Science, politics and climate change

We are witnessing something very unusual and important in the public debate about climate change and how we should best respond to it. One part of the political spectrum, the conservative or right-wing parties, particularly in Australia and the US, is rejecting the science of climate change itself, rather than focusing on the political question of how we should respond to what the science tells us is happening.

In Australia the Liberal Party leader, Tony Abbott, has been reported as saying that the science of climate change is ‘crap’, though his comments on the record are much more moderate. Not so Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, however, whose web site in a piece on the Prime Minister (dated 29 November 2010) declares (without providing any evidence or sources for his assertion):

"Every day, new evidence emerges that the climate alarmists have got it wrong. The earth is no longer warming and the alarmist camp has been exposed as riddled with scoundrels, shysters and snake oil salesmen."

Senator Bernardi holds a senior position in the Liberal/National Party Coalition as the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Supporting the Leader of the Opposition. It would appear that many others in the Party hold similar views. Certainly the Coalition’s Direct Action Policy on Climate Change suggests climate change does not need to be tackled as a priority.

In the US, the Republican Party has opposed the Democrat’s proposed action to cut US emissions, and the incoming Leader of the Congress John Boehner’s saying ‘the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical’ certainly suggests he has a limited grasp of the issue.

The politicisation of the science of global warming in the US is starkly revealed by Gallop polling, which shows that an issue which was not a line of political cleavage ten years ago is now a political chasm.

In the decade since 1998 the number of Republican voters who agree that the effects of global warming have already begun has fallen 5%, from 46% to 41%, while among Democrat voters those who agree that the effects of global warming have already begun has increased almost 30% (47% to 76%).

In the same period, the percentage of voters from both parties who agree that most scientists believe global warming is occurring increased significantly, by 17% amongst Republican voters (39% to 56%), and 23% amongst Democrat voters (51% to 74%).

The statistics show two aspects of the politicisation of climate science: the deepening cleavage in views along party lines; and the fact that a majority of Republican voters deny that the effects of global warming have already begun while accepting that most scientists believe this to be the case. Political considerations would appear to be overwhelming evidence and expert opinion in the minds of Republican voters.

Of course it is not uncommon for science to bear on hot political issues – for example, ecology and hydrology inform decisions about how much water should be taken from a river system and used for irrigation. In such circumstances scientists might find themselves drawn into political controversy, asked to comment on how this or that proposal lines up with the science. But this is not the same as the science itself being the subject of political controversy.

Rather, politicisation of science occurs when political parties or similar groups more or less formally take a position for or against the science of some phenomenon, not on the basis of the scientific evidence, but rather according to the how they see the science aligns with their political interests. While there is a history of such politicisation, it is now an unusual event, and fraught with danger for both science and the political interests involved. Three examples stand out.

First, the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo and other scientists who proposed that the sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the solar system. The church opposed the new science not on scientific grounds but on the basis that a geocentric theory of the solar system had been incorporated in Catholic theology and to challenge this was therefore seen to challenge the authority of the Church itself. The matter ended badly for the Church, but not before many scientists were harmed, including Galileo himself.

Second, the response of churches generally to Darwin’s theory of evolution. While mostly the churches have now accepted that religion should not give an account of biological processes in competition with science, there remains significant pockets of resistance in the more fundamentalist (and politically conservative) churches which hold to a literal reading of the Bible, including the account of the origin of the species given in Genesis.

Third, and more directly political, Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics and the official adoption of Lysenkoism by the Soviet political leadership. Again scientists who held to the accepted scientific view were persecuted, and genetics as a science failed to progress for a generation in the Soviet Union, from 1930 until the 1960s.

We should learn two things from these examples. Firstly, politics of either the right or the left can come into conflict with science. Secondly, that conflict occurs when a political (or religious) group offers an explanation or theory of something in competition with the explanation or theory given of the same thing by science itself.

Before we take up the question of what alternative theory the right is offering in competition with the science of climate change, let us note in passing that the idea that some part of science is inherently political is a complete confusion. To take just two examples: the science of nuclear energy is not and cannot be inherently right-wing, nor can the science of climate change be inherently left-wing. The physics of nuclear energy was the same before humans existed and it will be the same after; it is the same now in places where we exist and in places where we do not. Likewise the science of climate change would be the same if it concerned another planet like the Earth in all relevant respects apart from the cause of an increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is nothing in science which is inherently political. Thus for science to become political, science’s explanation of some phenomena must be contested by a politically motivated group.

There are very limited grounds to contest the science of climate change.

The prediction of global warming came initially from Arrhenius, in 1896. He observed that the CO2 molecule absorbs long wave radiation such as heat reflected back into space from the Earth, and concluded that an atmosphere richer in CO2 would trap more heat leading to global warming. If we wish to reject his conclusion we have just three choices: Arrhenius got the physics of CO2 wrong; our burning fossil fuels and forests is not increasing the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere; this is happening but some other process is producing a balancing cooling.

None of these are seriously argued in the scientific literature. There just is no rival theory to global warming. Full stop.

Or rather, there is no rival scientific theory. The various voices raised against the theory of global warming are raised outside scientific debate: they are attacks on science rather than contributions to science, as in the case of Galileo, Darwin and Lysenko. They assert that the science of global warming is false science put forward by scientists whose real motivation is not to explain the observed facts but to enrich themselves or advance their political cause. Just what that cause may be is not made very clear, but it has something to do with green politics, anti-capitalism, diverting funds from the advanced nations to the developing world, and generally opposing the unfettered development of our economy.

If this is so, then as I have recently detailed there is a very large and diverse group of conspirators among scientists and other experts: the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and its equivalent organisations in the US and the UK, the CSIRO, the IPCC, the members of the various recent enquires into the soundness of climate science, and the peak scientific organisations in Australia, the UK and the US, not to mention the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Then we have various conservative national governments which have joined the conspiracy, in particular the UK, France and Germany.

Such an unholy alliance could not have been easily forged, so it is no surprise to find a conservative politician with the skill and credentials of Margaret Thatcher was behind it, right back at the Second World Climate Conference.

Nor in Maggie’s absence could this diverse group be held together were it not for the efforts of royalty itself! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8179778/Prince-Charles-defends-climategate-scientists.html

If this list of conspirators is not enough to bring the climate change denier to their senses, perhaps they might then consider more carefully what would be the point of such a conspiracy? No one yet knows what will be the outcome of our nations taking action to greatly reduce their carbon emissions. Perhaps a ‘green’ future is possible, but environmentalists as deeply green as James Lovelock and as active as Barry Brook argue that our only hope of avoiding dangerous climate change is widespread use of nuclear energy. Not exactly a green/left agenda.

Without even a coherent conspiracy theory, the right’s attempts to explain away the science of global warming are weak indeed, and not likely to last. For when politics opposes science it has a tiger by the tail. Not a comfortable position for the anti-science politicians.

We can confidently expect that the world will continue to warm, the community and industry calls for action to reduce global warming will become more and more determined, and politicians who refuse to act will be seen as putting their own short term political interests above the interests of their electors and their country. In other circumstances that would be thought of as treachery and that may well be the outcome in this case too.

One final point. Ensuring our understanding of the world is soundly based on all of the available evidence is not an easy thing to do. As humans we have a strong tendency to see the world in ways that fit with beliefs we already hold: half the crowd at the grand final will boo the umpire for a bad decision whenever a free is granted; which half depends on which way the free went. Being rational is hard and continuous work; it is more like being an umpire than a loyal team supporter.

It is not just a matter of looking at bits of evidence here and there, and choosing what looks convenient to our beliefs. We can find evidence to support any nutty theory we like: the Earth was settled by aliens; Apollo 11 did not land on the moon; the science of global warming is a giant conspiracy by leading scientists all over the world in all kinds of countries aiming to destroy capitalism and establish world government by replacing coal with nuclear power, the conspiracy being begun by Arrhenius, helped along by Margaret Thatcher and now led by Prince Charles!

So it is important for each of us to test whether we hold our views on the science of global warming on rational/scientific or political/ideological grounds.

If you do not accept the science as summarised by the IPCC, the Royal Society, and the Australian Academy of Science, ask yourself what evidence would convince you. Likewise, if you do accept it, ask yourself what it would take to persuade you that the science was wrong, after all.

For my part, I would definitely start to doubt the science if the last seventeen years in a row were cooler than the long term average in my old home state of South Australia. After all, if the climate is not cooling the probability that one year will be cooler than the average is the same as the probability that a fair coin will land heads on the next toss. The probability of seventeen heads in a row is 0.5 raised to the 17 power, which is 0.000007629 or just under eight in one million.

Long before the seventeenth summer, I would be wondering whether this was just a local phenomenon or one affecting the whole of Australia. If I found that for Australia as a whole the last six decades in a row were each cooler than the previous, I would certainly be looking hard at how this could be reconciled with the theory of global warming. After all, if Australia’s climate was not cooling, the probability that each of those last six decades in a row was cooler than the previous decade would be the same as rolling a fair dice six times and getting the numbers 1 to 6 in order. The probability of that is 0.0000214 or just over two in a million.

But in fact South Australia has experienced seventeen years in a row with warmer than average temperatures.

And Australia as a whole has become warmer in each of the last six decades.

So to those who don’t think that the science of climate change is well supported by the evidence, what do you make of that? The Bureau of Meteorology is lying? We are heating up but not the rest of the world? And what is your scientific theory to explain why the world is not warming?

Over to you.