Another interesting disclaimer from the front cover of expensive reports commissioned by the Committee on Climate Change… This one looks at the future of wind energy in the UK.

While Pöyry Energy (Oxford) Ltd (“Pöyry”) considers that the information and opinions given in this work are sound, all parties must rely upon their own skill and judgement when making use of it. Pöyry does not make any representation or warranty, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this report and assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information. Pöyry will not assume any liability to anyone for any loss or damage arising out of the provision of this report. The report contains projections that are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainties and contingencies. Because of the subjective judgements and inherent uncertainties of projections, and because events frequently do not occur as expected, there can be no assurance that the projections contained herein will be realised and actual results may be different from projected results. Hence the projections supplied are not to be regarded as firm predictions of the future, but rather as illustrations of what might happen. Parties are advised to base their actions on an awareness of the range of such projections, and to note that the range necessarily broadens in the latter years of the projections.

Most interesting in my view is the line that ‘The report contains projections that are based on assumptions that are subject to uncertainties and contingencies.’

Isn’t that true of the environmentalists’ entire argument?

While we’re on the subject of making predictions… I was interested in this post by Roger Pielke Jr yesterday.

Forecasting the future is fraught with difficulties.  It can be even more challenging if people pay attention to your forecasts and use them in decision making.  So it is perhaps understandable that some forecasters seek to avoid accountability for their predictions.

Pielke is responding to the emergence of some embarrassing internal memos from the Met Office, in which the author considers ways to plausibly distance the organisation from its statements. The contents of the MO’s machinations are by-the-by… Pielke continues,

The idea that forecasts, once made, leave an agency “hostage to fortune” is no doubt true, but it can also be crucially important information for the public to evaluate the reliability of future forecasts.  The criticism that the Met Office has faced in recent years results from too much credibility being placed in their forecasts.  Highlighting the true state of predictive capabilities can help decision makers to understand better the uncertainties in forecasting, even if that means low credibility for the forecasters.

This is a point made often here. Over-statement, exaggeration, dramatisation, moralisation, and so on, are all things that have, in the past year created the embarrassment for the climate alarmist. That is to say climate alarmism undermines its own credibility.

The Met Offices recent embarrassments relate to weather more than climate, of course. And as we are often told ‘weather is not climate’ (unless it’s weather that demonstrates global warming). And so there have been predictable (pardon the pun) comments to the effect that the short-term predictive skill of weather forecasters says nothing about their colleagues’ ability to predict future climate. That’s easy for them to say, of course.

So there’s predicting weather. And there’s predicting climate. And presumably, there’s predicting the consequences of the predicted climate. And then there’s the predictions about how effective policies will be, and what their costs will be, which weigh up one set of forecasts against another. It’s a vast web of predictions, which must in itself call into question the safety — if not the sanity — of all this projection. Nonetheless, we are reminded that ‘the science is in‘.

While doing some research today, I came across this neat little caveat at the front of a report by AEA, which describes itself as A world leading energy & climate change consultancy. It reminded me of Pielke’s post.

Confidentiality, copyright and reproductionThis report is the Copyright of Defra and has been prepared by AEA Technology plc under contract to Defra. The contents of this report may not be reproduced in whole or in part, nor passed to any organisation or person without the specific prior written permission of Defra. AEA Technology plc accepts no liability whatsoever to any third party for any loss or damage arising from any interpretation or use of the information contained in this report, or reliance on any views expressed therein.

The report was commissioned by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which was established by the Climate Change Act 2008. AEA were commissioned by the CCC to produce a number of reports and analyses, so that the CCC could advise Parliament on what the carbon budgets for each 5 year period to 2050 should be. You can see all the ‘supporting research’ for the CCC’s carbon budget advice to Parliament for the first 3 budgeting periods at the CCCs website, here.

AEA produces the following reports:

AEA (2008) MARKAL-MED model runs of long term carbon reduction targets in the UK (1)
AEA (2008) MARKAL-MED model runs of long term carbon reduction targets in the UK (2)
AEA (2008) Review and update of UK abatement cost curves for the industrial, domestic and non-domestic sectors
AEA (September 2008) Greenhouse gas emissions from shipping: trends, projections and abatement potential

… And each of them contains the same caveat:

AEA Technology plc accepts no liability whatsoever to any third party for any loss or damage arising from any interpretation or use of the information contained in this report, or reliance on any views expressed therein.

There are approximately 60 million third parties to this report, to which its authors accept no responsibility. Yet their futures, and the futures of the millions more who will be born after the Climate Change Act, are in no small way being decided by the content of this report, which its authors accept no responsibility for. And this little caveat gives us a glimpse into the nature of contemporary politics.

At the bottom, are these 60 million people, none of whom has had the opportunity to express their views on environmental politics at the ballot box. At the ‘top’, so to speak, is a Parliament, comprised of parties which have each absorbed environmentalism and climate-alarmism. Yet in spite of this consensus, the parties were unable to interpret ‘the science’ to turn it into policy. So they created the CCC to which they deferred technical, scientific, and economic policy-making. The CCC in turn defer to environmental consultants. Everyone is claiming to be the one ‘saving the planet’, yet nobody is accepting any responsibility for making policy, or for producing the evidence for ‘evidence-based policy-making’.

In normal democratic politics, people have a sanction. Come the beginning of a new electoral term, even if we lack something to vote for positively, political disappointments can be de-selected, or the parties that represent their ideas voted against. Yet what opportunity is there to express our (lack of) confidence in an environmental consultancy which lacks the balls to even put its money where its mouth is? What opportunity is there to challenge the CCC, and the values and ideas it brings to its analysis? And when did the political parties ever have the bravery to reflect critically and publicly on the climate agenda?

Yet the projections supplied to the CCC and to Parliament must stand as equivalent in some way to the ideas which once informed normal politics. That is to say that these projections are political in their function, even if the content of them seems to be scientific, objective, and value-neutral.

Perhaps I am over-stating things here. Perhaps the caveat is a mere formality, designed to pre-empt some unforeseen legal problem. But to me it reads like a get-out clause by an outfit which knows its product is not fit-for-purpose. Like a cheaply manufactured, low-quality knock-off item sold without guarantee out of a car boot or garage sale. Caveat emptor.  Except we don’t buy it… We haven’t bought it. The only people who have bought it are the people who have shirked their responsibilities, but kept their office.

Perhaps the Met Office and the AEA are now beginning to realise the extent to which forecasting and prediction are now political functions. As Pielke points out, ‘The idea that forecasts, once made, leave an agency “hostage to fortune” is no doubt true’… The response has been the ‘plausible denial’ of agency itself: politicians can say, like Blair leaving office, having launched wars from dodgy dossiers, ‘I did what I thought was right‘. Panels of experts can claim that they merely reviewed ‘the best available science’. And those engaged in projecting and forecasting can say that they’re not responsible for the decisions that are made in the light of their research. ‘Don’t blame me, I only work here’…

The Guardian have annouced that ‘2010 was the Year of the [climate] Sceptics‘.

But, says the Guardian, sceptics should not sleep easy in their beds; ‘science’ is making a comeback…

By contrast, 2011 could just see the triumph of science, for two reasons.

First, the facts are increasingly stark. 2010 looks set to equal or exceed 1998 as the warmest year on record. And it doesn’t stop there. 1998 hit record levels in part because it coincided with the warming impacts of ‘El Nino’. By contrast, 2010’s highs have happened despite the cooling influence of ‘La Nina’.

Second, in the wake of Climategate, scientists are realising that pure research ain’t enough: they need to communicate much better, too – and engage openly with their adversaries. The more that happens, the more threadbare the rhetoric of denial will appear. The grudging agreement reached at Cancun will help; all the more so because both China and India have come on board as never before.

The hack-activists at the Guardian still believe that the debate divides on ‘the science’, such that one side consists of ‘scientists’ and the other, ‘sceptics’/’deniers’. This is a view of the debate that this blog has spent much time debunking, to spend much time repeating it would be pointless; they’re simply not listening. Briefly, then…

2010 was ‘the year of the sceptics’, not because the sceptics triumphed, but because climate alarmism weakened.

Climategate didn’t do as much to undermine climate science as it undermined the picture that the Guardian — amongst others — had painted of climate scientists as saintly warriors for truth. Once its silly cartoonish view of the debate had suffered embarrassment, so too did its entire argument. The point the Guardian misses in its observation that ‘that pure research ain’t enough’, is that it never was ‘pure research’ driving the debate; ‘pure research’, that is, in either the sense of unadulterated science or morally unimpeachable — both senses being interchangeable in the Guardian’s bizarre narration of the climate debate. Scientists, if they ‘come out’ as the Guardian are anticipating, will only reveal more of the same. Let’s welcome them, whichever putative side they belong too… If only there was allowed to be a debate, were it not not for the shrill histrionics from that newspaper… Bring it on.

This doesn’t mean scepticism will melt away overnight. With the impacts of global warming, as ever, lagging behind the rise in temperatures, the sceptics will still find a hearing. And they’ll be fired up by a new kind of energy. For years, advocates of bold action on carbon cuts have argued that energy insecurity strengthens their case. That’ll be harder to maintain now that shale gas has entered the mix. Not only is it relatively cheap, but there is a truly humungous amount of it in the USA. The science may be settled, but the coming year will show that the debate is far from over.

2009-10 was even more a catastrophic episode for climate-environmentalism because its incoherence as a political idea became obvious as it got closer to being reproduced in real, functioning, political institutions and bureaucracies. COP15 didn’t fail to produce a meaningful agreement because it was invaded by sceptics; it fell apart because too much moral and political capital was invested in ‘the science’. Yet the Guardian still believe that all that it will take for ‘the sceptics’ to be routed is a year that is 0.01 degrees hotter than the previous, and ‘scientists’ bashing sceptics round the head with the proof. This is precisely the expectation which has undermined climate science. You can make any argument you like, and expect it to be taken as unadulterated truth, as long as its premise is that ‘climate change is happening’.

So what kind of year will 2011 be? This Last year, we made our own predictions on this blog:

First, we are anticipating that “scepticism” or “denial” – call it what you want – will become more organised this year, perhaps it already is. Second, although the climate issue is not going away, it has suffered terrible PR, and there is widespread recognition that the climate change pudding has been over-egged. We anticipate that the environmental debate will begin to refocus around the issue of over-population, rather than climate.

The sceptics have yet to prove themselves as organised as we thought they could be. Sadly it seems that many critics of environmentalism are still preoccupied with the idea that the science by itself is sufficient to understand and challenge the excesses of environmentalism. We’ve argued here that this is to mirror the mistake that environmentalists make; to believe that a negative or static temperature trend will defeat eco-dogma. Perhaps worse, it seems that where sceptics do venture more political arguments, it is to reinvent the political battles of the past than to shed any real light on the present. The use of the climate issue to reanimate lifeless political traditions and the conflicts they define themselves by speaks to the vacuity of the perspectives comprising the wider debate, not merely the climate issue. And that makes the second prediction yet more relevant; the climate issue could disappear from public life tomorrow, and barely a tenet of environmentalism will have been challenged. Climate alarmism will be able to simply slide into some other ground: the population issue.

So for 2011, I think we can say to the Guardian that if they thought 2010 really was ‘the year of the sceptic’, they ain’t seen nothing yet… They are their own worse enemy, and it seems that, judging by their recent articles, there is considerable scope for them to continue undermine themselves, without the help of sceptics.

But… in all seriousness, as several recent posts on this blog have discussed, the population genie is out of the green bottle. It is becoming respectable and mainstream with the help of media-friendly, but geriatric household names, such as Sir David Attenborough; and scientists such as the previous president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees; and James Lovelock. Being much less abstract an idea than climate change, Malthusianism will be an easier thing to sell to a public suffering from ‘austerity measures’, rising unemployment, increasing costs, and an increasingly detached political class and an ever more hopeless political opposition.

Happy new year!

Happy new year…

As you can see, we have a new site design, on a new server.

Please feel free to express any thoughts about it in the comments. Anything need to be changed? Could something be better? Is it easy to navigate/read?

UK politics is taking a very spooky turn.

I came across this today in the course of some research…

Lords Science Committee expand Behaviour Change Inquiry to consider interventions to reduce car usage in towns and cities

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee have launched a new call for evidence as part of their inquiry into the use of behaviour change interventions in delivering Government policy. The Committee, who have been investigating behaviour change since July, have so far focused on Government efforts to promote healthy eating and reduce obesity. With the publication today of a second call for evidence, they are now turning their attention to policies designed to reduce car usage in towns and cities.

Call for Evidence ( PDF 228 KB)

The Committee are inviting written evidence on the issue from any interested parties by Friday 21 January 2011.  Some of the questions they are seeking answers to include:

• What are the most influential drivers of behaviour affecting an individual’s choice of travel?
• What role does infrastructure play in encouraging and facilitating changes in travel-mode choice?
• What are the most appropriate type and level of delivery of behaviour change interventions to change travel-mode choice?
• Are current policy interventions addressing both psychological and environmental barriers to change?
• Are policy interventions appropriately designed and evaluated? What lessons have been learnt as a result of these evaluations?
• What lessons can be learnt from interventions in other countries?

Baroness Neuberger, Chairman of the Inquiry on Behaviour Change, said in comment:

“We have had some very interesting evidence sessions in this inquiry, which has so far focused on efforts to reduce obesity. However, Government programmes to change behaviour go much wider than personal health alone.

“We will now focus on programmes designed to reduce car usage in towns and cities. Reducing the number of journeys made by private car is likely to be a big part of a  successful programme to reduce the level of carbon emissions in the UK.

“We will look at examples of where successful schemes have been implemented and examine what lessons can be learnt and applied elsewhere.”

I haven’t got much to say about this right now — nor the time — but a couple of points should stick out.

First… That there are Government programmes to change behaviour should worry us immensely. Aren’t they supposed to ‘work for you’?

Second. It’s interesting that climate change is the legitimising basis of this proposed intervention.

Third. There seems to be no call for evidence regarding the rightness or wrongness of intervening in this way, whether or not climate change is happening.

Perhaps it is incumbent on us to take the initiative. If you have any time this Christmas holidays, consider responding to the “Science Committee’s” social engineering project.

It’s time to modify their behaviour!

Brain Cox is a great science communicator. That is to say, he makes very effective TV programmes, which do not condescend, and do much to encourage an interest in science. But there is surely science as process, and there’s ‘science’ as an institution. It’s not clear which one Cox – who gave this year’s Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Lecture –  was speaking for. His lecture, given the title, ‘Science: a challenge to TV Orthodoxy’ was disappointing given his previous arguments for scientific research, and didn’t challenge orthodoxy as much as it reproduced it, almost entirely uncritically.

To people who follow the climate debate, the interesting things would seem to be Brian’s treatment of Martin Durkin’s film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was ‘bollocks’, in Cox’s view; and Iain Stewart’s Climate Wars series, which was held up as a model of good science documentary making. (More on those points shortly.)

But what Brian’s lecture really demonstrates is very much the problem in the background to the climate debate, not merely the problem within it. As we’ve argued here, environmentalism is a symptom, not a cause of the problems experienced in today’s society. Some interesting contradictions in Brian’s thesis reveal the context of the climate debate.

Take, for instance, these two statements, one made at the opening and the other further into his presentation.

Science is enjoying a renaissance in its political and cultural visibility. It was largely protected in the recent government spending review, which speaks not only to its economic value, but also to its increasing public profile.

[…]

So since the continuing health of our science programming depends on the public and therefore government support, and the steady flow of excited young people who want to become scientists and engineers, television clearly has a big responsibility to get its science programming right.

At the same time as Cox celebrates the apparent scientific renaissance, he seems to be concerned that television isn’t getting science right. This appears to be something of a contradiction. What kind of cultural renaissance misconceives the very substance that drives it?

To demonstrate the problem of broadcasters’ approach to science, Cox turns to the treatment of two scientific arguments. The first is the BBC’s handling of complaints about his (correct) claim that ‘astrology is a load of rubbish’ in his film, the Wonders of the Solar System. It had drawn the following complaint:

His careless assertion was unreserved, unsubstantiated and unscientific. Has he done any empirical studies? Has he explored his birth chart? … I have certainly never seen him at an astrology conference or read anything written by him about astrology… This bad science is an abuse of a position of trust in an educational scientific programme funded by BBC licence payers. BBC guidelines state that astrology must be presented in a balanced way.

When the BBC asked Cox for a response, he simply put his argument more forcefully. The BBC instead released a statement explaining that Cox’s views on astrology were his own, and not necessarily a reflection of the BBC’s views. The issue Cox takes here is with the supposition that broadcasters should be ‘neutral’ in their coverage of ‘controversies’.

Cox says that this is a trivial case, but that there are much more serious problems caused by the imperative of impartiality. The next case he explores concerns criticism of the the media’s coverage of the MMR-autism scare from Dr. Ben Goldacre. Goldacre says:

Now debate’s good. But this was conspiracy theory and ignorance. The pharmaceutical industry have certainly been guilty of cover-ups. But MMR just isn’t one of them. And it’s not as if scientists have ignored the question. Researchers in Denmark looked at half a million children. 400,000 had MMR. 100,000 didn’t. And yet the rates of autism was the same in both groups. You’ve not heard about research like this, because the media chose not to cover the evidence that goes against their scare story. I can’t blame parents for being terrified. Evidence-based medicine — the science of how we know if something is good for us, or bad for us — is fascinating. It’s easy to understand. And I think the public deserve the chance to hear about these ideas.

Just as the BBC had sought to distance itself from Cox’s statements about astrology, the ITN news programme featuring Goldacre’s authored piece also emphasised that the opinions reflected belonged to the author, not the broadcaster.

These two cases indeed seem to point to a problem, though it’s worth asking how representative they are. And Cox’s reflection on them is not deep. Astrology is, as Cox claims, a mystical view of the universe. But its adherents no longer express their ideas in supernatural terms. The complainant’s criticism of Cox is expressed in scientific terms. It accused him of bad science. However much nonsense it is, the complainant’s reformulation of a supernatural idea in scientific terms speaks volumes about science’s ‘cultural and political renaissance’.

And to the MMR scare, we might want to say that, although the media’s appetite for controversy certainly raised the profile of the issue, scientists were at the heart of the story. Surrounding the coverage of Andrew Wakefield — the now disgraced researcher — who gave the story seemingly scientific credibility, were the angry parents of autistic children. A strange mix of high emotions and cold scientific language dominated the coverage, obscuring the substance of the matter. Cox and Goldacre both promise that science had the answer. But what does this promise say to the suspicion of the pharmaceutical industry — and by extension, medicine — that Goldacre seems to share? What can it do about the media’s need for ‘scare stories’? It seems, after all, less that science is enjoying a renaissance, but that ‘science’ is simultaneously the expression of a weakening of public discourse and trust, and is given as its remedy. To what extent is the use or abuse of science in the MMR scare or astrology really about science?

Moreover, climate sceptics would recognise Goldacre’s criticism of the media’s use of ‘scare stories’. And this makes Cox’s use of the Great Global Warming Swindle and BBC’s Climate Wars series all the more odd. If the media are drawn to scare stories such as MMR, is it not fair to ask if this phenomenon extends to the media’s coverage of the climate?

To illustrate the expression of bad documentary film-making, Cox points to the Swindle film, to make the argument that a viewer might not have the substance behind the eyes necessary to understand that Durkin’s film was a ‘polemic’. He acknowledges that the film was advertised and introduced as a polemic, but that this is not enough. He seems to want the words ‘POLEMIC’ in flashing red letters, throughout the broadcast.

Durkin’s film was polemic, of course. But Cox doesn’t ever explain what the fault of the film’s polemic was. Was it the solar / cosmic ray theory of cloud-formation? Or was it the argument that climate change is the product of this natural variation? Cox’s objection to TGGWS appears to be that it broke with what he calls the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’, misleading the audience who may not be sufficiently well informed to understand that the film was a polemic. Broadcasters and film makers should stick to the peer-reviewed scientific consensus.

But if Cox doesn’t identify precisely what the object of the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’ actually is, how can he criticise a ‘polemic’ which seems to contradict it? This blog has, over the past 4 years attracted criticism for the same thing, yet we’ve rarely ever ventured into matters of science. Indeed, our principal argument is that the ‘consensus’ seems to stand for whatever those who wield it claim it stands for. More to the point, we can see as much confusion about what the consensus is from climate scientists, world leaders, and activists as we can see from any group of sceptics. Yet it is only ‘sceptics’ and ‘deniers’ who are taken to task for taking liberties with the consensus.

There is a further problem here, in that the climate debate divides on another axis, between the argument about whether or not ‘anthropogenic climate change is happening’, and what its consequences are. Within each side of this axis there are competing and contradicting claims, and questions of degree, rather than binary, true-or-false calculations. If, just over a year ago, had you proposed a film to Brian Cox, which took issue with the claims that climate change would massively reduce crop yields in Africa, or that the hundreds of millions of people living beneath the Himalayas face chronic water shortages as a result of glacial recession, you would, in his view, be a ‘maverick’. You would be outside the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’. Yet those are the things that this and other blogs have discovered to be false. The implication of Cox’s argument is that such claims should be ignored by broadcasters.

So the notion of a ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’ serves to polarise the political and scientific debates. And the unfortunate implication for Cox is that, as long as what you say apparently ‘fits’ the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’, you can whittle out any nonsense you wish without incurring the wrath of the ‘scientists’. (And it should be asked again at this point, exactly how representative TGGWS was — as we’ve pointed out before, this bogeyman sticks out of many tens of thousands of hours of programming. It’s hardly typical of contemporary programming, and sits amongst many many hours of green trash.) You can, for instance, claim that a billion people will starve or face drought. You can claim that 150,000 people a year die of climate change. You can then, for no good reason double the estimate to say that 300,000 die of climate change. You can claim that there are just ‘50 days to save the planet’, or you can claim that ‘Obama has just 4 years to save the planet’, or you can claim that there are only ‘100 months to save the planet’.

In other words, you can use the ambiguous ‘peer reviewed scientific consensus’ to construct dramatic stories about catastrophe, and you can use this urgency to develop political arguments with the blessing of ‘science’. And that is precisely what Iain Stewart did for in his series, Climate Wars, which Cox holds up as an example of ‘drawing a clear distinction in the viewers mind, between the peer-reviewed science and his opinion’. In the clip Cox showed, Stewart said:

It would have been lovely to have made a programme about how science had got it all wrong. That actually we’ve got nothing to worry about. But unfortunately it’s the opposite. Most of the climate scientists I talked to are actually genuinely scared by the future. They’re worried that it’s in the nature of the climate to change far faster than we once thought possible. And my feeling is, if they’re scared, so should we be. Because whatever the uncertainties surrounding climate prediction, the fundamental science is pretty clear. We may not know exactly what global warming will bring, but we sure as hell know it’s happening. There’s just no hiding place from that simple fact. And of course what it means for us an our families, well, that’s a different matter. But if I’ve learned one thing in this series, it’s that the stakes are so high, doing nothing simply isn’t an option.

But as we showed here (and here), Stewart’s films took massive liberties with the facts of the climate debate, and even greater liberties with his treatment of the arguments of the ‘sceptics’. For instance, he presented the last 20+ years of debate as one between ‘scientists’ representing an unchanging ‘scientific consensus’ and the usual deniers. This re-wrote history, not only from the perspective of just one side, but also from the present. This ahistoric perspective was owed to the fact that the film is nothing more than a verbatim replication of Naomi Oreskes’s ‘Tobacco Strategy’ thesis. Indeed, Oreskes gets a credit on the film. But it’s nothing more than a conspiracy theory. As we pointed out:

To find support for her Tobacco Strategy theory, Oreskes simply takes debates about acid rain, secondhand smoke and CFCs, and divides each into two positions such that, with the benefit of hindsight, one is necessarily false, and the other is necessarily true; she polarises the debate so that it can be cast as a reasonable position versus a ridiculous one. From this vantage point, she can claim that a strategy has been in place throughout. But what debate with a scientific element to it wouldn’t be about how well understood the science is? Which one of these debates hasn’t involved exaggerated claims from alarmists? And what demands for regulation have not been met by opponents that it is not necessary. The Tobacco Strategy is a rather mundane observation about the nature of arguments. Yet Oreskes gives it enough significance to paint a picture of a conspiracy. As we have argued before, this search for geometric congruence between ‘denialist’ arguments comes at the expense of meaningful moral or political analysis. And by the same token, it could be argued just as easily that demands for acting on the best scientific evidence and scientific opinion makes bedfellows of greens and the eugenicists of the early-mid 20th century.

Brian Cox cannot have looked too deeply at the Climate Wars series, because Stewart routinely confuses ‘science’ with opinion. It was, in the words Cox might use, ‘factually total bollocks’, both in its treatment of the scientific arguments, and matters of history and politics. And it’s Cox’s surprisingly fragile understanding of the climate debate and his failure to subject claims about the ‘scientific consensus’ to criticism which causes him to reproduce the same old orthodoxy:

As Iain Stewart says, the consensus is clear. The real controversy is political, and centers on the question ‘what is to be done’. Should we increase tax on oil? Should we not build a third runway at Heathrow? Should we build more nuclear power stations? Or wind turbines? Should we risk damaging our economy in the short term by reducing CO2 emissions quickly? Or should we continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, and seek a more market-oriented solution to climate change? These are complex questions, the answers to which often divide down political lines. But I think Iain Stewart navigates these treacherous waters well, because he remains true to the science, and true to television.

Here, Cox is simply naive. For him, the political debate emerges after the ‘science’, but as this blog argues, there’s plenty of politics prior to the science.

In one sense, the politics is prior in determining what the consequences of climate change are likely to be. In order to understand the material consequences, environmentalists presuppose a fragile nature in ‘balance’. And to understand the human, social consequences of climate change, environmentalists need to presuppose that social phenomena are ‘natural’, such that nothing could ever be done, for instance, to abolish poverty. These points are discussed at length elsewhere on this blog. But there is another sense in which the politics is prior that could do with some exploration here.

As discussed above, science’s ‘political and cultural renaissance’ is coincident with moral disorientation at the newsdesk, and a collapse of trust between the public and medicine. Cox identifies that there’s a problem with TV makers responding to the controversies that its audience wants answers to, but appears to say nothing of what this phenomenon arose from. Just as newsdesks can only see the world in terms of scare stories and controversies, so too do today’s political arguments ground themselves on matters of catastrophe.

Cox does this himself:

This means that the most objective and impartial presentation of the so-called contentious story, such as MMR, climate change, astrology, or even the so-called evolution debate should be given significantly more weight to the scientifically peer-reviewed position. Because this will leave the audience with the more truthful view of the current thinking. Now you may see there that I’m redefining what impartiality means. But the peer-reviewed consensus is by definition impartial. To leave the audience with this particular kind of impartial view is desperately important. We’re dealing with the issues of the life and death of our children and the future of our climate. And the way to deal with this is not to be fair and balanced, to borrow a phrase from a famous news outlet, but to report and explain the peer-reviewed scientific consensus accurately.

Cox makes an argument for science, not on the basis of its positive potential for us, but on the same old basis: that we face crises. This is not an argument for science. It’s an appeal for authority.

… the grand challenges of our age such as climate change, and the ever-increasing appetite of our planet’s rapidly expanding population for clean water and energy require scientific and engineering solutions as well as political ones.

Cox is kidding himself. The peer-review process is not, by definition ‘impartial’. For instance, the peer-review process can’t necessarily exclude the possibility that the peer-reviewers are victims of the thinking that Cox is victim to. Does the peer-review process reject claims about the consequences of climate change which don’t give consideration to the degree to which social factors — i.e. poverty — determine the human outcome far more than weather? Or are scientists, just as journalists and politicians are, vulnerable to the idea that catastrophes are merely material events, devoid of any social or historical context? It strikes me that you can do perfectly good science on a flimsy social premise that ‘poverty is natural’, to conclude that climate change will make it worse. But why should this premise have more weight in the debate about climate change than the argument that we could do more by abolishing poverty? Moreover, the view of the climate debate that Cox seems to have is that it simply divides on the question about whether or not ‘climate change is happening’. And the fundamental problem here is that the ensuing arguments confuse the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 and the sensitivity of human society to climate.

My argument on this blog is that this confusion is the presupposition of much climate science that constitutes the ‘peer-reviewed scientific consensus’. This is at best a kind of soft-environmentalism, and it’s passed off as the conclusion of climate science. But really, it’s the premise of political environmentalism. The conclusion and premise of much climate research is identical, and never interrogated. This is the major fault not only of environmentalism, but also of science’s ‘political and cultural renaissance’.

Scientists, journalists and politicians are all vulnerable to the view that debates about science consist merely of arming the argument about ‘What is to be Done’ with the imperative: ‘Something Must be Done about…’. That is the extent of science’s ‘cultural and political renaissance’. In the process, a great number of presuppositions are smuggled in, consciously or not.

To this, Cox might respond (indeed he says it),

Science is simply the process by which we seek to understand nature. It is utterly a-populist. Its findings reflect no social or political norms or religious beliefs. In other words, when it comes to the practice of science, the scientists must never have an eye on the audience. For that would be to fatally compromise the process.

‘Science’ as a process may well have no agenda to speak of. But the same cannot be said of science as an institution. Science does not do science; people do science. And as much as the aim may be to produce a value-free investigation of the material world, we see in the climate debate that the issue is muddied. Climate science is no longer merely engaged in an attempt to understand material processes, but becomes the substance of an understanding of how humans relate, and the basis on which far-reaching political institutions are being established. The claim that 150,000 people die each year from climate change, for instance, to form the basis of a projection and a call for action, must presuppose that there is nothing that can be done to abolish poverty. In other words, climate science begins to explain the existence of poverty in the world: it’s the result of a degraded environment. The more general expression of this problem is the ‘naturalisation’ of social problems and phenomena.

The problem becomes clearer in a statement Cox makes near the start of his presentation:

I think the best way to illustrate these occasional incompatibilities is to first define what science is. Now this is not easy in a historical context, because to put it bluntly, vast amounts of drivel have been written about the subject by armies of postmodernist philosophers and journalists. But I’m going to ignore all this, because I concur absolutely with the quote attributed to the Nobel-prizewinning physicist, Richard Feynman. He said the philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornothology is to birds. To my mind, science is very simple indeed. Science is the best framework we have for understanding the universe. Now as long as you accept that evidence is more important than opinion, then this is a statement of the obvious. See everything we take for granted in the modern world, from atoms to electricity, from our understanding of the stars to medical imaging, is down to somebody being curious about the universe and using the scientific method to investigate it.

‘Science is the best framework we have for understanding the universe.’ Of course it is, with two important caveats. First, that material science is the framework for understanding the material world. Second, that this first caveat must imply some method which makes it possible to identify whether science is attempting to study something material, or something that is better understood or studied through social science.

Cox is nearly onto something when he says that postmodern philosophy confounds the definition of ‘science’. But he perhaps forgets what it also did to the study of the human realm. If we take ‘postmodernism’ to mean some radical form of relativism, which reduces ‘science’ to nothing more than ‘just another belief system’, this also reduces the social sciences and humanities to meaningless narratives. The effect of postmodernism on the understanding of the human world was far more devastating. The escape from postmodern relativism has been to locate authority not in human-centric ideas, values, or principles, but to ground it in what appears to be objectivity… ‘Science says…’ This really does turn ‘science’ into ‘just another narrative’, because it now starts to become an encompassing framework, from which claims are made about the non-material world. It starts to explain poverty as a natural phenomenon. It starts to explain the right and the wrong in material terms of ‘true and false’. It starts to connect humans through material phenomena. ‘Climate change’ begins to explain social phenomena; it measures the ‘ethics’ of our behaviour; it determines what form of social organisation is best, and how people should relate…

That is the reality of ‘science’s cultural and political renaissance’. Science becomes far more than a value free investigation of the material world, and starts, in Cox’s own words,

…to draw profound conclusions about our responsibility to ourselves, our planet, and ultimately the cosmos itself.

This is no longer ‘objectivity’. And when it turns out that the institutions of science don’t engender the respect and authority that Cox believes they deserve, he has only one answer: more scientism. The reality is that people are suspicious of the MMR jab and people believe in astrology, not because they are mislead, but because it takes more than sheer wonder at the universe to create trust in political, social, and scientific institutions.

I have a story on Spiked today, about the pre-Cancun messages from the Met Office. In retrospect, I wish I’d called it “Some of our Global Warming is Missing”, but I expect it’s been said before.

Conventional climate wisdom has it that once ‘the science’ is put before politics, politicians will respond to the imperative to save us from Gaia’s revenge. So each year, representatives from each country that has signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) assemble to turn it into an agreement to limit CO2 emissions.

But science is a slow process; politics happens much faster. In the rush to get the most recent research under the noses of policymakers, those engaged in the climate debate show that climate politics exists before climate science has even got its thermometer out.

I don’t normally ‘do’ science, but it seems that the MO are getting less coherent and more involved with the politics.

It would have been good to also have had a look at the stuff from the Tyndall Centre / RS Phil Trans A and their panic about 4 degrees, but there wasn’t room.

While you’re over at Spiked, check out Eero Iloniemi’s article on  land prices in places that are about to be washed away by climate change and sea-level rise.

I’ve been too busy for blogging recently. To break the silence, I thought I’d post this presentation I gave at a debate at York University this time last year. The discussion was about the view often expressed by environmentalists that there is no need for any further scientific debate.  Needless to say, our side won the vote about the motion.

One of the most striking characteristics of the climate debate is the almost routine confusion of politics and science.

“Climate change is happening”, we’re told, time and time again, therefore “we need strong, radical, international frameworks on climate change”, laws, regulation, and maybe even rationing in order to prevent a disaster.

In this view, we need to fundamentally change our economies, our industry, and our lifestyles. And we need institutions to be put in place to make sure this happens.

This has even become an argument against democracy itself. This argument holds that the public are too stupid to understand the gravity of the situation we face. Democracy therefore becomes no more than a means to satisfy individual greed and indulgence in the face of catastrophe.

“We are fiddling with our ipods and plasma widescreen TVs while Rome burns.”

My argument here is that to forbid the discussion of the science of climate change is therefore to forbid the discussion of the organising principle of today’s political institutions.

We cannot challenge it because it exists behind closed doors. It exists on computer simulations, guarded by today’s priests: a holy order of climate scientists.

The scientific proposition that CO2 causes or will cause catastrophe has formed the basis of a system of ethics and a system of politics. This system is environmentalism, and it exists in contrast to human-centric systems of thought and politics. It informs the creation of supra-national political organisations, such as the UNFCCC and treaties that follow in its wake. It informs our industrial transport and the energy policies and strategies of our government. It establishes the relationship between individuals and the state.

We take it for granted that this proposition, or set of propositions, is true, because science is, in today’s world, the last seat of authority.

The question I have is about whether that desire for political authority exists before or after climate science. I believe that the politics is prior.

The unstated premise of environmentalism is that politics is impotent to face the challenges of development.

Once this view has been established, once we decide that politics is pointless, catastrophe becomes a given.

As I argued on Tuesday, catastrophe is inevitable, only if we take it for granted that we cannot organise the world to combat poverty through development, i.e. through the creation of wealth.

We hear so often that climate change will be worse for the poor, but we never interrogate this claim to ask whether it might be better to address the issue of poverty than to attempt to make other people’s lives better by driving less.

So we hear that the 300,000 deaths attributed to climate change are a bigger concern than 40 million deaths — and the rest — from poverty, throughout the world.

This dysnumeric moral calculus is owed to our politicians’ inability to generate authority for their political ideas in political terms: by asking you to engage with them, for instance. It is owed to their inability to connect with the public. This has driven politicians to search for another basis for their authority. Contemporary politics cannot conceive of a way of making life better for the millions or billions of people living in poverty in this world, never mind finding a way of improving life for the rest of us. There is no science which could serve as the basis for such an idea.

Accordingly, we are forced to accept a form of politics that is limited by the ethical imperatives seemingly issued by climate and environmental science

This, it is argued, is evidence-based policy-making.”The science is in”, and the continued debate about climate change impedes the possibility of “rising to the challenge” we are faced with. Instead, I would argue, we can see policy-based evidence making.

The catastrophes that we are confronted by, are instead the products of today’s vapid political imaginations. They confused their own impotence for material reality. No wonder the other ‘side’ does not want there to be a debate.

A continued debate might reveal just how hollow today’s political discourse actually is: what is passed off as climate science is a fig leaf. It hides our politicians shame: an embarrassment of bad faith, bad politics, and bad science.

Read my article about Ch4’s What the Green Movement Got Wrong at Spiked-Online.

Environmentalists have long claimed that their desire to save the world has been thwarted by conspiracies of Big Oil and right-wing think-tanks. Channel 4’s What the Green Movement Got Wrong (watch it here) showed signs that some environmentalists are at last beginning to take responsibility for their failures. But does it tell us anything we didn’t already know, and will the new environmentalists be so different from the old?

While you’re there, check out Brendan O’Neill’s excellent take on neomalthusianism.

When modern Malthusians insist that resources are finite, they only expose their historical illiteracy, misanthropy and social pessimism.

Arguing the corner for the neomalthusians, Adrian Stott of the OPT tries to defend his case.

Are we facing an existential environmental problem?

Yes. I hope we agree that the global environment is already in bad trouble, and getting worse. (If spiked is in denial over that, then there’s not much hope for this debate). The increasing rate of extinctions, the rising number of species suffering population declines in the order of 90 per cent (not just tigers, but sparrows and voles, too), the destruction of rainforests, the pollution of the oceans – the evidence is plain to see.

It’s plain to see that neomalthusians don’t really understand their own argument, nor the criticism of it, in spite of its historic failures.

Channel 4 will be showing “What the Green Movement Got Wrong” tonight. Tune in at 9pm…

It’s too early to say much about the film — I haven’t seen it yet — but it appears to feature prominent environmentalist, Mark Lynas saying that environmentalists were wrong to oppose GM and nuclear energy. The thinking being that these are two ways we could prevent global warming.

“My view”, says Lynas, “as one of the contributors to the film, is simple: the greens can dish it out, but they can’t take it.”

You what, Mark?

This is a real debate and the environment movement needs to tackle it head-on rather than asserting that all challenges must be part of some imagined evil conspiracy.

Is this the same Mark Lynas:

Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg’s comments on climate change. “I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face,” said Lynas, “in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life.” Many countries in the Third World are also experiencing the effects of climate change. In Africa, Lake Chad is now a twentieth of the size it was in the 1950s, leaving millions potentially without water. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is planning the evacuation of its entire population as sea levels continue to rise. “And yet despite all this evidence,” comments Lynas, “Lomborg somehow contrives to argue that it is cheaper to go on burning fossil fuels than to switch to clean energy to prevent runaway global warming. This feeds right into the agenda of profiteering multinationals like Esso.”He continued: “I don’t see why the environment should suffer every time some bored, obscure academic fancies an ego trip. This book is full of dangerous nonsense.

Lynas’s views on nuclear power has got him into trouble with the green movement before, of course. Back in 2008, he wrote,

Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. […] The backlash to my first magazine article on the subject prompted my inbox to collapse, the blogs to drip with venom, the dirty looks to multiply.

Just imagine! Venomous attacks from environmentalists! Poor, poor, Lynas. Still, at least it’s provided a moment of self reflection, even if it is own backside he’s disappearing into.

But was Lynas’s conversion a Road to an Atomic Damascus or the Green Reformation, we asked, as Lynas battled with another favourite of ours, Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas. Lynas, like Luther, has nailed his theses to Ch4’s door. It will be interesting to see just how deep a reflection on the problems of the environmental movement Lynas has been able to commit himself to. I have my doubts.

It’s all well and good to propose nuclear power as a technical solution to an objectively-defined problem of climate change, and to point out that the greens have been the ones doing most to prevent progress in this regard. But this misses the point that environmentalism — Lynas included — doesn’t begin with objectively-defined crises. For instance, Lynas now finds himself accused of the kind of attack on his integrity he was once proud to be involved in. Silly consumer ethics guru, Leo Hickman in Tuesday’s Guardian points out that

An environmental documentary due to be broadcast on Channel 4 on Thursday evening has come under attack from a leading American environmentalist who was interviewed for the programme, as well as a coalition of anti-GM campaigners based in the developing world. [… ] In a letter sent today to Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs, Dorothy Byrne, a coalition of anti-GM campaigners based in the developing world led by India’s Vandana Shiva accused the filmmakers of using only two “southern-based commentators”, both of whom are “funded by major GMO [genetically modified organisms] companies”.

Friends of the Earth, who are angry that they have been named in the film, have issued a statement and a film:

[youtube EHREDKZLfII]

And it is here that we can really see what the environmental movement gets wrong. Kirtana Chandrasekaran’s vision for the future is one in which we ‘build on the knowledge’ that small farmers throughout the world have. The irony here being that, just a moment previously, she had complained that GM technology locks poorer people into debt and poverty. She can’t see beyond this form of existence, to consider the possibility of small farmers becoming big farmers, and of leaving subsistence existences — and possibly rural life — far behind them. For Chandrasekaran, subsistence existences are the expression of pure eco-virtue. And this is what the environmental movement gets terribly, terribly wrong.