The Age of Global Warming: A History (55 page)

McKeown argued that

patients have been and continue to be exposed to pain and injury from misguided attempts to do them good. Suffering is marginally more tolerable when inflicted with the best of intentions, and the death of Charles II under treatment by his doctors was much more cruel than that of his father at the hands of his executioner.
[15]

When did reputable doctors retrospectively become quacks and when did clinical interventions, based on the medical science of the day, become of net benefit to patients? Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to know. One answer is certainly wrong – at doctors’ evaluation of their own abilities. Good intentions and strength of belief are highly misleading indicators of the quality of scientific knowledge. Physicians had been swearing the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm for twenty-three centuries prior to Henderson’s Great Divide.

A tiny minority of climate scientists scrupulously avoided lending their voices to policy pronouncements. The vast majority saw it as part of their vocation. In the Fourth Assessment Report’s chapter on climate change and sustainable development, the Working Group II authors said that the ‘real message’ from the IPCC’s estimates of future global average temperatures was that

no threshold associated with any subjective judgement of what might constitute ‘dangerous’ climate change can be guaranteed by anything but the most stringent mitigation interventions, at least not on the basis of current knowledge.
[16]

Despite uncertainties acknowledged by the authors, there can be no mistaking the therapy these doctors believed necessary – ‘on the basis of current knowledge’.

How can we know whether current knowledge on climate science is correct? In a video in the run up to the Copenhagen climate conference, Schneider made the comparison with tobacco smoking and lung cancer.

We to this day do not know the precise mechanism whereby smoking causes lung cancer, but the statistics are so overwhelming that it would be irresponsible not to act. It’s the same in climate.
[17]

Al Gore also made the link. It’s human nature to take time to connect the dots, Gore says in
An Inconvenient Truth
of his sister’s death from lung cancer.

Leading climate scientists have invoked the American tobacco industry’s denial of the link between smoking and lung cancer.
*
The attacks on climate science ahead of the Copenhagen conference mirrored the earlier tactics of the tobacco industry, according to IPCC vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Yperselethe.
[18]
Five years before, Robert May, president of the Royal Society at the time and previously the British government’s chief scientific adviser, accused those questioning the science of using tactics ‘reminiscent of the tobacco lobby’s attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer’.
[19]

David King, May’s successor as chief scientific adviser, mounted a similar argument after the collapse of the Copenhagen conference.

When paid lobbyists try to discredit the scientific theory that smoking causes lung cancer, they used the argument that it wasn’t a proven fact. Well it wasn’t then, and nor will it ever be, but would you now bet against it? ... And in the case of climate change, the scientific probability that the world is warming, and that humans are the chief cause, is overwhelming.
[20]

King made the comment in 2010 – at the end of a decade which showed no statistical trend in average global temperatures.

The clear implication is that the relationship between rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and changes in global temperature is as solidly founded as that between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. There is little dispute that tobacco smoking is, in the words of Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer, authors of
Unfiltered: Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health
, ‘the single most important preventable source of morbidity and mortality in advanced industrial societies’.
[21]

The parallel with smoking and lung cancer is a potent advocacy tool to discredit opponents. Global warming was an idea in search of evidence, reversing Popper’s formulation that a theory must allow us to
explain
the observations that created the problem.
[22]
Here, the theory preceded the observations: speculation that rising levels of carbon dioxide would lead to rising global temperatures led concerned scientists – many of whom were worried about the possibly deleterious consequences on the environment if such a rise were to occur – to seek evidence for it.

Superficially, the most compelling evidence for global warming was derived from temperature reconstructions that purported to show that the rise in temperatures during the twentieth century was unprecedented and way outside the bounds of natural variability. After the Hockey Stick was discredited, the IPCC changed tack. Now the principal evidence was the ability of computer models to replicate global temperature trends over the second half of the twentieth century. The rise in average global temperature could only be explained by the rise in carbon dioxide (although the computer models used assumptions about cooling induced by sulphate aerosols that were little more than guesswork).
*
Secondary evidence was also adduced, including glacier retreat, arctic sea ice extent, the number of polar bears, extreme weather events and sometimes lurid forecasts of what the world was going to look like, amplified and often distorted by NGOs who shared scientists’ concern about the environment.

In terms of Schneider’s ‘courtroom epistemology’, carbon dioxide was in the dock from the start. To change the metaphor, the disease pathway had been found before evidence of disease – the opposite of the case with lung cancer.

Until the 1920s, cancer of the lung was considered rare. Death rates from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, typhus and cholera had fallen steadily during the nineteenth century. As deaths from infectious epidemics fell, lung cancer rates climbed. In Britain, lung cancer rose by one thousand, five hundred per cent between 1922 and 1947 and overtook the declining death rate from tuberculosis. ‘By the late 1940s,’ according to the medical historian Conrad Keating, ‘Britain had the highest lung cancer rates in the world, and the reasons for this were completely unknown.’
[23]

In 1947, the Ministry of Health wrote to the Medical Research Council. At a meeting of thirteen leading researchers, various hypotheses were put forward. These included proximity to gas works, tar on roads, vehicle exhaust fumes and cigarette smoking. ‘There was no consensus of opinion.’
[24]

The task of finding the cause was given to Austin Bradford Hill (a pipe smoker) and Richard Doll (who smoked a pipe and non-tipped cigarettes). ‘I was not antagonistic to tobacco when, in 1947, I began to study its effects,’ Doll wrote in 1999.
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‘Originally Doll thought the increase in motor cars and the tarring of roads were likely to be responsible for the epidemic,’ Keating wrote in his biography of Doll. ‘Hill, typically, was reported to have entered the study “with an open mind.”’
[26]

The survey questionnaire designed by Hill and Doll was ‘no frontal attack on smoking, which formed one section out of nine – eleven questions out of nearly fifty’, others being on social class, diet, electric or gas cookers, whether those surveyed lived near a gas works.
[27]
After the study had been extended for a year, Hill and Doll’s analysis started to reveal evidence neither had anticipated. In October 1949, Doll wrote to the Medical Research Council of a ‘real association between smoking and cancer of the lung’.
[28]
It was only then that Doll quit smoking. ‘That so many diseases – major and minor – should be related to smoking is one of the most astonishing findings of medical research in this century,’ Doll wrote fifty years later.
[29]

Coincidentally in 1948 Ernst Wynder, a summer student at New York University, decided to conduct a case-control study on smoking and lung cancer. In February 1949, Wynder presented the results of his study to the national meeting of the American Cancer Society.  They aroused little interest. In May 1950 Wynder and his supervisor, Evert Graham, published a paper in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
. It concluded: ‘Smoking, especially in the form of cigarettes, plays an important role in the aetiology of lung cancer.’
[30]

Two studies – completely independent of one another – came to the same conclusion. The two teams were not part of a community, comparing notes as part of a collective endeavour. In the case of the Englishmen, both were rigorous in separating scientific research from policy. Doll, a committed communist for much of his life, never permitted his personal political views to cross over into his work as a scientist. Doll had an ideological immune system and scrupulously followed what Hill had taught him: ‘If you were going to contribute to a subject it was very important to separate the presentation of evidence from the discussion of what should be done on the basis of that evidence.’
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A scientist was an expert witness, not a policy advocate.

Doll was acutely conscious of the susceptibility of epidemiological evidence to distortion: ‘The only safeguard is always to suspect the influence of bias, consider every way it could have entered the study and then test to see if it has.’
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According to Keating, ‘In nearly every way Doll embodied Charles Darwin’s definition of a value-free experimenter. “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections – a mere heart of stone.”’
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Doll was thus an exemplar of the scientific method that Gore vehemently denounced in
Earth in the Balance
, guilty of man’s breach with nature and contributing to the evils perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin.

For his part, Doll was critical of claims – inspired by Rachel Carson and
Silent Spring
– made by the US environmental movement that the widespread use of chemicals and other forms of industrial pollution were causing a cancer epidemic. A 1981 paper written with Richard Peto concluded: ‘Were it not for the effects of tobacco, total US death rates would be decreasing substantially more rapidly than they already are.’
[34]
Indeed Keating makes the case that US environmentalists helped Big Tobacco off the hook:

The claim that twenty per cent of cancers were a result of the actions of a rapacious chemical industry created an apologia for Big Tobacco … In 1980-81 the American cigarette industry had a record year … Commenting on this, the Chairman of the largest American cigarette manufacturer was reported as saying that he thought the ‘cancer problem’ was no longer hitting sales as hard as before because ‘so many things have been linked to cancer’ that people might be getting sceptical.
[35]

The implication is inescapable. Environmentalism cost lives.

With global warming, there is an additional layer of opaque uncertainty – the extent to which climate science is subject to a paradigm in the sense Kuhn wrote about in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. ‘Current scientific knowledge’ views large-scale changes in the Earth’s climate, whether natural or man-made, through the prism of a paradigm of CO
2
-induced climate change. Accordingly changes in concentrations of carbon dioxide are assumed by climate scientists to play a major role in the succession of glacial cycles.
*

‘The proponents of competing paradigms are always to some extents at cross-purposes,’ Kuhn wrote. ‘They are bound partly to talk through each other in a battle that cannot be resolved by proofs.’
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Thus debates between scientists are not going to settle the issue.  Neither would counting the number of scientists for or against the prevailing consensus resolve the matter. The existence of consensus might only constitute evidence of a paradigm’s hold on the minds of contemporary scientists.

However there is an indicator that provides a rough and ready litmus test. Popper’s search for a principle to distinguish science from pseudo-science was sparked by the contrast between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis and Alfred Adler’s ‘individual psychology’. Einstein’s theory was supported by passing the severe test conducted by Eddington, a test it could have failed. By contrast, subscribers to the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler found confirmatory evidence wherever they looked. Their theories seemed to explain practically everything within the fields to which they referred. Whatever happened always confirmed it. ‘It was rather that I felt that these three other theories, though posing as science, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather than astronomy,’ Popper wrote.
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Common to the three, Popper noted, was their treatment of unbelievers – or, to use the terminology of global warming, sceptics and deniers. Their defiance in the face of manifest truth had a ready explanation, for, as we’ve already seen,

unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still ‘un-analysed’ and crying out for treatment.
[38]

Attempts to settle a dispute by pointing to the other side’s motives are the stock in-trade of the political campaigner. In framing the argument on global warming in terms of scientific truth versus the false consciousness promoted by special interests, proponents of the idea of global warming inadvertently proclaim their adherence to a pseudo-science.

The argument that the public became confused about the science because of the activities of malign special interests (i.e., fossil fuel companies) is so ubiquitous as to be an intrinsic component in the morphology of global warming. It has been articulated by leading scientists (Michael Mann has written an entire book blaming the shortcomings of the Hockey Stick on special interests), politicians (Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd, as well as Al Gore), and environmental NGOs. In 2012, William Nordhaus compared the ‘distortion’ of climate science to the activities of tobacco companies. ‘Scientists, citizens, and our leaders will need to be extremely vigilant to prevent pollution of the scientific process by the merchants of doubt,’ Nordhaus wrote, criticising global warming sceptics.
[39]

It is also unhistorical. Despite the opposition of tobacco farmers and cigarette manufacturers, governments ran extensive anti-smoking campaigns and adopted other preventive measures, including vertiginously high taxes on tobacco. ‘By the close of the twentieth century, anti-tobacco advocates, public health officials, physicians’ groups, and international organisations, separately and in concert, had succeeded in putting tobacco control on the policy agenda of every industrialised democracy,’ Feldman and Bayer wrote.
[40]
Thanks to them, cigarette smoking has fallen in the Western world. As predicted by Doll, after a lag, lung cancer rates fell too.

Even the most ingenious maker of conspiracy theories would be hard pressed to forge a chain of causality linking the activities of Western fossil fuel companies to the refusal of India and China to accede to the West’s demands for a global cap on greenhouse gas emissions, especially as the Third World’s resistance to the claims of Western environmentalism had been adopted in the early 1970s – a decade and a half before the arrival of global warming in world politics in 1988.

So we come to the final paradox of global warming. The science is weak, but the idea is strong. The science is inherently weak because it is not capable of being falsified in the here and now. Voluminous evidence is itself testament to its weakness, for the same reasons Popper noted with respect to the trio of pseudo-sciences prevalent in Vienna in the 1920s.