Global Warming Climate Change Two Views
Post
21/10/06, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Unleash Canada's capitalist creativity on global warming, (Source: Globe, Not Available On-Line).
29/09/06, Gwynne Dyer, Climate: A Stich in Time ..., (Source).
03/11/06, Rex Murphy, Overheated climate arithmetic, (Source).
21/10/06, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Unleash Canada's capitalist creativity on global warming, (Back).
'Greenland's Ice on the Scales." The headline caps an article -- appearing in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature -- that reports on the state of Greenland's ice sheet. About the size of Mexico, and in some places about three kilometres thick, this ice sheet is the world's second largest after Antarctica's.
For years, two U.S.-German satellites have measured Earth's gravity field as they've passed over Greenland. Scientists have carefully interpreted the data to track changes in Greenland's massive body of ice. And what they've found supports conclusions of other studies -- using very different methodologies -- that the ice sheet is now disappearing at the astonishing rate of more than 200 cubic kilometres year. That's equivalent to 200 times the amount of water Los Angeles will consume this year.
Some of the ice loss comes directly from increased melting of the ice sheet: Parts of Greenland have warmed almost 3 degrees Celsius in the past 20 years. But more comes from the movement of a dozen glaciers whose runoff flows from Greenland's highlands to the sea. Their speed of movement has doubled just since the year 2000 -- in some cases, to more than 12 kilometres a year -- and their huge tongues extending into the sea have disintegrated into tens of thousands of icebergs.
Greenland is far away and doesn't matter much in the everyday lives of Canadians. But the drumbeat of news about the effects of global warming is quickening -- and getting steadily closer to home. This week, the CBC reported that every pine tree in Kamloops is either dead or dying because of an infestation of mountain pine beetles that began just a couple of months ago. In the next two years, the city will lose 75 per cent of its trees.
Bark beetle infestations are chewing their way through pine forests from Alaska and B.C. to Arizona. These infestations are likely an early sign of climate change because higher temperatures have extended the beetles' lifespans and range. Alberta is now fighting what's almost certainly a losing battle to prevent the insects from crossing the Rockies to invade Canada's vast boreal forest that extends to Labrador.
Most Canadians don't read Nature, but many do pay attention to the CBC and other media outlets that report on recent climate science. And everyone notices when the forests around them die in a matter of weeks. Polls show that Canadians are connecting the dots. But the Conservatives' environmental plan announced this week shows that our federal government isn't.
The plan was thoroughly analyzed in these pages and elsewhere yesterday. The consensus, and not just among environmentalists, is that it's a hodgepodge of mismatched policies -- dealing with everything from dishwashers to power plants -- that's best characterized as an exercise in obfuscation and delay. It extends the Tories' deliberate effort to conflate the problems of urban air pollution and global warming, as if Canadians don't now know the difference. And it puts off any tough decisions or economic pain for years, and in some cases for decades.
Why have the Tories chosen such an approach? Because global warming is a nightmare issue for conservatives. Our greenhouse gas emissions come mainly from burning fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are the industrial world's main source of high quality energy. So policies that really curtail emissions will affect practically every activity in the world's rich countries. They'll not only change each and every person's life in these countries, but they'll also challenge the political and economic power of many entrenched interest groups, from tar-sands oil producers and car manufactures to lobbyists for the coal-mining industry. Even market-based strategies for dealing with carbon emissions (like systems for trading carbon-emission quotas) will demand -- if they're properly implemented -- reams of government regulation and elaborate institutions that will intrude into every niche of business.
Global warming, in other words, raises colossal difficulties for laissez-faire versions of capitalism. It's what political scientists call a "collective action problem." Most people and companies, if left to their own devices, will choose to let others bear the costs of doing something about carbon emissions. Government action is essential to stop this "free-riding." But anything that involves greater government intervention, especially in the marketplace, makes conservatives see red.
It doesn't have to be this way. There's a rich tradition of conservative environmentalism -- stretching back to president Teddy Roosevelt's actions to enlarge America's system of federal parks -- that emphasizes people's responsibilities as stewards of nature. More important, from the point of view of conservative economic policy, the powers of market capitalism are just waiting to be unleashed to address global warming.
Yes, enormous government intervention will be needed to create the necessary incentives and markets. But all markets -- always -- exist within an elaborate framework of laws, regulations and institutions that are almost all supplied by government.
If we unleash Canada's capitalist creativity, we could be an international leader in a suite of technologies urgently needed in a warming world that will depend on fossil fuels for many decades. These include technologies for the clean combustion of coal, for storing carbon dioxide underground, and for using hydrogen as a transportation fuel. We could make staggering amounts of money selling these technologies around the world. Instead, once again, we're at risk of falling behind places like California -- a mighty engine of invention that is rapidly focusing its creative energies on solving global warming.
The Tories are missing a huge opportunity. We need a federal government with a sense of urgency about the problem, the guts to act, and the commonsense recognition that government must play a major role in Canada's response. Instead, right now, we have a federal government with its head stuck in the tar sands.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, will be published at the end of October.
29/09/06, Gwynne Dyer, Climate: A Stich in Time ..., (Back).
It's a law of physics that translates well into the behaviour of human beings: the greater the mass involved, the more effort is needed to overcome its inertia. But it doesn't read very well as an epitaph for civilisation.
The information we need in order to act is around us every day. Three small, low-key stories in the inner pages of the newspapers I read at breakfast this morning -- the sort of stories you find in the media almost every day -- should have been enough to galvanise every reader into instant action. But the human version of the laws of physics gets in the way.
The first story was a warning by the Meteorological Office in Britain that summer temperatures in south-eastern England may reach as high as 46 degrees C (115 F) by the end of this century. "By 2100, such heatwaves are likely to occur almost every year, and could occur several times in any given summer," said the Met Office.
London with the summer temperatures similar to Kuwait's seems incredible, but the Met Office was relentlessly reasonable. Depending on how fast greenhouse gas emissions rise, it pointed out, we are facing an average rise in global temperature rise of between two and five degrees Celsius (4.5 and 11 degrees F) by the end of this century.
If the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is halted at the level of 450 parts per million, then we get away with "only" two degrees hotter. But we are already at 385 ppm, so that requires immediate global agreement on radical action to curb the growth of CO2 emissions. Allow the current model of economic development and energy use to continue basically unchanged, and you end up with 800 ppm by the end of the century and the five degrees hotter world.
Except -- and the Met Office didn't say this part -- that you never get there, because global civilisation falls into violent chaos as huge numbers of people start to starve. Even two degrees hotter will reduce agricultural output in the main food-producing regions of the world by about a quarter.
Much hotter, and it will be much worse, so we may end up negotiating (or more likely, fighting) over which billion of us starve first. Intelligent human beings, faced with that prospect, would act at once, or so you would think -- especially because the actions required are not really all that painful, provided that they start right away.
The second story in this morning's papers was about a "green growth plus" strategy devised by consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the US-based giant that provides a wide range of business services including risk management. Basically, the report said that it wouldn't cost all that much to save civilisation.
The economists at PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that serious efforts to improve energy efficiency, greater use of renewable energy, and new technologies for carbon capture could cut global CO2 emissions by about 60 percent from the level predicted for 2050 if countries just pursue a "business-as-usual approach." Moreover, the costs involved would not beggar us all.
"Estimates suggest that the level of (world Gross Domestic Product) might be reduced by no more than two to three percent by 2050 if this strategy is followed," said John Hawksworth, head of macro-economics at PwC. But the success of the strategy does depend on getting really serious about global heating RIGHT NOW.
Is that really likely to happen? The third story in this morning's paper seemed encouraging at first, for it reported that scientists now believe the battle to close the "ozone hole" is being won.
It is an impressive tale of global cooperation to stop human activities that damage vital natural systems. The ozone hole was first spotted in 1985, and soon researchers linked it conclusively with chlorofluorocabons, compounds that were widely use in refrigerators, air-conditioners and aerosol sprays.
Every Antarctic spring, the CFCs in the upper atmosphere were interacting with the returning sunlight to destroy the ozone that protects living things from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. The predicted consequences included blind penguins, sunburned fish, and a soaring rate of skin cancer among people living at high latitudes.
However, the Montreal Protocol of 1987 restricted the production of CFCs only two years after the hole was discovered. The Antarctic hole still covered an area bigger than all of North America this month, but scientists are now confident that the worst is past. It will stay at about this size for fifteen or twenty years, and then "somewhere between 2020 and 2025 we'll be able to detect that the ozone hole is actually beginning to decrease in size," said Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Within seventy years, the hole should be entirely healed
So why can't we react as fast to global warming? Because of inertia: the mass of people and institutions to be moved is just so great.
Fixing the ozone hole was easy because neither hair-spray nor refrigerator coolants are centrally important in the economy. Changing the way we produce and use energy is not easy at all, even if PricewaterhouseCoopers are right and the ultimate level of economic sacrifice would not be that great. So many people and institutions are involved that it's hard to move fast, even if failing to do so costs us the Earth.
03/11/06, Rex Murphy, Overheated climate arithmetic, (Back).
When the Stern review on global warming was released this week, and I'd had the chance to catch a few of the headlines it inspired, I thought immediately of Joey Smallwood.
Mr. Smallwood liked big numbers. Especially big numbers preceded by dollar signs. If a road somewhere on the South Coast was about to be paved, a new trades school built, or a new industrial project launched, Joey would wind himself up and find a microphone. “This new road (school, industry) is going to cost NOT 10 million dollars, NOT 20 million dollars, but FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS!”
He could find nearly infinite rhetorical variations on a simple number (breaking it down into its constituent “hundreds of thousands”; pluralizing — 50 MILLIONS of dollars, etc., etc. and etc.) The trick was to bludgeon Newfoundlanders, not accustomed even to the sound (never mind the actual possession) of great amounts of cash, into a state of catatonic awe at the nearly inconceivable heaps of money this project or that was going to cost.
The trick grew stale. After a while, being told how many $20s were in a stack of $50-million became tedious, and the long tease of “not 10, not 20, not 30 but X millions of dollars” became a risible bore. Another failing of the technique was the fading power of the word “million.” He upgraded. By the end of his fractious reign, the campaign speeches rang with allusion to hitherto unapproached altitudes of “billions of dollars.”
When arithmetic is rhetoric, each new speech must have a bigger number. Let us call it Smallwood's Law.
The Stern report on climate change illustrates Smallwood's Law in a way that would make the old conjuror proud. It projects a cost to the world, if measures are not taken to mitigate or halt global warming, of 7 TRILLION DOLLARS. Even in these days of Enron-scale frauds, and income trust cancellations, a trillion dollars is an astronomical number. Seven trillion summons all the galaxies and all their wheeling stars.
I look at that number more as an instrument to arrest attention, than as a real figure. If Sir Nicholas Stern had said nine trillion or six trillion, would he have been pounced on by accountants and academics the next day saying, “He's up by two trillion, or down by one?” I don't think so.
When we enter the area of projecting costs in the trillions of dollars, based on the wild variables of planetary weather patterns over the next 45 years or so, and speculations on the industrial growth of 162 nations over the same period — a marriage, let it be noted, of two roulette tables: weather forecasting and the stock market — any claim of exactitude is at best a mirage, at worst a carney's bark.
I know that skepticism over global warming, or as it has been more tactically rebranded, “climate change,” is less and less a popular stance. In some quarters, it even approaches being socially unacceptable — as, in the old days, talking in church. On the not so far fringes of Gaia-consciousness, the phrase “climate change denial” is being tested out.
It is a worrisome development. The ardent advocates of climate change are more than a little imperious in their certitudes. Every counterargument or qualification to their view of things is discounted as being “paid for” by the oil industry. Or, it is labelled as being a denial of “the science.” They cast yesterday's hurricane as “evidence” of extreme weather brought on by greenhouse gas emissions in the full knowledge that what we now call one “weather event” is, or can be, proof of nothing.
In my view, it cannot be emphasized sufficiently that the climate-change movement is at least as much a subcategory of rhetoric — the art of persuasion — as it is a branch of science. It is at least as much a partisan exercise (partisan in the sense of supporting a cause) as a harvest of neutral experiment and observation.
The science is not complete. The models are not perfect. The projections, economic or meteorological, over the next 50 to 200 years are most unobligingly and massively complex: Prediction on this scale is necessarily wildly fallible.
Journalistic skepticism on climate change is a rare orchid indeed. Too many journalists are advocates, and that — whatever the cause — is a fatal mixing of mutually exclusive categories.
Most pernicious in this context is the attempt to declare, “The debate is over.” It isn't over. That declaration is unsupported assertion. It is rhetoric's oldest trick. Just as declaring the arguments of those who see things differently as being corrupted by other interests is not a counterargument but a commonplace ad hominem evasion.
It is in this same territory that I place the Stern review's $7-trillion warning. It is not a number. It is just a gorgeous and late-blooming illustration of Smallwood's Law. How Joe would have worked it — a 7 and then that whole mile of 0's.
I can, alas, hear him now.
29/09/06, Gwynne Dyer, Climate: A Stich in Time ..., (Source).
03/11/06, Rex Murphy, Overheated climate arithmetic, (Source).
21/10/06, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Unleash Canada's capitalist creativity on global warming, (Back).
'Greenland's Ice on the Scales." The headline caps an article -- appearing in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature -- that reports on the state of Greenland's ice sheet. About the size of Mexico, and in some places about three kilometres thick, this ice sheet is the world's second largest after Antarctica's.
For years, two U.S.-German satellites have measured Earth's gravity field as they've passed over Greenland. Scientists have carefully interpreted the data to track changes in Greenland's massive body of ice. And what they've found supports conclusions of other studies -- using very different methodologies -- that the ice sheet is now disappearing at the astonishing rate of more than 200 cubic kilometres year. That's equivalent to 200 times the amount of water Los Angeles will consume this year.
Some of the ice loss comes directly from increased melting of the ice sheet: Parts of Greenland have warmed almost 3 degrees Celsius in the past 20 years. But more comes from the movement of a dozen glaciers whose runoff flows from Greenland's highlands to the sea. Their speed of movement has doubled just since the year 2000 -- in some cases, to more than 12 kilometres a year -- and their huge tongues extending into the sea have disintegrated into tens of thousands of icebergs.
Greenland is far away and doesn't matter much in the everyday lives of Canadians. But the drumbeat of news about the effects of global warming is quickening -- and getting steadily closer to home. This week, the CBC reported that every pine tree in Kamloops is either dead or dying because of an infestation of mountain pine beetles that began just a couple of months ago. In the next two years, the city will lose 75 per cent of its trees.
Bark beetle infestations are chewing their way through pine forests from Alaska and B.C. to Arizona. These infestations are likely an early sign of climate change because higher temperatures have extended the beetles' lifespans and range. Alberta is now fighting what's almost certainly a losing battle to prevent the insects from crossing the Rockies to invade Canada's vast boreal forest that extends to Labrador.
Most Canadians don't read Nature, but many do pay attention to the CBC and other media outlets that report on recent climate science. And everyone notices when the forests around them die in a matter of weeks. Polls show that Canadians are connecting the dots. But the Conservatives' environmental plan announced this week shows that our federal government isn't.
The plan was thoroughly analyzed in these pages and elsewhere yesterday. The consensus, and not just among environmentalists, is that it's a hodgepodge of mismatched policies -- dealing with everything from dishwashers to power plants -- that's best characterized as an exercise in obfuscation and delay. It extends the Tories' deliberate effort to conflate the problems of urban air pollution and global warming, as if Canadians don't now know the difference. And it puts off any tough decisions or economic pain for years, and in some cases for decades.
Why have the Tories chosen such an approach? Because global warming is a nightmare issue for conservatives. Our greenhouse gas emissions come mainly from burning fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are the industrial world's main source of high quality energy. So policies that really curtail emissions will affect practically every activity in the world's rich countries. They'll not only change each and every person's life in these countries, but they'll also challenge the political and economic power of many entrenched interest groups, from tar-sands oil producers and car manufactures to lobbyists for the coal-mining industry. Even market-based strategies for dealing with carbon emissions (like systems for trading carbon-emission quotas) will demand -- if they're properly implemented -- reams of government regulation and elaborate institutions that will intrude into every niche of business.
Global warming, in other words, raises colossal difficulties for laissez-faire versions of capitalism. It's what political scientists call a "collective action problem." Most people and companies, if left to their own devices, will choose to let others bear the costs of doing something about carbon emissions. Government action is essential to stop this "free-riding." But anything that involves greater government intervention, especially in the marketplace, makes conservatives see red.
It doesn't have to be this way. There's a rich tradition of conservative environmentalism -- stretching back to president Teddy Roosevelt's actions to enlarge America's system of federal parks -- that emphasizes people's responsibilities as stewards of nature. More important, from the point of view of conservative economic policy, the powers of market capitalism are just waiting to be unleashed to address global warming.
Yes, enormous government intervention will be needed to create the necessary incentives and markets. But all markets -- always -- exist within an elaborate framework of laws, regulations and institutions that are almost all supplied by government.
If we unleash Canada's capitalist creativity, we could be an international leader in a suite of technologies urgently needed in a warming world that will depend on fossil fuels for many decades. These include technologies for the clean combustion of coal, for storing carbon dioxide underground, and for using hydrogen as a transportation fuel. We could make staggering amounts of money selling these technologies around the world. Instead, once again, we're at risk of falling behind places like California -- a mighty engine of invention that is rapidly focusing its creative energies on solving global warming.
The Tories are missing a huge opportunity. We need a federal government with a sense of urgency about the problem, the guts to act, and the commonsense recognition that government must play a major role in Canada's response. Instead, right now, we have a federal government with its head stuck in the tar sands.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, will be published at the end of October.
29/09/06, Gwynne Dyer, Climate: A Stich in Time ..., (Back).
It's a law of physics that translates well into the behaviour of human beings: the greater the mass involved, the more effort is needed to overcome its inertia. But it doesn't read very well as an epitaph for civilisation.
The information we need in order to act is around us every day. Three small, low-key stories in the inner pages of the newspapers I read at breakfast this morning -- the sort of stories you find in the media almost every day -- should have been enough to galvanise every reader into instant action. But the human version of the laws of physics gets in the way.
The first story was a warning by the Meteorological Office in Britain that summer temperatures in south-eastern England may reach as high as 46 degrees C (115 F) by the end of this century. "By 2100, such heatwaves are likely to occur almost every year, and could occur several times in any given summer," said the Met Office.
London with the summer temperatures similar to Kuwait's seems incredible, but the Met Office was relentlessly reasonable. Depending on how fast greenhouse gas emissions rise, it pointed out, we are facing an average rise in global temperature rise of between two and five degrees Celsius (4.5 and 11 degrees F) by the end of this century.
If the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is halted at the level of 450 parts per million, then we get away with "only" two degrees hotter. But we are already at 385 ppm, so that requires immediate global agreement on radical action to curb the growth of CO2 emissions. Allow the current model of economic development and energy use to continue basically unchanged, and you end up with 800 ppm by the end of the century and the five degrees hotter world.
Except -- and the Met Office didn't say this part -- that you never get there, because global civilisation falls into violent chaos as huge numbers of people start to starve. Even two degrees hotter will reduce agricultural output in the main food-producing regions of the world by about a quarter.
Much hotter, and it will be much worse, so we may end up negotiating (or more likely, fighting) over which billion of us starve first. Intelligent human beings, faced with that prospect, would act at once, or so you would think -- especially because the actions required are not really all that painful, provided that they start right away.
The second story in this morning's papers was about a "green growth plus" strategy devised by consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the US-based giant that provides a wide range of business services including risk management. Basically, the report said that it wouldn't cost all that much to save civilisation.
The economists at PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that serious efforts to improve energy efficiency, greater use of renewable energy, and new technologies for carbon capture could cut global CO2 emissions by about 60 percent from the level predicted for 2050 if countries just pursue a "business-as-usual approach." Moreover, the costs involved would not beggar us all.
"Estimates suggest that the level of (world Gross Domestic Product) might be reduced by no more than two to three percent by 2050 if this strategy is followed," said John Hawksworth, head of macro-economics at PwC. But the success of the strategy does depend on getting really serious about global heating RIGHT NOW.
Is that really likely to happen? The third story in this morning's paper seemed encouraging at first, for it reported that scientists now believe the battle to close the "ozone hole" is being won.
It is an impressive tale of global cooperation to stop human activities that damage vital natural systems. The ozone hole was first spotted in 1985, and soon researchers linked it conclusively with chlorofluorocabons, compounds that were widely use in refrigerators, air-conditioners and aerosol sprays.
Every Antarctic spring, the CFCs in the upper atmosphere were interacting with the returning sunlight to destroy the ozone that protects living things from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. The predicted consequences included blind penguins, sunburned fish, and a soaring rate of skin cancer among people living at high latitudes.
However, the Montreal Protocol of 1987 restricted the production of CFCs only two years after the hole was discovered. The Antarctic hole still covered an area bigger than all of North America this month, but scientists are now confident that the worst is past. It will stay at about this size for fifteen or twenty years, and then "somewhere between 2020 and 2025 we'll be able to detect that the ozone hole is actually beginning to decrease in size," said Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Within seventy years, the hole should be entirely healed
So why can't we react as fast to global warming? Because of inertia: the mass of people and institutions to be moved is just so great.
Fixing the ozone hole was easy because neither hair-spray nor refrigerator coolants are centrally important in the economy. Changing the way we produce and use energy is not easy at all, even if PricewaterhouseCoopers are right and the ultimate level of economic sacrifice would not be that great. So many people and institutions are involved that it's hard to move fast, even if failing to do so costs us the Earth.
03/11/06, Rex Murphy, Overheated climate arithmetic, (Back).
When the Stern review on global warming was released this week, and I'd had the chance to catch a few of the headlines it inspired, I thought immediately of Joey Smallwood.
Mr. Smallwood liked big numbers. Especially big numbers preceded by dollar signs. If a road somewhere on the South Coast was about to be paved, a new trades school built, or a new industrial project launched, Joey would wind himself up and find a microphone. “This new road (school, industry) is going to cost NOT 10 million dollars, NOT 20 million dollars, but FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS!”
He could find nearly infinite rhetorical variations on a simple number (breaking it down into its constituent “hundreds of thousands”; pluralizing — 50 MILLIONS of dollars, etc., etc. and etc.) The trick was to bludgeon Newfoundlanders, not accustomed even to the sound (never mind the actual possession) of great amounts of cash, into a state of catatonic awe at the nearly inconceivable heaps of money this project or that was going to cost.
The trick grew stale. After a while, being told how many $20s were in a stack of $50-million became tedious, and the long tease of “not 10, not 20, not 30 but X millions of dollars” became a risible bore. Another failing of the technique was the fading power of the word “million.” He upgraded. By the end of his fractious reign, the campaign speeches rang with allusion to hitherto unapproached altitudes of “billions of dollars.”
When arithmetic is rhetoric, each new speech must have a bigger number. Let us call it Smallwood's Law.
The Stern report on climate change illustrates Smallwood's Law in a way that would make the old conjuror proud. It projects a cost to the world, if measures are not taken to mitigate or halt global warming, of 7 TRILLION DOLLARS. Even in these days of Enron-scale frauds, and income trust cancellations, a trillion dollars is an astronomical number. Seven trillion summons all the galaxies and all their wheeling stars.
I look at that number more as an instrument to arrest attention, than as a real figure. If Sir Nicholas Stern had said nine trillion or six trillion, would he have been pounced on by accountants and academics the next day saying, “He's up by two trillion, or down by one?” I don't think so.
When we enter the area of projecting costs in the trillions of dollars, based on the wild variables of planetary weather patterns over the next 45 years or so, and speculations on the industrial growth of 162 nations over the same period — a marriage, let it be noted, of two roulette tables: weather forecasting and the stock market — any claim of exactitude is at best a mirage, at worst a carney's bark.
I know that skepticism over global warming, or as it has been more tactically rebranded, “climate change,” is less and less a popular stance. In some quarters, it even approaches being socially unacceptable — as, in the old days, talking in church. On the not so far fringes of Gaia-consciousness, the phrase “climate change denial” is being tested out.
It is a worrisome development. The ardent advocates of climate change are more than a little imperious in their certitudes. Every counterargument or qualification to their view of things is discounted as being “paid for” by the oil industry. Or, it is labelled as being a denial of “the science.” They cast yesterday's hurricane as “evidence” of extreme weather brought on by greenhouse gas emissions in the full knowledge that what we now call one “weather event” is, or can be, proof of nothing.
In my view, it cannot be emphasized sufficiently that the climate-change movement is at least as much a subcategory of rhetoric — the art of persuasion — as it is a branch of science. It is at least as much a partisan exercise (partisan in the sense of supporting a cause) as a harvest of neutral experiment and observation.
The science is not complete. The models are not perfect. The projections, economic or meteorological, over the next 50 to 200 years are most unobligingly and massively complex: Prediction on this scale is necessarily wildly fallible.
Journalistic skepticism on climate change is a rare orchid indeed. Too many journalists are advocates, and that — whatever the cause — is a fatal mixing of mutually exclusive categories.
Most pernicious in this context is the attempt to declare, “The debate is over.” It isn't over. That declaration is unsupported assertion. It is rhetoric's oldest trick. Just as declaring the arguments of those who see things differently as being corrupted by other interests is not a counterargument but a commonplace ad hominem evasion.
It is in this same territory that I place the Stern review's $7-trillion warning. It is not a number. It is just a gorgeous and late-blooming illustration of Smallwood's Law. How Joe would have worked it — a 7 and then that whole mile of 0's.
I can, alas, hear him now.
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