No, that voice is not mine, but any voice of reason in the smoke and dust and the hysterical pronouncements surrounding the leaked e-mails is difficult to find; once found it deserves to be shared.
I try, imperfectly, to operate to some basic principles. One, relating to this blog, is that it is devoted to information, ideas, news and fun that interest me and illustrate the stories that sand can tell and the journeys it can take us on; it's been called a "niche" blog, and I'm happy with that. What it is not is a platform for my opinions (of which I readily admit to having many) or antagonistic debate. But just once in a while, something comes up that prompts me to make a brief exception, to stray from my theme into an area that is not strictly arenacaeous. I last did so over the Simon Singh case and the dire relationship between science and the British libel laws, and now "climategate" prompts another departure.
Another principle that I try to adhere to in life in general is that, in public and professional life, I will only express my views on topics that I know something about; privately (as my wife will testify to), I can become vocally excited about all kinds of issues. As a scientist, I am particularly exercised by the portrayal of our world in exclusively black and white terms by individuals and organisations with axes to grind and by people who set themselves up to pontificate on topics for which they have no credentials to do so. If science tells us anything, it's that we live in world characterised by a glorious spectrum of shades of gray, a spectrum that we should relish rather than seek to portray it as black and white.
As, over the last week or so, I have sought facts or at least authoritative and credible opinion on the case of the Climatic Research Unit e-mails, it has been once again driven home to me how naive I am in restricting public pronouncements to topics on which I like to think I have some credibility - the media and the internet are, in many ways, a free-for-all. In the UK recently, for example, we have been treated in the Guardian and television's Channel 4 news (neither of them exactly from the muck-raising hysterical end of the media spectrum) to the views of the founder of "The Global Warming Policy Foundation." Now this title would seem to carry intellectual gravitas - I certainly presumed so. Until I discovered that the founder is a social anthropologist in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool's John Moores University (as distinct from Liverpool University) and that the chairman (and co-founder) is Nigel (sorry, Lord) Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher and prominent denouncer of climate science.
Irritated, but undeterred, I continued with my quest. And I found Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia and founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a body with, for me, greater credibility than the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He's the author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, a book recently published by Cambridge University Press (and one that I should now read), and a thoughtful - and informed - commentator on these issues. In an atmosphere within which some scientists seem, quite frankly, to have lost the plot and provided grist to the cacophonous mills of those who make a living out of vilifying science, Hulme's is a refreshing voice of reason. A couple of days ago, the online Wall Street Journal carried a piece by him that struck me as excellent, and so I have reproduced it below; for further reading, try The Five Lessons of Climate Change: a personal statement, and much more via his website.
The Science and Politics of Climate ChangeScience never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete.
By Mike Hulme
I am a climate scientist who worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s. I have been reflecting on the bigger lessons to be learned from the stolen emails, some of which were mine. One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence.
Surveys of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic about man-made climate change continue to tell us something politicians know only too well: The citizens they rule over have minds of their own. In the U.K., a recent survey suggested that only 41% believed humans are causing climate change, 32% remained unsure and 15% were convinced we aren't. Similar surveys in the U.S. have shown a recent reduction in the number of people believing in man-made climate change.
One reaction to this "unreasonableness" is to get scientists to speak louder, more often, or more dramatically about climate change. Another reaction from government bodies and interest groups is to use ever-more-emotional campaigning. Thus both the U.K. government's recent "bedtime stories" adverts, and Plane Stupid's Internet campaign showing polar bears falling past twin towers, have attracted widespread criticism for being too provocative and scary. These instinctive reactions fail to place the various aspects of our knowledge about climate change—scientific insights, political values, cultural moods, personal beliefs—in right relationship with each other. Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and value systems.
If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore "has to be done," then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it. . . and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty.
The events of the last few of weeks, involving stolen professional correspondence between a small number of leading climate scientists—so-called climategate—demonstrate my point. Both the theft itself and the alleged contents of some of the stolen emails reveal the strong polarization and intense antagonism now found in some areas of climate science.
Climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles. The consequence is that science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums for ideological battles are ignored.
We have also seen how this plays out in public debate. In the wake of climategate, questions were asked on the BBC's Question Time last week about whether or not global warming was a scam. The absolutist claims of two of the panelists—Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips, and comedian and broadcaster Marcus Brigstocke—revealed how science ends up being portrayed as a fight between two dogmas: Either the evidence for man-made climate change is all fake, or else we are so sure we know how the planet works that we can claim to have just five or whatever years to save it. When science is invoked to support such dogmatic assertions, the essential character of scientific knowledge is lost—knowledge that results from open, always questioning, enquiry that, at best, can offer varying levels of confidence for pronouncements about how the world is, or may become.
The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.
Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don't know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.
Similarly, we endow analyses about the economics of climate change with too much scientific authority. Yes, we know there is a cascade of costs involved in mitigating, adapting to or ignoring climate change, but many of these costs are heavily influenced by ethical judgements about how we value things, now and in the future. These are judgments that science cannot prescribe.
The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been "done" or "is settled"; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it. This is one reason why British columnist George Monbiot wrote about climategate, "I have seldom felt so alone." By staking his position on "the science," he feels alone and betrayed when some aspect of the science is undermined.
If climategate leads to greater openness and transparency in climate science, and makes it less partisan, it will have done a good thing. It will enable science to function in the effective way it must do in public policy deliberations: Not as the place where we import all of our legitimate disagreements, but one powerful way of offering insight about how the world works and the potential consequences of different policy choices. The important arguments about political beliefs and ethical values can then take place in open and free democracies, in those public spaces we have created for political argumentation.
The emails are a reminder that even scientists are falliable and human. If data has been massaged and deleted then their actions are to be rightly condemned.
But a larger issue still exists. Climate change is happening, glaciers have not stopped retreating, C02 levels are increasing, species are responding to changes in temperature and the oceans are growing more acidic among many other worrisome trends.
Even if it is still un-settled as to whether climate change is mostly the result of human activities, the reality is that the horrendous waste and amount of energy and resources we are consuming today cannot persist indefinitely.
The loss of biodversity,species extinction, freshwater depeletion, fisheries collapse are real issues that are impacting all us no matter how much some will want to scream hoaxes and remain in insular denail of a larger biological reality that is the absolute foundation of our lives on this planet.
Sooner or later we will have the alter our prodigious waste of energy by hopefully engaging new technologies and adopting mature behaviors that respect real conseravtion and wise use of resources.
Sometimes when I read the extreme reactions of climate change denailists and other reactionaries screaming about AGW conspiracies and how freedom will be sacrificed by adopting energy conservation, I think many of these people just don't want to soberly accept that in a world of 7 billion and counting, we all have shared responsibilities to clean up our messes,practice "real" conservatism and be responsible for our actions.
In this modern world there is hardly anything we do that does not affect for good or bad someone or something else. It is impossible to compatmentalize the world anymore into isolated regions or nations.
We are all in this together for better or worse.
Posted by: jules | December 09, 2009 at 02:03 PM
I agree completely, Jules. The thing that bothers me is that the spectrum of opinion is so broad and the voices of vested interests so loud, that the facts become secondary to the "hot air" of the so-called debate. The fact is, regardless of the relative correctness of this graph or that graph, or the accuracy of a given prediction, that we are doing stupid and unnnecessary things to the planet. A simple glance out of my window reminds me every night - why are the lights in the office buildings of London still burning brightly? It seems to me that, communally, we await some global solution when in reality there are so many simple things (the "low-hanging fruit")that we could and should be tackling regardless - things that just make sense. For example, I was struck by an article in the New York Times recently on sealing up methane gas leaks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/business/energy-environment/15degrees.html,
plus a follow-up piece in The Guardian here in in the UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/26/network-climate-change
Posted by: Sandglass | December 10, 2009 at 11:16 AM
Thanks Michael,
I agree also about the small things that can be easily be done to conserve energy starting with all the unnecessary lighting in skyscrapers and other places at night.(not to mention the light pollution issue) I read that Chicago is trying to get owners of their tall buildings to turn off lights at night for energy conservation, but also in the spring and fall to keep migratory birds from colliding with them as they often do. Chicago is also experimenting with green roofs on public buildings.
I think there is a real grassroots effort being made by individuals and businesses to be more green, but it will take a Manhatten type project to address the major energy issues we face.
The bright side is that it could spur on perhaps millions of new jobs, small businesses and companies around the world implementing new innovations to save energy and generate alternative energy. I know some countries in Europe are already making forward thinking advances on these issues. China is being forced to develop green technology and implementing major conservation/restoration efforts because of their myopic and impatient desire to be a economic superpower. Their ecology is being heavily damaged by mega scale development.
Maybe the next step in our social evolution is going to have to focus on ecological restoration and conservation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
Posted by: jules | December 10, 2009 at 08:50 PM