Science, politics and climate change

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.