The third world nation's and NGO's, until the 'Lords of the Universe' arrive, have compliantly played a 'bit part' as bottom half of the bill warmup acts, having been encouraged to hold out they're begging bowl to help get a sceptical, yet gullible western public on board. With 'right on lovies' having been penciled in as the main support act, as there're only to willing to act front of camera, whilst lip-sinking the leading politicos words and mockney concern.
Leaving the overwhelming majority of the great unwashed, i. e. us, left with a sneaking suspicion at the back of our minds that we are about to have the wool pulled over our eyes, yet again.
Below are a couple of cartoons which epitomise how I feel on the global warming debate, plus an interesting letter from Professor Bob Ryan, who points out there are heavy consequences when scientists forget Karl Popper's dictum that good science seeks to refute not confirm.
There is also a link here to last nights BBC4 TV debate in which a panel of invited guests discuss the issues surrounding Fanny Armstrong's film The Age of Stupid, which explores the effects of climate change. I found this debate informative as one of the contributors raised my fear that giving the fight against global warming priority, will mean cutting back, at home and abroad, the drive to reduce the gross inequality which exists in the world and which is the main cause of the injustices, poverty and hardships billions of people suffer today.
MH
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Sir
George Monbiot again attempts to make the subliminal link between those who disagree with the consensus view on climate change and Holocaust deniers (Comment, 8 December). However, he fails to admit the real scandal of the leaked emails. As Karl Popper taught us, scepticism is a cardinal virtue, and this is particularly true in sciences that rely upon the interpretation of historical data and the output of theoretical models. In this respect climate science is similar to my own subject, financial economics, and there are important lessons to learn from the way that discipline has developed. In the 1970s the Chicago School dominated finance, and leading journals would not accept articles contradicting the rational expectations/market efficiency paradigm. Over the subsequent decades, counter-evidence and alternative theoretical explanations of market behaviour began the emerge at the margins of the discipline. Now, the contrary view has become so persuasive that the certainties of 40 years ago appear naive. However, the academic lockout put back the development of the subject for a generation.
My reading of this affair is that climate science, like finance in the 1970s, is at an immature stage of development. There are heavy consequences when scientists forget Popper's dictum that good science seeks to refute, not confirm. With climate science the stakes are high, and so we need the very best of science. That is why I am on the side of the sceptics.
Emeritus Professor Bob Ryan
Nettleton Shrub, Wiltshire
Posts
6 comments:
Global Warming-IS- Human / Industrial Pollution
As you know, scientist and science itself has been slandered with misinformation and ridiculed in advance of the talks. (A favored, repeated, and effective, right wing tactic).
Is Global Warming related to human/ industrial pollution? The atmosphere seems to be an arbitrary subject right now because of the propaganda effort to confuse the linkage between burning of fossil fuels and its effect on the atmosphere.
The real question is- are we going to put pandering ahead of science in addressing and acting upon human/industrial pollution now and in the future?
The best indisputable SCIENCE example that should be a test model and the #1 item on the Copenhagen Agenda would be the toxic plastic waste dump, the size of Texas, 900 miles off of the United States and Canadian West Coast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatPacificGarbatchageP
That is a Big SCIENCE problem with no dedicated U.S SCIENCE and INNOVATION DEPARTMENT to address the issue. The U.S (or Canada) has not even sent out a SCIENCE research vessel to evaluate this ecological disaster; neither country wants to take the responsibility for the industrial/human pollution or even acknowledge its existence.
No Profit-No Action!-No SCIENCE! Will the World Trade Organization and the New Industrial World Order address the issue? Where is their World SCIENCE Department? Advancement in SCIENCE would outmode the use of fossil fuels but the U.S has not funded innovative SCIENCE since 2001.
www.eere.energy.gov/inventions
Can the problem be solved with SCIENCE? Probably so, Americans are very ingenious primarily because we were raised with the compliments of Freedom and Democracy and are free thinking individuals. We could probably figure a way to clean up the mess and possibly make a profit doing so.
We can do nothing until we have a funded DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE that is free to address SCIENCE and to develop the advancement of SCIENCE. (Yes, for the sake of humanity; SCIENCE FIRST-PANDERING SECOND.)
windcatcher
A department of science is a very good idea, I have not heard that one before. I agree industrial/man made pollution is a major problem and in itself we should make it one of our priorities to clean the mess up and hopefully cut back on the scale we are polluting the planet.
However I am fearful about the consequences of the scare mongering over climate change, in that this will become our main priority to the detriment of reducing inequality at home and abroad. I also fear carbon trading is/maybe a massive fraud.
I am old enough to remember the clean air acts when they were first introduced, which were I believe also opposed by the industrial lobby. Yet today in the UK the benefit are there for all to see. I wish there was far less 'end of the planet and humanity' scare-mongering and a more rational debate on climate change.
Some of the appeals to 'scepticism' are cynical, and I don't think you've thought this through. In the next 50 years population growth may be almost as much again as in the last 50. Assuming we think coercive methods of population control are unacceptable and we support equality and a decent life amongst 10 billion in the same way we support it amongst 2 or 6 what is to be done about the stresses that humanity's demands are going to place on the resources needed to support the kind of society we want to see?
Some so-called sceptics including ex-revolutionaries would say that a pure market and cutting edge science will come up with what we need, and that the new 'religion' of anthropogenic climate change is an irrational fetter on the adaptive capacity of human beings. Some, such as Bjorn Lomborg, have put a kind of social democratic twist on scepticism and argued that the benefits of measures to tackle climate change are pretty small and the resources would be better put into tackling poverty and disease.
How do you test these rival propositions? The answer might be to wait a few decades and see if global warming continues with a vengeance or if its apparent effect was a blip. If it turns out the global warmers are right that probably means by the time the sceptics are reduced to a mad rump that billions are affected by food shortages, flooding of coastal communities (some of which have nowhere to go) etc etc.
You could also do the same stress test with regard to 'peak oil'. Lomborg's contribution to that debate was to argue that marginally higher prices would drive exploration and that in real terms prices would remain in the range $20-30 a barrel for the foreseeable future. Instead we've had prices recover to $70-80 barrel in a global downturn after a low above the top of his range.
Individual sceptics have different positions but broadly speaking they argue maybe climate change caused by CO2 emissions isn't happening at all and if it is it's not as bad as the global warmers say it's going to be and if it is something will turn up. Particular events may have multifactorial explanations, but we can see a run of exceptional weather events here in the UK and elsewhere. For example, Australia has been suffering from years of exceptional drought and heat. Glaciers all over the place including the Antartic and Greenland have retreated at rates for which we know of no precedent in human history. Changes in sea temperature and chemistry are observed to have had a drastic efect on coral reefs and if they die and erode this will change the ecology and behaviour of coastal waters. Permafrost is melting disrupting habitation and transport links. I could go on. It is perfectly possible that scientific work on exactly why and how this is happening will develop significantly in the future, but is there really a rational basis for ordinary people to doubt the overwhelming consensus on the trend?
I can't see it. The corollary of this for those of us who care about inequalities of wealth and power is that rather than wasting time calling for a rational debate with people who are irrational deniers we should be casting a sceptical eye over what is proposed to be done. We should be coming up with a programme for it. If we do nothing the poor and powerless of the world will be the ones who suffer the worst of the famines, the water wars and the fake market solutions.
You've copied Bob Ryan's letter, but it doesn't support the case for scepticism at all. In fact it draws an analogy with something unrelated and uses that to justify generic scepticism. The claim is that scepticism and science is with the self-styled sceptics, but it doesn't follow. Similar arguments were advanced to claim HIV doesn't cause AIDS twenty years ago. In some places they still are. I can't say hand on heart that I know the case is proven beyond all doubt. But would you act today on the basis the verdict is still out?
Paul
Paul
You raise a number of questions which I intend to deal with in a post to Organized Rage, as I started to reply here, but my comments have grown like topsy and turned into an article, as the issues you raised touched upon comments people have made elsewhere.
On the change of temperatures we have been experiencing of late, I would be interested to know when the earth experienced such temperature changes in the past, how quickly did they occur, was there a slow lead into say the ice age/whatever or did this suddenly occur.
I found this, for example:
For Northern Hemisphere temperature, recent decades appear to be the warmest since at least about 1000AD, and the warming since the late 19th century is unprecedented over the last 1000 years. Older data are insufficient to provide reliable hemispheric temperature estimates. Ice core data suggest that the 20th century has been warm in many parts of the globe, but also that the significance of the warming varies geographically, when viewed in the context of climate variations of the last millennium.
Large and rapid climatic changes affecting the atmospheric and oceanic circulation and temperature, and the hydrological cycle, occurred during the last ice age and during the transition towards the present Holocene period (which began about 10,000 years ago). Based on the incomplete evidence available, the projected change of 3 to 7°F (1.5 - 4°C) over the next century would be unprecedented in comparison with the best available records from the last several thousand years.
(http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html)
On the other hand I also found this which appears to say ice cores etc show evidence of rapid changes:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full
I don't know about you but I think I have to admit my limitations. I don't think I have the time or perhaps the ability to weight differing scientific views of different factors appropriately, at least to pronounce with any authority. Trying to grasp the whole system is an order of magnitude above that.
To go back to the orginal issue, radical scepticism might lead one to doubt everything, even one's own existence, but we don't actually live like that, so some assumptions must be made.I look forward to seeing which ones you are going to embrace.
As well as adopting a Socialist perspective to the political economy, I've also adopted a sceptical approach to all things. Of course scepticism is a double edged sword as cited by others above, but I think Nassim Taleb has come up with a rather mundane but elegant solution. One doesn't categorically state that x will happen; much less that if x occurs y must follow. Rather, one asks if x is a possibility? Is x harmful to me or to society? What is the probability of x, and can I do anything to alievate the results of x occuring? (One then has to surmise about the carry-on effects or possible side effects of y, d, z and realisation of complete unkowns.) It's an exercise in risk management.
Your answers to the questions, based upon come sort of quantitative and qualitative criteria, will determine your actions, and the extent of your actions in relation to x. On top of this creeking edifice I add Socialist goals that also affect my analysis whilst realising that my primary duty is to curtail risk as much as possible.
At some point I have to come to a conclusion. I'm not an eco-scientist, and just reading about the subject throws up so many contradictions with ease that my head spins. I, like so many people, fall back to a position that pollution is not good for the environment nor the human animalin the long term. Human animals create a lot of pollution. The consumerist ethic, if it can be called such, produces ever more pollution through packaging and vertical industrial integration; to name two increasing types of pollution. As many nations try to emulate the West's consumption and industrial infrastructure, we are bound to expect at least arthimetical growth of pollution, and possibly exponential growth of some sorts of pollutive side affects due to the surge in emulation of Western patterns of behaviour across the globe.
My conclusion is that we should create policies that reduce pollution in order to minimise the affects of such things as CO2 emissions and so on. While we cannot declare that CO2 will categorically create an environmental catastrophe, we can make a justifiable claim that such emissions create a greater potential risk. We can actually create a probability distribution, and we can take solace from the fact that the UN and most global govts recognise that pollution is harmful as exemplified by the various meetings such as Copenhagen (leaving aside the photo ops and vote generation potentials.)
[It should also be noted that far too many debates fail to mention that climate change scientists, or those who are worth any salt, don't categorically say that a 2* celcius rise in tempature automatically leads to a specific event. They say that a % rise increases the probability of a number of possible events to occur. It's only a minor point but has major implications in the debate and how it is conducted in the public arena. Ignoring this point allows deniers and down-right cranks too much latitude in rebutting pollution concerns.]
slán
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