Climate change: an apology
June 22 2019
FIRST, A confession: It’s coming up to nine years since I last referenced the Hockey Stick Controversy or the ClimateGate papers, but I remain a recovering climate change sceptic.
I like to pretend my encounters with denialism beginning more than a decade ago were part of a long and immersive thought experiment designed to test the limits of my reason, but they were much more shameful than that. And now, as the ice melts and the oceans roil and the insects and birds drop from the sky, I am still trying to work out what it was I thought I was doing.
It started in 2007 as an inkling of a desire to differentiate myself from the doom-mongering orthodoxy. By 2008, I was diving deep into the sceptical literature. I began asking why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had “sealed their theories from criticism” through the creation of a “self-contained, self-fulfilling, ideological system that violates Popper’s falsifiability principle.” I began accusing climate scientists and activists of an almost religious arrogance:
Anthropogenesis is the new anthropocentrism, and a more secular way of fulfilling that millenarian urge burrowing away in all of us. Speculation that powerful particle accelerators could create a catastrophic and universal "phase transition" and envelop the whole of existence in a black hole, or that nanotechnology created by humans could turn the entire cosmos into "grey goo" - whatever their scientific merits - possibly fulfill a similar role.
I began to ask why global warming theorists were explaining away “contrary evidence”, including the indications that global warming had already “peaked” and temperatures were now starting to level off and fall. I began making references to the way “the planet has been warming and cooling in 300-year cycles for eons” and then began to argue about the way carbon dioxide build-ups would be counterbalanced by new biomass.
I began using phrases like “CO2 is a natural fertilizer”. I would talk about Vostok graphs showing a predictable pattern of ice ages interspersed with warm periods called "interglaciations". I would talk about “urban heat island effects” and solemnly wonder why climate change advocates had so little to say about clouds or the albedo, as if I were an expert all of a sudden. I began to use disparaging phrases like “eco-warriors” and “tree huggers”. Still, a glance at my diaries from mid-2008 shows I was still hedging my bets:
Again, I have no way of deciding the truth of these theories, and I am left to rely on my hunches, which are shot through with prejudices that actually serve both sides of the argument. That's to say, I deplore the self-righteousness and reflexive anti-development bias of the environmental movement - who seem to believe in the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in order to save the world. And I also despise the business lobby trying to argue against any sort of regulation that might eat into their profits. I love science and hope that the crisis - if that is what it truly is - will provoke some of the most creative technological innovations in history. On the other hand, there is a touch of anthropocentrism in the arguments of some climate change aficionados.
Years later, as I try to present my foolishness in a more positive light, I tell myself that I was misguidedly “pro-development”. Gallantly, I was coming to the rescue of fair maidens like China and India as the likes of Lester Brown impugned their reputation and said they could not possibly be allowed to consume the same amounts of metal, coal, grain or meat as the rest of the world.
I tended to believe in technological solutions, and there was, I thought, far too much of the hair-shirt about climate change activism, and also an unmistakeable sense of disdain towards the luxurious coal-fueled and technology-driven lifestyles now enjoyed by most of the lower orders. Activists seemed to relish the notion that millions of feckless conspicuous consumers from around the world would soon get their comeuppance.
There was also an undoubted northern British working-class epater les nambypambies feel about my attitudes. “Look at you George La-di-Da Monbiot with your bloody climate change. What do you bloody know about not having enough bloody money to pay for your next meal? You want to get yourself a proper job. You can stuff your quinoa and your sustainability up your arse.”
This, it seems, remains a common instinct. Don’t tell us what to do. Don’t treat us like children. We’ll consume coal if we bloody want to, you busybodies. This is of course the same attitude that helped drive Brexit, and is part of the UKIP-style up yours to all manifestations of “the nanny state”, including “political correctness” and “health and safety”.
THE EINSTEIN DEFENCE
I BECAME a sceptic presumably because I wanted to separate myself from the crowd. I disavowed my previous position not because I developed a better grasp of the science, but because I wanted to return to that crowd, my tail between my legs. I want to be part of the solution. I want to be approved of by Greta Thunberg. As a good old-fashioned leftist, I don’t want to be on the same team as hydrocarbon-bothering tar-fuckers like the Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, Lord Lawson and, er, Johnny Ball.
But this doesn’t feel like a good reason, and for all the talk about the “scientific consensus”, I still keep reminding myself what Albert Einstein supposedly said in response to a 1931 book entitled A Hundred Scientists Against Einstein: “If I were wrong, one would have been enough!”
The Einstein line has provided no end of succour to a variety of cranks and contrarians involved in all kinds of spurious pseudoscientific ventures over the years. It appears to give Einstein’s impramatur to the maverick truth-seeker willing to defy a stultifying consensus such as manmade climate change. Argumentum ad numeram cuts no ice when it comes to the science, and the "consensus" of several thousand IPCC-affiliated climatologists would mean nothing at all if their theories are wrong. And thus, we see Anthony Watts, the former TV weatherman and famous climate denialist making use of the quote on his blog Watts Up With That?, where it has been claimed that Einstein himself would “almost certainly” be a climate sceptic were he still alive today.
Not actually being in the pay of the fossil fuel industry, my own particular brand of climate change scepticism clearly served a psychological need, allowing me to pose as some sort of anti-consensus rebel who is swayed by evidence and not by emotion. It didn’t matter that the “evidence” I had were little more than cavils and caveats that failed to address the bigger picture, for which there was no shortage of proof. I would cherry-pick with the best of them and accuse my opponents of doing the same, only worse. I would cite arguments that global warming had stopped, even though seven of the ten hottest average annual temperatures had occurred in just the last 10 years.
Climate scepticism appealed to my intellectual arrogance. I could pretend I was one of the select few who could see through all the delusions, nitpicking at minor details and somehow assuming that the entire brocade would unravel.
It is clear by now that intellectually vulnerable people like myself were being manipulated, that evil corporations were deliberately sowing doubt wherever they could. It was always quite clear to anyone with any sense that the fossil fuel industry was borrowing the strategies once used by Big Tobacco, which quite deliberately deployed fake science to deny the connections between smoking and lung cancer. Lee McIntyre, in a little book called Post-Truth, describes it like this:
Most commonly, (the strategy) is kicked off by those who have something to lose, and is later carried on by those who get caught up in their campaign of misinformation.
I am a perfect demonstration of the sad fact that an advanced education and an insatiable longing to learn does not actually lead to wisdom, does not inculcate an ability to identify and fend off falsehoods, and does not automatically cure poor judgement.
It is no comfort whatsoever to know that I was just one of many thousands of dupes: despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, a recent opinion poll shows that only 27 percent of American adults agree with the statement that “almost all climate scientists agree that human behaviour is mostly responsible for climate change.”
And so, in order to make sure I don’t get fooled again, I have been trying to find the epistemological basis to my scepticism, and indeed, the epistemological grounds to prove that scepticism is wrong, thus saving me all the effort required to master the data.
Frankly, I have no way to judge the science and have to trust the “97 percent” consensus as well as the evidence of my own eyes, which points to a convergence of evidence that one cannot plausibly attribute to conspiracy, including ever more extreme freak weather. But it is the style of argumentation among sceptics that should raise alarm bells: It is either absolutely 100 percent certain or it is false. If it is not 100 percent certain, then we shouldn’t do anything about it. And we alone have the right to move the goalposts whenever we want to serve our own arguments.
The goalpost moving is a crucial element of any bullshit theory. A sceptic could deny climate change was happening at all and cherrypick data until it showed that, say, temperatures in 1340 were significantly higher than they are today. If that didn’t work, one could shift one’s position and accept it was happening but deny it was caused by carbon emissions, blaming it instead on sunspot variability or Milankovich cycles.
One could then accept it was happening, and that it was caused by carbon emissions, but then deny it would lead to the sort of catastrophic tipping points and negative feedback loops envisaged in the models devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, it could be a good thing! Vineyards in Aberdeen!
Above all else, climate scepticism relies on conspiracy theory. It posits a cabal of attention-seeking, glory-hunting, business-hating Communists lke Al Gore, George Clooney and, er, Prince Charles, supported by dozens of deluded or suborned scientists deliberately suppressing contrary evidence.
Conspiracies depend on uncertainty. There is always doubt., and that element of doubt provides the space in which conspiracies can thrive. And if you have failed at conformity, if you sweat and shiver and feel completely out of place in the ordinary world, you can find yourself another opportunity to thrive by taking yourself to the paranoid fringes, where you can insist on your own righteousness and tell yourself that others are evil or deluded or in the pay of Jews or victims of an overarching miasma of false consciousness and bad faith.
Groupthink is a recognised psychological flaw, but it is inconceivable that so many independent scientists could be so consistently wrong without at least a few of their rogue comrades finding out. As Carl Sagan eulogises in The Demon-Haunted World, science has so many built-in error recognition mechanisms that it is almost impossible to imagine a theory lasting so long without being toppled. It is ridiculous to think that a conspiracy the size of "anthropogenic climate change" could prosper in such circumstances.
