The Great Disruption (5 page)

While I was still at Greenpeace Australia in 1992, one of the most important historical environmental conferences was held, the Rio Earth Summit. This conference came at a new high point in global political awareness of these issues and was attended by 108 heads of state, including George H. W. Bush. This conference started the process of global climate agreements with the adoption by consensus of a treaty agreeing to prevent dangerous climate change—the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

I have attended many such international meetings, including the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Kyoto in 1997, which led to the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Summit +5 in New York, also in 1997. These events are better understood as “festivals of debate” rather than meetings, with thousands of lobby groups of all persuasions battling for media and political attention on their particular agendas.

They are also important examples of our immature global governance structures. They are generally great gatherings of the elite of environmental decision making, with business, NGOs, and government representatives getting together to lament the lack of progress—like a great collective confessional!

When I attended the Earth Summit +5 review in New York in 1997, a special UN General Assembly meeting, world leaders got up one after the other and gave speeches on how appalling it was that so little progress had been made in the five years since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It was a strange thing to witness, as the most powerful people in the world gathered but then behaved as if they were observers of the process and had little power to influence it. Five years later in 2002, the whole process occurred again in Johannesburg at the Earth Summit 2002.

At each of these meetings over two decades, increasingly earnest speeches have been made, I'm sure mostly genuinely felt, about the critical risks that humanity faces and the urgent need for action. From the outside, it looks as though all the important people are in the room and all the power required to change the world is there, ready and able to act. Yet on the inside, what actually happens is that pretty much no one is in charge, because as we'll discuss later, the system has become so large that no one can be.

Over the fifty years of the Scream, we've learned that in reality global change is much more a bottom-up process. Our political leaders, with rare exceptions, respond at best to what they think the politics allows them to do rather than what they feel they should do. As we saw in Copenhagen, even when our political leaders are personally convinced of the need to act, the strategy of keeping one eye on what is politically acceptable at home and the other eye on protecting national economic interest merges with an immature and chaotic global decision-making process to make progress glacial.

So critically for our story, and the good news here, is that while little happened over these decades at the upper ends of political power, except for a greater understanding of the challenge, enormous strides were taken in the bottom-up process. Many, many millions have joined the ranks of the passionate and committed people working as activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, corporate sustainability champions, and ordinary citizens. They have slowly but surely changed the way we all think, so that today everyone's an environmentalist.

When the history of environmentalism is written, 2010 will be the point when pretty much everyone was on board and has agreed: “Someone should do something!” Now all we have to do is work out who that's going to be. We'll return to this at the end of the story.

However, despite the extraordinary levels of activity, the millions of people and billions of dollars focused on the effort, nothing of any real systemwide consequence has happened in response. We have all agreed the science is clear and indicates a major problem. We have fixed this river and that town, we have saved forests here and there, we have banned numerous toxic and dangerous chemicals, and we have become highly knowledgeable, now being able to monitor the total earth system as never before.

But where have we got to in the system as a whole?

That's the next part of the story. For fifty years we've been saying we have to act on these issues or our children's children will suffer the consequences. Well, we are their children's children. So what's going to happen?

To quote Winston Churchill (November 12, 1936):

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.… We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now.…

CHAPTER 3

A Very Big Problem

I have argued that humanity, the economy, and the planet's ecosystem operate as a single interdependent system and that this system is in serious trouble. We will now look at the scientific and economic evidence for this.

Our story now moves from the past to the present. This means we need to understand the condition the planet's ecosystem is currently in. What is our starting point?

At the Rio Earth Summit nearly twenty years ago, our leaders—representatives from 172 countries, including 108 heads of state—gathered in a momentous meeting that agreed protecting the environment was critical to sustained prosperity for humanity. The resulting declaration recognized many important principles that remain relevant today, such as the “precautionary principle”:

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
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They also signed on to the UNFCCC, which committed them to “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate system.”
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So in 1992, a road map for the subsequent decades of action was set. How did we do?

Any analysis of the state of the world's capacity to support human society must be based on the physical sciences—measurement and trend analysis of actual physical activity based on our understanding of physics, biology, and chemistry. Therefore, I first want to make some comments on how nonscientists (people like me and most readers) can approach such information. I am often asked by people not involved in these issues day-to-day: “So how am I supposed to come to a view in these debates? I hear this side and that, and it just seems very confusing.”

The way through this confusion lies in a combination of a basic understanding of the scientific process and some good old common sense. In explaining this, I will use climate change as an example to make my point, but the principles apply across the board to all areas of sustainability-related science, which is my focus here.

As our starting point, it is critical to understand that the scientific process is deliberately designed to encourage the questioning and challenging of ideas. This is good. Otherwise our progress to greater knowledge would be much slower and ideas that are wrong would not be exposed as quickly. Humans in general, scientists included, get attached to ideas and ways of thinking, so skepticism is healthy as it pushes against this attachment and therefore should be encouraged. This makes genuine skepticism useful in life but especially in the scientific process.

The problem comes when people with a particular agenda use the debate this healthy skepticism creates to cherry-pick science that supports their position. It gets worse when they then use that narrow piece of science as supposed “evidence” that a whole area of analysis should be in doubt. The climate debate is very challenging in this regard because that process, which occurs anyway, is further driven by powerful and well-funded interests in a systematic and deliberate way. The book
The Merchants of Doubt
explores the way this has become endemic across many issues, from tobacco to climate change.
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A recent example on climate change would be Koch Industries, a U.S. oil and chemical giant with $100 billion in annual sales that has spent almost $25 million funding organizations involved in spreading climate denialism.
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The way past all this for the non-specialist is a simple one. In considering the complexity involved, you should be comfortable that no single scientist understands all the detail, either. They can't, because they have one or a small number of scientific disciplines, whereas understanding something with the complexity of the global ecosystem requires many disciplines to be considered together. Any one individual who claims to understand it all in full detail, including a number of prominent skeptics, clearly doesn't and should be treated with caution.

For this reason, the science already has a process embedded in it to deal with the challenge of cross-discipline issues and the inherent uncertainty they involve. This is important because we use scientific conclusions to guide everything from approval for medical processes and drugs to the design of bridges and the safety of airplanes. What happens is scientists come together and intellectually fight it out to reach what they call “consensus positions.” Scientific bodies, either within a discipline or across a number of disciplines as appropriate to the task, analyze an area of debate, rigorously peer-review the data, argue out the uncertainties, and come to a considered, collective view based on the balance of evidence. The process also plays itself out in the peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and other academic discussions, allowing a common view to emerge over time. This is what is meant by the term
consensus
. It is inappropriately named because it implies 100 percent agreement, which it isn't, but it does represent the considered integrated view of qualified scientific experts.

It is a good example of where the collective mind is greater than the individual one. What these “consensus” positions effectively say is: “We have considered all the debate and the uncertainties, and we acknowledge them. We know what we know, but we also know where the uncertainties lie. Therefore the considered view of the top experts in the world on this topic is XYZ, and we have an ABC percent level of certainty in that view. So if you want to make a decision, this is the best advice on balance that can be provided by the science.”

Because so much of the process is internal, those inside the scientific community may recognize a consensus more easily than those outside it. That is why the important scientific organizations, which work internally but also communicate externally, can be particularly useful.

When this approach is applied to climate change, it is interesting to note that
every
major grouping of qualified scientists that has analyzed the issue comes to the same conclusion and has done so consistently over time and around the world. Examples include national science academies, which are the peak science bodies across all disciplines in a given country, or major international subsets of the scientific community, such as atmospheric scientists or, at the highest and most comprehensive level globally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The broad conclusion they all come to is that we face a significant risk of major change that undermines society's prosperity and stability, we are a substantial contributor to the risk, and to reduce the level of risk we should dramatically reduce emissions of the pollution that causes the problem. As with most issues in sustainability, defining the problem and the solutions is really very simple.

This “consensus position” on climate change is also reflected in the rigorously peer-reviewed journals in which research is presented and issues are debated. One study by Naomi Oreskes published in the journal
Science
demonstrated that of the papers whose abstract contained the keywords
global climate change
between 1993 and 2003, none questioned the consensus position—not one.
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Oreskes's subsequent book
Merchants of Doubt
interestingly reveals how many of the figures who fronted the tobacco industry's antiscience campaign to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer are also now prominent and vocal climate skeptics.

A more recent study in
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
used a data set of 1,372 published climate researchers and their publication and citation history, finding that 97 to 98 percent of those climate researchers publishing most actively on the topic agreed with the tenets of climate change as identified by the IPCC. They also found the expertise and prominence of the scientists who agreed with the IPCC findings to be substantially higher than that of the scientists who did not.
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Of course, there are always outliers who hold a different view regarding the level of consensus on an issue, and that is good. In the case of climate change, though, this uncertainty, where it is genuine, applies to detailed subissues such as regional variations or speed of change, not to the basic conclusion. There is organized skepticism, but it comes primarily from small groups that have banded together specifically for the purpose of promoting uncertainty, as opposed to the scientific bodies that are structured to apply their expertise objectively across a scientific discipline. These organized groups leap on any mistake, such as those detailed in the so-called Climategate e-mails, and pretend it has some greater significance regarding the whole process and conclusions, even though numerous independent reports and investigations concluded the Climategate e-mails did nothing to question the science of climate change.
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So it is important to separate the two types of skepticism. On the one hand, we have the scientific process, where outliers have a healthy role to play in challenging dominant views and seeking to find holes in consensus positions. On the other, we have an ideologically or commercially driven process, which deliberately seeks to undermine a viewpoint for political or commercial gain rather than scientific inquiry. These are increasingly called “deniers” or the “antiscience crowd,” to separate them from those genuine scientists engaged in healthy skepticism.

This separation is important to the health of science. It is dangerous to dismiss all counterarguments to the consensus on climate science as coming from climate denialists or as representing corrupt science driven by coal or oil industry funding. This is not to say the latter doesn't exist, but there is alongside it a healthy skepticism that we should celebrate as being at the core of good science. We should be aware that discouraging people who challenge the consensus risks undermining good science.

This is where common sense comes in. You should not be overwhelmed by scientific complexity. The experts are capable of sifting that and telling us what we need to know. An inquiring mind and common sense are all you need to draw your own conclusions.

So how do we apply this to our task with common sense?

First we need to think about how and where the science is being applied. Science at the scientific research level is about finding the “truth.” That process is generally about narrowing uncertainties until we know with a high degree of certainty how something works and how it will behave in different situations. This high degree of certainty is the right approach to take when the field of inquiry or application is narrow. Examples include designing a chemical plant or a nuclear power station, where the consequences of failure are catastrophic and immediate and the uncertainties can be narrowed to a manageable level.

We get into trouble when we take this approach of requiring certainty and apply it to the worlds of broad policy and business strategy. Doing so often translates into “We're not sure, so we shouldn't change anything.”

In those worlds, the commonsense approach is to get solid advice that informs us
on balance
what is likely to happen and what the levels of risk are in different paths. It therefore requires not certainty but broad general agreement as to direction, an understanding of where the uncertainties lie, and an analysis of what the consequences might be if those uncertainties lead to different outcomes.

It is through this framework of common sense that I view the science of sustainability. I am comfortable with a degree of uncertainty, and I recognize that we cannot know everything we'd like to know about how things will unfold.

I am uncomfortable, however, with those who argue that the uncertainties are justification for delay and inaction; that because we're not sure, we should stay on our current path. The reason this is so dangerous is that we are not dealing with normal policy or economic challenges here, where error can generally be later rectified and the course altered in response to new information. We are dealing with changes that are in some cases irreversible, at least in time frames meaningful to humanity. Failure in this particular set of issues is unforgiving.

A commonly used analogy to explain this is the medical one. If you were told you had a serious heart problem, a clogged artery that posed a very high risk of a fatal heart attack, you would respond dramatically. There would still be uncertainty, but if a doctor said you had a 25 to 50 percent chance of a fatal event in the next five years, you would not respond with, “Oh well, let me know when you're 100 percent certain and then I'll consider surgery or taking medicine.” You would respond immediately, because a 25 to 50 percent chance of catastrophic failure (death) is a very high likelihood.

In summary, what this means is we should not look for certainty in our assessment of the science of sustainability, because certainty will not be found until it is too late to influence the outcome. You can't measure the future. We need instead to take a commonsense or precautionary approach—what are the scientists collectively telling us about the level of risk that we face, what are the consequences of acting early or late, and what is the right strategy to follow in response?

So in that context, let me move on to answer the first of those questions: What is the science telling us about the state of the global ecosystem and how much risk we face? Just how serious are the challenges, and what would failure in this context look like?

There have been many studies published concerning the state of the global ecosystem. As we discussed earlier, however, the danger with considering something as abstract as the “global ecosystem” is that we tend to see it as a system “over there,” the place we visit on occasion. While of course Rachel Carson and others have long demonstrated the fallacy of such a view, we still struggle with it. Therefore the best way to consider the science from a human impact point of view is to take the “ecosystem services” approach—to look at those things in the ecosystem that we draw on every day for our human society and economy.