News from the New Party

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Making sense of climate change

This week the guardians of the Doomsday Clock decided to diversify. Until now this rather singular timepiece has been used by a group of self-appointed scientists as a kind of barometer to indicate to the people of the world just how close we are to nuclear annihilation. However, since the Cold War ended quite a few years ago now, and the threat of global nuclear conflagration in the near future would appear to be limited, the Doomsday-mongers have decided to broaden their remit. Henceforth the Doomsday Clock will indicate not merely our proximity to a nuclear holocaust, but also global climatological catastrophe. Daniel Finkelstein is suitably doubtful:

The BBC website reports on this move as follows:

Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind

Experts in what? In atomic science, I presume. This provides them with a unique insight into the consequences of a nuclear explosion, but not in the probability of it occurring. It is this probability that the clock is measuring (or should I say indicating since it isn't any kind of measure).

They also have no better insight than anyone else into climate change.

The quality of their understanding is illustrated by the fact that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the clock was further from midnight than it is now, while in 1984, when Reagan was President, it was nearer to midnight than at any other time. These seem eccentric judgments and political rather than scientific in origin.

Indeed. The trouble with a lot of what passes for scientific debate about climate change is that it doesn't appear to be very scientific. At least not by the time it has been mangled by sensationalist media pundits and political activists and agitators of various hues.

We are approaching the stage now where doubting whether or not "climate change is real" is a qualification for consignment to the same intellectual outer darkness where Creationists and Flat-Earthers are currently obliged to reside. Melanie Phillips has even reported on one David Roberts' brainwave (in Grist magazine) to punish such heretics in the future: the Climate Change Nuremberg Trial.

When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate Nuremberg.

Admittedly such hysteria (or fanaticism) is extreme and unrepresentative of any kind of mainstream opinion. However, it would be helpful to remember that alarmism can be every bit as destructive as complacency when dealing with an issue as complex as climate change. The fact is that although a number of worrying developments have been identified in terms of changing climatic conditions across the world, it is very difficult to tell what these mean in practice when applied to world conditions over the longer term.

For example, rising temperatures across Europe are predicted under some models to rise, so that Northern Europe and Britain will enjoy Mediterranean temperatures in the future. On the other hand, the Gulf Stream which currently keeps British temperatures above those of Canada by transporting warm Caribbean waters to the North Atlantic Ocean, is forecast to switch off. What is likely to be the result of the conjunction of these two factors? At present no one can say with any certainty, and neither can we tell what other currently unknown factors may yet come to light. What can be said with certainty is that climate change is definitely happening - if only because climate change has been a constant factor ever since there has been an atmosphere on this planet. The climate is changing because the climate always changes. The key questions are: are the current climate change phenomena we have been observing the result of human activity - i.e. carbon emissions, deforestation and so on? and, if so, what can be done to reverse or at least stop these changes from occurring?

The answer to the first question is not precisely known, but the "scientific consensus" from which it is no longer possible to demur without finding oneself under threat from Mr. Roberts' Climate Change Trial is that carbon emissions are the major cause of the problem. The answer to the second is that any climate changes currently in progress are probably not reversible, and probably cannot be stopped: they may be impeded to a greater or lesser extent, and the "scientific consensus" is that we have only a very few decades left even to do that. On the other hand, the results of any remedial activity we may undertake cannot be guaranteed not to make the problem worse. So what do we do?

It is a commonplace (as well as blindingly obvious) that any action to reduce carbon emissions significantly must be concerted and global. It would require total buy-in from all the major countries of the world, at least, on a scale never before achieved for any purpose. The political reality is that this is not going to happen. Without China, India and other emerging economies fully committed to carbon reduction (and in the short to medium term at least, this means a commitment to hobbling their own economic development), any national or even international action is more or less useless. We could shut d0wn the British economy tomorrow and all go back to living in caves, and it would make no significant difference because the elimination of British carbon emissions would be fully offset by the growth in emissions by China alone within a year or so.

So again, what do we do? The Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out that even if the predictions of the environmental lobby are correct, the economic costs of acting to reverse or reduce the impact of climate change are massive and not guaranteed to be effective in any case. He has recommended that resources be focused on environmental activities which will deliver real benefits to the largest number of people, in the hope that communities worldwide will be in a better position to cope with the negative effects of climate change in the future. The Copenhagen Consensus has recommended a number of such activities:

prevent HIV infection worldwide;
provide the micronutrients (e.g. iron, zonc, vitamin A) missing from half the world's diet;
establish global free trade;
effective management of malaria - including effective medication and mosquito nets; and
improved agricultural and water technologies to secure food production and clean, safe water supplies.

While some of these activities may appear trivial compared with the lurid threats promised by the climate change lobby, the above activities would transform the lives of billions of people and the economies of developing countries in particular, and would actually be achievable. A healthier and wealthier world will be much better prepared to survive the challenges of the 21st Century than a sicker and poorer one.

The New Party supports the Copenhagen Consensus along with technological research and innovation to combat current and future problems. In particular we support the expansion of nuclear energy as the most effective and safest alternative form of power generation. And above all, we support the separation of science from political agendas of any kind.

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