The Age of Global Warming: A History (56 page)

Predictions that global warming will be harmful or dangerous are future statements which cannot be verified. By default, computer models have been used to guide governments, but they too depend on unverified assumptions about the cooling effect of aerosols.
*
But these models have failed to capture the amplitude of natural variability or to predict the absence of a clear trend in average global temperatures during the twenty-first century in what could be called Trenberth’s Travesty.
*

Bias in the IPCC is endemic, from language of the expected signal of global warming emerging in the future, the cover-up of flaws in the Hockey Stick, its politicisation through government selection of lead authors and their control over what the IPCC says, to its infiltration by NGOs. ‘Despite the numbers of persons involved, and the lengthy formal review procedures, the preparation of the IPCC Assessment Reports is far from being a model of rigour, inclusiveness and impartiality,’ David Henderson wrote in a critique of the IPCC.
[41]

After the Fourth Assessment Report was found to be full of errors, Working Group II co-chair Martin Parry wrote to colleagues characterising it as a ‘clamour without substance’ fed by critics and sceptics, at the same time defending the inclusion of NGO literature in IPCC output.
[42]
Bob Watson, the IPCC’s second chairman, thought otherwise. ‘The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying,’ Watson said. ‘The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.’
[43]

Yet global warming’s success in colonising the Western mind and in changing government policies has no precedent. It dominated the international agenda from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit until the 2008 banking crisis and the West’s defeat at Copenhagen a year later. The prospect of planetary salvation inflated the science so it became too big to fail, justifying the anti-scientific practice of withholding data and methods from potential critics and de-legitimising critical argument.
*
‘What is called objectivity consists solely in the critical approach,’ Popper wrote.
[44]
          

The credibility of global warming rested on the prestige of science – the branch of knowledge that had advanced further and faster than any other in human history. Underneath though, the nature of science was changing. It is hard to see a scientist such as Percy W. Bridgman in the middle of the twentieth century accepting with equanimity unverifiable future statements as science. Without the possibility of verification, Bridgman wrote, truth becomes meaningless.
[45]
Apply his criterion to the output of the IPCC, and there wouldn’t be much science left to furnish the basis of an immensely costly call to action. 

This change was accompanied by a highly expansive view of the social role of scientists as uniquely capable of identifying and devising solutions to the problems threatening the survival of humanity and the planet. To this, scientists brought their cultural aversion to learning from the past. For them, history is not so much a closed book as irrelevant to the problems of the future. So they didn’t ask why previous predictions of imminent catastrophes, from Malthus and Jevons in the nineteenth century to the limits to growth debates of the early 1970s, were all wrong. 

True to form, in 2012 the Royal Society produced the latest in the series of doomsday predictions. Unsurprisingly
People and the Planet
argued there were too many of the former for the latter.

Over the next thirty to forty years the confluence of the challenges described in this report provides the opportunity to move towards a sustainable economy and a better world for the majority of humanity, or alternatively the risk of social, economic and environmental failures and catastrophes on a scale never imagined.
[46]

The last claim was untrue. Such catastrophes had been imagined. Exactly forty years earlier, Julian Huxley, winner of the Royal Society’s Darwin Medal, together with four other Fellows of the Royal Society and twenty-nine eminent scientists and experts, predicted the collapse of industrial civilisation in famine, epidemic and war within the lifetimes of people then living. ‘On a planet with finite resources there are limits to growth,’ the Royal Society stated, repeating the message of the Club of Rome’s
The Limits to Growth
, also from 1972, and making the same error.
[47]

When it comes to learning from their mistakes, collectively scientists vie with the Bourbons.

In believing scientists and politicians can solve the problems of a far distant future, the tangible needs of the present are neglected. We cannot know what the future holds. It is like walking into a dense fog armed with a flashlight and one’s wits, picking out objects which we only know for sure what they are when nearly upon them.

No one knows what the Earth’s climate will be at the end of the century. Based on history, it is possible to hazard a prediction of a different kind. Before the end of the century, the Western mind will conceive another environmental crisis necessitating the ending of the modern industrial economy, the only form of economic arrangements that has lifted mankind to undreamt of prosperity. 

The big question is whether the Western mind will be sovereign at the century’s end and the West remain the core of the world economy or relegated to its periphery – something only the passing of the present century can answer.

*
  An example is provided by Naomi Oreskes, historian of science and co-author of
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
(2010). In an interview on Australian radio, Oreskes said: ‘Well, of course, no one can ever say, a hundred per cent, that any particular individual piece of science is correct, but that’s what the scientific process is all about. And over the past four hundred years, scientists have developed mechanisms for evaluating scientific work, and the most important mechanism is peer review.’
The World Today
, 19
th
October 2010.

*
  ‘Buried’ is the right word to use about the IPCC’s handling of subjectivity. It does not appear in any of the summaries for policymakers in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Neither does it appear in the crucial Chapter Nine on understanding and attributing climate change, but is buried in the chapter’s supplementary material.

*
  In its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC acknowledged that observational uncertainty, uncertainty about external influences on the climate (‘forcing uncertainty’) and internal climate variability affect the width of probable outcomes (‘the prior distribution’). The prior distribution used in the calculations, the IPCC authors wrote, ‘indicates that little is known, a priori, about the parameters of interest except that they are bounded below and above. Even so, the choice of prior bounds can be subjective’. Hegerl, G.C., F.W. Zwiers, P. Braconnot, N.P. Gillett, Y. Luo, J.A. Marengo Orsini, N. Nicholls, J.E. Penner and P.A. Stott, ‘2007: Understanding  and Attributing Climate Change’ in
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
, Appendix 9.B, SM.9–3.

*
  Notoriously the US tobacco industry ran an advertising campaign in the 1950s claiming that its customers’ health was the industry’s overriding concern. The response of the UK industry was different. After the industry’s chief statistician was sacked for saying he would resign unless the tobacco industry accepted that smoking caused lung cancer, he was reinstated six weeks later and the industry agreed not to say anything to imply that smoking did not cause lung cancer. Conrad Keating,
Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Richard Doll
(2009), pp. 183–6.

*
  According to Richard Lindzen, ‘The models focus on aerosols and solar variability, and generally assume that natural internal variability is accurately included and accounted for. That models each use different assumptions for aerosols and solar variability makes clear that these are simply adjustable parameters.’ Richard S. Lindzen, ‘Response to the critique of my lecture in the House of Commons on 22
nd
February 2012’, 12
th
April 2012 http://thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/5437-richard-lindzen-response-to-the-critique-of-my-house-of-commons-lecture.html

*
  For example, Brian Hoskins, J. Mitchell, T. Palmer, K. Shine & E. Wolff wrote that the termination of the most recent glaciation, with a small initial rise in temperatures followed by several thousand years in which temperatures and CO
2
rose together, ‘is entirely consistent with the role of CO
2
as an amplifier of an otherwise small external forcing’ (
A critique of the scientific content of Richard Lindzen’s Seminar in London, 22
nd
February 2012
). In response, Lindzen wrote: ‘The notion that the small changes in globally and annually averaged insolation are the crucial driver is implausible to say the least, but it stems from the current simplistic view of climate consisting in a single variable (globally averaged temperature anomaly) forced by some globally averaged radiative forcing – an idea that permeates the critics’ discussion.’ Richard S. Lindzen, ‘Response to the critique of my lecture in the House of Commons on 22
nd
February 2012’ 12
th
April 2012 http://thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/5437-richard-lindzen-response-to-the-critique-of-my-house-of-commons-lecture.html

*  ‘There are considerable uncertainties in estimating the impact of aerosols on climate,’ according to Hoskins et al., who go on to say that ‘uncertain’ does not mean ‘unknown’ or that the cooling effect of aerosols is zero. Brian Hoskins, J. Mitchell, T. Palmer, K. Shine & E. Wolff,
A critique of the scientific content of Richard Lindzen’s Seminar in London, 22
nd
February 2012
(undated).

*  According to Lindzen, ‘The assumption that the models adequately represent natural internal variability is seriously mistaken.’ Richard S. Lindzen, ‘Response to the critique of my lecture in the House of Commons on 22
nd
February 2012’.

*  Hill and Doll’s findings on tobacco and lung cancer were fiercely attacked by R.A. Fisher, the leading geneticist and statistician of the period (Fisher formulated the null hypothesis test), who demanded to see the underlying data. Hill and Doll passed two data sets to Fisher. Conrad Keating,
Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Richard Doll
(2009), p. 191.

[1]
 
Herodotus,
The Histories
, Book 1.

[2]
 
T. Rees Shapiro, ‘Stephen H Schneider, climate expert, dies at sixty-five’ in the
Washington Post
, 20
th
July 2010.

[3]
 
Thomas S. Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1996), p. 47.

[4]
 
The account of and quotes from Stephen H Schneider’s ‘Climate Change: Is the Science “Settled ”’ have been transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmlHbt5jja4

[5]
 
NCAR, ‘Dr Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist’ http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html

[6]
 
Kevin Trenberth email to Michael Mann, 12
th
October 2009.

[7]
 
Kevin Trenberth, ‘Communicating Climate Science and Thoughts on Climategate’ (January 2011), p. 3.

[8]
 
Richard S. Lindzen, ‘Resisting climate hysteria’ in Quadrant Online (26
th
July 2009) http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria

[9]
  Martin Rees & Ralph Cicerone, ‘What’s happening to the climate is unprecedented’ in the
Financial Times
, 9
th
April 2010.

[10]
 
Michael Liebreich, Chris Greenwood, Max von Bismarck & Anuradha Gurung,
Green Investing 2010: Policy Mechanisms to Bridge the Financing Gap
, World Economic Forum (January 2010), p. 6.

[11]
 
Douglas Martin, ‘Stephen H. Schneider, climatologist, is dead at sixty-five’ in the
New York Times
, 20
th
July 2010.

[12]
 
Theodore R. Marmor with the assistance of Jan S. Marmor,
The Politics of Medicare
(1970), p. 1.

[13]
  Thomas McKeown,
The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis?
(1979), p. xi.

[14]
 
ibid., p. 177.

[15]
 
ibid.

[16]
 
Yohe, G.W., R.D. Lasco, Q.K. Ahmad, N.W. Arnell, S.J. Cohen, C. Hope, A.C. Janetos and R.T. Perez, ‘2007: Perspectives on climate change and sustainability’ in
Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
, p. 827.

[17]
 
Stephen H. Schneider, ‘Stephen Schneider vs Sceptics’ goodplanet.org (December 2009)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj1QcdEqU0

[18]
 
Damian Carrington, ‘IPCC vice-chair: Attacks on climate science echo tobacco industry tactics’ guardian.co.uk, 28
th
October 2010.

[19]
 
Robert May, ‘Under-informed, over here’ in the
Guardian
, 27
th
January 2005.

[20]
 
David King, ‘Sir David King: IPCC runs against the spirit of science’ in the
Daily Telegraph
, 6
th
February 2010.

[21]
 
Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer,
Unfiltered: Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health
(2004), p. 4.

[22]
 
Karl Popper,
Conjectures and Refutations
(2002), p. 73.

[23]
 
Conrad Keating,
Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Richard Doll
(2009), p. ix.

[24]
 
ibid., p. 82.

[25]
 
ibid., p. 83.

[26]
 
ibid., pp. 83–4.

[27]
 
ibid., pp. 84–5.

[28]
 
ibid., p. 86.

[29]
 
ibid., pp. 446–7.

[30]
 
Ernst L. Wynder, ‘Tobacco and Health: a Review of the History and Suggestions for Public Policy’ in
Public Health Reports
, January-February 1988, Vol. 103, No. 1, p. 9.

[31]
 
Keating,
Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Richard Doll
(2009), p. 155.

[32]
 
ibid., pp. 93–4.

[33]
 
ibid., p. ix.

[34]
 
ibid., p. 372.

[35]
 
ibid.

[36]
 
Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1996), p. 148.

[37]
 
Popper,
Conjectures and Refutations
(2002 edition), p. 45.

[38]
 
ibid.

[39]
 
William D. Nordhaus, ‘Why the Global Warming Sceptics Are Wrong’ in the
New York Review of Books
, 22
nd
March 2012.

[40]
 
Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer,
Unfiltered: Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health
(2004), p. 1.

[41]
 
David Henderson, ‘Governments and Climate Change Issues: The case for rethinking’ in
World Economics
, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2007), pp. 183– 228.

[42]
 
Martin Parry letter to WGII authors, co-chairs and vice-chairs, 13
th
February 2010.

[43]
 
‘IPCC scientist dismisses furore over climate change report’ in the
Daily Telegraph
, 15
th
February 2010.

[44]
 
Karl Popper, ‘Science: Problems, Aims, Responsibilities’ in
The Myth of the Framework
, (ed.) M.A. Notturno, (2006), p. 93.

[45]
 
P.W. Bridgman,
The Way Things Are
(1959), p. 239.

[46]
 
Royal Society,
People and the Planet
(2012), p. 105.

[47]
 
ibid., p. 63.