CLIMATE scepticism is on the rise, boosted in large part by the hacked emails originating from the “climategate” scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, and by the carelessness of fact checkers for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The damage to the public standing of climate science has been substantial. In the UK in February, a BBC poll of 1001 people found that just 26 per cent believed human-made climate change was an established scientific fact, down from 41 per cent only three months earlier. And in the US, Republicans hope to kill the “American Power Act”, sponsored by Senators John Kerry, a Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, who sits as an independent.
Libertarian columnists have helped turned many British Conservative parliamentarians into climate doubters, and the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has installed a Liberal Democrat climate secretary to give his coalition’s green policies some protection from his own party’s right wing.
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This political reaction against scientific “facts” is hardly surprising, as from the libertarian perspective climate science points towards a global socialism where individual choices are constrained. If you accept there is a limit beyond which atmospheric CO2 levels should not prudently pass, you are plunged into uncomfortable questions about how the allowance for emissions should be shared, or rationed.
In the US, some now argue that their citizens merit a bigger carbon footprint than others under a formula that would acknowledge their blameless consumption in the innocent years Before Global Warming. To them, climate change smells like a UN trick to foist on the world policies transferring hard-earned wealth from citizens in western democracies to corrupt governments in the global south: not an act of generosity, but moral blackmail.
In those right-facing shoes, you would want to be sure that climate science was certain. How much does CO2 warm the planet? Are the computer projections right when they forecast catastrophe?
To those of a different political persuasion, this reeks of denialism. And certainly some of the speakers I met recently at the world climate sceptics’ conference in Chicago gave the appearance that they wouldn’t accept human-made climate change if the grass under their feet caught fire.
That meeting was arranged by the Heartland Institute, a think tank which has taken money from oil and tobacco firms over the years. The libertarian audience applauded the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, hissed at energy taxes, and called for the “climategate criminals” to be jailed. A few moderates – and even left-wingers – had joined the conference to keep alive those climate science debates which some politicians have tried to close down in their anxiety to achieve a deal on emissions.
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, emeritus reader in geography at the University of Hull, UK, warned the audience they would never win the climate policy battle if they continued to alienate socialists and social democrats by their politicised demeanour. Governments needed to impose taxes, she said, and energy taxes were efficient. Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition, a home to climate sceptics, was another political outsider. He said many scientists he knew were queasy about what he called “climate alarmism”, but were also reluctant to be lumped in with the right wing.
And Steve McIntyre, the Canadian mining engineer who has become the reluctant hero of climate sceptics, told libertarians to end their pursuit of climate “fraud” over those UEA emails and the hotly disputed “hockey stick” climate graph, and simply ask the scientists at the centre of the affair to say sorry. McIntyre says he does not want to bring down climate science; only to correct any statistical errors. If governments believe CO2 is a danger, they should legislate against it, he said. He rose to a standing ovation but sat down to one-handed applause.
Most of the audience didn’t want this consensual climate pacifism. Christopher Monckton, a political adviser to Margaret Thatcher when she was UK prime minister, was more to their taste. His much-reported ridicule of the IPCC chairman, “railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri – Casey Jones of climate change”, went down particularly well, as did his appeal over the American troops who died defending the freedom that their political leaders are abandoning in the rush towards “climate socialism”.
These sceptics claim they already enjoy quiet support from many academics scared to speak out for fear of losing tenure. Groupthink, they insist, has taken over. Is this so? A few months ago, I put out feelers on three sceptic websites asking for sceptical scientists at British universities to contact me anonymously. I could count the positive replies on one hand with a few missing fingers. Meanwhile, alarm among many scientists over the risks of climate change appears as strong as ever – if not stronger.
“Sceptics claim they already enjoy quiet support from academics who are scared to speak out”
It’s impossible to take the politics out of a topic as complex, uncertain and far-reaching as climate change. But maybe there is a way to improve matters. The majority of the sceptic scientists at the conference appear now to acknowledge that the world has warmed and that humans may be partly to blame. Most agree with the scientific consensus that basic physics means CO2 will warm the planet by about 1 °C above pre-industrial levels.
Where they disagree is over computer models supported by the IPCC, almost all of which project that the world’s natural feedback mechanisms will amplify the CO2 warming, probably to a dangerous degree. If the debate can focus on this feedback warming, we might be able to remove some of the political heat. But don’t hold your breath.
