If we don’t act soon, climate change could become an existential threat (Image: SeppFriedhuber/Getty)

Naomi Klein’s analysis of climate change is a full-blooded offensive against free-market fundamentalism and elite money-players, but key questions are left unanswered

Political arguments are not won by nuanced scientific claims, nor by clever point-scoring devices: they are won by telling stories – human stories – that resonate powerfully and persuasively with their audience.

Now, as the New York climate summit meets, we have just such a powerful story about climate change and what it means for the world in This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, writing fellow of New York’s and darling of the radical left.

Following Klein’s earlier books and The Shock Doctrine, it will be no surprise that her climate change story is a full-blooded offensive against capitalism, the ideology of free-market fundamentalism and the elite money-players who breathe life into it.

This, simply put, is her narrative: human influences on the atmosphere must be arrested urgently to keep global warming below 2° C. If not, then the ensuing changes in climate become an existential threat.

Most people, although aware of the concept of climate change, are in denial about the catastrophic reality. That is because we are all compromised, and hence pacified, by what she calls the “extreme market fundamentalist ideology” driven by the political and corporate elites running the world.

The green economy, carbon trading, new energy technologies and proposals for climate engineering are all failed or failing fixes for an increasingly desperate crisis. Only bottom-up social mass-movements, such as the , offer hope. To defeat free-market capitalism requires new moral vigour and altruistic sacrifice among ordinary people. If not, all hope is extinguished.

There are few heroes, but many villains – and not just the usual suspects. Klein has little time for green pragmatists in US pressure groups such as or the , nor for green billionaires like Richard Branson or Jeremy Grantham. Politicians like Obama, along with carbon pricing, fracking, nuclear energy and even 21st-century socialism all turn out to be on the wrong side, according to Klein.

Anti-capitalist protesters in central London during protests ahead of the G8 summit last year (Image: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)

The book is powerfully and uncompromisingly written, the impassioned polemic we have come to expect from Klein, mixing first-hand accounts of events around the world and withering political analysis.

If this narrative appeals to you, then you must read This Changes Everything today. It will release the moral energy that Klein calls for and inspire you to acts of resistance and sacrifice.

But what if this narrative does not accord with how you see the world? Even if it does strike a chord of truth, if it is what you would “like” to believe, will it persuade you to join the populist movements Klein desires to be mobilised from both left and right? And are there examples of enduring success emerging from “people’s movements” over the last 200 years? Klein herself is sceptical.

Well, you too should read the book and discover whether this story of climate change resonates, whether it is persuasive. But there are many people for whom it will not.

So the problem for Klein remains twofold. What is it that causes someone’s worldview to change, and, for those who share her worldview, from where is the new moral energy for action to be drawn? A clear answer to either of these questions is lacking in the book.

Social psychology research, which Klein herself quotes, shows that world views are rarely changed by paying attention to climate science. Indeed, Klein’s own encounter with climate science confirms this: it is simply a useful means for her to secure a prior goal. This suggests – President Kennedy’s famous quote can be borrowed – “ask not what you can do for climate change, but what climate change can do for you”. The issue then is not just about climate science, but about everything else.

Klein’s relationship with science seems rather schizophrenic. On the one hand, she calls on it to justify the goals and the timelines of the cause and to define the consequences of failure. But on the other hand, she recognises the impotence of science to provide the decisive epistemic or moral authority needed for that vital motivation.

Thus she recognizes that the 2° C goal is a political choice not a scientific discovery, and that evidence just presents us with the logical need to choose from a range of options.

In Rio de Janeiro about 1,500 people walked on Sunday for the defence of a global policy to preserve the environment (Image: Thiago Ripper/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty)

And what about the source of the climate movement’s “full moral voice”? Klein alludes to the Abolitionists’ and the civil rights movement’s unyielding vision of right and wrong, but is remarkably silent on religion.

Nowhere in 466 pages does she mention faith, let alone analyse the potential contributions of enlightened religious convictions to the “language of morality” she seeks.

Take the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a secular body helping religions develop environmental programmes based on their own teachings, beliefs and practices. In a , announcing the launch of a joint climate programme with the UN, the ARC wrote: “Without narrative, few people are ever moved to change or adapt. The faiths have been masters of this for centuries.”

Klein’s claim is that climate change affects everything, and her stirring vision is nothing less than a political, economic, social, cultural and moral make-over of the human world. But this story will not change everyone. Other persuasive stories will continue in circulation, each using climate change as a catalyst to achieve goals in which their advocates “already believed”.

The world does not move together, and nor can it. Some things do not change.

However, we must distinguish between three possible outcomes from Kyoto. One
would be an agreement that is so trivial, or even nonexistent, as to discredit
the Convention as an effective mechanism for bargaining around the global
climate table. Another would see the Convention survive essentially intact, with
agreements to some modest curbs of emissions in industrialised countries. But
such curbs will have little tangible benefit as far as averting climate change
is concerned. A third outcome would be one in which emissions controls were
agreed that translate into a significant slowing down of global warming—an
agreement which could be described as “controlling the world’s climate”.

Much of the discussion surrounding the conference seems to have assumed that
the third outcome is the ultimate objective of Kyoto. It is, however, an
idealist’s dream, totally divorced from the realities of how the climate system
works. Global climate is not so easily controlled. The real debate after Kyoto
will not be whether the global climate is under control, but whether we still
have a credible Climate Convention.

The difficulty of controlling global climate can be illustrated by taking
several of the proposed emissions controls and running them through a simple
climate model—one used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Using a standard “no-action” emissions scenario, the global warming by
2050 will be about 1.6 °C over 1990 levels. For most of the credible targets
so far proposed—the US stabilisation by 2012, the call from small island
states for a 20 per cent reduction in CO₂ by 2005, and the European
Union’s 15 per cent and Britain’s 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by
2010—the rate of global warming falls to about 1.5 °C by 2050 (to the
nearest 0.1°C the three targets are indistinguishable). Only Brazil’s
proposal of a 30 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 brings
global warming down by a further 0.1 °C, to 1.4 °C.

So, in hard global climate terms, Kyoto is about whether global climate warms
by 1.6 °C by 2050 or by 1.5 °C. And we can take this exercise one step
further by converting these calculations of future global warming into estimates
of the number of people at risk from starvation. Using published crop and food
trade models, we estimate that the difference between the “no-action” case and,
for example, the EU proposal, is 2 million fewer people at risk from starvation
due to climate change (20 million will starve as a result of climate change
rather than 22 million). This does not fit with the Kyoto rhetoric about “saving
the world”.

This perspective on Kyoto suggests a number of more realistic priorities.
First, Kyoto must maintain the integrity of the Convention as a mechanism for
global negotiations on climate control. The exact form of any agreement reached
about the control of emissions is of secondary importance. Second, we need to
realise that achieving the ultimate objective of the
Convention—stabilising global climate at “non-dangerous levels”—is a
long haul in which the Rio Summit in 1992 was only the beginning and Kyoto is
merely the next step.

Third, we need more thoroughgoing assessments of what constitutes dangerous
climate change. Most of the Kyoto proposals are designed without reference
either to the level of climate change to which we can adapt, or to the level of
climate change that will cause significant damage. We are whistling in the dark.
Despite the considerable achievements of the IPCC in its first two assessment
reports, there is a need for a closer interaction between climate science and
climate policy.

And finally, given the history of global greenhouse gas emissions and the
inertia of the climate system, we are committed to a substantial amount of
further global warming. This inertia in global climate demands creative,
insightful and internationally just strategies to reduce our own and our
children’s vulnerability to climate change. Both mitigation and adaptation are
appropriate responses to climate change, but adaptation may well prove the more
necessary and achievable response in the near term.

It was perhaps unfortunate that I read this book just after the inundation
of large coastal areas of Bangladesh and the announcement that the subsequent
death toll was probably more than 200,000. On the second page of W. J. Burrough’s
book Watching the World’s Weather, the claim is made that the advent of
weather satellites has both dramatically improved forecasts of the movements
of storms, such as the severe cyclone of 1970 which led to about 250,000
deaths in Bangladesh, and sharply reduced the loss of life.

The first part of this claim is probably indisputable (although improvement
does not imply accuracy); the second is definitely worth a lively discussion.
The recent devastation in Bangladesh was caused by a tropical cyclone which
was quite well forecast with the aid of satellite imagery. To save lives,
however, good forecasts of extreme weather require good responses.

Despite the many benefits that satellite-based environmental monitoring
has introduced to society, the improvement of social, institutional and
political decision-making and response structures is not one of them. The
on-going haemorrhage of life in northeast Africa is further evidence that
good quality and reliable satellite-derived information (in this case concerning
rainfall and crop performance) is only the first, and relatively easy, step
toward ‘sharply reducing the loss of life’.

I was also uneasy for other reasons about the faith in human technological
achievement that underlies this optimistic, attractive and well-illustrated
book. Burroughs explains how we can watch the world’s weather from satellites.
The assertion is made, with such frequency that it almost appears as the
main justification for meteorological satellites, that this is important
for understanding climate and climate change. But there is a distinction
between weather and climate that needs to be made before this assertion
can be evaluated.

Weather can be seen but climate cannot. We experience weather directly
through hail storms, floods or hurricanes; climate is a statistical construct
that has proved of immense value for planning purposes. Belief in the invisible
is hard, which explains why climatology was a relatively late disciplinary
arrival on the horizon of human knowledge. Belief that the invisible changes,
however, is even harder – thus explaining why climate change developed as
a serious offshoot of climatology only within the past two or three decades.

The geological evidence of the Ice Ages unearthed in the 18th and early
19th centuries led to the belief in climate change on very long timescales.
That climate changes on contemporary timescales has only been realised,
at least in most circles, in more recent years through the systematic analysis
of early documentary and instrumental evidence.

This difference between weather and climate commonly leads to confusion
when we try to explain contemporary climate change to a popular audience
– whether the requirement to understand this distinction as part of the
geography National Curriculum at Level 5 (9 to 10 year olds) will reduce
this confusion remains to be seen.

The direct evidence we all have of changes in weather (a windy January,
a Great Storm or a record hot summer) is often mistakenly used to infer
climate change. Since climate is a statistical construct, a change in climate
can be inferred only from a change in statistics, which by definition are
gathered over a long period of time. Here lies the limitation of satellite
‘watching’ for climate studies – the longest homogenous satellite time series
of any component of the global climate system is no more than 20 years long
and in many cases much shorter.

When one compares the efficacy of satellite versus ground-based observation
of the world’s weather for climate change purposes exactly the same problems
emerge: massive data accumulation of which only a fraction is analysed;
instrumental drift or failure leading to inhomogeneity in a time series;
change in observation site due to orbit decay or platform replacement again
leading to inhomogeneity in a time series; and observational error. Here
the famous example is the rejection by the automated data screening procedure
of the measurements made by the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)
on Nimbus 7 in the mid-1980s of the substantial and increasing depletion
of strato-spheric ozone over Antarctica.

All these problems also affect climate change monitoring using conventional
ground-based instrumentation, although there is one sense in which ground-based
data are more appropriate for climate change detection. The average lifetime
of a satellite instrument, by design, is usually only a few years – few
if any meteorological satellites have operated for more than a decade –
compared with a potential lifetime of two or three decades for conventional
meteorological instruments. Replacement costs, too, are vastly more favourable
for ground-based monitoring ensuring that, with care, long-term homogeneity
of meteorological time series can be maintained (of critical importance
when small climate changes are to be detected).

This is not to decry the key role that meteorological satellites have
in furthering our understanding of the global climate system – they increasingly
provide extensive baseline data of new, and not so new, meteorological variables
for weather forecast and climate models. But it is to warn against a false
vision of the future in which all the needs of weather and climate science
are met through the ‘eye in the sky’. It is one thing to watch the world’s
weather and to forecast it reliably; it is another matter to reduce vulnerability
to weather-related hazards and to detect global climate change.

My final evidence for the technocentric advocacy I detect at times in
this book is the author’s title for the second chapter ‘The global weather
machine’. A machine implies a human creator. Whether one is a theistic or
atheistic evolutionist, a Gaian or Creationist, the global climate system
most certainly is not made by humans.

Mike Hulme works in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia. His current research interests are the validation of climate
models, global climate monitoring and climate change impacts.