2008 Harold Clough Lecture:
'The Politics and Science of Climate Change: The Wrong
Stuff'
OCCASIONAL PAPER Aynsley Kellow
I am pleased to present this lecture today in Perth.
I am particularly pleased to find that Perth is still here. I last visited
here in 2005 - the year that Professor Tim Flannery suggested that Perth could
become the first ‘ghost metropolis' due to reductions in rainfall because of
climate change.
I must confess that I was somewhat bemused by this statement, because my
visit to Perth was to present a paper on water policy under climate
uncertainty. I knew from my research for that paper that Perth was in fact
better adapted to uncertainty in its water supply than any other capital city.
Perth and the south-west of the state have suffered a decline in rainfall,
which appears to have shifted to the north-east. The cause appears to be not
the gradual accumulation of greenhouse gases, but a sudden shift in ocean
currents. This decline in rainfall has translated into a marked decline in
catchment yields thanks to changed catchment management, and an increased yield
can be obtained by thinning catchments.
Regardless, Perth has adapted to its natural environment with a number of
responses: demand management; use of aquifers; the construction of the Kwinana
industrial recycling plant; and now a desalination plant.
Professor Flannery was, of course, talking nonsense - but, as sales of his
book The Weathermakers
and his subsequent selection as ‘Australian of the Year' showed, this is
popular nonsense.
As Arthur Herman has shown in his book The
Idea of Decline in Western History, the proposition that we are all
going to hell in a handcart is a recurrent and persistent idea. From the
neo-Malthusianism of the Club of Rome to Y2K to bird flu pandemics, modern
society has demonstrated that, despite the triumph of reason over belief in the
Enlightenment (and the enormous improvements in human welfare it brought) it
has more in common with the apocalypticism of numerous millenarian movements
than it would readily admit.
Malthusian sentiment still abounds. Paul Watson, Founder of the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society thinks mankind is ‘acting like a virus' and
called for the human population to drop to less than 1 billion.
The head of the Science Museum in London and former head of the British
Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley, also thought we should get rid of a few billion
people - in the future in his case: ‘I'm not advocating genocide,' said Rapley,
reassuringly. He simply wanted to use ‘contraception, education and healthcare'
to stop the world's population from reaching its current projected peak of 8-10
billion.
Aspects of Christianity (especially the Book of Revelation), Marxism and
National Socialism (with its promise of a ‘Thousand Year Reich') all contain
elements of millenarianism. But just as we can be Christians or Marxists
without signing up as millenarians, so can we be concerned about the
environment without signing up for the Apocalypse.
I know of only one book-length study of environmentalism describing it as a
middle-class millenarian movement. This probably reflects the fact that most of
us support the cause of environmental protection, and we tend to be less
prepared to submit our own beliefs to critical scrutiny than we are those of
others. I have to confess to being a recovering neo-Malthusian, having once
stood for elected office for an ecological political party.
I mention all of this because it reminds us that non-rational beliefs
continue to hold us in their sway even when we think we have left them well
behind. And those non-rational beliefs can affect both the conduct of science
and the risk assessments we collectively make on the basis of science.
The point I want to develop in this lecture is that environmental
protection does not require that we adhere to millenarian beliefs, or
ecocentric political philosophies, or biodynamic agriculture, or any of the
other ‘New Age' or other non-rational elements we can find in contemporary
environmentalism.
Rather, good environmental policy requires that we reject such beliefs and
uphold the Enlightenment commitment to sceptical, rational humanism. This also
requires open contestation of science and the rejection of the idea that
science can be too closely embedded within the affairs of the state. In other
words, it requires the political liberalism that also emerged from the
Enlightenment.
This is because the conduct of both science and politics require openness
and contestation. Government, as Bernard Crick once observed, is not synonymous
with politics, and governments do not always celebrate the playing out of
political debate. They seek to impose authoritative decisions, rather than
celebrate alternative points of view, and this makes official endorsement of
science particularly dangerous.
Yet officially endorsed science is what we have with climate change.
Governments have not only endorsed a particular point of view with respect to
an area of science that is inherently uncertain, but they have gone the extra
step of attempting both to marginalise competing points of view and convince
their own citizens of the correctness of their interpretation in paid
advertisements aimed at convincing the public of the seriousness of the
situation.
These are dangerous moves. I feel a little uncomfortable when a government
spends my money to tell me whether and when I should be concerned. I'm
old-fashioned enough to think I should be telling them.
The attempt to marginalise dissenting views is best exemplified by the use
of the term ‘Denier'. It has been used not just by Climate Change Minister
Penny Wong and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but by their adviser Professor Ross
Garnaut. They all should know better.
To question the attribution of the current state of the Murray-Darling
Basin to ‘climate change', rather than (more correctly) to mismanagement and
over-allocation is not to deny anything, but - rightly - to speak truth to
power. (Senator Wong needs look no further than the Bureau of Meteorology
rainfall records in the Basin to see that the current drought is not
unprecedented).
Fortunately, we have some curmudgeonly types who are prepared to subject
official science to critical scrutiny. For example, Ian Castles, the former
Australian Statistician, drew our attention recently to an inconsistency
between the dire projections of increased drought frequency in a (non-peer
reviewed) CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology report for the government, and a couple
of peer reviewed papers produced by some of the same authors.
It is instructive to ask where the use of the expression ‘Denier' came
from. It was first used, as far as I can tell, in an attempt to attack Bjorn
Lomborg for his apostasy in suggesting the global environment was getting
better, not worse according to most accepted statistical indicators.
Having misused the expression ‘sceptic' - a badge of honour for any
scientist worth their salt - as a term of criticism, environmental activists
and activist scientists quite deliberately sought to liken those who questioned
the prevailing consensus on climate change to Holocaust deniers. This was quite
shameful spin - but they have succeeded in having ministers and even prime
ministers repeat the calumny.
Lomborg was excoriated because, among other things, he was not a ‘climate
scientist'. This is an interesting charge, because it is not clear what counts
as ‘climate science'. But it is a charge that is frequently levelled against
dissenters, but rarely levelled against those supporting the prevailing
consensus.
Understanding the global climate system is beyond any individual or
individual scientific discipline. It involves not just specialisations such as
meteorology and atmospheric physics, but oceanography and glaciology. It also
requires a good knowledge of statistics - Lomborg's discipline. It is
necessarily, as the historian of science Spencer Weart pointed out, a
collective undertaking. Collective decisions must be made about
simplifications, adjustments to data, and so on. This means, of course, that it
is inevitably socially constructed - though (as Weart was quick to add)
this does not mean it is only
a social construction.
An interesting question these days is what actually qualifies a scientist
as a ‘climate scientist'. One's qualifications as a climate scientist appear to
depend not upon one's formal qualifications, but upon the soundness of ones
views, whether one says ‘The Right Stuff.' Lomborg's credentials were
questioned in a way that Professor Flannery's have not been. Yet Professor
Flannery, as a palaeontologist, would appear to be no better qualified than Professor
Lomborg to pass comment on climate change matters.
Lomborg, it should be noted, largely confines himself to policy matters,
such as priority setting; Flannery's expertise seems to know no bounds - he has
commented not only on the causes of climate change and its impacts, but policy
matters and even international negotiation processes.
Professor Flannery receives a free pass because he says The Right Stuff.
Many climate scientists turn out to have degrees in disciplines like
biology and chemistry. As with Flannery, few have questioned their right to
speak on climate science - even on issues where they would seem to lack
expertise. They say The Right Stuff.
NASA was once described by Tom Wolfe as having ‘The Right Stuff', but there
is evidence that it now has The Wrong Stuff.
Interestingly, of the main datasets that track ‘mean global temperature' at
the surface, the one that is an outlier (in that it tends to show the most
warming in the recent past) is the so-called GISTEMP series maintained by
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by James Hansen.
Let's leave aside for a moment the scope for social construction to affect
the business of constructing highly complex models of the coupled
atmosphere-ocean system, having them duplicate to a reasonable extent the
recent climate history, inputting emissions scenarios based upon some economic
scenarios and projecting the future climate 100 years hence. Let's just focus
on the business of producing this global mean surface air temperature (or
Note that, ironically, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies prefers
surface temperatures manually recorded to satellite data - the only true global
record.
The Goddard Institute website (responsible official James E. Hansen) tells
us that this is a measure that depends enormously upon the assumptions made.
Whether we measure temperature 5ft, 10ft or 50ft above the ground makes a
difference. As Hansen states: ‘To measure
Then there is the problem of constructing a mean - which is problematic,
even on a daily basis for one location, let alone for a global annual mean.
Again, in Hansen's words:
‘Again, there is no universally accepted correct answer. Should we note the
temperature every 6 hours and report the mean, should we do it every 2 hours,
hourly, have a machine record it every second, or simply take the average of
the highest and lowest temperature of the day? On some days the various methods
may lead to drastically different results.'
This means that, even at the most fundamental level, climate science
requires that assumptions and manipulations must be made - to an extent that is
considerable. Data ain't data. They must be prepared for inputting into
computer models.
Novelist Michael Crichton once remarked (in the US context) that data is
not Democrat or Republican, it's data. But climate science provides
considerable scope for data to acquire values as it is prepared for models.
This makes the GISTEMP data series interesting.
Steve McIntyre is the amateur scientist who exposed the folly of Michael
Mann's ‘Hockey Stick' research that attempted to use proxies from tree rings to
rewrite the climate history of the past millennium. (Mann should have known
better than to mix environmentalism with tree rings: Henry David Thoreau, in a
supreme irony, died in 1862 of complications of a cold caught while counting
tree rings on a winter's day).
McIntyre has also audited the GISTEMP record, and showed that Hansen had
been manipulating his raw data by adjusting the pre-1970 data downwards by as much as 0.5°,
and his post-1970 figures upwards.
This, of course, has had the effect of amplifying the apparent recent warming.
McIntyre also found an error in the manipulation (essentially a Y2K error)
that shifted the warmest year in the US data record from the 1990s to the
1930s.
Hansen endorsed Kerry against Bush in the 2004 presidential election, and
has claimed that the Bush administration has attempted to muzzle him on climate
change. The Republicans were quick to point out that, since he had made
approximately 1,400 media interviews, the muzzle was not particularly
effective. You might suspect, therefore, that his data (after adjustment) might
be a little more Democrat than Republican.
Hansen, of course, has form. It was his testimony before a Congressional
committee in 1988 - 20 years ago - that got the contemporary concern over
climate change going. As Jonathon Lash, president of the World Resources Institute,
put it in a story in the Washington
Post to mark the 20th anniversary of his testimony:
‘Before Jim Hansen's testimony, global climate change was not on the political
agenda. . . . Hansen was clear, explicit and unequivocal.' It is instructive to
look at how that political effect was achieved.
The power of Hansen's testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural
Resources Committee was enhanced by the imagery - relayed on television - of
the participants sweating and in shirt sleeves, as the cloying humidity of a
hot June day in Washington ‘leaked in through the three big windows in [Room]
Dirksen 366 [and] overpowered the air conditioner....' as Post reporter David A.
Farenthold put it. Sitting on the committee that day was a young Senator from
Tennessee, Al Gore. In the chair was Senator Tim Wirth from Colorado, later to
serve in the Clinton-Gore administration as Under-Secretary of State for Global
Affairs, with carriage of climate change negotiations.
Farenthold reported that Hansen had hoped for a sweltering day to
underscore his message. He quoted Hansen as saying: ‘We were just lucky.'
There is a saying that you make you own luck, and that turned out to be the
case with Hansen.
Hansen's testimony was largely orchestrated by Hansen and Friends of the
Earth for maximum political impact. Rafe Pomerance, then President of Friends
of the Earth, arranged for Hansen to testify, which he did as a private citizen
to avoid the risk of censorship by his government employer. He was originally
to appear before the committee in November 1987, but he convinced Friends of
the Earth that his testimony would not have maximum impact in the cold of
autumn, and instead appeared on 23 June 1988, when Washington was sweltering in
a hundred degree summer day.
The leaking of the windows that overwhelmed the air conditioning system was
apparently given a helping hand by a Democrat staffer, who left the windows
open overnight. The air conditioning system didn't stand a chance. The windows
were framed.
As Andrew Revkin reported in the New
York Times in 1997, ‘To get the point across at the time, staffers
called the National Weather Service to be sure the hearing date would be a hot
one. "We had it on that day, and opened all the windows," Mr Wirth
recalled.'
This is not a practice that appears to be limited to Dr Hansen. NASA itself
posted on its website a satellite image of the minimum Arctic ice extent in
1979, which I used on the cover of my recent book. As sceptical climate
scientist Pat Michaels pointed out, this was the beginning of a series of
animated images that came at the end of a cool period, and told a story of
shrinking ice cover. But NASA did not have any data for the immediate polar
region for the first five years or so, so it simply made it up.
It placed a solid white disk over the North Pole, but did so ineptly, so
that the sharp edges of the disk can be clearly seen in several places.
If that is worrying enough, even more disconcerting is the fact that, once
discovered, NASA has not owned up to its deceit, but simply improved the
quality of its retouching, so that the falsification of the image is now much
better. This is not The Right Stuff.
It is a clear example of what Harry Frankfurt has called bullshit: the
deliberate creation of the impression that you know more than you do. Laura
Penny took this up in a book with a title that will resonate with anyone who
has been kept on hold on the telephone (does that exclude anyone?): Your
Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.
The fact that NASA would photoshop an image to enhance its persuasive power
is worrying. Even more worrying is the fact that it failed to notice for seven
years an error that inflated recent warming in the United States.
NASA, like any organization can develop ‘groupthink' - as the O-ring
problem with Challenger showed us, and as the null corrector problem with the
Hubble telescope showed us. There's an old joke among engineers about the
stages of any project, where ‘Praise for the Uninvolved' is followed by the
‘Search for the Guilty.' As shown by the searches for the guilty in the
Challenger and Hubble cases - the Rogers Commission and the Allen Commission
-NASA had problems with its organisational culture. Their science was good but
the sceptical culture needed for good quality assurance was lacking. The Right
Stuff had become The Wrong Stuff.
The problem is an example of what I call virtuous corruption, or what in
policing circles is known as ‘noble cause' corruption. It is sometimes defended
because it is all in a good cause. But it is always wrong.
The problem is many climate scientists have strong beliefs, but beliefs are
not scientific. One erroneous belief many have is that they adhere to what
Roger Pielke Jr has called a linear relationship between science and policy -
that science will compel a preferred set of actions. The virtual science using
computer models so common in climate science is seen as particularly valuable
in this quest, because it gives the appearance of objectivity. It is an example
of a political strategy the late Aaron Wildavsky called ‘Look! No hands!' We
must do as the science compels us! But we know, of course, that computers are
only as good as the assumptions and data fed to them: Garbage In produces
Garbage Out.
Without healthy scepticism and open disclosure of data and contestation of
ideas science can get it wrong. Even getting it wrong by a matter of degree
makes for bad policy. It leads to wrong priorities and poor choices and has
created a wasteful sense of urgency in international negotiations.
Everything we know about the development of effective international regimes
tells us that they are best built from the ground up, with the evolution of
shared understandings of causes and solutions, and respect for differences
between parties.
As Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner put it in the journal Nature last year, by rushing to
targets and timetables too soon, pushed by blaming and shaming tactics, we have
so far wasted 15 years during which a more successful climate change agreement
could have been developed more slowly.
I will predict here and now that we are highly unlikely to get an effective
agreement in Copenhagen next year, and we will continue to waste time and money
making more haste but less speed, and thinking - wrongly - that misconstrued
and exaggerated science can ever serve as the basis for good policy.
The climate change problem is inherently one of making decisions over the
very long term, under conditions of considerable uncertainty. Misrepresenting
the problem as one where we can (with any degree of accuracy) set the global
thermostat by limiting atmospheric CO2 to any particular level is
not productive in the long run.
Neither is defining the problem as one where we should necessarily focus on
mitigating CO2 to the neglect of adaptation or other mitigation
efforts.
For all my criticism of James Hansen, I am a strong supporter of what became
known as the Hansen Alternative Scenario, which involved pursuing ‘no regrets'
options to mitigate CO2 but a focus on other climate forcing factors
that could be mitigated more readily, in a technical sense, more cheaply, or
with greater co-benefits.
One such forcing factor was black carbon soot from inefficient combustion
of diesel or of biofuels in places like India, where indoor air pollution kills
an estimated 150,000 (mostly women and children) each year. Such options offer
opportunities for investment that might actually improve the chances of
securing international agreement from developing countries.
But, in putting this scenario forward, Hansen was offering The Wrong Stuff.
He was misrepresented by the journal Nature,
which then refused to print his corrective correspondence. And he was
excoriated by the Union of Concerned Scientists for providing President Bush
with a possible alternative to Kyoto. (Actually, what we need is a Union of
Disinterested Scientists!)
This is a state of affairs that should be of concern to us no matter what
our political allegiances. In a recent essay, Rudd Government Minister Craig
Emerson reminded us all that the great improvements in human welfare have
stemmed from the advances of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on science,
rationality, and humanism and their triumph over mere belief.
Where scepticism is at the heart of science, belief is its enemy.
Psychologist Leon Festinger developed his theory of cognitive dissonance to
explain our ability to deflect information that might challenge our dearly held
beliefs. Festinger was also the co-author (with Riecken and Schachter) of a
study into the response of a modern millenarian movement when confronted by
evidence that their forecasts of apocalypse have not been met. Their
observations are worth quoting:
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and
he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal
to logic and he fails to see your point. But man's resourcefulness goes beyond
simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his
whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he
has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is
presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief
is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only
unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.
Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other
people to his view.
When Prophecy Fails,
1956
If climate science is not to fit this description, it must celebrate
scepticism and the challenging of beliefs, not marginalise dissent with terms
like ‘denier.' And the institutions of government, be they NASA or the
Australian government, must foster the dissident culture upon which the
Enlightenment was based, not the culture of conformity that currently pervades
climate science and climate policy.
At present, I believe we have The Wrong Stuff, and that means - to use a
line from Apollo 13 - ‘Houston, we have a problem.'
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