Barry Woods points us to Mark Lynas’s latest comment on the gap opening up between himself and anti-nuclear environmentalists.

Yesterday I was an environmentalist. Today, according to tweets from prominent greens, and an op-ed response piece in the Guardian, I’m a “Chernobyl death denier”. My crime has been to stick to the peer-reviewed consensus scientific reports on the health impacts of the Chernobyl disaster, rather than – as is apparently necessary to remain politically correct as a ‘green’ – cleaving instead to self-published reports from pseudo scientists who have spent a lifetime hyping the purported dangers of radiation.

As said in the previous post here, the bond formed between environmentalists, and of course between environmentalists and the establishment, is insubstantial. They were held together by the utility created by their scare stories, given scientific authority, not by the cohesive substance that might bring people of a similar political philosophy or culture together: shared values, vision, or goals.

In 2008, the Royal Society gave Lynas an award for his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. At the time, we wrote,

It seems that, rather than basing knowledge about the material universe on experimental evidence, the Royal Society and its senior members instead seek authority in science fiction; the extrapolation of superficially plausible science, forward into the future, where a drama plays out. … Lynas the one-time circus-activist stuntman, has his childish perspective on the world given respectability by the establishment’s accolades, and has expensive films made about his dark fantasy.

There is a peculiar symbiosis, in which, Lynas and his ilk give the scientific establishment authority by constructing nightmare visions of the future, which are given credibility by figures such as Sir Martin Rees and Lord May. The service that Lynas does for the Royal Society is to connect this institution to our everyday fears and anxieties, to give it relevance at a time when, as with politicians, it struggles to define its purpose.

Lynas, Like Monbiot now shouts “DENIERS” at the environmental movement, who call him a denier…

I have discovered over the past few weeks that the anti-nuclear end of the environmental movement has no regard for proper scientific process when it comes to the issue which defines it. Perhaps this is no surprise, because as George Monbiot and others have shown, the methods used by campaigners on nuclear bear all the hallmarks of the methods used by anti-science climate change ‘deniers’.

Lynas and Monbiot have forgotten their own environmental journeys. They have forgotten where they came from. They find themselves in a snug relationship with respectable, institutional science, and imagine that it was always so. They cannot remember their lives as self-styled anti-establishment radicals.

According to the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit, “the claimed effect has no biological plausibility”. So why were Green Audit’s conclusions accepted so uncritically by the media and the public, if not by scientists? Because, “a high degree of mistrust in conventional agencies can make elaborate conspiracies seem plausible”.

So this is what Green Audit and other anti-nuclear campaign groups thrive on: distrust of both the nuclear industry and official health protection and regulatory agencies, allowing them to invoke shadowy conspiracies by men in white lab coats who presumably enjoy foisting dangerous radioactive materials on an unwilling public, all no doubt controlled by a sinister mastermind bearing a striking resemblance to Mr Burns off the Simpsons, the evil boss of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Lynas nearly has a point here — the issue of trust is key. But he has forgotten that he himself stood against the science… Just last year, in What the Green Movement Got Wrong, Lynas admitted that his objection to GM, and his participation in anti GM direct action ‘wasn’t a science-based rational thing. It was an emotional thing and it was about the relation between humans and other living things’.

What Lynas should do is attempt to understand why his preoccupation with some emotional idea about ‘the relation between humans and other living things’ precluded trust in the scientific institutions that claimed it was safe. Instead, he uses the authority of institutional science to bash his erstwhile comrades, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, barely a decade ago, he would have been just as indifferent to such an argument about what ‘science’ says, just as Monbiot was.

The similarities with climate science ‘deniers’ is overwhelming. Take the selective use of data. Climate sceptics make much of the supposed lack of global warming over the last ten years – they do this by starting their data series in 1998, which was a very hot year, making it appear as if cooling took place thereafter. Similarly, Busby et al exclude Welsh leaukaemia data between 1974-81 (when there was only one incidence on the North Wales coastal strip, despite a much more lax safety regime in Sellafield during that period and consequently far greater releases of radiation into the sea), and use instead the period 1982-90, when there were nine. Had Green Audit used the longer data series, their conclusions would not have been statistically significant, which was presumably why the earlier data was excluded.

Leaving aside ‘the science’ for a moment, Lynas misses the point — made here, often — that, as far as ‘the Deniers’ are concerned, there is no longer any good reason to take pronouncements from official science at face value. They have been politicised. Scientists now fulfil a political need. That is the price of politics that claims legitimacy in scientific authority. It no longer matters what official science says. Moreover, once environmentalists decided to invest their political capital in the notion of scientific certainty, they let the politically-and-financially-motivated-science cat out of the bag. After all, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if oil interests can influence the science, so too can the interests that stand to gain from seemingly eco-friendly policies.

And there are bloody good reasons for asking questions about ‘the science’. As Barry Woods asks at Lynas’s blog,

Franny Armstrong, in the Guardian scoop of the 10:10 ‘No Pressure’ video said 300,000 people were dying of climate change.

Am I a ‘deniar’ to ask her where she got that figure from, or ask Damian Carrington who wrote the story to verify her source for that statement.

The full story of Franny and the 300,000 ‘deaths from climate change’ claim can be read here.

The claim of X deaths per year from climate change belies the reality that each of those virtual deaths are from poverty, not from from climate change. This blog has argued that in this claim we can see climate politics preceding climate science. In order to make it stand, we have to presuppose that things could not have happened any other way than a small change in the weather causing so many deaths.
The implication is, then, that those people could not have been wealthier, so that they were not so vulnerable to the elements. Such a possibility is anathema to the environmentalists’ conception of the world. And this is the logic that Lynas carries forward in his fantasy, Six Degrees, and this highly deterministic, naturalistic view of the world is what the scientific establisment has bought into, not discovered through science. It is a value-driven view of the world, not a value-free investigation of it, as much as Presidents of the Royal Society protest otherwise.

So Lynas is left in a bind. If he really were to see the argument about trust through, he would realise his own role as the purveyor of distrust. If he were to start to understand himself, as he once stood alongside his former anti-nuclear colleagues, he would realise the fragility of scientific authority, used in lieu of trust. He would be forced, simultaneously, to understand the objections of the deniers, and he would start to see how trust in science is being squandered, colonised by empty political agendas such as his own.

I’ve been too busy for blogging, again. Moving house — or trying to, and boring stuff like that. This is a very long post, and slightly out of date. So only read if you’ve got some spare time this Easter weekend. I will come back to some of the points I’ve tried to raise here, because I think the accident in Fukushima has caused interesting things to fall out of the environmental debate. I’ve been thinking about what Monbiot has to say about nuclear power, and how it interacts, so to speak, with the climate issue. The issue that emerges when we look at both debates is, I believe, trust.

George Monbiot has escalated his rhetoric against his one-time anti-nuclear colleagues in the environmental movement.

The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

This isn’t an atomic coming-out party for Monbiot. He and fellow environmentalist Mark Lynas have had a number of skirmishes with others from the green camp over the years over the issue.

In 2008, Lynas claimed to have experienced a ‘Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma.’ Monbiot agreed. Lynas went head to head against Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas. The reality of the rift developing between greens, however, is not one in which dogma is replaced by ‘evidence’ or ‘science, as Monbiot and Lynas claim, but by another dogma – climate alarmism, the logic of which now unsettles the grounds it emerged from. As was argued here, this fusion of environmentalism and advocacy of nuclear power looks less like a Damascene conversion, and more like a Reformation. Deep ecologism was giving way to a form of seemingly pragmatic environmentalism, or climate-centricism – a form that is more palatable to the establishment.

Any kind of ‘climate sceptic’ could tell Monbiot and Lynas that their outlooks ‘have done other people […] a terrible disservice’. But what nobody who emphasises the potential of nuclear power would argue is that it is ‘safe’. What makes nuclear power more or less risky than any other form of power is a mixture of things, some technical, and some institutional, the same as any other. As has been pointed out across the wider debate, coal mining in some parts of the world is a far more dangerous enterprise than in others. And so it is with nuclear, which remains amongst the safest means of producing energy, according to the attempts to model the human of accidents.

And so it is with climate change. That is to say that while a total rejection of climate change is at best premature, so the extent to which climate change became the organising principle of today’s climate-obsessed political world is absurd. As has been argued here, in lieu of some idea about the extent to which ‘climate change is happening’, and the degree to which human society is sensitive to climate change, the mantra ‘climate change is happening’ stands to obfuscate any attempt to put risks and their solutions into perspective, and intensely polarises the debate. This mantra is sufficient, it seems, to permit any imagined (i.e. superficially plausible) scenario to dominate the discussion under the rubric of the precautionary principle, at the expense of any sense of proportion. There are some interesting parallels developing between the highly charged and polarised climate and nuclear debates.

What this blog has emphasised is first that what determines the outcome of climate (whether or not it is changing) is much more the human, social, economic, or political conditions than the magnitude of any natural phenomenon. Second, this means that environmental dogma which argues that we live within ecological limits may actually make us more vulnerable to changes in the natural world. Third, the argument here is that we have lost sight of the fact of our self-dependence over some kind of theory of natural or divine providence, leading to a form of environmental-determinism. Everything is seen through the prism of climate, or environment. Last, we can better account for the rise of this eco-centrism by taking a broader look at changes within the human world, than taking it for granted that environmentalism is in the ascendant because of changes in the natural world observed by science.

These things in mind, then, what is there to say about the most recent leg of Monbiot’s nuclear journey?

It might seem in order to welcome Monbiot’s apparent honesty. But while he seems to have emphasised evidence over irrationality, something important is missing from his argument. The debate Monbiot seems to be involved in now is with anti-nuclear campaigner, Helen Caldicott. Typically for Monbiot, he believed the debate could be won by asking her for her ‘sources’, and then demolishing them. This involves a point-by-point refutation of Caldicott’s claims, courtesy of Professor Gerry Thomas, Chair in Molecular Pathology, Department of Surgery & Cancer, Imperial College, London, and Professor Robin Grimes, Professor of Materials Physics, Imperial College, London. Rather than engaging in debate, Monbiot and Caldicott now seem engaged in a battle of received wisdom – a my-dad’s-bigger-than-your-dad pissing-contest.

And isn’t that the problem with the climate debate? George can make all the appeals to scientific, institutional authority he pleases – the IPCC, scientific academies, peer-reviewed journals – but it makes no difference to people who lack the confidence in those institutions necessary to take their statements at face value.

It is no good, then, being the warrior who marches into intellectual battle bearing someone else’s authority. It is a blunt and soft instrument, whether it’s Monbiot using it to bash his erstwhile fellow eco-warriors, whether it’s climate sceptics hoping that the latest research will once-and-for-all debunk AGW, or whether it’s climate activists marching under banners claiming to best represent scientific evidence.  Beating people up with other people’s scientific authority does not move either the climate or nuclear energy debates forward.

There is an impasse. It should cause George to stop, not to turn around and shout at his own team, screaming, ‘you’ve got the science wrong, idiots’, but instead to attempt to understand why he once found the arguments against nuclear so compelling. He should then try to understand why his opponents still find themselves convinced of the same case. Why don’t they find the same evidence compelling? After all, the science is the same as it was when he stood against nuclear. Only he has changed his mind. Instead, he says of his ‘hero’, Caroline Lucas that she can ‘be wildly illogical when she chooses’, and of the green movement…

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

This is an especially absurd criticism from Monbiot. When Mark Lynas made the same kind of  comments in Channel 4’s film, What the Green Movement Got Wrong, last year, Monbiot was livid. Remembering that Channel 4 had broadcast Against Nature — a three-part series criticising environmentalism – in 1998, and The Great Global Warming Swindle in 2007 (two films, nine years apart, both by Martin Durkin), Monbiot constructed a view that the broadcaster had been engaged in a war against environmentalism.

Last night it aired yet another polemic: What the Green Movement Got Wrong. This one was presented by two people who still consider themselves green: Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas. It’s not as rabid as the other films. But, like its predecessors, it airs blatant falsehoods about environmentalists and fits snugly into the corporate agenda.

Mark Lynas, just 4 months ago, was according to Monbiot, a useful idiot, unwittingly reproducing corporate propaganda. To his anti-nuclear counterparts in the green movement, Monbiot may well now look like such a character. The film he criticised angrily sold itself with these words,

In this film, these life-long diehard greens advocate radical solutions to climate change, which include GM crops and nuclear energy. They argue that by clinging to an ideology formed more than 40 years ago, the traditional green lobby has failed in its aims and is ultimately harming its own environmental cause.

Now, Mobiot says of the green movement’s anti-nuclear effort,

The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

It’s not merely that Monbiot has a short memory. After all, not only does he now seem to some extent sympathetic to the film he was hostile to in 2010, the point is the same as those made in Martin Durkin’s films in 1998 and 2007: environmentalism does humans a disservice. Monbiot should realise that there is no mystery to this. The tendency of environmentalists to produce anti-human arguments it not down to mere errors of judgement, the result of some slight numerical oversight in an otherwise procedurally-sound empirical calculation; it is fundamental.

But Monbiot doesn’t understand criticism of his own argument. What was in 2010, according to him, ‘corporate propaganda’ might well be, in 2011, good science. He doesn’t seem to recognise that the political argument came before the scientific evidence. And he doesn’t seem to recognise that the scientific evidence isn’t sufficient to make the case for nuclear alone.

A different perspective on the science exists because of a distrust of the organisation or institution which produced it. Nuclear sceptics – Monbiot compares them to ‘climate change deniers’ – don’t believe that the science of the pro-nuclear argument has been produced by a transparent, objective and impartial process. Similarly, Monbiot claims that climate change deniers – the ones he compares nuclear sceptics to – have not produced their scientific arguments from an objective, transparent, impartial basis; they are driven by a commitment to a ‘free-market ideology’, or more straightforwardly, by their lust for profit. No matter what really lies behind his opponents’ arguments, Monbiot, like many others, claim the authority of institutional science.

But Monbiot has forgotten his own stand against institutional science. In 1999, for instance, he wrote,

When nineteen eminent Fellows of the Royal Society publish a joint statement, the world, quite rightly, takes note. We need, the biologists told us in a letter to The Telegraph this week, “to distinguish good science from bad science” and “bring good science into the centre of decision-making.” To which we all reply, quite so. But what, precisely, is good science?

[…]

In an article in the Guardian last week, another eminent Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Christopher Leaver, argued that genetic engineering will save the world from starvation. His assessment would be hilarious, were we to forget how influential he is.

[…]

It’s hardly surprising that scientists, even the most illustrious, can no longer distinguish good from bad. […]Our laboratories, as a result, are crammed with idiot savants, people with a profound understanding of their own subject, but who know nothing whatever about the political and economic realities which govern its deployment. Christopher Leaver’s primitive Modernism, his childish faith in technology’s ability to solve political and economic problems, are shared by some of the best researchers in Britain. Unable to see beyond the sub-microscopic, they have, unwittingly, become mercenaries in the corporate war against the poor.

Genetically engineered plants offer the world very little of benefit that conventional breeding has not already produced. But they offer the corporations control over what, indeed whether, we eat. The people who develop them have got the science right, and everything else wrong.

It didn’t matter what institutional science said. If they were seemingly pro-GM, it was because, as ‘idiot savants’, they were unable to fathom the ethical, political, and economic consequences of their science. Like Frankenstein, they did not know what they were unleashing into the world.

Now, of course, to further his nuclear argument, Monbiot hides behind that same scientific authority, but fails to understand why the same story of ignorant scientists — obedient slaves of industrial capitalism — persists. It’s as though the distrust in science had nothing to do with him. He no longer seems to understand why people don’t trust scientific and quasi-independent official organisations to say what’s safe, and what’s not.

There is a sickly atmosphere of distrust in which this debate takes place. On the one hand, many such as Monbiot seem happy to throw around these claims about those on the wrong side of environmental debate being in hock to private interests. And yet on the other, science is expected to do all the moral and political work: ‘science says…’

The fundamental here then, is distrust. Monbiot, and many like him do not trust corporations, do not trust the governments which seemingly regulate them, and do not trust scientists when they produce arguments which coincide with commercial interests. His recent self-reflection isn’t so deep: he does not take responsibility for the arguments he has been advancing for decades. He doesn’t attempt to understand his own former perspective, and why people who once shared it with him remain unconvinced by the position he now claims.

We should extend the point… the environmental movement’s distrust spreads wide and deep. Even democracy itself is the object of criticism from environmentalists – it seems to allow the expression of climate-change denial. People are, according to this view, too weak-minded to abandon the material comforts that industrial society serves to them, and thus are too easily led by ‘greed’ than by reality. On this view, people don’t know their best interests, and so political ecology has rarely been tested by the democratic process, but has been reproduced in institutions above democracy, above national governments. Meanwhile, Monbiot has argued that this process has been too slow, not ambitious enough, and doesn’t reflect sufficient ambition on behalf of the governments involved in it. The ethic driving this construction is best expressed by Monbiot himself:

It 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 no faith in humans, finds no moral good in the service of human interests, and has faith in scientific institutions only to the extent that they serve his own argument. He trusts governments and public institutions only when they serve this bizarre authoritarian, technocratic, and regressive agenda, confused though it is. The rest of the time, they, and anyone who criticises his perspective is the agent of ‘corporate propaganda’, and will bring nothing less than doom upon this planet. His claim to be concerned about the ‘disservice’ done to people by the anti-nuclear campaign is a paper-thin lie.

His argument for nuclear power has come because he has sensed that environmental movement’s continued objection to nuclear power will drive a wedge between them and the scientific authority he and they have claimed. Fukishima threatens to open up a rift between Greens and institutional science, and as has been pointed out, it is institutional ‘science’ which now carries the political and moral argument for environmentalism.

Over recent years, a strong relationship has developed between scientific institutions and one-time radical greens. The catastrophic narrative which emerged from environmentalists’ experience of malaise and its inherent distrust and disregard for people, once given scientific plausibility, gives renewed purpose to the political establishment. The putative magnitude of the looming climate crisis made it possible to sweep aside the differences that had troubled the relationship between institutional science and ecologism in the past such as GM technology and nuclear power. The green movement was, in these cases, able to move public opinion with fears about ‘frankenfood’, and the effects of invisible, radioactive substances also finding their way into our bodies.

Distrust in biotech firms in particular — and in corporations in general — led to ideas about firms gambling with ‘bio-security’ in order to increase their control over the food chain. The terrifying possibilities created by the cold war made individuals suspicious of nuclear power: it had been a mere ruse, designed to create the possibility of weapons development while only pretending to offer us a virtually inexhaustible quantity of cheap power. By the end of the eighties, the accident in Chernobyl destroyed confidence in many governments’ nuclear energy programmes.

In the cases of GM and nuclear power, the discussion about their potential was lost to the discussion about worst case-scenarios. As we can see in Mark Lynas’s arguments in What the Green Movement Got Wrong, it takes a bigger risk to turn up to put these scenarios into new perspective. The scientific establishment, as has been discussed on this blog, has not sought to intervene in the debate — since GM — to emphasise perspective on risk, and the potential of the fruits of modern, industrial society. While president of the Royal Society, Bob May’s pronouncements on climate change were uncompromising, Martin Rees, in the same role, had more charm, but no less of the alarm. He gave the human race just 50/50 odds of surviving this century in a book called ‘Our Final Hour’. Since taking the same position, Paul Nurse has entered the debate to claim that those who take issue with the predominance of alarmism are ‘attacking science’. The motto of the Royal Society, ‘Nullius in verba’, translated as ‘on the word of no-one’, and re-translated by May as ‘respect the facts’ might just as well be ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.

It is as if science had nothing to offer, save for during times of crisis. It might as well be held in a red box with a glass front, with the words ‘break only in case of emergencies’ etched onto it. In this atmosphere, GM technology and nuclear power only really offer any potential when we are subsumed by a larger crisis than can be conceivably generated by them. The political debate, equally, is not dominated by a positive discussion of possibilities and potential, but by worst-case scenarios. No energy policy is legitimised on the basis that it will create the possibility of cheaper energy to the consumer; it has to be framed in terms of its environmental impact. No discussion about transport — in the UK, at least — is given momentum by the opportunities that would be created were it possible to travel the length of the country in an hour or so, but by the question ‘is it sustainable?’ Architects no longer design buildings to meet people’s needs and wants, but to fulfil ecological criteria. People, in this weird political culture, are merely objects to be managed lest they cause an environmental disaster. That is the ethic of establishment environmentalism.

The accident at Fukushima threatens to unleash again green hostility to any conceivable risk created by technological society. This would upset the fragile agreement between the environmental movement, politicians, and institutional science that ‘climate change is the biggest threat facing mankind’. But the trust created between these groups under that mantra is provisional. It only exists while its logic is not threatened by, for one, the tendency to deep ecology that remains within it. Political reality precludes the expression of real, hair-shirt environmentalism. Nuclear power is a compromise.

Monbiot has missed, in his nuclear debate, an opportunity to reflect on his perspective, and on the perspective of his new-found opponents, his one-time fellow campaigners. Instead, he turns the issue into a battle of factoids, none of which he really understands, and none of which gives him the opportunity to form an analysis of the debate and what is driving it. Monbiot and Caldicott are playing my-evidence-is-better-than-your-evidence, but neither can explain why we should trust their ‘sources’; the origins of received wisdom. In his latest salvo in this absurd battle of the miserablists, Monbiot tells Caldicott,

If, on the basis of falsehoods and exaggerations, we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. Two immediate issues leap to mind. The first is that countries shut down their nuclear power plants or stop the construction of new ones, and switch instead to fossil fuels. Almost all of us would prefer them to switch to renewable, but it seems that this is less likely to happen.

We can see here how ‘decisions’ Monbiot speaks of and seems to worry about, are not really matters of choice at all, but of survival. There is of course no choice between survival and annihilation. Thus politics itself – on Monbiot’s view – isn’t really something that involves creating a relationship of trust or agreement between decision-makers and the public, such that the former can claim to have been given a mandate by the latter; the consequences of the decision are too grave to be left to the hoi-polloi. The debate about the future no longer involves the consideration of arguments, or of creating trust in public institutions – trust, which, ironically, Monbiot has spent the last 20 or so years doing his best to undermine. In the place of giving consent to authority, we are forced to accept whatever is decided by Monbiot on behalf of science. We are held hostage by the claim that to do otherwise would bring about the end of the world.

This reformulation of the means by which political ‘decisions’ are made legitimate creates a new contradiction from Monbiot’s incoherent thought. In his 2003 book, Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order, he claimed that,

Everything has been globalised except our consent. Democracy alone has been confined to the nation state. It stands at the national border, suitcase in hand, without a passport.

A handful of men in the richest nations use the global powers they have assumed to tell the rest of the world how to live. This book is an attempt to describe a world run on the principle by which those powerful men claim to govern: the principle of democracy. It is an attempt to replace our Age of Coercion with an Age of Consent.

‘Consent’, my elbow.

Climate change caused by the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gasses is further reducing the earth’s capacity to feed itself, through the expansion of drought zones, rising sea levels and the shrinkage of glacier-fed rivers. Partly because of the influence of the oil industry, the rich world’s governments have refused to agree to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels sufficient to arrest it.

This isn’t true now, and it wasn’t true when Monbiot was writing it. The reason governments have been unable to control the emissions of greenhouse gasses is not as Monbiot would have it, because of pressure from energy companies, but because such policies simply lack any form of democratic legitimacy.  In other words, the reason governments have been unable to control CO2 emissions to the extent they and Monbiot would like is the same as the reason why governments have been unable to go forward with nuclear energy programmes.

That is why environmental ideology is reproduced, not as much at the level of national democracy — which, remember, ‘stands at the national border, suitcase in hand, without a passport’ — as it is in the supranational political institution: the UN, for instance. All the more surprising then, that Monbiot, in Age of Consent,  singles this institution out for its failure to represent the world’s population.

Nobody voted for the ‘campaign against ourselves…’ that Monbiot proposes in Heat. Few people are interested in his ‘ campaign not for abundance but for austerity’. This campaign has not created a belief in its principles. It has not shared its vision of society, and of the future. It has not created its own institutions, in which people invest their trust. Unable to create trust in itself, it focuses on creating distrust. It borrows trust from science, to engender distrust in other institutions which fail, on its view, to protect us from climate crisis. It tells anyone who disagrees that they are taking issue with objective fact… against reality itself. It has been brought into establishment thinking, for its political currency, generated by  terrifying stories of Thermageddon.

The question ‘in whom do we trust’, seems to be answered now by which scare stories we believe in. Monbiot asks us to trust expertise to tell us about nuclear power, not because the potential of nuclear power creates new possibilities for us, and not because those possibilities are worthwhile ends in themselves, but because we’re supposed to be terrified of climate change. The truth is that we are asked to trust expertise on climate change, not because science has identified a possible threat to the security of our future, but because there is simply no other way that today’s political players can create trust.

Afterthought.

There’s been some criticism here that this blog has given too much emphasis to Monbiot. Unfortunately for him, however, he manages to epitomise contemporary politics. He vacillates between on the one hand, seemingly revolutionary politics, and on the other, deeply conservative and establishment prejudices. Monbiot himself is not so powerful, but his relationship with the scientific establishment, and his transformation from some kind of anarcho-syndicalist to ambassador of scientific fact reveals a lot about contemporary debates.

No blog from me for a while, apologies.

However, I have an article up on Spiked today about the real and metaphorical fallout from Fukushima. Last week, UK monitoring stations detected infinitesimal quantities of iodene-131 from the accident there, leading to some strange comments from politicians and the media.

‘Fukushima radiation from Japan’s stricken plant detected across UK’, reported the Guardian, followed by a half-hearted attempt to emphasise the HPA’s advice that there was no risk present to human health. This included repeating the HPA’s ‘warning’ that ‘radiation levels in the UK could rise’. However, it’s hard to construe as a ‘warning’ the advice that even raised levels ‘will be significantly below any level that could cause harm to public health’. This was followed by a story that Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister, had claimed that the HPA had delayed publishing their advice in order to prevent causing embarrassment to the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment – headed by erstwhile chief scientific adviser to the UK government, Sir David King – which was due to make a public call for investment in nuclear energy.

I think this shows some of the limitations of contemporary politics, not just environmentalism.

I have to admit, I have been surprised at the absurd levels of radiophobia surrounding this accident. I was hoping to put the scale of the ‘radiation from Japan’s stricken plant detected across UK’ into some numerical perspective. Here’s the start of that attempt, which I didn’t put into the article,

A slightly morbid experiment often given to science students is to estimate the number of molecules of air in our lungs might have also been exhaled by some historical figure during their final breath. Einstein is a popular and poignant choice. The outcome of the estimation varies, depending on how much attention to detail one wants to pay and which assumptions one makes, but it’s possible to argue that in each breath we take, there are 15 molecules which were also present in Einstein’s last gasp. This would seem remarkable, except that there are approximately 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules in each breath we take.

It struck me, however, that if there’s anything rational really driving radiophobia, it’s not any actual risk that can substantiated which bothers the anti-nuclear lobby. Instead, like many climate-alarmists, it’s mere theoretical possibility that really panics them. This enters the nuclear debate, just as with the climate debate, via the precautionary principle. This, I think, can be best summed up as ‘risk-analysis without numbers’. It doesn’t matter how you populate any such calculation with actual numbers (ie ‘knowns’), its what you don’t know which weighs the most.

As I mention in the article, no doubt this comes across to many as ‘pro-nuclear’. But the point is not to extol the virtues of any particular means of producing energy. What is at stake in the discussion about how to produce it is the benefit it creates for us. Not just ‘us’ here in the west, where more expensive energy has a relatively limited impact (for the moment, at least, though I’m sure the increasing cost of energy will begin to start having much more serious material and social effects in the future), but also for poorer parts of the world, who will really have to suffer the effects of Western anxieties about climate and nuclear.

I have an article up on Spiked about the response to the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from the media and anti-nuclear lobby.

Thousands of people are feared dead. Tens of thousands are missing or injured. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes. Buildings, vehicles of all kinds and civil infrastructure have been smashed to pieces and swept away. But the story that has dominated the news in the past 48 hours is the loss of control of two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In contrast to the devastation across Japan, however, the accident has – at the time of writing – so far caused only 15 injuries, just one of which appears to be serious, and a handful of suspected cases of exposure to radiation, none of which appear to be serious. So why is there such a preoccupation with the nuclear power plant?

Read on…

The low-quality copy emerging even from the ‘quality’ press has been amazing. It has been totally speculative, and giving a lot of free airtime to the nakedly anti-nuclear agenda, merely to generate something exciting out of the unfolding event.

Think Progress is a misnomer for a site devoid of thought or sensible conception of ‘progress’. It’s currently running a series of crass, pointless, sub-tabloid mini interviews with climate alarmist, Nicholas Stern. In the first interview, Stern expounds some views that mirror the site’s problems with thinking about progress.

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Nicholas — now Lord — Stern is a pillar of the climate change establishment. He is perhaps even more respected a commentator on matters climate-related than most climate scientists. He authored the 2006 report on climate change that still determines UK policy today, and which NGOs and other organisations draw from to set and further their own self-serving agendas. Since authoring the report, Stern has shot to climate stardom, being sought by carbon finance firms, keen to cash in on his connections to government and his insider policy-making knowledge, by the media, and by billionaire philanthropists wishing to have him set up and manage climate research organisations that bear the benefactors’ names.

But why? Anybody could invent the argument in the video above, in which Stern claims that increases in temperature will make some areas inhospitable, driving the population away, causing war. It’s a what-if-join-the-dots kind of bogus thought experiment, which only carries any weight because of Stern’s authority, not because of the quality of any research or theoretical ground behind it. In order to take Stern’s word for it, we have to trust that authority. It goes without saying that I don’t.

And so shame on Brad Johnson, the author of the piece, whose idea of an ‘interview’ is merely to repeat, verbatim, what the interviewee told him, without subjecting the claim to any criticism whatsoever. That’s not interviewing, Brad, that’s flattery.

Stern, who advises politicians the world over, gets to sit on influential panels that dictate national and international policies, and who does the bidding of billionaire ‘philanthropists’ seems particularly reluctant to face criticism. He has strong views about what the world should do, but has yet (as far as I am aware) to face, let alone answer, a single critic or criticism of his work. The closest Stern ever seems to get to defending himself is to send the idiot climate bulldog, Bob Ward, out to harass any editor that dares publish anything that dissents from the orthodoxy.

So much for Stern’s authority then. Since he is incapable of defending them, his arguments and research can carry no authority. The authority he has then, lies only in the fact that he repeats the mantras that politicians and others engaged in the climate change agenda want and need to hear. For instance, I had the misfortune of attending a lecture by luvvie-turned-planet-saver Lord David Puttnam a few years ago. (They’re all Lords — unelected, unaccountable feudal relics — these people; Lord Stern, Lord Puttnam, Lord May, Lord Turner.)  During the lecture Puttnam claimed

To read much of the media, you simply wouldn’t know that there’s a ninety-nine per cent scientific consensus on this issue. In some cases we’re even led to believe that the whole idea of man-made climate change has been put about by a bunch of self-promoting scientists in flapping white coats in some vast conspiracy. If anyone ever tries to pull that on you, I beg you; ask them a few very very simple questions. Where has this conspiracy come from? Who is financing it? How is anything in this disorganised world so brilliantly organised as to make this possible? And most important of all, consider this. If Crispin Tickell, myself, and others are wrong, and if ninety-nine per cent of the world’s scientists are wrong, to what degree will we have damaged your lives and life chances? […] On the other hand, if the climate change deniers are wrong, if you’re stupid enough anyway to believe them, the net effect of that could be to devastate your entire life, and more important than that, your children’s’ lives, your grandchildren’s lives and your great grandchildren’s lives. You cannot afford to give them that much credibility. Everything I said about the BNP, I feel just as strongly about intelligent climate deniers. They are living on another planet. I wish they’d go there.

Puttnam’s own contribution to scientific knowledge is limited to his role producing films such as Bugsy Malone and The Mission. These remarkable achievements, nonetheless, qualify him to make pronouncements about who in this debate are reckless and stupid.

I asked Puttnam where the 99% figure came from. The figure is widely cited, he told me… And after some hesitation, ‘from Stern’. All that it took for Puttnam — who chaired the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill — to have such confidence in the figure was for Stern to have uttered it. I asked him precisely where the figure had come from. He promised to reply to my email, asking him. I sent him three. He never replied. Meanwhile, anyone who disagreed with Puttnam, was, by proxy, disagreeing with Stern, and 99% of the world’s scientists. Now we can see how Stern’s authority exists at the end of a chain of circular reasoning. This must be what is meant by ‘peer review’.

But what of the argument itself. The climate changes where people can be, claims Stern. This is true to an extent, of course. But who could have imagined Phoenix, Arizona, before it was possible to divert entire rivers? The extent to which human populations are forced to move, then, is determined by our ability to transport sources of water to where they are needed. Leaving aside the matter ‘is climate change happening, the question here, then, should divide the debate between those who think that, in the 21st century, this is no impossible challenge, and those who think it is. Stern must presuppose it is impossible. We can see for ourselves that it is possible, and it should be more possible between the years 2011 and 2022 than it was when those first huge dams were constructed in the early part of the last century. We can now see how it is Stern’s presuppositions which influence his understanding of climate, not his understanding of climate which informs his economics.

But let us assume, anyway, that it is not possible for humans to respond positively to climate change, and that, a century from now, climate change has caused the displacement of a billion people? Is this likely to be the cause of World War III, as he claims?

No. The movement of a billion people over the course of a century amounts to the movement of 10 million people a year. This is no exodus. It is 0.143% of the world’s population.  In other words, it’s the equivalent of 87,000 people leaving the UK (population 60 million) each year. That’s fewer people than would fit into the new Wembley stadium. It’s less than half the number of people who pass through Heathrow airport each day.  The resettlement of a billion people throughout the world over the course of a century presents absolutely no technical challenge whatsoever. Again, Stern must presuppose a political problem with such a movement of people in order to demonstrate that a climate problem exists. Why is ‘Think Progress’ — seemingly a ‘liberal’ organ — so convinced that immigration is such a problem that it could create a world war? So much for liberal values. In fact, we might point out that, if the problems of climate change are problems of poverty, the world might well cope with climate change — anthropogenic or not — by migration. Isn’t that how early man survived the ice age, after all? It shouldn’t need pointing out: as a race, we’ve survived climate change before. And we survived it with far less technology and resources than we now posses.

So, in order to take Stern seriously, we must presuppose too much. We can only arrive at a position in which we trust Stern after too much circular reasoning. We can trust Stern because of his authority, or we trust him because we presuppose the bleak things he presupposes. But we can’t trust him for having made a sound argument.

As the political ambitions of Stern and Co have failed, so they have escalated the drama in their depiction of the future. As Stern finds it harder to make convincing and coherent arguments, so the worse the future becomes in his view. What Stern expresses then, is not ‘science’, nor even coherent economics. It is just the ravings of a lunatic, the same as any religious nut-case in a sandwich board bearing the words, REPENT: the end is nigh! The man in the sandwich board, and Lord Nicholas Stern say more about themselves than they say about the end.

George Mon-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on-biot is convinced that ‘astroturfing’ outfits are influencing on-line discussion.

The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?

‘Astroturfing’ is, I think, one of those words like ‘cult’, which, is especially hard to define, and even harder to use with precision.

What is a cult? On the one hand, we can think of cults which we know exist to extort money (and other things) from people by using illegitimate means of persuasion: brainwashing, bullying, false promises. But on the other hand, to make premature statements about someone taken in by a cult, might be to say that they have been duped, that their rational and critical faculties were compromised or insufficient, or that they are simply stupid. So while it’s easy to say that a cult manipulates people by exerting undue influence over them, we run the risk also of diminishing the putative cult-victim in just the same way that that the cult has. We say they are not complete, they are unable to look after themselves, and that they need our protection. The cult-buster risks reproducing the techniques employed by the cult; he promises us protection from them and their distortions or ignorance of the truth. The hazard is in making hasty assumptions about what other people think, why they think or believe certain things, and how such beliefs are turned into actions. To determine that people act in certain ways because of some undue influence or other is necessarily to leap to premature conclusions, unless we know the individuals concerned intimately. That is to say, only somebody who knows another person very well can say that an idea or action is out-of-character. And even then, to claim that something is uncharacteristic, and therefore the result of some illegitimate influence over their will is again to presuppose perfect knowledge about what somebody’s will ought to be, and the content of the persuasion.

None of this is in defence of cults, of course. There are horrific instances of cults, some leading to mass-murder and suicide. The point is to emphasise that much human behaviour involves persuasion and grouping of various kinds. Associations of individuals are defined by the ideas that they have in common. Those ideas give groups and their members identity. The point at which this normal, positive and rewarding process becomes toxic is not straightforwardly defined, and is certainly not captured by the term ‘cult’. Persuading, and being persuaded; joining and identification with groups are normal human experiences. There is something wrong, then, with seeing normal human relationships in such a way.

And so it is, I think, with this word ‘Astroturf’. It is as ambiguous as the word ‘cult’. Says Monbiot:

Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there’s a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

The evidence of the ‘long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups’ is an article George wrote in 2006.

ExxonMobil is the world’s most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what’s its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company’s official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled “junk science”. The findings they welcome are labelled “sound science”.

Monbiot returns to this claim again and again: that Exxon has distorted the public’s perception of the science. But as this blog has pointed out many times, Exxonsecrets’ grubby investigation failed to turn up the dirt it was expecting. Last year, Greenpeace — who ran the Exxonsecrets campaign — congratulated itself for exposing the ‘secret’:

And indeed, over the past four years, Exxon has reduced its grants to prominent climate change deniers from the peak spending in 2005 of over $3.5M. Greenpeace’s research shows a $2.2 million reduction in annual funding to these organizations, down to roughly $1.3 million in 2009.  The number of groups known to be funded has dropped from 51 to 24 between 2005 and 2009.

The thing that Monbiot and Greenpeace have never explained is, why they have made such a big deal out of such small change? The peak $3.5M/year allegedly spent on climate change denial represents less than 0.001% of its $billion/day sales, the profits from the remainder of which were apparently threatened by the policies Monbiot and Greenpeace wanted. Wouldn’t it be worth spending just a bit more? It’s such small beer, yet the conspiracy theory put about by Monbiot and Greenpeace persisted. This cash, he argued, was used to create fake campaigning organisations, established by the people involved in the same campaign to protect tobacco-company profits:

Philip Morris, APCO said, needed to create the impression of a “grassroots” movement – one that had been formed spontaneously by concerned citizens to fight “overregulation”. It should portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one “unfounded fear” among others, such as concerns about pesticides and cellphones. APCO proposed to set up “a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of ‘junk science’. Coalition will address credibility of government’s scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars … Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states.”

… the “coalition” created by Philip Morris, was the first and most important of the corporate-funded organisations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.

… This, it seems, is how Monbiot understands ‘astroturf’ organisations.

But does it not also provide us with an adequate description of many environmental campaigning organisations? Some simple substitution of terms suggests that ‘astroturf’ might begin to be too broad a category to apply to just the one side of the debate:

“a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of CLIMATE CHANGE. … Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states.”

Surely that could be any green group which receives much funding… Millions and millions of $, £ and € more than Exxon ever spent on the same… from organisations like the UN, the EU, and the UK government to do precisely that same thing? Isn’t that what environmental NGO’s seek also to do?

If it is, then, precisely what NGOs do, what sense does the term ‘astroturf’ bring anything useful to a discussion about the respective sides’ strategies in the climate debate? We can see the problem, of course, with the public agenda being influenced by parties passing themselves off as somehow better reflecting public opinion than their counterparts, but isn’t this form of theatre simply a fact of political life in the 21st century? Isn’t the problem not that there are fake ‘grassroots’ organisations, but that there aren’t really any genuine grassroots organisations at all? Monbiot seems to hint that astroturfing ‘deniers’ serve commercial interests. But there are plenty of cases of the same happening in the other camp.

One such organisation, for instance is Embrace My Planet, which aims to be “a movement of ordinary people who are supporting renewable energy in the UK, enabling you to make your opinions known to politicians and the media”, but is in fact “an arms-length campaign of RenewableUK (formerly BWEA), the trade association for renewable energy suppliers in Britain.” As ‘arms-length’ as Embrace want to claim that they are, anyone who understands Top Gear’s appeal would know how much more quickly the non-renewable energy sector could, should it desire to, mobilise many thousands more people, with much less effort. There are at least as many petrol-heads as there are Gaia-botherers, and there are a great many more people who, if nothing else, merely understand the utility of cars, roads, and fossil fuel. Monbiot’s claim on the moral high ground is precarious enough, and to remain there he has to turn logistical somersaults to claim to represent the public interest whilst denying the fact that the public know their own interest.

Real Climategate Blogger Barry Woods has a couple of posts recently on what might reasonably be called Astroturfing outfits, from the greener side of the fence. Woods points out that The Carbon Brief website, set up apparently put writers and journalists in touch with scientists has a clearly partial agenda:

On further investigation, the website demonstrates that they appear to be nothing but advocates of consensus climate change policy.  A look at their further resources page gives the first two links as the Climate Science Rapid Response Team and RealClimate and it also include Climate Progress. There are no sceptical or even lukewarm website or blog links of any kind.

“Our team of researchers will provide a rapid response service for climate science stories. We go straight to peer-reviewed science and the relevant scientists to get their opinions” – The Carbon Brief

The Carbon Brief appears to have been set up for the specific purpose of countering sceptical stories relating to ‘climate change’ by going to AGW consensus  scientific sources for an instant rebuttal. It is a project of the Energy and Strategy Centre, funded and supported by the European Climate Foundation (ECF)

Furthermore, Woods’ investigation into the ‘Green Social Network’, as he calls it, puts Monbiot at the centre of attempts to influence online debate in a remarkable instance of eco-hypocrisy.

It is Monbiot’s belief that the ‘denial’ attempt executed by Exxon, with no more funding than $3.5 million a year has virtually scuppered the attempt to prevent global warming. Yet there is not one shred of evidence that a single comment beneath Monbiot’s articles on the Guardian has been as such ‘paid for’, or put there by ‘sophisticated software’.  Even if you had $3.5million a year to spend, and you paid denier-drones just $10 an hour to spread their denial across the web, you’d only have 350,000 man hours of commenting. That’s 43,750 working days, 8,750 working weeks, or 190 working years. So let us call it that: if this astroturfing effort exists, and it is funded to the same tune as Exxon’s entire effort, it’s just 190, low-waged people, commenting on websites such as the Guardian. But what a waste of money this would be. For instance, Monbiot has it that ‘Between 2000 and 2002 [TASSC] received $30,000 from Exxon’, and that this same organisation (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) “has done more damage to the campaign to halt [CLIMATE CHANGE] than any other body”… If donations of just $10,000 dollars can buy the effect Monbiot is claiming TASSC achieved with it over three years, why on earth would anyone pay for far more expensive comment drones?

The amounts Monbiot gets heated up about are really very small indeed. Given that the issue relates to the creation of hugely powerful supranational institutions, a total transformation of the entire global economy, and the most far-reaching regulations of industry and of lifestyle ever conceived, I think that exchanges of tens of thousands of dollars between interested parties is completely insignificant. Ditto hundreds of thousands. And the same for the millions, too, because the propaganda effort running the other way stretches to millions… No, hundreds of millions… No… Billions of dollars… From NGOs, from carbon finance firms and low carbon venture capitalists, from philanthropic self-serving billionaires… from governments, from supranational organisations… And not a single penny of that is any cleaner than the dirtiest dollar from Exxon.

It’s not the actual amounts that concern Monbiot. If he were to actually gain a sense of proportion, he would have nothing to write about. What disturbs him is the fact that it’s Exxon giving money to the likes of TASSSC, and Steven J Milloy’s Junk Science website. How dare they? Monbiot moans,

JunkScience.com – has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists.

It is true that Junk Science is a very influential website. It has been the starting point for many days of research for many people. This site is frequently linked to from there. And it’s brought some visitors who have both agreed and disagreed with the content here, and either hung around, or moved on. Is this the criticism? Is this what has annoyed Monbiot? Is his complaint that some Exxon money ended up as a site that directs people to the latest stories about climate change written from a sceptic’s perspective?

It is here that the problems with the use of words like ‘cult’ and ‘astroturf’ begin to emerge.

There is no question about it. Steve Milloy wants to persuade you. I want to persuade you. But so does Monbiot. Monbiot, however, wants to claim that the form of persuasion that Milloy is engaged in is illegitimate. It’s not enough, you see, to simply disagree with Milloy. It’s not enough to put counter arguments to his criticisms of environmentalism.

This is where Monbiot turns the normal, democratic exchange of views; the normal, democratic development of associations between individuals and groups; and the normal, democratic presentation of arguments intended to persuade others… into a dark, sinister and devilish conspiracy.

It now seems that these operations are more widespread, more sophisticated and more automated than most of us had guessed. Emails obtained by political hackers from a US cyber-security firm called HBGary Federal suggest that a remarkable technological armoury is being deployed to drown out the voices of real people.

It is nonsense, of course. It might work in some sense to market the occasional product. It might create better rankings for certain search terms. The strategy might even drown out online criticism of products within a limited market. But no more than that. As Richard Chirgwin points out on the Register, the best that this form of intervention can hope to achieve is to alienate any genuine participants from online discussions:

While it looks a little like the corporate threat to democracy and free discussion that the Daily Kos believes it to be, it’s also a completely self-destructive strategy. The personas will invade any and every conversation they’re instructed to, acting like over-indulged toddlers and yelling “want #banana NOW!” across grown-up conversations.

Anyone with a brain worth having would, were they ever to find themselves in virtual conversation with an individual operating dozens of personas, recognise that they were engaged in a discussion with a moron. It would certainly not be possible to have as many persuasive simultaneous discussions. But for Monbiot, the idea that thousands of debate-hackers each operate dozens of puppets in thousands of online fora, absorbing the collective mental energies of all virtual environmental activists, thereby stalling progress, is just too good to let go. It explains to him the failure of his own arguments to persuade the wider public, and it explains the dearth of harmony under his own articles. It’s not that he doesn’t inform the debate with robust argument; it’s not that Monbiotists too, lack coherent and powerful arguments; it’s that an army of ciphers exists, merely to overwhelm them. Hence, he asks the readers of CommentIsFree :

So let me repeat the question I’ve put in previous articles, and which has yet to be satisfactorily answered: what should we do to fight these tactics?

Online discussion fora are perhaps the most disposable form of public debate. On sites like CommentIsFree, dozens of articles a week feature exchanges below the line between the same characters, throwing the same arguments at each other. The aggressive, pedantic, exhausting form of exchange alienates the casual participant, and discourages the casual reader. Vast amounts of energy are spent on these little battles, that are, in almost every case, forgotten by the time the next article is published. Why would anyone want to pay people to dominate the billions of such discussions that take place? It would be absolutely futile.

Yet it’s what happens below the line that is the subject of Monbiot’s articles, above it.

George’s articles about the environment and environmental politics are poorly conceived. Yet they call for radical political, economic and social changes, throughout the world. It is obvious from what happens below the line that George’s ideas are not going to spread throughout wider society. The only way George can account for this is by conceiving of an effort to deny ‘the truth’. He can’t reflect on the idea that people might disagree with him, because he is wrong. They can’t have worked out for themselves that he’s wrong. They can’t have been persuaded by a better argument than his. They must all have been persuaded by a lie, then. Or they must all have prostituted themselves to Big Oil, and spend their time engaged in futile online discussions, hoping to dissuade others from Monbiot’s own righteous cause.

Whether or not Monbiot is right about climate change and the need for political and economic reorganisation of the world to stop it; his ideas about why his perspective is not shared by people is simply implausible. It doesn’t pass basic tests of proportion and logic. The result in black and white is an ego-centric fantasy that says much more about the mythology of the environmental perspective than it says about its detractors. In positing that these detractors belong to an astroturfing outfit, Monbiot turns normal political debate and the exchange of ideas into a conspiracy. Normal discussion becomes a manipulated space, dominated and controlled by sinister interests. But worst still, in the process, Monbiot reduces anyone involved in, or following the conversation into zombies, easily influenced by the dark forces that seek to control the ideosphere. In his rush to explain why people simply don’t agree with him — and in fact strongly disagree with him — he insults the intelligence of anybody who dares to take issue with him. Like brainwashed cult victims, they merely respond to the misinformation they are exposed to.

What this speaks about then, is the contempt Monbiot has for humans and their faculties of reason; for democratic expression such as association and debate. He simply does not trust people to make their own minds up: all that happens is they end up disagreeing with him. Worst still is that Monbiot simply doesn’t recognise that this extraordinary narcissistic  approach to debate is what alienates him. He’s expecting the sympathies of the same people he is calling stupid. Monbiot doesn’t seem to understand that his critics often accuse him of being anti-human, but we can see this misanthropism running across his whole argument.

If there’s a film which questions climate change, it’s because the broadcaster has declared a war against science. If there’s an organised effort to challenge environmentalism, there’s a ‘tobacco strategy’ and a conspiracy. If his fellow greens take issue with his religiosity, they have been sucked into the corporate agenda. If people in internet chat rooms disagree with Monbiot, it is because there are paid minions of Big Oil, tapping away at their keyboards for money. If the public don’t buy his ideas, it’s because they are feckless, stupid, sheep, blindly following their base drives and instincts. This is the consistent pattern of Monbiot’s arguments. Climate change has little to do with it… It’s about people. The environment is merely the thing which Monbiot uses to legitimise his elitism, and his anti-humanism. It’s a device, a story, a myth that elevates him. That’s why nobody buys it, because they’re not so stupid, after all.

Bishop Hill points to a paper by Ross McKitrick. The Bishop himself points to the following passage, a thought experiment in which an Intergovernmental Panel on Economics, analogous to the IPCC is imagined.

Suppose the International Monetary Fund (IMF) created an economics version of the IPCC, which proceeded to issue an Assessment Report and Summary for Policymakers every five years that was promoted as the consensus view of what “every mainstream economist believes.” Suppose further that the IMF was committed to one particular school of economic thought, such as New Keynesianism, that they ensured that all the lead authors of the IMF report were dedicated New Keynesians, and that the report inevitably concluded the New Keynesians are right and their critics are wrong (or do not even exist). And finally, suppose that the IMF report was sponsored and endorsed by government departments who benefited by promotion of New Keynesian ideas, and that major funding agencies and university oversight agencies also began to endorse, support and promulgate the views in the IMF report.

It should be obvious that all of this would, over time, degrade the intellectual climate in the economics profession. It would do so even if New Keynesianism is true—and moreso otherwise. Members of the research community would be forced to respond to the warped incentives created by such a dominant institution by embracing, or at least paying lip service to, New Keynesianism. Over time it would be costlier and costlier to be publicly identified as a critic of New Keynesianism, and as critics became marginalized by political forces the IMF’s declaration of a “consensus” would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But how hard do we have to try to imagine such an institution, premised on such an orthodoxy?

The World Commission on Environment and Development, was established in 1983, and chaired by then Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. In 1987, the group published its report, “Our Common Future”. The blurb on the back of the report proclaimed:

Our Common Future serves notice that the time has come for a marriage of economy and ecology, so that governments and their people can take responsibility not just for environmental damage, but for the policies that cause the damage. Some of these policies threaten the survival of the human race. They can be changed. But we must act now.

It was here that “sustainable development” became part of the global political and economic agenda. According to the report:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present wihtout compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

It’s interesting to note how concern for the world’s poor quickly turns into a prison for them. ‘Sustainability’ in the first instance promises to prioritise their development, but with the caveat that any development is ecologically ‘sustainable’. Nobody, anywhere, gets to decide what kind of development is appropriate for themselves; Brudtland decides for them. She gets to define everybody’s needs, present and future. She gets to decide what’s an appropriate speed and form of development.

This blog argues that, as important as it is to look at and criticise climate science, the real substance of the debate should be about the politics. If I understand McKitrick’s point correctly, it is that we wouldn’t accept an orthodoxy in an economic organisation such as the IMF. I would suggest that an orthodoxy has already been established, long before the IPCC was even established. The reason it doesn’t get noticed as such is that it appears as though the argument for sustainability is premised on ‘the science’. I suggest that much of the science is in fact premised on the orthodoxy. That is to say that the IPCC, presupposing the orthodoxy’s rectitude, imagines society to be as vulnerable to climate as climate is sensitive to CO2.

McKitrick points out that, ‘the IMF’s declaration of a “consensus” would become a self-fulfilling prophecy’; but worse than this, so to would be the object of the prophecy/consensus. The more we believe that society is vulnerable to climate, the more vulnerable it becomes. Imposing the limit of ‘sustainability’ over the development of the poor precludes an economy which can withstand the elements — it’s climate resistance — sustaining only that economy’s vulnerability. Sustainability make people more vulnerable to climate.

There is only one climate sceptic in the world. His name is Christopher Monckton. This is the only conclusion you could draw from Rupert Murray’s film, Meet the Climate Sceptics,  broadcast on BBC4 tonight.

The film portrays Monckton single-handedly attacking the entire global scientific establishment, sabotaging any possibility of climate legislation in the USA, and thereby demolishing any possible global deal on emissions-reduction through the UNFCCC process. Along the way he destroys Kevin Rudd’s administration and the Australian ETS… In Murray’s fantasy, Christopher Monckton is to climate scepticism what James Bond is to the UK.

The film belongs to a strand on BBC TV, called Storyville. But Rupert Murray doesn’t just tell a story, he constructs a mythology. Says Murray, introducing his film:

I don’t know about you, but over the past few years, I’ve been quite frightened by all the media stories about global warming. Even the British government mounted an ad campaign to try and scare us and our children into acting on CO2.

I thought like quite a few people, that we humans were heading for disaster. I was scared we were going to lose our freedoms, because our free-wheeling lifestyle was going to have an impact.

I was worried for my children. What kind of world were they going to grow up into?

Then one day I came across this film, and the more I watched, the better I felt. my guilt for being human began to evaporate as leading sceptic, Lord Christopher Monckton seemed to demolish many of the key predictions of doom.

If the sceptics were right, we could all celebrate. But what if they were wrong, and by listening to them, we were gambling with millions of peoples’ lives and our future?

I set aside my own green beliefs and any preconceived ideas I might have had. I wanted to hear their side of the story, to find out if they had the answers we’re all looking for.

But Murray doesn’t meet them. He doesn’t hear their side of the story. And he doesn’t set aside his green beliefs and preconceptions; he brings them with him on his journey following Mockton across Australia, the USA. With the footage, he weaves a story that is transparently intended as some kind of moral pornography for liberals.

This journey shows Monckton at the same time affable and charismatic in bed with a nasty, reactionary audience: elderly and religious conservatives, the Tea Party movement; Glen Beck; Fox News; bizarre conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones; the Republican Party; and a bigoted homophobe who claims to agree with what he imagines as Monckton’s attitude to gays:

I endorse your stand on homosexuals and Aids {sic}… They should be locked up they should be exterminated.

This is all Murray wants to say about Monckton — he’s in bed with the baddies. We learn almost nothing about Monckton’s argument. This demonstrates that as hard as Murray pretends he aimed to understand the sceptics, and to have put his prejudices to one side, he couldn’t create a film which accurately portrayed the thesis of just one of them, in spite of spending a great deal of time with him. All we see is small, disconnected fragments of argument, devoid of any context. The superficial attempts to portray Monckton’s ideas are counterposed by much longer expositions of strong and at times shrill, opinion from the likes of Kevin Trenberth, Andy Pitman, and David Griggs, to which Monckton is denied the opportunity to answer.

This is a pity, because it precludes proper criticism of the argument Monckton actually makes. It instead takes issue with the image of Monckton that Murray invents.

I’ve seem Monckton’s presentation, and I do not find it convincing. At the risk of annoying visitors here, my criticism of sceptics in general is that the dependence on scientific arguments fails to challenge the eco-centric politics that precedes it in the environmentalists case. Thus, scepticism makes a concession to environmentalism: all you need is the right science, and then you’ll know what to do. Scepticism almost accepts environmentalism’s premises, and so fails to criticise it, leaving the debate to oscillate according to the latest scientific discovery. All it would take to make climate alarmism and the political changes it demands legitimate, then, would be for some new scientific discovery.

However, a film which made a serious attempt to understand Monckton’s argument would be interesting, and likely would reveal weaknesses in the alarmist’s case, even if it wouldn’t be conclusive. Many films are made about scientific controversies, featuring strong personalities, outlining their thesis, allowing critics to give their perspective. Such a film could be made in a matter of days, with a fraction of the carbon budget…

But Murray, the film-maker, prefers cheap shots and expense accounts that take him across the globe. Instead of giving us Monckton’s own account of his argument, he has created a snide character assassination, taking advantage of unguarded moments, and moments from the fringes of Australian and US politics. Murray wraps them all up so that the viewer can have a good old titter to himself about what fools the rest of the world are. And he does it for a transparent purpose: to maintain the perception of the debate as one divided into scientists on the one side, and foolish ‘deniers’ on the other.

This is reflected in a short review of the film on the Guardian’s TV page:

Storyville: Meet the Climate Sceptics
10pm, BBC4
Despite – or because of – the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is a tangible hazard, a fringe of vociferous opinion holds that the danger has been massively overstated; that global warming is an environmental equivalent of the millennium bug. Rupert Murray’s film introduces leading climate change sceptics, attempting to understand their arguments and motivations – are they misguided, are they opportunists, or do they have a point? Their cause is possibly not aided by having as spokesman the hereditary peer Christopher Monckton, who recently needed to be told to stop referring to himself as a member of the House of Lords.

The film really does not feature ‘leading climate sceptics’; it features only Monckton. And Monckton is not the spokesman for climate scepticism.

Yet again, it is the reaction to climate scepticism which tells us much more about political environmentalists than scepticism. There is a need to explain the failures at COP15 and 16, there is a need to explain the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, there is a need to explain the failure of the green movement. Thus the myth of Lord Monckton, attacker of science, destroyer of progressive climate policies… Because that, fundamentally is the only way the failure to turn climate alarm into political authority can be explained. It is only by creating what appears to be a whole, powerful, enemy — an other — can the likes of Murray begin to explain environmentalism’s discombobulation, so as to start to give it identity as an alternative to the sheer nastiness depicted by the myth.

There are many climate sceptics Murray could have chosen to interview. But none that lend themselves so easily to creating this picture of the debate. There are climate sceptics from across the political spectrum in both houses of Parliament. There are climate sceptics in other public and civil institutions, think tanks, campaigning organisations, and universities. An interesting film that sought to make sense of climate scepticism could be made, even by a critic of environmentalism. Murray is not that film-maker, and now, after two cheap, partial and crass films in the space of just one week, it’s probably time to ask if the BBC is even capable of commissioning a film that gives a sobre, honest account of the debate.

The BBC now has to cope with the fact that an editorial agenda appears to be at work more than ever, long after it has been accused of this, and long after it made statements that it would behave otherwise. The BBC gives succour to Monckton at the expense of its own credibility, just as it did a week earlier. By making a caricature of Monckton, Delingpole, and climate scepticism, the BBC reveals itself as the same kind of beast it attempted to slay: given to dogma, unwilling to countenance either debate or dissent, and failing to reflect on its function as an impartial broadcaster. It could be all the things it mocks in Murray’s film. It could be Fox News. It could be the homophobic bigot. It could be the religious zealot.

Just a week will have passed between the broadcasting of Paul Nurse’s film about climate change sceptics’ alleged ‘attack on science’ and the BBC’s next film about… climate change sceptics.

Meet the Climate Sceptics
NEXT ON: Today, 22:00 on BBC Four

Filmmaker Rupert Murray takes us on a journey into the heart of climate scepticism to examine the key arguments against man-made global warming and to try to understand the people who are making them.

Do they have the evidence that we are heating up the atmosphere or are they taking a grave risk with our future by dabbling in highly complicated science they don’t fully understand? Where does the truth lie and how are we, the people, supposed to decide?

The film features Britain’s pre-eminent sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton as he tours the world broadcasting his message to the public and politicians alike. Can he convince them and Murray that there is nothing to worry about?

Here’s a trailer for the film,

Skeptics from PTV Productions on Vimeo.

Without wishing to prejudge the film, why send an environmentalist to make a film about climate sceptics? Doing it once… Hmm… You can sort of see the journalistic value. Doing it twice in the space of a week, however, starts to look like a phenomenon. If the intention is to understand criticism of environmentalism, why not let a critic of environmentalism author the film?

This post was intended for Spiked-Online. They may print it next week, but I wanted to get it out there sooner.

Sir Paul Nurse, the new president of the Royal Society, has followed his predecessors, Martin Rees and Bob May, by making a loud public statement about the climate debate [1]. His claims — the subject of a recent edition of Horizon on BBC2 — are that science is under attack, and that public trust in scientific theories has been eroded. Like his predecessors, however, Nurse fails to understand why partial statements from the president of the Royal Society do more to impede the progress of debate than move it on.

Although it was advertised as a discussion about an ‘attack on science’, the film is dominated by the climate change debate. In Nurses view, the public are less convinced by climate change than they ought to be. This has followed an ‘attack on science’, which Nurse explains in a somewhat one-sided account of the ‘Climategate’ affair — the leaking of thousands of emails between researchers. But as ugly, pointless and as unpleasant for those involved as it was, if there is something to be said about the character of the debate about climate change, it is that raised passions and low tactics are not unique to either putative ‘side’.

The mistake Nurse makes in his treatment of the climate debate is to imagine that it is divided over a simple claim that ‘climate change is happening’. It is this polarisation of the debate into simple categories — scientists verses deniers — which obscures the real substance of debate, its context, and its nuances. The reality is that climate change is a matter of degree, not a matter of true versus false. From this question of degree emerge points of disagreement about the likely material consequences of warming, each of which are also questions of degree. And from these consequences emerge debates about how these Nth-order effects of Nth-order effects of global warming are likely to cause problems for humans. There are then yet further debates about how best to respond effectively.

The debate is multi-dimensional, and controversy exists throughout. But for Nurse, identifying the points of disagreement and offering up an analysis isn’t the point. Instead, he takes for granted that ‘the science is in’, and wonders why trust in scientific authority seems to have been eroded. One reason for this loss of trust just might be that controversies and other inconveniences are swept aside by the polarisation of the debate, leaving a perception that authoritarian impulses are hiding behind scientific consensus. But to point this out would not fill an episode of Horizon. Instead, after a rather feeble retelling of the consensus position — mostly filmed before a NASA video wall depicting the robustness of consensus position — Nurse goes after the deniers, who he suspects are responsible for undermining public trust in science.

This takes Nurse to the home of outspoken climate sceptic and Telegraph journalist, James Delingpole, who disputes the existence of the consensus, and its value to science. The film has clearly been constructed around this moment, at which Nurse seemingly delivers a coup de grace to the deniers. ‘Say you had cancer, and you went to be treated, there would be a consensual position on your treatment.’ This ‘doctor analogy’ appears to leave Delingpole uncomfortable, and stuck for words. ‘Can we talk about Climategate… I don’t accept your analogy’.

Whatever the reason for Delingpole’s hesitance, there are many good reasons for not accepting Nurse’s analogy. The most obvious being that the climate is not like the human body; climate change is not like cancer; climate scientists are not like oncologists; and climate science research institutions are not like hospitals. But worse is the fact that Nurse’s thought experiment defeats its purpose. He’s asking us to believe that there has been an attack on science, and that trust in science is being eroded. But if we presume that Delingpole is forced by the analogy to accept that he should trust the consensus formed by scientists, we must conclude that science is not under attack. An ‘attack on science’ would reject both climate change and medicine.

Nurse’s reasoning is that if we’re not scientists, we are not able to follow the complexities of climate science, and so take arguments about the climate on trust. But newspapers, he observes, are full of contradictory messages. ‘Political opinions’ are expressed through ‘lurid headlines’, causing ‘an unholy mix of the media and politics […] distorting the proper reporting of science, and that’s a real danger for us if science is to have its proper impact on society’. Perhaps worse, The internet allows ‘conspiracy theories to compete with peer-reviewed science’. The concern here is that, trust in the wrong source prevents the feckless public from responding to the correct messages about climate change, sending us all to our doom. Instead, people should trust in science, because unlike the politically-driven newspapers, and internet lunatics, its authority, ‘comes from evidence and experiment’.

But there is no attack on science. Even climate change deniers will still take the advice of oncologists, and will still express criticism of climate change policies in scientific terms. What Nurse fails to recognise is the difference between science as a process, and science as an institution. The reputation of the former is intact; but, as I’ve argued before here on Spiked, the scientific institution undermines its own credibility, regardless of any effort by ‘deniers’[2]. The members of those institutions embarrass themselves, and then step to the BBC to create documentaries in which they scratch their heads about why nobody trusts them anymore.

Aside from the technical complexity that Nurse describes, and the multiple dimensions to the climate debate that he ignores, there is the context of the climate debate to be considered. The background to the climate debate is a collapse of trust in public institutions of many kinds[3]. Echoing this collapse in public reason, Nurse urges, ‘trust no one, trust only what the experiments and the data tell you’. But isn’t this also the message from climate sceptics, who accuse institutional, official science of corruption and political-motivation?

It would seem that the sceptics have a good point here. Climate change has come to the rescue of the forgotten old academic department, the tired political establishment, and the disoriented journalist. The possibility of ecological catastrophe injects moral purpose back into public life, in spite of a collapse in trust. Accordingly, local authorities and national governments have, in recent years, transformed their purpose — to monitor your bins, rather than provide public services. Powerful supranational political and financial institutions have been created to ‘meet the challenge’ of climate change. And these political changes have for the most part occurred without any semblance of democracy; it is presupposed that these changes to public life are legitimate because they are seemingly intended to do good.

Nurse might argue that this reorganisation of political life around environmental issues comes with the blessing of scientific authority, and that it is science which identified the need to adjust our lifestyles and economy. But the greening of domestic and international politics preceded any science. The concept of ‘sustainability’ was an established part of the international agenda long before the IPCC produced an ‘unequivocal’ consensus on climate; the IPCC was established to create a consensus for political ends. Nurse, nearly recognising science’s role in the legitimisation of such political ecology, worries about loss of trust. If scientists are not ‘open about everything they do’, he says, ‘then the conversation will be dominated by people driven by politics and ideology’. But it is already ‘driven by politics and ideology'[[4]]; it’s simply that Nurse does not recognise environmentalism as political or ideological, and he does not notice himself reproducing environmental politics and ideology. The loss of trust he now observes is not the consequence of politics and ideology, but the all too visible attempt to hide it behind science and highly emotive images of catastrophe. If the presidents of science academies want their trust back, they will first have to admit to the politicisation of their function[5] in an atmosphere of distrust. Nullius in verba, indeed.

[1] Ben Pile. A sideways step from climate panic to Malthus. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/9825/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ben Pile. Why Copenhagen was bound to fail. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/7912/

[4] Ben Pile. Political prejudices dressed up as science. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8508/

[5] Ben Pile & Stuart Blackman. The Royal Society’s ‘motto-morphosis’ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3357/