Following the recent post on Monbiot’s war on ‘liberatians’, Alex Cull points towards Monbiot’s latest article in his ….

Bruenig explains what is now the core argument used by conservatives and libertarians: the procedural justice account of property rights. In brief, this means that if the process by which property was acquired was just, those who have acquired it should be free to use it as they wish, without social restraints or obligations to other people.

[…]

Climate change, industrial pollution, ozone depletion, damage to the physical beauty of the area surrounding people’s homes (and therefore their value) – all these, if libertarians did not possess a shocking set of double standards, would be denounced by them as infringements on other people’s property.

It is frightening to think that Monbiot has taught politics and environmental policy at UK Universities; the students really would be better taught by simply being at the pub. Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons is a primary text in any course on environmental politics:

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance–that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of “like father, like son” implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust–but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

In 1968, private property was understood — by Hardin at least — as the way to best protect the environment from over-exploitation. How can Monbiot not know this?

Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons lays the ground for much environmental regulation. Carbon markets are owed to the logic he proposes: the privatisation of the ‘commons’ — the atmosphere. What Monbiot doesn’t get is that you can use the ‘environment’ to make an argument for the abolition either of the commons, or of private property. The argument made on this blog is that between Hardin’s and his own times, political arguments are increasingly framed in terms of their environmental ‘necessity’, precisely because advocates of the arguments fail to make them persuasively on their own terms. It is moral blackmail, in other words… ‘Abolish private/public property, or the planet gets it…’ rather than an appeal to your conscience or ability to reason.

And that is why those of a greenish bent also seem preoccupied with the general public’s faculties of reason. Monbiot questions it routinely. Chris Mooney goes even further, suggesting that the differences between individuals on the left and right can be explained biologically, as can such individual’s attitudes towards scientific evidence. As discussed previously on this site, the fact that Mooney, the liberal, finds that liberals are more rational hardly needs an explanation. What is interesting, however, is the tendency of many — not just of the left, as it happens, as Hardin shows — to form scientific perspectives on the political/social world.

I feel somewhat annoyed that I may have flattered Monbiot by making him the subject of the last three posts here. In fact, I think he gets too much attention. It would be generous to say that he has even a mediocre grasp of his subject. The fact is though, that in this respect, he epitomises environmentalism. Ideas such as Monbiot’s and Mooney’s are in vogue amongst a narrow, sector of society. But it would be a great mistake to imagine that Monbiot and Mooney had much to do with their success.

Monbiot’s attempt to explain ‘denial’ as an expression of a particular political idea or philosophy is an attempt to draw lines over the debate: to give it dimensions and coordinates, not unlike ‘left and right’. As long as he can make ‘libertarians’ and conservatives just look greedy by their emphasis on private property, he feels he can explain the climate change debate. Never mind what libertarians actually believe, what they have traditionally argued for, and that the history of these ideas crosses with environmentalism’s development. Monbiot wants simple categories — nouns, to which he can put faces, at which he can shout. And he wants simple coordinates to the debate: goodies and baddies. It’s not really a matter of his simplifying matters for expediency, it’s more a case of him struggling to fit the world into a schematic that already exists in his head. His rants about ‘libertarians’ are an attempt to have a debate without understanding it, and thus it reduces ultimately to being about the world’s failure to conform to Monbiot’s will. It’s all the fault of ‘libertarians’.

The fact that Monbiot has no idea what ‘libertarians’ are, nor what they say or stand for, nor how they were able to engineer the world as they wanted it is immaterial. They’re just against him, on his view. And that’s enough, for someone who can’t tell the difference between Monbiot and the world, to think that ‘libertarians’ want the end of the world. Environmentalism, if it is anything at all, is mediocrity and narcissism combined.

Happy new year.

Over in the Grauniad today, George Monbiot gets his new year knickers in an unfestive knot over the failure of the Daily Mail’s prediction of a cold winter.

“Brrr-ace yourselves! Britain to shiver in -20C in WEEKS as councils stockpile extra grit”. So the Mail on Sunday warned us in October. Blizzards, snowdrifts, locusts with the faces of men and the teeth of lions: we would become, it cheerfully assured us, prey to every nightmare nature could devise.

Last week the story flipped. “December has sprung! Spring blooms arrive early and autumn blossom lingers… so what happened to our winter?” I scoured the text but could find no mention that the Mail had forecast the polar opposite.

The issue for Monbiot is that the Mail takes a more sceptical view of climate change than the paper he writes for.

This is the newspaper group which led the crowing about the barbecue summer that never was. In April 2009 the Meteorological Office announced that “summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer”. In the event, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth. From its offices on Mt Ararat, the Daily Mail called down the wrath of God on the weathermen, who had been proven “hopelessly wrong” and were now “left red-faced”.

According to Monbiot, the UK Met Office had refused to confirm predictions of a cold winter given by the then Secretary of State for Transport, Phil Hammond at the Conservative Party conference in the Autumn. The Met Office, of course, had been embarrassed by a slew of precisely wrong long-range weather forecasts about mild winters and ‘barbecue summers’. The Mail, and other papers, had sought instead forecasts from private forecasters.

Who are they, and what are their credentials? I have been trying to obtain answers from Exacta since 20 December, without success. Among other questions, I asked whether it is true that the company consists of one undergraduate student and a computer.

You have to admire the bravery, tenacity and a tonne of other virtues possessed by this noble investigative journalist. OTHER NEWSPAPERS ARE GETTING THE WEATHER WRONG, AND I’M FINDING OUT WHY…

It’s not FAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIR, discovers Monbiot.

Unlike the Met Office, the alternative forecasters are neither roasted nor frozen out when they get it wrong. In 2010, for example, the Daily Mail announced that “the country really is on course for a barbecue summer”. This time, it told its readers, the prediction “comes from a forecaster with a somewhat better record on the subject than the poor old Met Office”. This was PWS – which has no published record at all. PWS told the Mail that “there will be stifling temperatures, making it possibly the warmest UK summer on record”. In fact it was an unremarkable summer, but there were no “red faces” at PWS. Nor has Philip Hammond been denounced as “hopelessly wrong”.

Monbiot seems to think that it is remarkable that there should be no outrage when an independent forecaster gets the weather wrong.

There is a subtext at work. The Met Office, like the BBC, is the subject of intense tabloid hostility, because it refuses to accept the consensus in the rightwing press that man-made climate change is a myth. Perversely, it prefers to rely on data. The incompetence of the Met Office and the superior skills of other forecasters are now part of the litany of climate change denial. Weather forecasting, in the hands of the press, has become a political science.

Well, by ‘right wing press’, Monbiot means only the Daily Mail. And it would be hard to detect a ‘consensus in the rightwing press that climate change is a myth’. There is no such consensus evident on the pages of the Times, for instance, nor the Telegraph, nor the Sun. The Telegraphs own environment correspondent, Louise Grey gets to hang out on Greenpeace’s ship with pop stars. What ‘consensus in the right wing press’?

There is no consensus, of course. What Monbiot does is imagine that the other newspapers have as inflexible editorial lines as The Guardian, and confuse his own need to conflate the issues of weather and climate for theirs, also. The two things being established in his own head as equivalent stories, any story about the weather which doesn’t contain a climate change narrative is, by fact of this omission, delivering ‘a subtext’. The problem for Monbiot is that his own subtext is far more noisy.

It was of course that the BBC and Met Office routinely used the weather to talk about climate change that drew the ire of sceptics. And rightly so. Warm winters and hot summers (oh, for a hot summer!) were canaries in the coal mine, harbingers of doom, and were causing the extinction of rare creatures on these shores. And even when the weather misbehaved, and was, erm, as it had been before climate change, there was still an opportunity for the climate message to be shouted. In January 2009, Monbiot wrote,

I have spent the last two evenings skating. Last night we laid lanterns out across the ice and swooped and swung and fell flat on our faces on this silent lake in mid-Wales, for hours by moonlight. I should have been in bed – I have a chest infection and a cold – but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

For the exhilaration of this primal game was shaded with sadness: all of us knew that this time might be our last. It is many winters since most of the lakes in England and Wales have frozen hard enough to support a skating party; with every year the chances of another one recede. The fuss this country has made about the current cold snap reminds us how rare such events have become.

A year later — in the middle of another very cold winter, Monbiot teamed up with the resident eco-ethicist, Leo Hickman to snap that

This is called weather, and, believe it or not, it is not always predictable and it changes quite often. It is not the same as climate, and single events are not the same as trends. Is this really so hard to understand?

By the return of the winter that year — which was extremely cold, once again — Monbiot needed a new narrative.

That snow outside is what global warming looks like
Unusually cold winters may make you think scientists have got it all wrong. But the data reveal a chilling truth.

Yes, Britain had suffered three record cold winters in a row… because of global warming.

And this year… There is not yet the severe cold that there has been in the previous years. And yet somehow… somehow… Monbiot has managed to spin a climate change story out of it!

On his own site, the subtitle to his most recent article pronounces that ‘weather forecasts became a political issue’.

If it is true, it was not the ‘rightwing press’ which politicised forecasts. It was the Guardian, the BBC, and the Met Office. The British have a fascination with weather, probably because it is so variable, which is why the Mail would have run the story. The failed weather forecast that the story covered, about which Monbiot now complains was not ‘politicised’. The story is politicised now, by Monbiot. It is he who gives it significance; he reads ‘subtext’ into a fairly uncomplicated article about the winter.

Delving deeper into the Climate Resistance archives, we find Monbiot making other claims about the Met Office and their predictions…

In 2008, Monbiot’s colleague, James Randerson wrote that,

This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.

The Guardian, of course, wanted to explain that this didn’t mean that global warming wasn’t happening… (read more here)

Monbiot saw the reaction to the article on the papers website, and threw a tantrum…

The most popular article on the Guardian’s website last week was the report showing that 2008 is likely to be the coolest year since 2000. As the Met Office predicted, global temperatures have been held down by the LaNiña event in the Pacific Ocean. This news prompted a race on the Guardian’s comment thread to reach the outer limits of idiocy.

According to Monbiot, the commenters below the line were an army of unthinking drones, as was pointed out on this blog.

Monbiot is frustrated that he has failed to convince people of his perspective. But rather than reflect on his own argument, which, as we can see is constructed out of sheer bullshit, he finds ways to show faults with people – ordinary, normal, everyday people, not just ‘bloggers’ – and damns the entire human race in the process. We are unthinking automata, objects, blindly obeying the forces that surround us. Only he knows the truth. But the truth that most people can sense is that Monbiot uses the status of scientific factoids, such as the Met Office’s dubious ‘prediction’ to convince people in the same way that a caveman seeks to persuade people with a club.

The Met Office had predicted the decline in temperatures, so that meant that the ‘evidence’ belonged to the global warming narrative. Equipped with The Official Truth, Monbiot was now free to pronounce on the mental acuity of the online masses, who saw things differently: they had been brainwashed.

But as had been pointed out here, the Met Office had not ‘predicted’ the cold temperatures.

At the beginning of 2007, the Met Office had predicted that the year would be one of the warmest yet. The BBC and Guardian covered the story credulously. La Nina turned up to upset them all.

The weather is our immediate, and perhaps our only day-to-day interaction with concept of ‘the climate’. Everything else in the climate debate is highly abstract, and removed from our experience by statistics. There was a desperate need to connect environmentalism’s claims to real life. Thus, climate alarmism emphasised the likelihood of increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather. Any outlier or other anomaly was explained as ‘a taste of things to come’. Monbiot pondered about ice-free winters. All the hopes for the future that environmentalists had were pinned on things like the progress of Arctic sea ice. Environmentalism needed a real-time event to give itself some purchase in the world — pictures to feed the rolling news world. It needed a 9-11, or a Cuban Missile Crisis, or maybe a tsunami. But Environmentalism’s Hollywood moment simply hasn’t materialised, as Monbiot lamented in 2007.

We see Monbiot here claiming to be an optimist and to have a positive view of human nature. He’s only kidding himself. The Met Orifice and perhaps others have learned their lesson: nature will not obey forecasts. Monbiot, if he’s learned that lesson, still has to remember that he cannot un-write the past. It’s still all there, in black and white, and available to anyone capable of reading. It was Monbiot and co who politicised weather forecasting. He was the one foretelling doom, and saying that we must urgently prepare ourselves for The End. He was the one crying ‘fools’ at those who did not believe him, and claiming that the non-believers had been brainwashed by evil, mind-controlling forces. He was the one making weather — and weather forecasts — the centre of his moral and political argument. He can’t now pretend that it’s the ‘rightwing press’ who are ‘politicising’ weather forecasts by not politicising it.

Often, environmentalist’s sense of triumph belies their actual intellectual reach. George Monbiot calls himself the winner of a debate with director of the Institute of Ideas, Claire Fox,

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

The debate is available here. George opens with the classic litany of ecological alarmism, concluding that the ‘vast majority of climate scientists believe that climate change is happening’. The mistake, of course, is to forget that many — perhaps even the majority of — climate sceptics believe that ‘climate change is happening’, too. What is at issue is the degree to which it is happening, and what kind of a problem climate change is. ‘Climate change is happening’ doesn’t mean anything by itself; it’s an entirely empty claim. Complex debates, presuppositions, prejudice and claims are collapsed into one neat axiom, and allowed only to be ‘true or false’. George looks at the ‘opinion of the majority of scientists’ and ‘the weight of scientific evidence’, but is unable to discuss the object of all that ‘science’ and scientific opinion. It means whatever he wants it to mean.

Given that the substance of arguments like Monbiot’s are put beyond reach — in to the hands of some scientists, somewhere, according to him — it is inevitable that any attempt at reasoned discussion will end in an impasse. And so it was, really, with the debate between Monbiot and Claire Fox. Here’s how it continued…

Monbiot: Do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?
Fox: Um. Rarely.
Monbiot: So what about the situation for instance that I witnessed in Romania, where lead smelting plants, because they’re not properly regulated, are free to produced toxic fumes which are greatly shortening the lives of peope who live nearby? That’s one type of freedom intruding on another, is it not?

Impasses such as these are often more interesting than arguments that reach a resolution. ‘Freedom’ is of course a much contested concept. And it is telling that ‘freedom’ in Monbiot’s argument is an essentially problematic thing in itself. Monbiot is convinced that Fox — a libertarian — will want to defend merely the freedom to pollute. But Fox has a more sophisticated understanding of freedom:

Fox: Well, I don’t think it’s freedom. I mean, I think there’s problems of pollution. I think no doubt that behaviour of certain big, industrial, corporate organisations is not beneficial to people.
Monbiot: I’m talking about a clear case where regulation would be reduced in the name of freedom that you’re discussing, where industries are less regulated and so more able to produce pollutants, like the lead smelters I saw in Romania. Do you not accept that those enhanced corporate freedoms to do as they wish, or enhanced freedoms of the rich people who run those plants, limit the freedom of the people who live nearby?
Fox: It’s very interesting because you said ‘those enhanced freedoms’. Freedom is not about enhancing or not; freedom by the way is a political freedom, and political freedom is not divisible. I want people to be free. And that, by the way, means …
Monbiot: [Interrupring] You’re talking about being free to pollute in this case…
Fox: Yeah… In that instance…
Monbiot: [interrupting] You want people to be free to pollute.
Fox: I want freedom. You’re… I appreciate that you are keen to get me to say that I am on the side of the nasty polluters…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] No no no no. I’m just trying to persue this question with you…

This ‘clear case…’, it seems, is a reflection on experiences that Monbiot had in Romania, in 2000. Let us put ourselves in Romania in 2000. What would we be interested in? Ever the environmentalist, rather than heading for the huge expanses of wilderness — apparently the largest and least ‘disturbed’ in Europe — he heads for the environmental disaster: people living near lead smelting plants. My question would probably be: why are people forced to live in such proximity to this kind of industry; it’s not as if there’s no space in Romania. But if we really wanted to understand the condition of Romanians in 2000, wouldn’t the events of just a decade earlier provide a better account of them?

Just ten years before Monbiot’s visit, Romania was ruled by one of the most brutal regimes in the Soviet Bloc. The context of people being exposed to fumes from lead smelting then, is a nascent democracy in the aftermath of decades of oppression. The legacy of Ceausescu’s tyranny is not the subject of the discussion, however. But shouldn’t that be the discussion? If we want to understand why there are smelting works next to human dwellings, and why people are unable to either move, or force a change of practice at the factory, we surely have to understand the political and historical situation in Romania. But George — like most environmentalists — prefers a much more simple model of the problem. The case is not as clear as Monbiot wanted us to believe.

Fox: What I’d like to then persue back to you, as you were good on asking that, is, you see regulation then, constantly, top-down, regulation, limits and so on as the way to free society. Is that right? You think that will ‘enhance’ freedom? That will allow people in Romania to have a freer society?
Monbiot: I think that if the lead smelters that I saw in Romania were less free and more regulated, then the people living around them would be more free of the horrible diseases and shortened life expectancy which they currently face. Now, I’ve answered your question, in a very straightforward way, you still have not answered mine.
Fox: They wouldn’t be less free by the smelters being regulated, because freedom is not the same as, in the way that you’re describing. Freedom is political rights question…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] Yes, and at the moment the political rights of the smelters is to be able to produce these fumes which are doing other people in.
Fox: Yes, but I’m actually talking about… I mean if you want to talk about the political freedoms of the people in Romania, what you need is actually a sense of freedom in Romania, to fight for your rights, equally. And you might then go out and fight the smelters, as it happens…
Monbiot: [Interrupting] Wait a minute, you’re dodging the question again. OK. You say…
Fox: Listen, George, I’m answering it in a way that you don’t find satisfactory. That is not quite the same as dodging it…

Fox is about to answer Monbiot’s question. Sensing progress, Monbiot interrupts. As Fox explains — or tries to — people in Romania should be free to challenge the polluting effects of lead smelting.

George’s sense of triumph was misplaced. Fox had not argued that people should be free to pollute others. But in Monbiot’s head, that was what she had been arguing for. It’s what he came prepared for. Monbiot had imagined that libertarianism stood for nothing more than simply being ‘against regulation‘, rather than an idea about what constitutes political freedom. Again, ‘freedom’ is a contested idea, but in Fox’s argument it was that a free society creates the possibility of autonomous citizens challenging polluting industry. Fox was not against ‘regulation’ after all.

This speaks about the very narrow conception of ‘freedom’ in environmentalism in general, and in Monbiot’s perspective in particular. He simply doesn’t understand the concept of political freedom, let alone the nuanced discussions about it. On that eco-centric perspective, ‘freedom’ is understood merely in terms of metabolic function: your freedom to emit substances interferes with my biological processes. Metabolic freedom, not political freedom. Absent from this view is the possibility that lead smelting can become a mutually-rewarding enterprise. No. Lead smelters can only be greedy bastards, and can only be stopped by regulation. Never mind that lead has utility in a free society, as do many other materials.

Monbiot: I don’t find it satisfactory becuase you’re not answering it. And in this particular case, what people… The very people I met… were doing were demanding that the factories should be restricted, through regulations imposed by the government. Were they wrong to do so?
Fox: I would disagree with them as that being the priority. Let’s bring it closer to home, because you will know that one of the things that happens here is that whenever there’s a dicussion for example about climate change, or the environment in this country, one of the things that is constantly urged is that people, for example, curtail their use of energy, change their behaviour, and the government are asked to impose those changes because you can’t trust the democracy to do it themselves. Now do you think that what we should do is actually have no regulations about energy use in this country — we should be able to be free to use whatever energy they want. You can try to persuade them something, but we should get rid of all green regulations, from this country, ‘cos that would be free wouldn’t it. They would be free then to make decision based on genuine political choices, rather than having it dictated by a government.
Monbiot: You precisely illustrate my point. We would be free to limit other people’s freedoms in that case, because we would be to reduce the quality of life of people who are much poorer than ourselves, who have much less agency than ourselves…
Fox: [Interrupting] No, I’ll tell you what you need for cleaner technologies, you need to actually argue for greater investment in R&D, actually have a vision that is not about limits, and natures revenege and worrying about cutting down CO2 emissions, a vibrant, healthy, future-oriented society that says the way forward is to develop lots of new technologies, to industrialise everything.
Monbiot: But let’s look at what’s going on in the UK for a moment, where we’ve got a situation right now, where we’re faced with a very clear choice. We either go down the fossil fuels route, and replace current generating capacity with gas and coal. Or we go down the low-carbon route and go to a mixture of renewables and nuclear technologies such as integral fast breed reactors and so on. Route two is not gonna happen unless route one is regulated away, because at the moment the cheapest option is to go for gas and coal.

Monbiot, the new advocate of nuclear power, argues as if he’s the first person to have ever thought of it, not as the person who campaigned against it for years. And even now he has no insight into what drove his anti-nuclear impulse. The same arguments persist in his claims about climate change that characterise the anti-nuclear argument: that it is too dangerous, that it allows profit to be made at the expense of safety, that it was being undemocratically foisted on a population that were lied to about the risks. The idea that he should have convince people of the merits of nuclear, or even the dangers of climate change, is lost on him.

Back to George’s Guardian article — an attack on Libertarianism…

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

It’s an interesting reflection on his failure to move past his impasse with Claire Fox. The notion of political freedom lost on Monbiot, he now considers himself the saviour of the poor.

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

And this is a point answered well by Dr Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance in a letter to the Guardian.

[Monbiot] claims we “pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free.” Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.

Monbiot has been banging on about ‘libertarians’ for years. And yet had he seen just one interview with Ron Paul, for instance — not that I am his biggest fan — on the subject of the economy, he would know that conservative libertarians are fiercely critical of the extant relationships between governments and banks, even in the United States of America! To criticise libertarians for ignoring the relationship between the state and banks would be not unlike criticising environmentalists for not ‘caring about nature’.

How can a man who purports to have an expert grasp on the world and its politics, fail so comprehensively to understand the very terms of the arguments he is taking issue with?

To make matters worse, Monbiot now turns to Isiah Berlin’s ‘two concepts of liberty’ essay.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side, and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms. These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty. It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

It is something of an irony that Monbiot — who, as we have seen, has barely more than an idiot’s grasp of the terms of the debate — complains about the misconception of ‘The great political conflict of our age’. He flatters himself with the claim that ‘social justice campaigners and environmentalists’ exist on one side of a historical battle, pitched against phantom ‘neocons, millionaires, and corporations’. ‘In reality’, claims Monbiot, ‘the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms’.

This much is plagiarised from Adam Curtis’ trilogy, The Trap: Whatever happened to our dream of freedom.

But while what Curtis’s excellent films show is a complex world without straight lines and full of paradoxes, Monbiot’s fantasy depicts just two sides: goodies (hooray!) and baddies (boo!). In article after article after article, the recurring theme is a shrill attempt to reduce the world’s complexities to simple moral coordinates: cave in to the conception of liberty peddled by the libertarians, and Africa will be scorched by drought and heat, the waves will inundate the reminder of the third world, and Romainian workers will be forced to inhale lead. This cartoonish perspective on the world reveals Monbiot’s absolute failure to see any depth in it.

The claim that ‘the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms’ is true, but prosaic. There is no ‘great political conflict of our age’. What defines this age is not some battle between One Concept of Liberty, but a dearth of political conflict — of ideas, or concepts — of any meaningful kind. The millionaires, corporations and even neocons (whoever they’re supposed to be when they’re not a figment of Monbiot’s imagination) are as likely as not to be doing all that they can to demonstrate their ‘ethical’ credentials, to be showing themselves to be ‘caring about the environment’, and the ‘social justice campaigners and environmentalists’ only too keen to help them. You cannot move in this world without bumping into eco-marketing. There are even ‘ethical banks’. There are billionaire philanthropists, who donate vast sums to environmental organisations. NGOs are given priviliged access to policy-making processes at national and supranational political institutions. There are no straight lines. There are no simple moral categories. Monbiot concludes…

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

In real reality, however, libertarianism — of either the kind espoused by Claire Fox or more conservative libertarians — is not a political force. Yet. The idea that it is powerful, or has been able to assert itself is a fantasy. It is an illusion that is owed to Monbiot’s failure to grasp the world, and to understand the claims libertarians make, and thus to identify ‘libertarianism’ or its influence in the real world. Libertarians are perhaps environmentalism’s (and Monbiot’s) most coherent and vociferous critics, and hence they appear to him as the harbingers of doom: like a spoilt infant, he can’t tell the difference between the end of the world and a challenge to his will, or criticism of his argument. ‘Libertarianism’ becomes an encompassing explanation of his own sense of inertia, just as ‘the climate’ serves as an encompassing account of all that is wrong with the world.

I have a story up on Spiked today…

It was the latest in a long series of last chances to save the planet. Like a convention of superheroes, 14,500 politicians, civil servants, journalists and campaigners from development and environmental NGOs descended on Durban, South Africa, for the seventeenth Committee of Parties (COP) meetings under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Their agreement, if they could reach one, would save the remaining 6,999,985,500 of us from certain doom.

Read more at Spiked…

I’m so bored… BORED… of climate change. Environmentalism is such a boring, boring, boring thing. It’s mundane. It’s banal. It obsesses about the minutiae of biological functioning only to the extent that it wants to limit the possibilities of human life, rather than extend them. And it is mean spirited — it nags you about whether children need those Christmas presents, if you need that holiday, if you really need to take the car. It’s a joyless, nihilistic chasm, which sucks the life out of life.

According to some definitions, ‘politics is the art of the possible’. I was reminded of this by two videos I came across recently.

The first is this misery-fest from the Post Carbon Institute (PCI).

Yeah. Merry Christmas.

What we have in that little animated skit from the greens is the art of the impossible. On the Post Carbon Institute’s view, “We have to live within nature’s budget of renewable resources at rates of natural replenishment.” These limits become the parameters of our existence: the complete regulation of our productive lives.

But there are other ideas in the world, which don’t seem to conform to this stifling orthodoxy.

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY from jason silva on Vimeo.

Taking his inspiration from physicist, David Deutsch, Jason Silva says, ‘If you look at the topogaphy of the island of Manhatten today, that topography is a topography in which the forces of economics and culture and human intent have trumped the forces of geology… extrapolating… that will be the fate of the whole universe.’

Trumping the forces of geology is, of course, anathema to the PCI.

I have no idea whether Jason Silva and David Deutsch would thank me for offering them as examples of thinking which sits at the opposite end of an axis to rank gutless miserablism. Perhaps the climate debate is one they would rather avoid — sensibly. It strikes me, however, that this should be the geometry of the debate about the future. To the PCI, history is a series of mistakes, which have taken us to the point of crisis. To the optimists, it is the foundation of ever greater leaps. The PCI speak of constraint, whereas the optimists speak about unleashing ever more creative potential. But there is an even more important difference.

Whereas the likes of the PCI have been able to turn their bleak vision into a system of ‘ethics’ and politics, the optimists’ ideas don’t seem to have any immediate moral consequences. There is no Intergovernmental Panel on Trumping Geology. On the contrary, there is only an intergovernmental panel on sobbing at our utter vulnerability in the face of geology. The impossibility of overcoming it — to any extent — is presupposed in the very foundations of the UNFCCC process: it discovers natural limits, and we are expected to codify them in international law. This is bizarre, not least because there are so many problems that can be faced by not taking seemingly ‘natural’ limits for granted. But also, because so much positive good cold be done in genuinely transforming the conditions of our existence by transcending such boundaries. Environmentalists seem to want them to remain in place. ‘Science’ in that arrangement is restrictive. On the optimists view, however, it liberates.

Environmental politics is about nothing more than regulation of eating, shitting, sleeping and f***ing: human life is reduced to these things, and each must be done ‘sustainably’, lest any opportunity for a more meaningful life opens up between them. So, the pessimists’ approach to the immediate problems facing the world is to regulate them out of existence. But poverty, war, famine and disease could not be abolished from the world by acts of international law intended to make the weather more ‘predictable’. Even if that did succeed, what would human life look like? A drab, miserable existence characterised by subsistence, in which each generation’s existence is identical to its parents’.

We see in the PCI’s animation, active hostility to progress — it is impossible. In the optimist’s video, there is dedication to the idea — the possibilities of human life expand indefinitely. We can argue forever about what ‘science says’ about the climate; the real debate is about its interpretation. The optimists need to recapture the moral and political ground from the miserablists.

The BBC’s Frozen Planet is continuing to fuel controversy. First, as discussed previously on this blog, the BBC’s decision to sell the seventh episode of the series — David Attenborough’s personal view of climate change and the crysophere — as an option led to screams and shouts from environmentalists. Environmentalists turned natural history into a morality tale.

A new brouhaha has broken out. A short opinion piece in the Radio Times — the BBC’s ‘what’s on TV’ guide — by Nigel Lawson has got polar Open University Polar Oceanographer Dr Mark Brandon all hot and sticky. Said Lawson,

Sir David Attenborough is one of this country’s finest journalists, and a great expert on animal life. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to global warming he seems to prefer sensation to objectivity.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that, while satellite observations do indeed confirm that the extent of arctic sea ice has been declining over the past 30 years, the same satellite observations show that, overall, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that the polar bear population has not been falling, but rising.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have mentioned that recent research findings show that the increased evaporation from the Arctic ocean, as a result of warming, will cause there to be more cloud cover, thus counteracting the adverse effect he is so concerned about.

Had he wished to be objective, he would have noted that, while there was indeed a modest increase in mean global temperature (of about half a degree Centigrade) during the last quarter of the 20th century, so far this century both the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Office confirm that there has been no further global warming at all.

What will happen in the future is inevitably unclear. But two things are clear. First, that Sir David’s alarmism is sheer speculation. Second, that if there is a resumption of warming, the only rational course is to adapt to it, rather than to try (happily a lost cause) to persuade the world to impoverish itself by moving from relatively cheap carbon-based energy to much more expensive non-carbon energy.

The Guardian’s resident eco-gossip columnist, Leo Hickman is reporting that Brandon penned an irate response to Lawson’s article, calling it ‘”patronising”, wrong and the “usual tired obfuscation and generalisation”‘. A more sober rebuttal appears on the Open University’s website. The following passage about polar bears caught my eye.

Is it true that polar bear populations are rising, and not falling as reported?

Many bear populations are dropping, as we say. Longer summers with no ice are probably the main reason why many polar bear populations are dropping. So what is happening to the bears? Different things in different parts of the Arctic, but here is what the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission say about it:

In 2009, of the 19 recognised subpopulations of polar bears, 8 are in decline, 1 is increasing, 3 are stable and 7 don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions. Figure 1 below compares the data for 2005 and 2009.

It is clear that the area of red (bear population trend decreasing) has significantly increased from 2005 to 2009 and the area of green (bear population trend increasing).

Pie charts struck me as a very peculiar way of representing population decline. It says less than nothing about population. For instance, the graph could be true, yet the total number of polar bears have increased in just the one region under study. Indeed, a million billion trillion zillion new polar bears could have landed in the one area from nowhere, and the graph would look exactly the same. Brandon seems to have taken his stats from the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, and in particular this page which shows the different regions of their studies, and this table, showing the available data.

The 19 polar bear populations are divided as follows, according to the IUCN.

But if we rule out those 7 which ‘don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions’, we begin to see a problem.

There is insufficient data to say anything about the entire Eastern side of the polar region. Now let’s add the regions where populations are understood to be stable or increasing.

There are now 7 regions, of the 19, which are our focus. Working our way down the image, however, we find at Chukchi Sea that,

Abundance estimates are not available. The trend is believed to be declining and the status relative to historical levels is believed to be reduced based on legal/illegal harvest levels that were thought to be unsustainable. Sea ice loss is one of the highest levels in the Arctic. Combined impacts of high levels of legal/illegal harvest with rapid sea ice loss suggest that the risk for depletion is likely high.

In other words, the population of polar bears in this region have not been the subject of a population study.

Moving on to the Southern Beaufort Sea (SB), we discover the comment that ‘Estimated risk of future decline is based on vital rates estimated from the 2001-2006 data used in matrix-based demographic models that incorporate sea ice forecasts’. Models, not population studies are what see peril for polar bears. And indeed, going deeper into the analysis, it turns out that that,

The size of the SB subpopulation was first estimated to be approximately 1,800 animals in 1986. […] Through the 1980s and early 1990s, observations suggested that the SB subpopulation was increasing. Amstrup et al. (2001) found that the SB subpopulation may have reached as many as 2,500 polar bears in the late 1990s. However, that estimate was not considered reliable due to methodological difficulties, and management decisions continued to be based on a population size of 1,800. Results from an intensive mark-recapture study conducted from 2001-2006 in both the USA and Canada indicated that the SB subpopulation included 1,526 (95% CI = 1,211 – 1,841) polar bears in 2006 (Regehr et al. 2006). This suggests that the size of the SB subpopulation declined between the late 1990s and 2006, although low precision in the previous estimate of 1,800 precluded a statistical determination. […] Subsequent analyses of the 2001-2006 data using multistate and demographic models indicated that the survival and breeding of polar bears during this period were affected by sea ice conditions, and that population growth rate was strongly negative in years with long ice-free seasons[ …] Thus, the SB subpopulation is currently considered to be declining due to sea ice loss.

Again, we see that it is models which predict population decline, not actual population studies. On to Lancaster Sound (LS), the comments for which are that

A population size of 2,500 bears was estimated in 1998 using mark-recapture methods. Population is through {sic} to be declining, because of highly selective harvest of male polar bears. […] Demographic data are 11 years old. Population has highly selective harvest for males; however it is likely that selective hunting will decline with less sport hunting.

There’s an awful lot of estimating going on, about estimates of population done 14 years ago. Is this safe? Over to the Western Hudson Bay (WH).

The distribution, abundance, and population boundaries of the Western Hudson Bay (WH) subpopulation have been the subject of research programs since the late 1960s (Stirling et al. 1977, 1999, Derocher et al. 1993, 1997, Derocher and Stirling 1995, Taylor and Lee 1995, Lunn et al. 1997, Regehr et al. 2007). […] Between 1987 and 2004, WH declined from 1194 (95% CI = 1020, 1368) in 1987 to 935 (95% CI = 794, 1076) in 2004, a reduction of about 22% (Regehr et al. 2007).

At last, we seem to have a number of studies to work from — a 22% reduction, even though the confidence intervals are quite wide, and do not exclude the possibility of there having been no population reduction at all. Over to Kane Basin (KB), which is,

A small subpopulation of approximately 150 polar bears, estimated in 1997. Harvest is thought to be unsustainable, and the population declining.

Thought to be… Maybe even good reason for thinking it… But it’s still just a thought. Anecdote, not data. On to Baffin Bay,

The current (2004) abundance estimate is less than 1,600 bears based on simulations using vital rates from the capture study (Taylor et al. 2005) and up-to-date pooled Canadian and Greenland harvest records.

Next!

The initial subpopulation estimate of 900 bears for [Davis Strait] (Stirling et al. 1980, Stirling and Killian 1980) was based on a subjective correction from the original mark-recapture calculation of 726 bears, which was felt to be too low because of possible bias in the sampling. In 1993, the estimate was again increased to 1,400 bears and to 1,650 in 2005. These increases were to account for the bias as a result of springtime sampling, the fact that the existing harvest appeared to be sustainable and not having negative effects on the age structure, and TEK which suggested that more bears were being seen over the last 20 years. The most recent inventory of this subpopulation was completed in 2007; the new subpopulation estimate is 2,142 (95% log-normal CI, 1811 – 2534). Using new recruitment and natural survival estimates (Tables 3, 4), the 10-year mean un-harvested geometric population growth rate is 0.98 ± 0.001 (Peacock 2009; see Research in Canada, this volume). DS is currently declining based on survival rates calculated from data collected up to the conclusion of the mark-recapture study in 2007. Ecological covariates associated with survival suggest that the decline may be as a combined result of short-term and local density dependence, stabilization of harp seal (Pagophilus groenlandicus) numbers and declining ice conditions.

So in fact the population of the Davis Strait increased over the last 30 years, in spite of global warming, from 726 to 2,142. But now it is supposed that they are in decline, in spite of there being no actual population study.

I’m not impressed. I believed that claims about polar bear population declines were based on polar bear population studies. But in two of these seven populations (Davis Strait and Southern Beaufort Sea) there was good evidence from actual population studies that numbers were increasing, which was overturned in the final analysis by ‘estimates’ of decline. Of the remaining 5, one region seems to have a robust claim to have shown a decline in population, but the rest are claims made on ‘estimates’ and simulations. Time to update the map.

Black shows the areas where there is insufficient data. Green shows regions where there is evidence of increase or stability. Red shows decrease. And yellow shows regions whose polar bear population numbers have been guessed. Grey is N/A.

Moreover, the main emphasis made by the PBSG is not the effect of global warming on polar bears, but humans shooting them. They discuss ‘sustainable’ levels of harvesting these creatures, which are ultimately dangerous pests as far as humans are concerned.

Brandon’s silly population pie charts seem to me to epitomise the way ambiguous data is concealed, and given a façade of scientific certainty. More to the point, it was wielded in a public and political debate about global warming policy. And this is the interesting thing about the cryosphere. Since it is so hostile, data series longer than 30 years are hard to come by. It is no surprise then, that this is where we find arguments about catastrophic climate change bury themselves — in uncertainty and ambiguity. The same is true of polar bear populations as it is of sea ice extent and air, sea and surface temperature. Where there are gaps in the knowledge, prejudices, assumptions and speculation fill the void. We see, as a matter of routine, claims that there are only N years left before the summer sea ice will be completely gone from the Arctic, and repeated claims that ‘the Northwest Passage has opened up for the first time in recorded history’. The Arctic and Antarctic are where fears about ‘runaway global warming’ and speculation about positive feedback systems are grounded, precisely because these regions are so poorly understood. And this lack of understanding is the reason idiot self-publicists go on futile missions to swim to the North Pole, or to trek across it ‘while we still can’ with moron scientists in tow, doing far more PR than research. In this respect, the cryosphere is is to climate change alarmism what quantum mechanics is to people preoccupied with parapsychology: it offers a possible mechanism to explain telepathy, ghosts, and even homoeopathy.

I thought it might be worthwhile posting this presentation I gave in Edinburgh in Spring last year, following the first Climategate. It seems to me that the same is true of Climategate 2 as was true of the first: if there had been a more transparent debate, Climategate would not have have had the impact is has had. Some are calling for transparency in science, which I agree with, but I think it is a mistake to believe that even completely transparent science would answer the debate. It would make it harder to hide environmentalism’s political and ethical claims, perhaps, but it would be no guarantee, either of that or a bit more reflection on certain claims and why they exist, not just in the climate debate, but more widely also. For instance, the precautionary principle, and the deference to science, and the prostitution of its authority aren’t at all exclusive to the climate debate, but are almost ubiquitous in contemporary politics.

We often get comments on Climate Resistance that ask us what qualifications to speak about climate change I and my colleague, Stuart Blackman, have.

Neither of us are climate scientists.

To take issue with the moral and political arguments that emerge from the climate debate, is seen as equivalent to taking issue – to denying – climate science.

What I think this speaks most loudly about is the weight of expectations that climate science has to bear.

What makes climate science’s relationship with the social political sphere special and unusual, compared to other forms of science is that there is so much moral and political capital invested in the idea of a climate catastrophe.

It seems to me that that something like Climategate was bound to happen, and will continue to happen in the form of things like as Glaciergates and Africagates for instance as people start to see what climate science is and isn’t capable of producing for their moral and political arguments.

George Monbiot is one of my favourite writers, because you can always find something to say about what he says. And the thing I’ve chosen today is that George Monbiot believes that gay people are more moral than straight people, because they won’t produce any carbon-emitting babies.

I’m not pointing it out to say that gay people are immoral, but because I don’t see how they can be any more or less ‘moral’ than people who happen to be born straight.  This is just a bizarre moral framework.

We also hear from the likes of the New economics foundation and the green party that there are just ten years left to save the planet. If you go to the NEF website, you can even hear the clock ticking, down from 100 months.

According to Susan Watts, the science… Science!… Editor of BBC Newsnight, ‘scientists have calculated that Obama has four years in which to save the planet

So these are the kind of arguments people are trying to support with climate science.

But it is not just journos and activists. This is academics from many different disciplines,

Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tells us that fat people contribute more to climate change than thin people do. Because as they get fatter, they enter a positive feedback system, in which they increasingly use labour-saving devices to cart their increasingly fat bodies around, as they become less and less physically able. So they use escalators, lifts, cars, etc, pumping out CO2 all the while.

Using carbon is the equivalent of slavery, according to Jean-Francois Mouhot, a historian at the University of Birmingham.  If we compare our current attitude to fossil fuels and climate change with the behaviour of the slave owners, there are more similarities than one might immediately perceive.

There are now special climate change ‘ethics’, that occupy the minds of philosophers. The scientific certainty that we are destroying the planet has made black and white the moral questions that have haunted moral thinkers since ancient times.

This cheap moral realism gives purpose to special climate change psychologists, who are employed to find out why the moral message isn’t getting through to the public.

They set about working out how to communicate climate change to people who don’t believe it, and try to locate the processes that may be going on in the heads of those who refuse to believe it… The deniers.

There doesn’t appear to be an area of public life that has not been framed in the terms of climate change. The idea of climate catastrophe has become the prism through which we see ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it.  Everything is captured in this one idea that the world is about to be destroyed.

This is a political and ideological phenomenon, not something which has just emerged from climate science, to which conventional politics has simply responded after considering it carefully.

And yet, if you look at how the arguments within this system are constructed, they nonetheless all begin with the claim that “climate change is happening”. I think this is mistaken view. Not that climate change isn’t happening, but that it is a mistake to [allow] ‘climate change is happening’ [to be] the beginning of all these moral calculations.

What happens at UEA, then, appears to be the keystone of all the arguments that ensue.

And so it is no surprise that this is where people have been focussing their hacking efforts. And it is of no surprise that what has been found reveals that the source of all these moral and political arguments is not so clear cut.

I think sceptics have made a mistake here. And that a peak behind the firewall didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know.

Rather than a process of the science informing the political or otherwise social, the dynamic is the other way round. That is to say that the politics is prior.

Monbiot puts it best: It [the campaign against climate change] is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Monbiot has had to make his apology, because he has invested his entire perspective on the world, in “The Science”.

David Attenborough is even less reflective. He says.

“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time to control the population to allow the survival of the environment”.

The President of the Royal Society – the organisation that promotes the scientific view of the world, Martin Rees, writes in “our Final Century” that our odds of surviving the next 100 years are just 50/50.

I mention Rees because he was on the Today program this morning, talking about the IPCC review — a review of the review by the reviewers — and it struck me more than ever that Rees’ role was once occupied by people who were proud to speak truth to power. Now, he, the Royal Society, and so many institutions that have attached themselves to the climate issue, instead speak Official Truth FOR official power. And I think that is a dangerous thing.

The sense of overwhelming crisis is being used to give authority to the kind of political ideas I think we ought to reject. These political ideas, since they make a virtue of being anti human, depend instead of our consent, on empirical substance for their moral authority. That substance comes from organisations like of the CRU.

So there are two sense in which the politics is prior to the science.

First, there are the ideological presuppositions that we are powerless to address the things produced by our sense of alarm and imminent doom. We passively accept our fate, and the fate of others.

For instance, the Global humanitarian Forum released a study last year which claimed that 300,000 people a year die from the effects of climate change. This doubles the WHO’s estimate from 2002. They project that half a million people will die, in 2030, they say, from the same malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea, caused by climate change. This, they say makes climate change the biggest issue facing mankind.

Never mind the 10 million people who died according to the WHO in the very same report, from first order effects of poverty.

We feel so unable to understand the social world, that the only way we can conceive of its problems is by naturalising them through ideas about the environment and climate change.

Second, there are the searches for authority in the statistics and projections such as those produced at the CRU.

The academy, government, and the media each seem to have rooted themselves in this crisis, and define themselves by it.

The crisis gives orientation to journalists who are disoriented by a world that no longer divides into left and right, and East and West.

It breathes new life into dusty old academic departments who have had relevance and targets foisted upon them from above.

And it gives the government legitimacy in a time when no one can be ‘bovvered’.

Finally, then, in order to make productive sense of what the science ‘says’, we need to be sure that we know what science has been asked, and what it has been told, and what it is really studying.

The climate crisis — and all of its little debates and fights like Climategate– are a projection of much deeper problems and crises in society.

I have a post at the Independent on the Battle of Ideas blog about the problems with ‘evidence-based policy-making’.

The big lie about evidence-based policy-making is that it’s based on evidence. Evidence no more produces and speaks for itself than cars decide their destinations. Policy-making begins when people perceive a need for a policy. Even when it is evidence which moves a person to speak for a policy, such evidence is always seen through the prejudices, preconceptions and presuppositions that every human sees the world through. The desire for objectivity in politics, while seemingly sensible, belies a terrible loss of self-confidence, and can typically hide what should be political decisions under the guise of ’science’.

I was trying to make the point that a lot is presumed about science’s ability to answer deeper political and moral questions, and of course that politicians and other officials are somewhat promiscuous in their use of ‘evidence’. It’s not an argument against evidence, though no doubt some people will read it that way.

So… Part two of the Climategate series is out. Popcorn is flowing.

It’s too early to say anything that isn’t already being said about what the new emails revealed. But, as per usual, what’s being said about what the emails do or don’t reveal is interesting.

Leo Hickman is the first to the scene…

The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.

The BBC’s Richard Black was not far behind, quoting the a University of East Anglia (home to many of the climate researchers)…

The university says it has “no evidence of a recent breach in our systems”, and suggests that the cache – posted on a Russian server – has “the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks”.

The central argument from those invested in the climate debate seems to be that the release of these emails is a ‘deliberate attempt to derail the climate talks in Durban’.

It would seem so. But when is the best time to publish information pertaining to the climate debate? The proximity of the COP17 meeting didn’t stop the International Energy Agency announcing just two weeks ago that,

Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system […] The agency’s flagship publication, released today in London, said there is still time to act, but the window of opportunity is closing.

And the looming meeting in Durban didn’t stop the publication of the IPCC report into extreme weather:

Regarding the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that on a global scale hot days become even hotter and occur more often. “For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world”, said Thomas Stocker the other Co-chair of Working Group I. “Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease”.

Why weren’t the journalists at the Guardian as suspicious of the timing of these documents as they are now about the release of these emails? The two reports above, are consistent with the raised tone with which the Guardian has been reporting on climate matters recently. Fiona Harvey, for instance, covered the IEA’s report with the dramatic words:

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

And Harvey was equally credulous about the IPCC report.

Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns
Heavier rainfall, storms and droughts could wipe billions off economies and destroy lives, says report by 220 scientists
Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

There are double standards in play: it’s okay to step up the alarm on the eve of climate talks, but to throw any questions about the provenance of climate change alarmism into the mix is to ‘deliberately derail’.

I’ve made the point about timing myself, before. It seems that each autumn, the alarmist narrative goes into overdrive. Back in 2008, for instance, the ink on the UK’s new Climate Change Act was barely dry by the time the COP meeting was underway. As I said at the time,

The point of all this is that the UK Government’s need to have successfully created a a strong climate law, in place by now, December the 1st 2008, is owed, not to the Government’s commitment to ‘saving the planet’, nor even the UK population, but to the designs its members have on being ‘world leaders’.

Timing is everything, after all.

This story was intended for Spiked-Online, who may be publishing it at some point, but I wanted to get it out a bit sooner.

A new scientific study of the Earth’s temperature record aimed to rescue climate science’s reputation from the aftermath of the ‘Climategate’ affair. Advocates of climate policies have long argued that unimpeachable science has driven policy-making, but climate sceptics argued that due scientific process had not been observed. Climategate and other revelations  that seemed to undermine climate science seemed to make the sceptics’ case. Rather than bringing clarity to the debate, however, the new study inadvertently demonstrates that the desire for unimpeachable scientific answers belies a fundamentally political debate.

The ‘Climategate’ affair broke In late 2009. Thousands of private emails between climate researchers based at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unity were leaked onto the internet, the contents of which raised questions about the propriety of high profile scientists. Whether or not they had done anything wrong, the authors of these emails seemed to have been caught taking liberties with statistics, concealing their data and methodology from scrutiny, and treating the critics of their research with contempt. In the wake of Climategate, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, Richard Muller said,

Quite frankly as a scientist, I have a list of people whose papers I won’t read any more. You’re not allowed to do this in science; this is not up to our standards. […] This is why I’m leading a group to re-do all this in a totally transparent way.

The first results from Muller’s group — Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) — have been released. Rather than being released through publication in a peer-reviewed journal, however, Muller and his associates took the somewhat unusual step of publishing draft copies of their studies, and made themselves available for comment in the media. Fuelling controversy further, Muller wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, which an editor gave the title, ‘The Case Against Global Warming Skepticism — There were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This comment came to the delight of climate activist journalists, scientists and other commentators. ‘Sceptical climate scientists concede Earth has warmed’, announced the New Scientist. ‘BEST reconfirm: warming is happening’, said the influential Carbon Brief blog, which is staffed predominantly by activists from environmental NGOs. Channel 4 News’s science correspondent, Tom Clarke was asked, ‘so does this finally vindicate climate change science’. ‘In a word, yes’, replied Clarke. According to Clarke, the BEST team’s discovery that the world is warming got those implicated by Climategate off the hook.

From the copy it had generated, it would seem that BEST had ended the debate. But climate scientist, and contributor to the BEST project, Judith Curry observed, ‘the spin on the press release and Muller’s subsequent statements have introduced unnecessary controversy into the BEST data and papers’. Curry’s comments were picked up by Daily Mail journalist, David Rose, who wrote

‘The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of  trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.’

Exciting stuff. But not what Curry had told Rose. ‘To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me [in Roses’s Daily Mail article] are not quite right’, she wrote on her blog. Meanwhile, Muller himself was distancing himself from the headlines of the article in the Wall Street Journal. ‘It doesn’t represent the article’, he told a journalist in New Mexico. But sceptics pointed out that Muller had said,

Without good answers to [sceptics’ concerns about various attempts to measure global warming and its effects], global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Confusion reigns. The coverage had by now been established as so much he-said-she-said. Sceptics pointed out that, in spite of the claims that the debate was now over, the BEST study still had argued that ‘human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated’. The data still reflected a stalling of global temperatures over the past decade, and the study’s attempt to rule out one of the main concerns sceptics have about the way temperature data is recorded appear to have some serious shortcomings. Even the project’s leader didn’t seem to be making consistent statements about what his research meant for the climate change debate. None of this phased the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black, who continued covering the affair in much the same way. Wrote Black,

The original “hide the decline” claim is one of the most easily de-bunked in the entire pantheon of easily-debunkable “sceptic” claims.

Phil Jones wrote the email in 1999, immediately following what still ranks as one of the hottest years on record, and well before the idea of a “slowdown” or “hiatus” or even “decline” in warming gained currency.

So it can’t have had anything to do with hiding a global temperature decline.

The expression ‘hide the decline’ is what ultimately led to Climategate becoming such a major story. Defenders of those implicated by the emails argued that ‘hiding the decline’ referred to a mathematical technique, rather than a conscious effort to deceive. But there was nonetheless good evidence that something untoward had been intended. And it was this that moved Richard Muller to establish the BEST project, as he explains in this video.

If the sceptics’ ‘hide the decline claim’ was as easy to debunk as Black claimed, Muller — a Professor of Physics — would not have needed to bother with the BEST project. But Black had invented the claim he had attributed to sceptics, for which he later apologised. But the cat was out of the bag: rather than accurately representing the arguments made in the debate, he had picked a straw man to argue with, rather than sceptics.

Had Black wished to overcome the limitations of mediocre journalism, to get to the heart of the debate, there are many well-informed sceptics he could have turned to for comment and advice. One such is Andrew Montford, author of ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ and a report published by  the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on the Climategate affair (PDF).  ‘He’s not representing what the sceptic’s arguments are’, Montford told me.

The majority of sceptics say ‘yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the world has warmed’. That’s really hasn’t been argued very much for a long time. There are  few people out there arguing [against] that, but really not very many. What you read about sceptic objections in the newspapers is not really what the sceptics’ objections are.

Montford agrees that there is no definitive ‘sceptic’ argument. This fact mirrors the many varied positive claims that are made on the other ‘side’ of the climate debate, but which seem to emerge axiomatically from the fact that ‘climate change is happening’. For many sceptics, too much rests on the claim, however true it is, which is in the first place a question of degree with a considerable amount of latitude, even within the ‘scientific consensus’. A concatenation of non-sequiturs cascade from the first: about sea-level rise, species extinction, drought, famine, resources wars, and so on. And these consequences seem to cascade just as ‘inevitably’ to the remedy: the creation of powerful political institutions, a transformation of the global economy, and the de facto rationing of energy and regulation of lifestyle.

In short, the climate debate is by definition as complex as the whole of human social life and natural science combined. But such a complex state of affairs does not make for easy reportage, especially by journalists who don’t seem able to digest nuance and complexity, let alone reflect meaningfully on them. And so to take issue with any aspect of the debate is to seemingly deny that the earth has warmed approximately 0.7 degrees centigrade and that humans had some part in it.

So what does the BEST study really reveal, according to sceptics? And how has it changed things in the post-Climategate world? Montford tells me that,

[BEST] doesn’t really change anything. People like Steve McIntyre [the climate blogger who first raised issues with how historical temperature records were created] were saying long before Climategate: you’re not going to find a smoking gun in the temperature record, and you always had the satellite records which were telling pretty much the same story. [The Climategate researchers] are just being civil servants and trying to hide the fact that they’re not doing very much, they haven’t got many quality-control procedures, and they’ve got commercial incentives to keep everything under wraps. That’s the only reason for the secrecy.

So it would seem that few, if any, sceptics were claiming that there had been no warming, or that the scientific data had been plucked out of thin air. BEST merely confirmed what most sceptics agreed was probably happening anyway. Nonetheless, the BEST story was widely reported as representing a meaningful end to the climate debate. Muller had made ambiguous comments, which were amplified by an incautious sub-editor. A phantom news story appeared out of an uncontroversial study. Journalists were reporting from inside their own heads, not from the real world. And that is an interesting phenomenon, and one which needs some explanation.

Complex debates are reduced to simple, moral stories of ‘scientists versus deniers’, in part because of the shortcomings of news organisations and their journalists’ attachments to the debate. Anxieties about the end of the world give moral orientation to otherwise disorientated commentators. Taking a stand that claims to ‘save the planet’ elevates journalists, who without climate change, would quite probably struggle to overcome mediocrity, to define a sense of purpose for themselves. It looks like bravery, but it is merely vacuity that drives sensationalism.

However, vapid journalism — churnalism — is not the whole story. The controversy generated not by BEST itself, but by the treatment of its result, speaks about wider and unrealistic expectations of science. Politicians, activists, and scientists are as vulnerable as journalists to the idea that science can supply them with uncorrupted objectivity and unambiguous instruction. Given that Muller himself didn’t seem able to supply clarity to the debate — in spite of the science — it is no surprise that arguments downstream have even greater difficulty getting the story straight. ‘Science’, rather than shedding light on the material world, obscures the debate.

Climategate, and other events in late 2009, such as the failure of the COP15 meeting at Copenhagen to find a successor to the Kyoto protocol revealed that too much had been invested in science. Science was, after all, produced by humans prone to error and vice. Climate scientists had refused to reveal their data and show their workings, and several alarming claims about climate change were found to be groundless. This would have all been without consequence, had there been more circumspection about the role of science. But rather than reflect on such expectations, the BEST project aimed to reproduce the science with virtue: ‘transparency’. It made no difference, though, because before it had even been peer-reviewed and published, it became the peg onto which the same old prejudices, myths and politics were hung. BEST now ‘vindicated climate science’, exonerated climate scientists and forced ‘sceptics’ to concede that the earth had warmed.

BEST says nothing about any of these things, of course. Sceptics weren’t ‘denying’ that the world had warmed. The debate wasn’t divided between climate science and its critics. And ‘Climategate’ remains an embarrassment to those who refused to release data (or concealed it) and its methodology, as Muller explained. Science cannot end the climate debate, because the climate debate has very little to do with science.