SKEPTICISM AND DENIAL OF ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE
PETER C DOHERTY *
Skepticism is central to science. Good scientists look critically at their own ideas and those of others as they seek to cut some gem of understanding from the available observations and measurements. Better to find the flaw for yourself than to have someone else point it out! That's true for climate scientists and geologists and for research biologists like me. As an occasional attendee at 'climatology' seminars, I do not see any basic differences in philosophy and, like the people in my game, the scope of what they can do is constantly being enhanced by advances in technology.
While microbiologists benefit from new, ultra-high speed gene and protein sequencers the climatologists are, for example, informed by next generation satellites that measure the depth as well as the area of ice sheets, and from networks of 'bobbing' buoys that relay temperature measurements from different levels of the oceans.
The science is moving fast and, as in my field, I get the sense that anyone who isn't actively involved in the research rapidly becomes history. That's why retired scientists, who don't fully understand yet can't support the current consensus, are well advised to be quiet while conveying an amiable aura of experience and benign wisdom!
As an experimentalist who manipulates acute systems rather than an observer of long-term, natural events I may, though, be marginally more conscious of Murphy's Law. 'Anything that can go wrong will go wrong' too often rules when it comes to deliberately perturbing complex systems, which is what I do for a living.
When it comes to perturbation, there is no precedent for concurrently releasing the combustion products of billions of tons of fossil fuels, devastating the forests that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and rapidly acidifying that great CO2 'sink', the surface layers of the oceans.
This greenhouse gas experiment involves 6.8 billion human beings and every complex life form on our small planet, and it can only be done once. It is an experiment that could potentially lead to the loss of our Great Barrier Reef and the deaths of millions from inundation, famine and even nuclear war. Sure, there is no absolute certainty that the outcome will be anything like so dreadful, but can we afford to explore the possibility? I fail to comprehend how any competent scientist can reject the idea that this is an unsustainable strategy. Comparable intimations of disaster when, for instance, a new drug is being tested, would lead to the immediate termination of any human trial.
The fossil fuel/greenhouse gas problem is based in physics and chemistry and informed by research in meteorology, oceanography, geophysics, glaciology, paleontology, marine microbiology and terrestrial ecology, to mention just a few of the relevant fields. While conceptually straightforward, developing an accurate description of what's actually happening is much more complex and multifaceted. It is simply not something that can be done adequately by any single individual or small group.
Making sense of this myriad of diverse information is the responsibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), a unique activity fostered by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorology Organization. Thousands of scientists are involved, the evidence is drawn only from the peer-reviewed, published literature, and the contents of the Summary for Policy Makers are approved by representatives of 100 or so national governments. Download this 22- page summary from the Fourth (2007) IPCC Synthesis Report (ar4-wg1-spm.pdf). It's very readable and you may be surprised by the generally conservative and nuanced tone. Current measurements are tracking above their worst-case scenario.
Brief summary statements can also be accessed on the websites of the various National Academies of Science (search 'climate change' on http://www.science.org.au) and the plethora of professional societies that have a significant presence in this area of research. However, the IPCC reports only every 5 years and new data is coming in all the time. As with any computer simulation, the predictive mathematical models used by climate scientists can only be as good as the real numbers that are fed into them. Active researchers will inevitably have some level of uncertainty, or skepticism, about this or that emphasis.
That is how science works: skepticism plays out in competition, discussion, repeating analyses and generating more results to see if the conclusions are justified, need further refinement, or should even be overturned. Everything can be questioned, including the most basic assumptions. The debate can be intense and (for a time) not always totally friendly, with the issue being typically resolved by new findings from studies designed specifically to address the question.
In a completely different category are the climate change skeptics/deniers who cut themselves off from the ongoing scientific discussion and prefer to operate in the full glare of the public media. Who are these people and how credible are they? At the extremes, they use the language of conspiracy theorists to characterize the IPCC as a deeply flawed operation, describe some of the key data sets as fraudulent and argue that the climate science community is largely comprised of fools and knaves. If you think the latter is an outrageous overstatement, you could go to geologist Ian Plimer's recently published Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science. Greeted with great acclaim by those media commentators who have a systemic hostility to science and rational enquiry, informed reviewers have universally panned this book for its scientific inaccuracy and basic misrepresentations*. A much easier read is David Archer's The Long Thaw: How Humanity is Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate.
Even so, there is nothing like a passionate polemic to enliven a dull, cold Sunday morning. Heaven and Earth can be as entertaining, and as infuriating, as a Tom Clancy novel. Ian Plimer's historical account of climate change through geological time is both believable and scary. He seems to know his stuff on that front, and left me in no doubt that we should act immediately to avoid even the remotest possibility of bringing on a climate catastrophe. Furthermore, he convinced me that humanity must inevitably face some future, natural climate cataclysm over which we can have no control. Should our remaining, non-renewable energy resources be conserved as a long-term strategic reserve?
You might think that, because of the enormous social, financial and political challenge associated with any major action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the extremities of scientific skepticism and denial are somehow peculiar to this issue. Not so, look at almost any important field of science that's discussed widely in the public domain and you'll find a denialist fringe.
The most egregious example in my field is the claim that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not cause AIDS. Early on, before Barre′-Sinousi and Montagnier (Nobel Prize 2008) isolated and identified the virus, there may have been some excuse for thinking in this way. Now, with numerous cases of needle transmission, the identification and study of similar diseases in non-human primates, and the fact that specifically targeted 'designer drugs' reduce the virus load and bring people back to something like clinical normality, there is absolutely no case for HIV/AIDS denial.
Despite that the deniers, who include a Nobel Prize winner and a senior US National Academy of Sciences member, maintain their position. Even worse, they continued to advise former South African President Thabo Mbecki and caused him to delay implementing the public health measures that could have limited the terrible AIDS outbreak in that country. It's a sad fact that doing something good in science early in a career confers no protection against later becoming a dangerous and dogmatic nutter! And the true denier never changes his mind!
Apart from the outright deniers, every field has the occasional 'combative confrontationalist' who will automatically take a position against any major consensus. So long as they are active researchers and their input isn't virulently destructive, the 'confrontationalists' serve a useful role by forcing people to sharpen their arguments. And they aren't ignored. It makes writing up some rather mundane study much easier if you can cite an article from one of these guys as a foil for establishing the brilliance of your own intellectual synthesis!
Then there's the figure I think of as 'the professional controversialist.' Science is hard and it takes a great deal of effort to establish a strong reputation in any area. However, if you're well known for something else, or even obscure yet reasonably personable, one way to become part of a prominent public discussion is to speak out strongly against the consensus view. The pronouncements of the eminent, and elderly physicist Freeman Dyson on climate science are a case in point. Dyson seems to be against taking any action on climate change because it would delay development in countries like China.
The local climate scientists also identify the 'conflicted naysayer', someone who has, for example, worked closely with the mining industry and feels a strong sense of personal loyalty. It seems to me, though, that while the miners may lose on the swings they stand to gain on the roundabouts. While there's a likely downside for coal, uranium sales are up and they must be doing well out of the much cleaner natural gas.
Most renewable strategies use a lot of metal, including structural steel and aluminum, and nickel, cadmium, indium, gallium and platinum for batteries and fuel cells. Some jobs will be lost but, as with any technological revolution, others will be created. Once an ETS is in place, I suspect that we‘ll be through the phase where the miners, and others in the energy industry, 'protest too much.'
What about Australia's very own skeptic/deniers? So far as I can see, they pretty much fit into the categories I have identified above and, apart from a mid-career hydrologist who is publishing well, not one could be categorized as a currently active research leader. Some have held impressive appointments in the past, but spending a decade or more as the public face of an institution doesn't necessarily correlate with a high level of contemporary scientific awareness. As a very senior investigator, I am acutely aware of the fact that, though I'm still looking at data, talking to the young scientists in the laboratory, and helping to write research papers, there is no way I can be across my own increasingly complex area of research without the concurrent input of colleagues who command different spectra of expertise and insight.
There lies the basis of my extreme skepticism about the 'public media' climate change deniers, an objection that's reinforced by struggling through Ian Plimer's deeply flawed attempt at a counter-IPCC synthesis1. These guys have rocks in their head if they think they can command this enormously complex area from the Promethean viewpoint of the superior detached intellect, the former Director or the visionary authoritarian. Like all other science, climate science is data driven and the data is coming in constantly from measuring changes in bird migration patterns, ocean temperature and wind profiles, the calcification of corals, the ripening of grapes, the retreat of glaciers, and so on. Anyone who tries (as Ian Plimer did) to cover this by just reading the specialist literature will inevitably make major mistakes. It's essential to talk to people, especially when the relevant findings are in areas outside your own. Meteorologists, physicists, geologists and oceanographers all have contributions to make, but this issue doesn't belong to any one of them, and certainly not to retirees who are at odds with the currently active scientists in their various disciplines.
If media commentators, or politicians like Victorian Senator Steve Fielding, really want to understand what's going on now with the greenhouse gas/climate change/ocean acidification trinity, they would do much better to take themselves off quietly and spend some time interacting with one or more of the substantial research programs at Monash University, Melbourne University the University of New South Wales, the ANU, the University of Tasmania, The Australian Institute for Marine Science, The Australian Antarctic Division, the CSIRO or the Bureau of Meteorology.
Australian scientists are largely funded by tax dollars, and are there to talk to elected representatives and journalists at any time. Active and engaged scientists are motivated by curiosity and have no problem laying out what is solid and where they still see open questions. Science works by data not conspiracy though, given what they have to do to stay in the public eye, it may be hard for some politicians and pundits to take that on board.
Until perhaps a few days ago, many of the deniers were claiming that the world has started to cool since the beginning of the 21st century, despite the fact that the 'cold year' of 2008 was equal-eighth warmest since the beginning of instrumental measurement. Global land and ocean surface temperatures for June 2009 were the second warmest on record. In 2009 it seems likely that we're at the end of a cooling La Nina phase and are returning to El Nino conditions. The climate record over the past century shows an unequivocal warming trend, punctuated by decades of modest increase or even decrease.
Broadly speaking, the data oscillates around a mean that angles steadily upwards. Looking at the graphs, I cannot understand how any trained scientist could think that there is evidence of long term cooling. For the numerous IPCC models, measurable variations in solar activity cannot explain this warming without the added factor of greenhouse gas 'forcing'. The sun provides the heat in the first place, but the 'incremental' (Ian Plimer's word) greenhouse gas effect is what traps it in our living space.
The public 'debate' on the reality of anthropogenic climate change is a deliberate distraction. Those of us who live in southern Australia are acutely aware that our situation is becoming hotter, drier and in some senses more precarious. The real question is: 'how do we achieve the best possible technical and economic solutions for ensuring a sustainable future?' We can't control the sun, but we can start to limit this dangerous greenhouse gas experiment now and move on to the next (and ultimately inevitable) renewable energy phase of our great, and continuing, industrial revolution.
* Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne. An edited version of this paper was published in The Monthly of 11 November 2009 and The Greek Conference acknowledges that this version of this paper is published with appropriate consent.
1 *Google 'Ian Plimer's ‘Heaven + Earth'—Checking the Claims Ian G. Enting'; or go to http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2589206.html
Copyright 2009. Greek Legal and Medical Conference