climate change
19 May 2008
Death Rattles of the Climate Change Skeptics
Usually, lay people are loath to enter into scientific debates for fear of exposing themselves to ridicule. Not so Australia's climate change skeptics, writes Clive Hamilton
With the sharp turn in public opinion leading to the election of the Rudd Government, in part on a climate protection platform, many of us thought that climate skepticism in Australia was dead and buried.The most recent flicker of life in climate skepticism in Australia is a paper by Don Aitkin titled "A Cool Look at Global Warming", given to the Planning Institute of Australia on 2 April, followed by various opinion pieces and radio appearances based on it.
Usually, lay people are loath to enter into debates involving complex scientific questions for fear of exposing themselves to ridicule. Yet the wisdom of humility seems to evaporate when it comes to global warming and any number of people with no qualifications in atmospheric physics, climate modelling or related disciplines feel the urge to lend their opinions to the debate.
When challenged, these amateurs are wont to claim that they "have done a lot of reading". According to Professor Aitkin, a historian and political scientist, he has read a lot, an achievement that - along with the fact that his two brothers are a mathematical statistician and a neurophysiologist and he himself had considered becoming a geologist - qualifies him to challenge the foundations of climate science. One of the arguments he deploys is that climate systems are so fiendishly complex that no conclusions can be drawn about human-induced warming; yet it seems that the science is not so complex that it cannot be understood by lay persons such as himself.
Some years ago, when I first joined the climate change debate, I decided there was no way I could pretend to have a comprehensive grasp of climate science - just as I could not pretend to be an expert in genetics, chemical engineering or population ecology - and that the prudent stance is the one we always take in questions of public importance involving complex science. I had to decide not what to believe but whom to believe.
While lay people cannot be expected to speak with any authority on climate science, any well educated person should be able to understand the process of scientific inquiry and how it leads to scientific advance. Certainly, one would expect that Don Aitkin - who for some years chaired the Australian Research Council - would have as good an understanding as any. Yet he seems to be woefully misinformed.
The work of climate scientists is subject to the most rigorous testing by the peer review process before it gets the accolade of publication in respected journals. The peer review process is not infallible, but no other comes near it for effectiveness, which is why it is so widely used. It is how funds are allocated to academic research by the ARC, until it was corrupted by the political meddling of then-education minister Brendan Nelson.
Of course, not every published paper on climate science proves correct, which is to be expected in a rapidly evolving area. But in climate science the integrity of the review process has been heightened because of the enormously politicised nature of the climate debate fed by the small number of highly vocal skeptics, ever-ready to go on the attack by highlighting weaknesses, uncertainties and contradictions.
The charged environment in which climate science operates has meant that the experts have exercised more than the usual scientific caution in making claims about the results of their work. Many climate scientists believe that the IPCC has consistently understated the dangers of global warming. As James Hansen - perhaps the world's foremost climate scientist - has written, the culture of scientists is such that they would rather be accused of fiddling while Rome burns than of crying wolf.
Climate scientists are more aware than anyone of the uncertainties in their work, and go to great lengths to emphasise them, leading many to blame themselves for the slowness of the world to act on what is nevertheless an overwhelming case for action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the painful honesty of the scientists has merely provided an opening for the skeptics and denialists who have no empirical work of their own on which to base their contrary opinions. They feed on the inevitable weaknesses and uncertainties in the work of real climate scientists, which they distort and exaggerate to cast doubt on the whole body of evidence.
The truth is that if any of the skeptics - especially those who do have some claim to expertise in the area - were to undertake a study that cast genuine doubt on the global warming hypothesis and it could pass the tests of professional scrutiny, it would cause a sensation. If it were confirmed, we could all utter an enormous sigh of relief and shower those responsible with prizes and accolades. Yet none of them has carried out any original work that challenges the consensus view. Nevertheless, whenever they raise a non-trivial objection, the serious scientists - including the IPCC - go back and look hard at their conclusions to see if any change is required.
So when I read the musings of an amateur climate scientist like Aitkin, who reproduces the claims of the skeptics, I know that he cannot have read the reports of the IPCC and the other leading institutions carefully because he would have understood that all of the arguments he recycles have been carefully considered and rejected or, if they suggest a lack of clarity, corrected.
Aitkin wants us to believe that he is a disinterested observer whose views are based strictly on the evidence, yet his assessment leads him to reject all of the major claims about global warming. He claims to be "agnostic", willing to change his mind should the evidence become sufficient. This was the same claim made by former Prime Minister John Howard, who said he wanted to see the evidence for global warming before taking any action. In truth, the evidence had been piling up on his desk for years, yet he refused to look at it.
Contrary to the insinuations of the denialists, genuine scientific skepticism is alive and well in the scientific community. Every advance in our understanding about climate change has had to run the gauntlet of doubt and questioning before being accepted, until better evidence or a more persuasive hypothesis displaces it. However, as former CSIRO climate scientist Barrie Pittock argues, most of those who, like Aitkin, pose as scientific skeptics are better described as "contrarians" because they are not interested in weighing the balance of evidence, but rather approach one position with extreme skepticism while failing to question the opposite view.
This describes Aitkin's paper precisely. He has objected to any suggestion that he is a denialist because of the association of the word with Holocaust denialism. If denialism is the assertion of a position using analytical and rhetorical tricks to undermine a position based on overwhelming evidence, then it is apt in this case. It often tries to create the illusion of a debate among experts over fundamental questions when in fact there is none. Denialism works backwards from an ideological position to deny the facts.
Rather than the Holocaust, a closer analogy to Aitkin's position is HIV/AIDS denialism. These denialists put forward a number of bizarre theories that ignore a vast accumulation of medical and epidemiological evidence collected over a long period, claiming that health experts have misunderstood or deliberately misreported their data because they want funding from governments or drug companies and are caught up in a "group fantasy".
The denialists have won over some influential friends, including South African President Thabo Mbeki, whose public statements and actions slowed the roll-out of anti-AIDS treatment leading to many unnecessary deaths. The ideological beliefs that lead to this form of denialism include the conviction that AIDS is a colonialist plot and that gays receive too much sympathy and funding (a position taken by some right-wing American groups such as the Heritage Foundation).
Despite their use of evidentiary language, the denialists are not interested in weighing up the evidence but in skewing it to support a conviction reached by non-scientific means. Like other climate skeptics, Aitkin calls for an independent inquiry to get at the facts of climate science. This is a spurious and misleading claim: we already have a process of independent, evidence-based inquiry among the community of climate scientists, one that reaches a head every five years with the IPCC reports. When he calls for "a public inquiry into this matter in which scientists openly argue about the data", one has to ask: Where has Aitkin been for the last 15 years?
Aitkin wants an inquiry marked by "careful reasoning, humility before nature, understatement, respect for inherent uncertainties, care with language and definitions, grounded in evidence, presentation of theoretical frameworks, respect for contestability, and so on". Point by point, this describes precisely the IPCC process, which is painfully exacting and comprehensive, yet calling for independent inquiries has become a tactic of choice for skeptics who want to bolster the claim that the consensus is biased and all they want are the facts.
This brings me to the most indefensible aspect of Aitkin's intervention. He maintains that the hundreds of climate scientists who have been working on climate science for years have got it wrong and that, by implication, they have exaggerated or misrepresented their studies, been biased in the construction and interpretation of the models, and have been acting in bad faith because they have distorted the science in order to protect and build up their research funding. He accuses these eminent and accomplished scientists of adopting a "quasi-religious view" and even goes so far as to accuse academies of science of promoting climate science because they want more power.
After accusing climate scientists of bad faith and environmentalists and the media of religious zealotry, Aitkin takes offence at any suggestion that he is a denialist. Yet his analysis draws heavily on denialist papers and websites. When I turned to look at the references Aitkin had read I expected to find that the author - who has said that he spent a year researching the topic so that he could speak with some authority - had referred to a large number of papers in refereed journals which he had assessed in order to reach his conclusions. In fact, although he claims that he was "careful and systematic" in his research, he refers to a grand total of two articles published in climate science journals. Yet for him this is enough to make a series of strong claims that, if true, would blow out of the water 20 years of research by hundreds of climate scientists around the world.
If Aitkin does not refer to the enormous body of climate science literature, what is the basis for his claim that global warming is a myth? We do not have to look far to find out.
In his acknowledgements he singles out Ian Castles and Bob Carter, declaring that he is "enormously grateful" for their guidance in preparing the paper. Castles and Carter are two of Australia's foremost climate skeptics; both are associated with the denialists of the Lavoisier Group, an organisation that sees the Kyoto Protocol as a European plot for a "new imperial order" that would see our sovereignty "relocated from Canberra to Bonn". The Group has links to Exxon-funded organisations in the United States, including far-right think tanks.
As his primary source on climate science, Aitkin directs readers to a paper published by the Heartland Institute and posted on the website of the "Science and Environmental Policy Project" (SEPP), a well-known denialist website run by Fred Singer. Singer, the editor of the paper Aitkin cites, is sometimes referred to as the godfather of climate skepticism.
His "skepticism" is not confined to the science of global warming. Singer also rejects the association between CFCs and ozone depletion, and between passive smoking and lung cancer. Before becoming a climate denialist, Singer worked for organisations funded by the tobacco industry to sow doubt in the public mind about links between smoking and cancer.
Singer agreed to a plan from a PR firm in the pay of British American Tobacco to undertake an "aggressive media interview schedule" attacking the US Environmental Protection Agency's claims about passive smoking. Among its "Top 5 Environmental Myths", the PR company included global warming. Singer has admitted doing climate change work for oil companies including Exxon and Texaco. The tactic of creating doubt about the science in the public mind was developed by the tobacco industry and adopted, often using the same "experts" such as Singer, by climate skeptics groups sponsored by the fossil fuel lobby. (I am not suggesting, and have no reason to believe, that Don Aitkin has taken any money from Exxon or any other company or group.)
Among the contributors to the paper edited by Singer, which forms the basis of Aitkin's paper to the Planning Institute of Australia, are: Craig Idso, a former employee of Peabody, one of the world's largest coal companies, and now president of a climate skeptics group partially funded by ExxonMobil; Dennis Avery, a campaigner against organic agriculture at the Hudson Institute, a right-wing Washington think tank; and William Kininmonth, an Australian denialist whose 2004 anti-greenhouse book was launched at an event organised by the Lavoisier Group. The paper concludes that higher CO2 levels will be beneficial for the planet and, in contrast to the expectation of widespread catastrophes should the global average temperature rise by 3 degrees, the paper claims that such a warming would be in our interests.
The Heartland Institute, the publisher of the paper, is an American free-market think tank. Although it is secretive about its sources of funding, it is known that it has ties to the tobacco lobby, especially Philip Morris. In addition, over the period 1998-2006, the Institute received around A$1 million in donations from ExxonMobil. Its Board has included former senior executives of Philip Morris and ExxonMobil. The Heartland Institute sponsored the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which posed as a scientific conference but was in fact organised to promote the views of climate skeptics.
An innocent reader of "A Cool Look at Global Warming" might interpret Aitkin's intervention as one man's struggle to find the truth; that is certainly how the author presents himself. It reads as if he has spent a long time sifting through the competing claims in the scientific literature, weighing them up and reaching a considered view - one that runs counter to the "consensus".
The problem is that there is no body of literature with competing claims about the validity or otherwise of human-induced global warming. There is a very large and diverse body of science in a range of journals and, while there are acknowledged uncertainties and disagreements about the extent of the effects of warming and the role of various causal factors, the literature confirms all of the contentions of the IPCC, which Aitkin claims has got it so wrong.
Against this huge body of scientific research, Aitkin draws on a small number of repetitive, stale and wholly discredited papers cobbled together by skeptics groups, papers that circulate on skeptics websites and never find their way into the professional literature. The thinness of Aitkin's reference list confirms this; we can be certain any paper that seriously challenged the consensus view about warming would be seized upon by the skeptics and milked for all it's worth.
It seems clear to me that, in forming his views, Aitkin has not spoken to any serious climate scientists who are doing research and getting it published. If he had, he could not but be struck by their humility, caution and commitment to good science. At the end of his paper he thanks two well-known skeptics, but not John Church, Graeme Pearman, Andy Pitman, Barrie Pittock, Penny Whetton, David Karoly, Kevin Hennessy or any of the other Australian climate scientists who have made genuine contributions to the field. Nor did he make any reference to their work. Instead he accuses them, by implication, of being driven by a "quasi-religious view" which they cling to because of the "large amounts of money that have flowed to institutes and universities" that employ them.
The implication of Aitkin's paper is that these eminent climate scientists are not sincere, cautious and astute scientists committed to uncovering the facts about global warming, but are zealots who have for years been massaging their research for personal or political gain. So clever have they been at doing this that they have managed to get past the academic gatekeepers in professional journals. To anyone who has met them, nothing could be more insulting to these researchers, who have dedicated their lives to uncovering the facts through best scientific practice.
While Aitkin is happy to address the Planing Institute of Australia and have his views reproduced in The Australian, which continues to publish any climate skeptic opinion no matter how outlandish, he has rejected requests to debate climate scientists in public. This is prudent on his part, as his scientific ignorance would be exposed. Aitkin is willing to attack the science - and by implication the reputations of climate scientists - in circumstances that he can control but is unwilling to confront those he accuses of bad science.
I have often wanted to put the following question to skeptics like Don Aitkin: What if you are wrong? What sort of moral responsibility will the skeptics have if they succeed in their aim of stopping the world from taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
If scientific advances cause scientists to reject the conclusions of past IPCC reports and agree that there is nothing to be alarmed about, it will be mildly embarrassing for people like me; but not too much harm will have been done - according to all of the economic studies, the costs of reducing emissions are low.
But if Aitkin and his fellow skeptics were successful in stopping policies to cut emissions and the IPCC projections turn out to be correct, then environmental catastrophe will follow and millions of people will die. Do they lose sleep over this? Do they worry about how their grandchildren will see them? Or are they so consumed by their crusade that they know they will never be proven wrong?
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Yes, I think you are being too kind Clive. What struck me was the absolute silliness of the Aitken article, the sort of thing you would hear in a country pub late at night, or, I guess, in an IPA seminar. I wrote about the silliness here http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/85448/Good_heavens.html and for the Canberra Times, which it seems to me is as reluctant to believe in climate change as is the Australian, it just hides it better. But it is always happy to publish rubbish like the Aitkin article, when any kind of peer review, even a cursory reading by their environment editor, would have told them that this was just silly.
David Horton
Hmmm. I used (i)(/i) tags, I see they didn’t work.
Timhtrain, your comment is a cheap shot.
If you read Clive’s article you will find he doesn’t pretend to be an expert in climate science. He takes the very sensible precaution of being guided by the published evidence of scientific experts.
Contrarianism and denialism are becoming interesting topics, if only because of the ability of small numbers of vocal skeptics to convince politicians and other powerful people that they should not take the overwhelming scientific evidence all that seriously. "Flat-earthers" might be a better name still for these types.
This is an important article about a topic of unparalleled importance. The fact that our mainstream media continues to publish these sentiments is not only deeply concerning, it is another reminder of how media concentration in the hands of powerful vested interests can produce dangerous consequences for public policy.
I think the real root of this problem is the liberal belief that ‘robust debate’ is always productive and will always allow the truth to emerge unscathed. In fact, where the debate concerns matters as complex and technical as climate change, it can be difficult for an intelligent but scientifically illiterate bystander to dismiss the rubbish served up by people like ‘sceptics.’ Also, scientists are at a distinct disadvantage when making arguments. The scientific method, while being brilliant, makes science boffins reluctant to dismiss lunatics and too shy to assert what they have very good evidence to believe. On the other side, the denialists howl like banshees. Their voices seem to come from all sides- really it’s akin to ventriloquism! I’m sick of hearing calls for passionless and balanced debate. There is no balance in the scientific community’s view because balance is not justified. There is passion because the matter is of crucial importance. I don’t care how many thinktanks bloated with oil money attempt to bring us back to argue. We have to stop rising to their challenge. It isn’t productive. Just ignore em!
It’s worth pointing out too that the climate change deniers not only relate to the "tobacco is good for you" people but have a lot in common with (and often overlap with) the creationists (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/Evolution/). It would ony take minor changes for Aitkin’s article to be headed with a paragraph about how he had decided to spend a year looking at whether evolution was true, and had reached the conclusion, after reading Michael Behe, that it wasn’t.
David Horton
timhtrain:
You also miss the point, as do a lot of people, that a mathematician would be much more able to understand the results (not saying the science) than a political scientist and historian. The way skeptics misunderstand very simple statistics and graphs is something that should cause them a lot of embarrassment… if they understood that…
Justifying your whole position because the average temperature in March was a bit cooler than last year… it’s laughable. The whole "warming has stopped since 1998" meme is the best example.
The same principles of honest debate continue to apply - who is funding the speaker, really, and under what conditions. The more covert the funding source the more the position must be read down.
Having slogged away at an evolutionary ecology undergrad degree I personally have alot of faith in the publication discipline that Clive describes above. Nature, Science Journal and some others are like gospel texts to the academic profession.
Two things from my own multi discipline
1. politics - if it looks, smells, sounds like a sleazy special interest, defending big financial privilege then chances are it is. Just follow the money trail, and the money doesn’t get any bigger than institutional big oil/coal, with every motive to corrupt clean science. It makes the incomes of scientists look like chicken feed.
2. law - a lie can be half way round the world before the truth has even got out of bed and put on it’s boots.
And lastly the most chilling - Davos conference 2 years back reported in the AFR that most attendees were confident market forces would resolve global warming. That reads to me like Aldous Huxley’s quarantined islands of privilege and little people in short brutal lives in the foetid slums excluded. Rich folks, don’t you love ‘em.
I agree with the view of this article and like many others, have grown tired of non-experts proclaiming they can debunk the scientists. Not just academics like Don Aitkin, who I understand has qualifications in education, but the journalists and opnion writers like Andrew Bolt and Frank Devine.
There is however a group of scientists in the US, 31,000 in fact who have publicly stated they disagree with the consensus:
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/al_gore_global_warming/2008/05/19/97307…
Unfortuantely I’ve been unable to locate details of the scietists qualifications. This debate will continue to the detriment of all of us.
"If scientific advances cause scientists to reject the conclusions of past IPCC reports and agree that there is nothing to be alarmed about, it will be mildly embarrassing for people like me; but not too much harm will have been done - according to all of the economic studies, the costs of reducing emissions are low."
I think not!
What was the most costly intelligence failure of all time? No, was is not the world’s leading intelligence agencies’ failure to notice that Saddam had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction. It was the failure of many leading climate model builders to be modest enough about their predictions, and the politicians’ and media’s failure to ask the tough questions of these climate experts.
As a consequence of what we now know was an overblown global-warming scare, everyone on the planet is paying substantially more for food and fuel than is necessary.
Despite the prediction of all the major climate models, the Earth has been getting cooler since 1998. At first, it was not considered a big deal because temperatures fluctuate from year to year. However, the drop has now been going for a decade, with another big drop last year.
Global warming zealots have just been handed another rude shock, when the peer-reviewed journal, Nature, reported on May 1 that according to a new (and hopefully improved) climate model, global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade.
Roger A. Pielke, environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, not previously a global warming skeptic, reacted to the Nature article: "Climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global-warming policy."
As a direct result of global-warming hysteria, governments reacted by restricting energy production from traditional sources, such as oil, gas and coal, and by enacting very costly regulations on CO2 emission sources.
Governments also quickly jumped on the fad of "biofuels" production, which, at least in the case of corn, does not result in less CO2 but more than standard oil and gas wells produce - a clear "intelligence" failure.
The restrictions on oil and gas have greatly increased the cost of petrol and diesel and the production cost of almost everything else, especially plastics and food, even here in Australia.
Internationally, the corn-based ethanol craze has removed huge quantities of agricultural land that was used to produce things like wheat, rice and corn for animal food, to corn to be used as motor fuel.
The predictable result was a huge rise in global food prices and an increase in mass starvation in the Third World. Mildly embarassing, Clive? I think not.
If anyone has wondered why there has been such an obvious hiatus is the previous flood of half-baked articles in New Matilda promoting AGW alarmism they need look no further than the rapidly emerging stream of respectable commentators in Europe and North America, quoting significant numbers of sound scientific studies which have emerged over the last decade, casting doubt on all but the lowest of the IPCC (2007) projections and thoroughly debunking the extremism of the AGW bandwagon.
Overseas, a revisionist history is already under way. Clive Hamilton’s piece is just the one of the first subdued hints in Australia of the death rattles of the climate change zealots.
Thank you Clive. After I heard Don Aitkin over two Radio National podcasts I’d hoped RN might ask you to respond. It introduced new doubts to my mind.
The question you wanted to put to Aitkin in the end is precisely the question I wanted to ask him. It’s hard to believe someone who apparently hasn’t considered the ethical implications if he’s wrong. Considering the ethical implications doesn’t add any scientific weight, but it does imply rigour in the way the speaker thinks — both evident in all your work.
Reading your response makes it easy to decide whom to take seriously in this case.
Ecoeng - you can’t have it both ways. If you want to cite recent studies showing slight recent cooling since 1998, you need to accept the remainder of the evidence from ice-cores, tree-rings and radio carbon dating showing profound anthropogenic warming sincce the industrial revolution. You can’t cherry pick the data, and as any statistician can tell you, ten years of slight cooling does not negate a longer term trend that is at least 150 years old.
If you want to cite "respected commentators," you should cite the experts like Hansen as well, including the IPCC, and accept the process of peer-review … and therefore the overwhelming consensus that the earth is warming, caused by human emitting greenhouse gases.
Or perhaps the earth really is flat, and evolution really is just a theory?
Rachelc102
Here is the historical background-to, and information on the 31,000 scientists who have publicly stated they disagree with the consensus which you requested.
The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world’s environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.
In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world’s most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.
Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit’s end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal.
These scientists - mere hundreds - also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world’s poor (a class of human the Clive Hamilton’s of this world feel only ‘mild embarassment’ about).
Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.
The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony - such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series - were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.
Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto’s corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. "E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."
Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who’s who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you’d ordinarily expect," he explained. He’s processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go - most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org.
Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism?
"I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren’t alone."
At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn’t be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn’t matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them."
Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Financial Post, 17 May 2008
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32…
fluff4
http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/global-warming-01.html
I have posted this before!
If you doubt the skepticism of this article provided by a man who is a real climate scientist I want to read it!
Since first posting it, I’ve had just one post recognising that it makes sense.
No one is denying climate change "it’s the reasoning that is being denied." Mostly the criticism is of the models, which is very new and hardly science, yet.
If after reading, read his bio and please post again. for I sure do need more intelligent posts, rather then the list of reasons and numbers game that is on this blog.
As for the article it is labored and hardly informative.
fluff4
God (sorry, err Dawkins) save us from this onslaught of skepticism. I hope you guys pack your singlets and thongs. It might be lonely in the wilderness, but it will certainly be warm …
The predicted slight cooling (relatively speaking, ie from the current high level) over the next decade is a result of the oceans being able to absorb slightly more heat than originally thought. What the denialists don’t tell you is that even if this buffering effect is real, the upward trend in temperature will continue and get back to where it would have been without the buffering effect. And after that, the potential buffering is gone.
"30,000" sceptics from the "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" led by Dr. Frederick Seitz? Come on, do your homework and respect your audience. The "Institute " is a phony, we all know that, and Seitz has no credibility in this field. And 30,000 climate scientists? Now you really are being silly. Have you read any of the literature by any real climatologists? Are you aware of the actual changes now occurring in species distribution patterns and breeding behaviour, and changes in ice cover, the increase in severe events like droughts? Forget about models. Forget about measurements of CO2 and global temperatures. Forget about graphs. Forget about the physics. The real world doesn’t know that there are denialists who have their heads in the shifting sands, it is getting on and responding to the real changes already ooccurring. If we do get some buffering in the next ten years it might just be a chance to reverse things before all hell breaks loose, and tipping points beging occurring like a runaway train going through stop signs.
I know there is no point in reponding to these idiots. It has been pointless these last ten wasted years while they obstructed all attempts to start thinking about the health of the only habitable planet for miles around. But they need whacking on the head every time they emerge, blinking, from their dark cellars. The rest of us are out here observing, with fear, the changing ecology of this once beautiful world.
David Horton
Furthermore, the infamous Heartland list has a few (more) credibility issues as more and more horrified ‘signatories’ ask to be removed:
http://www.desmogblog.com/500-scientists-with-documented-doubts-about-th…
including at least a handful of Kiwi scientists:
http://www.niwa.cri.nz/news/mr/2008/2008-05-1
while others who might otherwise don’t, due to being dead.
http://www.desmogblog.com/a-few-scientists-who-wont-deny-being-deniers
In reading Dr Aiken’s article I note that he makes claims in relation to the scientific consensus in the 1970s:
Thirty years ago the climate worry in scientific circles was about the possible return of the ice age.
An article at Realclimate (dated 7 March 2008) contradicts this claim (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling…). As evidence, the article cites a review of the published literature from 1965-79 which found 71 relevant articles: 7 (10%) predicted cooling; 44 (62%) predicted warming; and 20 (28%) were neutral.
The Realclimate web site notes that the article from which this information is drawn is in press in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
It appears possible that Dr Aiken has drawn his claim from Michael Crighton’s novel "State of Fear", where it seems a character made an almost identical statement. I have not read the book, but the quotation is cited at http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/22/another-denier-talking-point-globa…
Jones & Moberg J of Climate January 2003, studied the warming period 1977-2001, and found "significant warming trends are present in only 10-20% of the available grid boxes" Jones and Moberg used 5x5 deg grid boxes. Of the present warming, only one fifth of the grid boxes show statistically significant warming and a close look at these boxes reveal that for land-areas, most of these boxes are in the vicinity of large cities and urban centres of the world. In essence the statistically significant warming is primarily due to urbanization and land-use change and NOT due to increased greenhouse gases.
McKitrick & Michaels J Geophys. Res. December 2007 succinctly show that up to half of the present warming is due to extraneous factors, urbanization, land-use change, economic activity etc. Outside of the "significant warming’ grid boxes, the warming is only modest and is of NO major concern. Further, this modest warming can be explained as due to changes in large-scale circulation patterns, solar variability etc.
So we have the basic question once again: Where is the modern CO2-induced warming which is statistically significant? It reality it is elusive and hard to locate as I have pointed out in New Matilda before using as an example the record from all the Southern Ocean weather stations south of 60 degrees.
Increasing CO2 in the long-term context? Overall, global climate has warmed steadily about 0.5 C°/century now for three centuries since the Little Ice Age, i.e. since BEFORE the rise in atmospheric CO2.
Sea level rise due to thermal expansion has not recently accelerated, either - see: Berge-Nguyen, M., A. Cazenave, A. Lombard, W. Llovel, J. Viarre, and J.F. Cretaux. 2008. Reconstruction of past decades sea level using thermosteric sea level, tide gauge, satellite altimetry and ocean reanalysis data. Global and Planetary Change Vol. 62, No 1-2, pp. 1-13, May 2008
Hamilton’s essential theme is not predominantly AGW at all, but a contemporary eulogy to elitism.
In Clive’s opinion, the Australian electorate should just shut up and accept scientist’s opinions. In other words, discard democracy; eliminate our cherished but now rarely accessed electoral consensus, and allow ourselves to once again become engulfed in beliefism.
Endemic to all of Hamilton’s arguments is the notion that scientists are intelligent, conscientious, honest and good-hearted men and women; totally deserving of our blind acceptance of their interpretations, doctrines and mantras.
Evidently, my overview of scientists is quite different.
I think about the thousands of scientists labouring profitably to produce the ammunition of biological warfare; nerve gasses, new high explosives, Monsanto’s GM crops, and audio and electro-magnetic weapons.
I shake my head dismissively at the idiot meteorologists who have continued to site wind speed measuring equipment in cyclone-prone urban locations, where they are routinely and quickly destroyed by flying debris; instead of the obvious choice of location on the beachheads. Their monumental stupidity prevents accurate comparison of cyclones, a failure that will cost lives. Compounding their stupidity, they continue to ignore comparative photographic evidence of cyclone impact on flora.
I chuckle at recently quoted temperatures measured on US weather sites, all but 4% of which have been absorbed by urban development; measurements that are influenced by concrete and bitumen, adjacent sun-heated parked cars and air con exhausts.
I snicker at social scientists; especially anthropologists who present themselves so profitably as experts on Aboriginal culture; yet who are hopelessly monolingual and would have their degrees revoked for such a racist breach of professional ethics, if they were based in Europe.
I jeer openly at social workers, who understand so well that there is big money in poverty; an industry which expands with their influence.
I stand in stupefied wonder at PhD bio-scientists who, without applying environmental impact assessments, introduce the European honey bee to a major new and pristine northern national park; and who wail defensively when confronted, "but honey is good".
I grow angry as the same scientists promote vast broad-acre burnoffs, turning their backs on inconvenient papers that identify fire-sensitive flora that are ipso facto evidence that such fires could not have been possible; either before the Pleistocene or following human habitation. I am outraged that the measurable damage to atmosphere, soils, flora and fauna, river-systems and corals, has become collateral damage to their romantic delusionism.
These same scientists supported foreign-owned mass tourism and all its massive infrastructure and impact on fragile ecosystems, rather than low ratio guide/client operations run by locals committed to preserving natural integrity.
Consequently, my impression of scientists in general evokes adjectives such as crass, ruthlessly ambitious, unprincipled, unethical, and plain stupid. Having researched for governments, I do not share Clive’s cherished faith in scientific integrity; having encountered precious little of it.
I am neither intelligent nor stupid, and I have perused vast tomes of literature promoting AGW, and I am very far from convinced. Furthermore, I am aware of too much evidence that contradicts their so-called evidence.
This is not a view that I widely proselytise. It is simply my opinion based on my experience and observation. This is my right, and if Clive Hamilton and his elitist allies harbour any intentions of curtailing this right, I would suggest he review possible outcomes.
I retain my right to form my own judgements of so-called scientific consensus (dually, an oxymoron, and a contextually misplaced term) and apply the virtue that has rescued mankind from countless such dogma’s in the past… common sense. We the people have this in abundance; manifestly, people like Clive do not.
If transparent hierarchists like Hamilton want people like me burned as heretics; a sentiment he appears to be warming to, then he should understand that we the people are more numerous, albeit still silent, and ultimately more steely in our resistance than his fellow gullible AGW drones.
Sorry Clive, your Global Warming fraternity are making the death rattle sound of apologists for their child like misjudgment as the climate naturally cools. But then your paid to churn out long winded advertorials for the now diminishing indefensible.
Excellent, balanced article by Clive Hamilton.
As a scientist and academic teacher I particularly approve of Dr Hamilton’s use of the term "denialist" to describe the "climate sceptics" rather than "sceptic" - science is intrinsically sceptical and indeed the scientific method is about critically testing potentially falsifiable hypotheses.
About 40 years ago I was first introduced to the "crime" of burning oil (the feedstock of our sophisticated organic chemical civilization) by my organic chemistry mentors; to the spectroscopic properties of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases; to the fragility of the biosphere (by Rachel Carson); and to the finiteness of the atmosphere (via the Club of Rome). As a scientist I became very concerned over anthropogenic global warming about 20 years ago and, while not an atmospheric physicist, have kept an eye on what was happening through top multi-disciplinary scientific journals such as Nature and Science.
While I have 4 decades of biochemical scientific research and of following scientific methodology, I am "expert" in a narrow domain - in a "risk management " sense I must defer to the collective wisdom of top climate scientists (e.g. NASA’s Dr James Hansen, the UK’s Pr9foessor James Lovelock FRS) , the IPCC, and major national scientific bodies (e.g. the US National Academy of Science, the US AAAS and the UK Royal Society etc) - the overwhelming
consensus view of which is that anthropogenic global warming acutely threatens the biosphere.
As a biologist I am well aware that we now have a species extinction rate about 1,000 times greater than that of the fossil record; as a chemist I generally understand the arguments of climate scientists about the nature of man-made global warming; as a biochemistry-based thanatologist (one who studies the causes of death) I am appalled at the mounting RISK to humanity: 16 million die avoidably each year, this being increasingly impacted by anthropogenic global warming; the global food price crisis (driven by a combination of mandated biofuel perversion, global warming, globalization etc) threatens "billions" according to the UK Chief Scientist Professor John Beddington FRS; Professor James Lovelock FRS says that over 6 billion will perish this century due to unaddressed climate change (for a recent "biofuel threat" lecture my me to final year Agricultural Science and Agricultural Scence/Economics students see: http://climateemergency.blogspot.com/ and http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/).
The latest versions of ALL major renewable technologies and geothermal deliver electricity at BELOW the "true price" of fossil fuel-based electricity (i.e. taking the environmental and human impact into account and about 4 times greater than the "market price") (see New Matilda: http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/08/08/how-numbers-stack ) - it is evidently CHEAPER for the World to invest in these technologies ANYWAY.
As a biologist I am heavily swayed by the huge extinction rate data and the data of Dr Hansen and his colleagues that at an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 385 ppm we have ALREADY reached a major "tipping point" that will see complete loss of Arctic sea ice in the coming decade - I must take very seriously Dr Hansen’s expert opinion that we must have an urgent "negative CO2 pollution" policy of returning the atmospheric CO2 to a safe and sustainable 300-350 ppm and that we have the technologies to do it (renewable energy, geothermal, re-afforestation, biochar carbon return to soils and if needed SO2-based aerosols for global dimming) (for detailed documentation and discussion of the Climate Emergency and Sustainability Emergency see: http://climateemergency.blogspot.com/ ).
Unfortunately Coal is King in Australia, the Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths) - as demonstrated by the cowardice and irresponsibility of both the Rudd Labs and the Opposition Libs and the extraordinary failure of the US-Australia-wrecked Bali Conference, the "stacked" Australia 2020 Summit, the 2008 Federal Budget, and the 2008 Victorian Budget in dealing with man-made Climate Change.
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
On 1 May Keenlyside and others of Germany’s Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, published a paper in Nature forecasting no additional global warming "over the next decade."
Al Gore and his minions will continue to chant that "the science is settled" on global warming, but the only thing settled is that there has not been any since 1998. Critics of this view (rightfully) argue that 1998 was the warmest year in modern record, due to a huge El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean, and that it is unfair to start any analysis at a high (or a low) point in a longer history. But starting in 2001 or 1998 yields the same result: no warming.
The Keenlyside team found that natural variability in the Earth’s oceans will "temporarily offset" global warming from carbon dioxide. Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is oceanic; hence, what happens there greatly influences global temperature.
It is now known that both Atlantic and Pacific temperatures can get "stuck," for a decade or longer, in relatively warm OR cool patterns. The North Atlantic is now forecast to be in a cold stage for a decade, which will help put the damper on any global warming. Another long term Pacific temperature pattern (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation); PDO) is also forecast not to push warming either.
Proponents of aggressive legislation like to point to the 2007 science compendium from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In it there are dozens of computer-driven projections for 21st-century warming.
Not one of them projected that the earth’s natural climate variability will shut down global warming from carbon dioxide for two decades. Yet, that is just what appears to be happening.
If you think about it, all we really possess to project the future of complex natural systems such as the Earth;s climate are computer models. Therefore, if the models that serve as the basis for policy do not work - and that must be the conclusion if indeed we are at the midpoint of a two-decade hiatus in global warming - then there is no verifiable science behind the current hysteria.
What does this mean for the future? If warming is "temporarily offset" for two decades, does all the "offset" warming suddenly appear with a vengeance, or is it delayed?
Computer models, like the one used by Keenlyside, et al., rely on "positive feedbacks" to generate much of their warming. First, atmospheric carbon dioxide warms things up a bit. Then the ocean follows, raising the amount of atmospheric water vapor, which is a greater source of global warming than carbon dioxide. When the ocean does not warm up, it seems that the additional warming is also delayed.
All of this may mean that we have simply overestimated the amount of warming that results from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. What the climate zealots are incapable of acknowledging is that this final point has actually been a subject of much debate for over a decade. This is the core issue that makes their claims of a ‘consensus’ or ‘the science is settled’ laugably naive.
A significant number of recent publications in the peer-reviewed literature argue that observed changes in temperature show the "sensitivity" of temperature to increasing carbon dioxide is lower than earlier estimates.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, this currently suggests a 21st-century warming trend that will be near to, or lower than the minimum value calculated by the climate models in the IPCC compendium. But who really knows? Before Keenlyside dropped his bombshell, few scientists would have said publicly that global warming could stop for two decades. Anyone raising that possibility would doubtlessly have been treated to the smug reply that "the science is settled," and that only the most bumptious ignoramus could raise such a question.
The only ‘thing’ that currently appears "settled" is the politics, NOT the science and we all know what a transient and illusory thing ‘political truth’ is!
Pressures to pass impossible-to-achieve legislation, are based upon projections of rapid and persistent global warming. The truth is: current science no longer provides justification for any mad rush to pass drastic global warming legislation.
I think many of the commenters here have shown exactly why lay people are loath to comment. The invective directed at them is quite disheartening.
I’m a lay person and have written my understanding and reasoning about the issue of burning fossil fuels. I wrote in the simplest possible language in an attempt to help those who have not considered a chemical formula since leaving school work out for themselves whether global warming is possible. Because it’s my work on display, I don’t feel obliged to retain any of the ad hominem comments.
http://denisetzumli.pbwiki.com/The+carbon+cycles
What distresses me, is that our community’s scientific education is so woeful that people are able to throw money away on researching the global warming impact of sheep and cattle farting without anyone criticism. Huh! have these folks not heard of the carbon cycle, and don’t they realise that whether it was millions of bison or now cattle, or millions of termites and now sheep, the result is the same?
Similarly with the so called clean coal technologies. The likelihood of sequestering carbon dioxide safely is going to require so much energy that it is the equivalent of perpetual motion science!
You can always pick a denialist by their ability to believe two contradictory things at once (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/81131/Bells_on_it.html). Once upon a time they used to go on and on about how the predictions of global warming were all based on "computer models". Couldn’t rely on computer models they would say. Now when the evidence that change is occurring is overwhelming to all but the most ideologically driven they seize on a computer model from one scientist suggesting (not proving, and already disputed) a theory that the rate of increase in temperatures might be slowed down a bit over the next decade. Suddenly a single computer model is enough to disprove not only the work of thousands of other scientists ("Al Gore and his minions"!) but to contradict the evidence of our own senses as we look at a world changing around us.
They remind me of a patient with terminal lung cancer who continues to smoke, and who from time to time uses an hour without coughing to prove that there is no problem after all.
David Horton
I think Tony Ryan is right: we should just vote global warming out! That’ll show it!
I’d like to remind people that it is not just CO2 that is being produced by our lifestyles but other toxic wastes simultaneously. Car exhausts and coal fired power stations etc also produce toxins and carcinogens.
Cut them all.
What I find remarkable about the modern crop of catastrophic global warming alarmist and zealots is this:
If, as they would have us believe, this ISSUE is the pre-eminent threat to humanity and to the Earth of all time, i.e. a cause so all-transcending that we must all bend our wills to the dictates of their opinion, a cause of such awesomeness that it utterly dwarfs the idealistic environmentalism, anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid cause of my (baby boomer) youth then WHERE, OH WHERE, IS THE LOGICAL FLOOD OF:
Energy sustainable eco-comunes and eco-communities, filled with keen pimply green zealots, springing up everywhere, boldly leading this ignorant society by example?
Energetic and aggressive young start-up companies, competitively selling us all solar panels, solar heaters and wind power generators for our rooves, gardens, foreshores and communal open spaces?
Energetic and aggressive young start-up companies, competitively fitting CO2-absorbing and recycling technologies to engine exhausts, coal-fired power station stacks, turning that deadly waste gas into fixed carbon and making a good buck out of being ‘ETHICAL’ at the same?
Time’s up! Have all these zealots and alarmist absolutely no cojones at all?
It certainly looks like it!
Fact is there is absolutely no death rattle from us ‘skeptics’, deniers’ or ‘denialists’.
Those so-labelled and suffering daily the invective of the super green alarmists and zealots are all in fact very much alive, very well and kicking pimply green butt all over the world with cold hard, logical argument and good hard mainstream, peer-reviewed science, commodities which, in reality, these muesli-munching w*****s are utterly incapable of understanding.
I hear no ‘death rattles’at all.
But what I do smell quite distinctly is the SWEAT OF FEAR.
The sweat of fear of their own futures from these poor Gen-X and Gen-Y pimply green zealots, all frog-marching in squeaking unison into their own uncertain and unknowable futures, intent only on ramming their own brand of eco-fascism down the throats of all and sundry. It’s just another accident of ‘left wing inclinations’ that so many end up infesting the readership of New Matilda!
Pity these poor creatures, logically incapable of converting their own carping creed into any sort of vibrant and powerful example for all of society. Pity these poor creatures, so miserably equipped for life as they are with their post-modernist, soft, shit-useless degrees. Pity these poor creatures, so condemned as they are to spend their ill-equipped, barely adult minds and remaining lives eking out a dead boring living in the only social institutions who will give them a wage i.e. local councils, state government departments etc just so they can spend the rest of their pathetic, unproductive lives subjecting everyone else to their petty bureaucratic Kafka-isms.
ecoeng: Seriously man, wtf…
Exactly, wtf…
But if you look at the sort of posts the AGW catastrophists put up here they are full of invective and crass insults and insinuations.
Almost all of the intellectually credible global warming ‘skeptics’ have sound technical credentials - and this includes many like myself, a practicising earth scientist with over 30 years experience, who simply dispute the more extreme projections yet still believe in some more modest degree of climate senstivity to CO2.
Nevertheless, it took less than 15 years for us to be cranked up from ‘sceptics’ to ‘deniers’, to ‘anti-evolutionists’, to ‘paid flunkies of Amoco’, to ‘those who deny smoking causes cancer’, to ‘anti-evolutionists’, ‘idiots’, ‘flat earthers’ etc boring etc and now to Hamilton’s equally assinine ‘denialists’.
On top of this comes another layer of juvenile, unsubstantiated categorization of so-called ‘suspect right wing organizations’ such as the the Heartland Institute who earlier this year organized an excellent international conference bringing reputable scientists holding ‘alternative’ views on climate change together.
What I set out to do in the 2nd half of my previous post was, tongue in cheek, to show just how easy it is to throw a dollop of cheap invective back at these lightweight global warming zealots - especially these numerous, scientifically illiterate nongs who purport to post ‘discussion’ of any article - and there has been a superfluity of such articles in New Matilda - in the name of AGW alarmist orthodoxy.
Doesn’t seem so nice when the shoe is on the other foot does it?
I am very pleased to see that Don Aitkin has now posted a calm, erudite, and focussed rebuff to the Clive Hamilton’s elitist piece of crass insinuation and phoney straw men (albeit flavoured with a soupcon of slimy revisionist positioning).
What about the Nuclear Skeptics
A great article, by Clive with some very intersting comments and contributions by others.
However, the same arguemnts could very well be put to all the nuclear energy skeptics, who run scaremongering rehtoric based on shabby science to say the least. And where the scientists make the valid "peer review" arguments for the technology they are accused of being industry lackies or industry funded (um, duh- so are solar, medical, pharmaceutical, mechanical, etc research). The tidbits of science we get from the nuke skeptics centres aroudn the half-life (waste) or visual (emotional) power of nuclear technology NOT the science, efficiency, potential or new technological advancement and research. For example, if you take the science about the risks of nuclear accidents (despite the couple we have had) when measuring the saftey data we have and the record of nucluur reactions taking place hourly across the globe- the skeptical response is really one NOT based on science.
And here lies the catch22 !
The arguments forwarded here are sound and I think rejecting the science is quite frankly a dead debate. A debate about the costs of desalination, brown coal, C02 capture, petrol excise, the solar power industry etc are where the scientific issues(economics included) require some thought, research and vigorous public debate. This for me is not a point the finger arguement, or two wrongs make a right. It is as Clive says about tackling the science of it all.
So lets all let go of our partisan conservatism (oue own views- not traditions) and critique the science properly and debate the public policy with honesty. Maybe then we can find some very reall answers to the this VERY serious issue of climate change that requires an IMMEDIATE response not one in 20 years.
Capitalists have an inexhaustible genius to turn any situation to their advantage. For the record, yes, it appears to me that there is global warming going on, perhaps some of from extra sun-spot activity, some of it at leasrt from human activity - that seems reasonable. But why do people think that the capitalist system is some brainless dinosaur which is 100% wedded to oil and pollution and totally opposed to renewable energy, etc. ? Capitalists will make a buck from whatever they can and some of them are, in their own interests and those of their shareholders, far-sighted to the point where they can see past Peak Oil and a renewable future. Shit-house rats have nothing on them, after all.
So can we move away from this adolescent either-or, that if you proclaim anthropogenic global warming, you are good and brave, while if you express doubts about it, yo uare a capitalist lick-spittle. I know Manichaeism dies hard, that it is so much easier to see the world as a constant battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, with God on our side and the Devil on theirs, but (to keep the analogy going) capitalists have ways to buy off both.
So no matter how the world goes in the future, capitalists, like those cockroaches appearing after a nuclear holocaust, will crawl out from the wreckage fully ready and able to launch into the next money-making venture. Including in an ecologically-friendly future. In fact, I’m suspicious that the deep greens are nothing more than the forward agents of the new era of sustainable capitalism, priming us all to be reconciled to a new capitalist world.
But I’m a suspicious old bastard, seeing capitalist evil under every rock and behind every tree, ever-devious and -inventive. For all that, yes, looking at how the North Pole ice is melting, how ecological zones are moving up mountains and into formerly colder areas, how South Australia is getting so much less rain - that’s enough to convince me about AGW.
Joe
To Joe [rmg 1859],
Yes, there is capitalist evil under every rock, perhaps not near the trees[unless cutting them down]… but no real Green let alone a Deep Green would be mixed up with them. Greens have a totally different paradigm & mind set which can be hard for a mainstream person to get their head around. Greens limit consumption generally, disbelieve the Growth-or-perish mantra, have a strong set of ethics & principles that are generally on a collision course with the principles [no ethics visible] of full-blown capitalism. Among other things, Greens consider the needs/rights of future generations in approaching, for example, the consumption of finite resources such as oil. It would be hard to align the two.
To Ecoeng, there are plenty of eco-communes, permaculture villages, intentional communities and so on throughout rural areas of Australia and New Zealand. But I hesitate to put contact details here as I don’t think they’d welcome the type of attention they might get from one or two of the posters here. Ecoeng, I took offence at your tone over several postings and would request that you moderate it on such forums in future. Thank you. Clive wrote a cool, considered article and it ill behoves the rest of us to rant and rave: let’s read; listen, think and chill out before responding.
Joe [rmg 1859]
Yes, there is capitalist evil under every rock, perhaps not near the trees[unless cutting them down]… but no real Green let alone a Deep Green would be mixed up with them. Greens have a totally different paradigm & mind set which can be hard for a mainstream person to get their head around. Greens limit consumption generally, disbelieve the Growth-or-perish mantra, have a strong set of ethics & principles that are generally on a collision course with the principles [no ethics visible] of full-blown capitalism. Among other things, Greens consider the needs/rights of future generations in approaching, for example, the consumption of finite resources such as oil. It would be hard to align the two.
Ecoeng, there are plenty of eco-communes, permaculture villages, intentional communities and so on throughout rural areas of Australia and New Zealand. But I hesitate to put contact details here as I don’t think they’d welcome the type of attention they might get from one or two of the posters here. Ecoeng, I took offence at your tone over several postings and would request that you moderate it on such forums in future. Thank you. Clive wrote a cool, considered article and it ill behoves the rest of us to rant and rave: let’s read; listen, think and chill out before responding.
Gday Isobel,
Yeah, my snide remark about deep greens all being in bed with capitalists was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I was simply trying in my feeble way to suggest (1) that we shouldn’t think in stark either/or terms, and (2) that capitalists would turn their mothers into beef jerky if there was money in it. I’m sure, in fact, that there are courses in business schools around the world which train business students in how to take advantage of the most unpromising-sounding situations - how to make money out of the Sechuan earthquake or the Burmese tragedy, for example, or turn shit into gold. I’m sure that in many business texts, there would be sections on Mao’s instruction ‘turn a bad thing into a good thing’, which, I suppose, gets us back to businessmen’s mothers.
Yes, there is AGW, I’ve believed that for twenty years or more, but I’m also aware that businesses (capitalists) are always on the look-out for opportunity, and tragedy, disaster and sorrow always promise ample profits for those who know where to look. They have no loyalty to oil or any other non-renewable resource, especially if they seem to be running out. And what resource will never run out ? Solar power, wind power, tidal power, perhaps hot rocks - a capitalist would be a mug if he or she wasn’t shifting some of his/her investments into these areas. So don’t think that anti-AGW is thereby pro-capitalist, or that pro-AGW is thereby incredibly progressive and 110% anti-ca