The Age of Global Warming: A History (2 page)

*  According to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, increased carbon dioxide emissions accounted for just over one hundred per cent of the net man-made global warming effect.  IPCC,
Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers
(2007), p. 39.

*  Raven described Lomborg as the latest in a line of ‘false prophets and charlatans’, concluding his American Association for the Advancement of Science presidential homily with the plea that scientists should learn to respect one another.

2

Promethean Revolution

Knowing the power and the action of fire, water, air, stars, heavens and all the other bodies which environ us as distinctly as we know the various trades and crafts of our artisans, we might in the same way be able to put them to all the uses to which they are proper, and thus make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.

René Descartes

Accounts of global warming usually start with the observation that carbon dioxide is one of a number of greenhouse gases and that human activities have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This isn’t the real beginning for it leaves out why modern civilisations evolved to exhale carbon dioxide. In the words of the Nobel economist Ronald Coase, we need to know the value of what is obtained, as well as what is sacrificed to attain it – the benefits as well as the costs.
[1]

A better place to start is at the beginning, or rather before the beginning, with the man who foresaw a new beginning when he turned his back on the Middle Ages.

In 1577 or thereabouts, the record isn’t precise, the sixteen-year-old Francis Bacon was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge. He had been a favourite of Elizabeth I, answering her questions with a gravity beyond his years. Bacon grew up in an age of vitality and exuberance. According to his Italian biographer Paolo Rossi, Bacon was a medieval philosopher haunted by a modern dream.
[2]
It was at Cambridge that the young Bacon had the decisive thought of his life, one that pointed to a new era in the history of mankind. In the words of his future private secretary, Bacon fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle, a pursuit strong only ‘for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works, for the benefit of the life of man’.
[3]
That the pursuit of knowledge should be directed at deriving practical benefits for mankind and not the abstract hair-splitting of the medieval monastery became the guiding idea of Bacon’s life.

Bacon spat at Aristotle, the pope of medieval philosophers, and Greek philosophy in general. Aristotle was a wretched sophist, his logic a manual of madness. Bacon denounced the ‘degenerate learning’ of the followers of Aristotle, who idled their lives in pointless disputes over logic and abstract speculation to prove points of no practical benefit. He also accused Plato of doing mankind a mortal injury by turning men’s minds away from the observation of nature to ‘grovel before our own blind and confused idols under the name of contemplative philosophy’.
[4]

Examining the long history of human thought from the ancient Greeks, Bacon asked: Why had mankind’s condition improved so little? Men’s minds should turn to the observation of nature and to experimentation. By discovering what was written in nature’s book, it could be harnessed to bettering man’s lot and transforming his existence. ‘We cannot command nature except by obeying her,’ he wrote.
[5]
  

Bacon saw himself as an experimenter, scientist and inventor. But his scientific contributions were minimal. Even his famous discourses on scientific method had little influence on the development of science. His mind had fastened on to something larger.

If a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention but in kindling a light in nature – a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that continue to circle our present knowledge; and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world – that man (I thought) would be benefactor indeed of the human race – the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities.
[6]

In
The New Atlantis
, Bacon advocated a scientific foundation, Salomon’s House, to engage in discovering ‘the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the Human Empire’.
[7]
In 1660, thirty-four years after Bacon died, the Royal Society was founded; its motto –
Nullius in verba
, take no one’s word – an exhortation to healthy scepticism.
For Bacon, knowledge about nature was not to be acquired for its own sake, but for the purpose of enabling man to use nature to better his material conditions of life – the invention of invention, as Whitehead put it.
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est
, Bacon wrote. Knowledge is power.

Karl Marx called Bacon the prophet of the Industrial Revolution, his ideas looking forward to ‘an alteration in the form of production and to effective control of nature by man’ – as Marx wrote in
Das Kapital
.
[8]
Karl Popper called Bacon the spiritual father of modern science and the creator of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions with his idea of ‘a
material
self-liberation through knowledge’.
[9]
It made Western civilisation different from all others, past and present. ‘European civilisation is an industrial civilisation … It uses engines, sources of energy which are non-muscular. In this, European and American civilisations differ fundamentally from all other great civilisations, which are or were mainly agrarian and whose industry depended on manual labour.’
[10]

Power has a political as well as physical or scientific dimension; power over people as well as power over nature. Plato’s republic was ruled by the wise. Scientists were to govern the New Atlantis. In a pre-democratic society where monarchs ruled by divine right, Bacon’s political idea was revolutionary, especially from the pen of someone who had been Lord Chancellor of England, the highest political office under the crown.

Popper described Bacon and scientists generally as epistemological optimists. They believed humans can know with certainty the truth about the natural world. ‘Once the truth stands revealed before us, it is impossible for us not to recognise it as truth,’ is the way Popper characterised epistemological optimism. As Descartes put it, God does not deceive us, making explicit science’s debt to religion. According to Whitehead, the scientific endeavour was driven by what he called ‘the unexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles.’
[11]
This belief, Whitehead thought, came from the prior epoch and ‘the medieval insistence on the rationality of God’.
[12]

The mental framework science inherited from religion also explains why some people rejected the manifest truth. Such people were, in Popper’s words, ‘epistemological sinners’ who erred because they stubbornly clung to their prejudices, in contrast to those who saw truth when it was set before them. ‘It is the unbiased mind, the pure mind, the mind cleansed of prejudice, that cannot fail to recognise the truth.’
[13]

These pre-scientific traits – that the truth of a rational, predictable nature could be apprehended by the human mind and that non-believers were not just ignorant but, in some way, morally corrupted – would become leitmotifs in debates on the science of global warming. In November 2009, the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd denounced climate change deniers. ‘They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests,’ Rudd warned. Small in number, they were ‘literally holding the world to ransom’.
[14]

Popper’s own theory of scientific knowledge was provoked by his experience in Vienna after the First World War. The truth of Marxism, of Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s psychology explained everything in their respective fields, including why people didn’t believe them, because of their class interest or because of unanalysed repressions crying out for treatment.
[15]

A confrontation with a young, uniformed member of the Nazi party armed with a pistol might, Popper thought, have planted the seed for his classic book,
Open Society
: ‘What, you want to argue? I don’t argue: I shoot.’
[16]
An open society is one that not merely tolerates dissenting opinions, but respects them: ‘Democracy (that is, a form of government devoted to the protection of the open society) cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists.’
[17]

By contrast, what Popper termed the ‘critical optimists’ based their views on the Socratic insight that to err is human. Less numerous, Popper numbered Locke among them. In this respect, the framers of the American constitution followed Locke. Checks and balances and the separation of powers are an implicit repudiation of the assumption that ‘the people’, or, at any rate, a majority of them, cannot err, a view made explicit in the
Federalist Papers
.

Bacon died in 1626, a decade and a half before the outbreak of the English Civil War, a conflict that was to lead to the development in England of the classical liberal political philosophy and find its most perfect expression in the constitution of the American republic. Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan
was published in the last year of that war when John Locke, whose development of Hobbes’ ideas inspired both Montesquieu and America’s Founding Fathers, was not yet twenty years old.

The debate Bacon and Locke could not have, whether society should be governed by scientists or whether it should be based on popular sovereignty mediated by a liberal constitutional order, is one that, some three hundred years after Locke’s death, sparked into life in debates on global warming.  Writing in September 2009,
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman asked whether China’s one-party system was better at tackling an issue like global warming because, Friedman argued, it could impose ‘the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the twenty-first century’.
[18]
 

In his 2004 book on globalisation, Martin Wolf argues that after a millennium or more of flat-lining the decisive technological shift from human and animal power to inanimate energy, most importantly hydrocarbons, was the key factor in the sudden and extraordinary take-off in economic performance and living standards within the last two and half centuries. ‘What is called the industrial revolution is better named the energy revolution.’
[19]
Its first stirrings were apparent in Bacon’s lifetime. Production of pit coal in England rose from an average of two hundred and ten tonnes a year in the decade 1551-60 to nearly two million tonnes in the decade 1681–90, a growth rate of over seven per cent a year.
[20]

Why coal? Why fossil fuels? Why did this energy revolution depend on the combustion of hydrocarbons and, as an unavoidable by-product, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? 

Hydrocarbon molecules are rich in energy. When fully oxidised as carbon dioxide (CO
2
) there is no more energy to be extracted from a carbon atom. Carbon dioxide can be re-energised by exposure to sunlight and water in the presence of an enzyme catalyst, a process known as photosynthesis. Plant leaves are able to do this in abundance, producing energy-rich molecules like sugar and cellulose. Cellulose, as wood, is still the principal fuel for many in the developing world. The remains of plants of the carboniferous era (around three hundred million years ago) are the source of fossil carbon which is the result of the geological processes of time, heat, and pressure, increasing their energy density with the loss of their oxygen atoms.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, it was more convenient to mine coal which, as a solid, could be easily transported and stored. Oil was obtained from plants (olive oil, linseed oil) or from animals like whales. Plants and animals, including humans, convert carbohydrate to hydrocarbons (fatty acids) to store energy efficiently. In using fossil fuels, mankind unlocked a store of energy used by plants and animal and, from the time of the Industrial Revolution, started to apply it on an industrial scale.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was becoming the world’s first industrialised economy. The Promethean Revolution was underway.

If Bacon was the prophet of man’s material liberation through the advance of science and technology, Malthus was its Jeremiah – prophesying that mankind’s future was to be trapped in an agrarian past which the Promethean Revolution was already making history.

If ever there was an inflection point in the economic history of mankind, this was it. It was a spectacularly inapposite moment to be writing a treatise on economic development and population based on the assumption of the static technological endowment of pre-industrial societies when industrialisation was taking mankind out of the Malthusian trap. 

In his 1798
Essay on the Principles of Population
, Malthus warned his readers that his view of human life had a melancholy hue. The great question of his age was, Malthus said, whether mankind was accelerating down a path of illimitable and hitherto unforeseen improvement (which it was) or instead whether humanity’s destiny was to be condemned to perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery.

Malthus’s argument proceeded from two propositions: the first, that food is necessary for the existence of man; the second, that, as this celibate Anglican cleric put it, ‘the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state’.
[21]
From these two propositions – as trite as they are true – Malthus launched the core of his case: ‘The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.’
[22]
Summarising the dilemma mathematically – any proposition that can be put into a mathematical form automatically improves its propagation – human population tended to expand at a geometric rate, whereas the means of subsistence expanded arithmetically. The two lines could not diverge for any length of time. The gap could only be closed by the population line moving back to the subsistence line through war, pestilence or famine.

Human progress would, Malthus surmised, be neither rapid nor unlimited. Instead, humanity would be subjected to repeated checks, forcing a reversion of human population growth back to the trend of the subsistence line. To Malthus, this appeared to be decisive proof against the possibility of a society ‘all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and their families’.
[23]
 

As an ordained clergyman, Malthus had to square checks on population growth with the existence of a benevolent God. Misery and vice – the twin mechanisms by which human population growth would be corrected – were natural and therefore sanctioned by God. As Malthus explained, ‘the ordeal of virtue is to resist temptation’.
[24]
The religious dimension of Malthus’s theory of population growth was summarised by the nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat. ‘If you multiply inconsiderately, you cannot avoid the chastisement which awaits you in some form or other, and always in a hideous form – famine, war, pestilence etc.’
[25]

Economic history demonstrates conclusively that Malthus was wrong to believe that, without population controls, no human society could completely escape a downward pull towards subsistence. If Malthus’s
Essay
demonstrated anything, it is that the accuracy of forecasts of doom is inversely related to their political impact.

The
Essay
’s impact was immense, running to six editions in Malthus’s lifetime. It speaks volumes for the potency of the scare Malthus created that in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, fighting France, a country whose population of nearly thirty million was nearly double Britain’s (over one third of which was Irish and of doubtful loyalty), a growing population was seized on in Britain as a cause of alarm. Such was its effect in creating ‘alarmist’ views about the future (the word used by Britain’s Office of National Statistics in describing the episode) that in 1800, Parliament passed the Census Act.
[26]
The first official census took place in 1801, subsequent ones every ten years afterwards except during the Second World War.

The 1801 census found that England and Wales had a population of 8.9 million. At the 1851 census, it had doubled to 17.9 million, rising to 32.5 million in 1901.
[27]

Had this nearly four-fold population increase led to greater disease and pestilence and put pressure on living standards? 

While infant mortally rates remained almost unchanged during the nineteenth century, recent research suggests that the trend of increased life expectancy from around forty years in Malthus’s day to between seventy and eighty years at the end of the twentieth century began around 1850.
[28]

Living standards rose as well.

Farming cash wages rose by twenty-eight per cent. Cash wages in industry rose by over fifty per cent.
[29]
These rises understate the rise in living standards because prices fell and the purchasing power of money more than doubled.
[30]
Living standards benefited even more from falling prices than rising wages.