10.1029/2008JD009916 [http://www.agu.org/
pubs/crossref/2008/2008JD009916.shtml].
[28] A
wide variety of “horror stories” about the suppression of scientific research
contradicting the AGW thesis are detailed on the website maintained by US
Senator James Inhofe, of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public
Works. See [http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.
Blogs&ContentRecord_id=865dbe39-802a-23ad-4949-ee9098538277].
