The Politics of Climate Change

by Anthony Giddens

  Figure 1.4 Energy from the sun has not increased Global surface temperature (top, dark grey) and the sun’s energy received at the top of the earth’s atmosphere (bottom, light grey). Solar energy has been measured by satellites since 1978.

  Source: NCDC/NOAA

  The IPCC assesses the implications of climate change in terms of a number of different possible scenarios for the period up to the end of the current century. There are six different scenario groups – in other words, future possibilities – depending upon factors such as levels of economic growth, resource scarcities, population increase, the expansion of low-carbon technologies and the intensifying of regional inequalities. Under the most favourable scenario, global warming will still occur, within a range of between 1.1 and 2.9ºC. Sea levels will rise between 18 and 38 centimetres by the end of the century. If, on the other hand, the world continues to run, as is the case now, on oil, gas and coal, and to strive for high levels of economic growth, world temperatures could increase by more than 6ºC by 2100. In these circumstances, the sea level might rise by between 26 and 50 centimetres.

  The ‘most probable’ scenario distinguished by the IPCC, in which fossil fuels are quite widely used, but are balanced by cleaner forms of energy generation, and where population growth is brought under control, is still worrying. In this scenario, temperatures could rise by more than 4ºC, with an increase of 48 centimetres in sea levels. There would probably be a decrease in rainfall of 20 per cent in sub-tropical areas, while more rain would fall in the northern and southern latitudes.

  The IPCC and the European Commission have both stated that the aim of emissions control policy should be to limit global warming to an average of 2ºC, and that to have even a 50:50 chance of achieving this outcome, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases must be stabilized at 450 CO2e. However, given the existing build-up of emissions, some regard this target as already impossible to achieve.

  The effects of climate change are almost certainly already being felt. The 2007 report of the IPCC states that we can assert with ‘High Confidence’ (an 8 in 10 chance or above of being correct) that global warming has led to more and larger glacial lakes, faster rates of melting in permafrost areas in Western Siberia and elsewhere, changes in some Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems, increased and earlier run-off from glacier and snow-fed rivers, earlier springtimes in northern areas and a movement of some plant and animal species towards the poles.2

  The IPCC says that resource-based wars could dominate the current century; coastal cities could become flooded, provoking mass destitution and mass migration, and the same could happen as drier areas become more arid. Given their location and lack of resources, the poorer parts of the world will be more seriously affected than the developed countries. Yet the latter will have their share of problems, including more and more episodes of violent weather. The United States, for example, has greater extremes of weather than most other parts of the world and these are likely to intensify further.

  The sceptics and their critics

  Scenarios are about future possibilities, so it is not surprising that there are those who question them, or who object to the very thesis that current processes of global warming are produced by human activity at all. Since the sceptics are in a minority, they see themselves not only as questioning a broad scientific consensus, but as tilting against a whole industry that has grown up around it.

  Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, for example, advance the thesis that ‘modern warming is moderate and not man-made’.3 Their view, they complain, does not get much of a hearing, because of the attention that surrounds the claims made by the IPCC. ‘A public relations campaign of staggering dimensions’, they say, ‘is being carried forward to convince us that global warming is man-made and a crisis . . . environmental advocacy groups, government agencies, and even the media have spared no expense in spreading [the] dire message.’4

  For them, there is nothing new about the increasing temperatures observed today. The world’s climate has always been in flux. A moderate but irregular 1,500-year climate change cycle, driven by shifts in sun-spot variations, is well documented by the work of geologists. We are in the warming phase of just such a cycle at the moment. The chief worry we should have for the long-term future is, in fact, a coming ice age, as our relatively mild period draws to a close.

  Other climate change sceptics take a somewhat different tack, while also emphasizing that heretical views don’t get much of a hearing, let alone research funding. Patrick Michaels, for instance, claims that the findings and projections of the IPCC are intrinsically flawed.5 Too many individuals and groups, he says, have a stake in predicting disasters and cataclysms to come. Only about a third of those producing the IPCC documentation are in fact scientists; the majority are government bureaucrats. Facts and findings that don’t fit the main storyline are suppressed or ignored.

  The Danish author Bjørn Lomborg is often lumped with the sceptics, and indeed entitled his first book on climate change The Skeptical Environmentalist.6 His is an unusual form of scepticism, however. He accepts that global warming is happening and that human activity has brought it about. What is much more debatable, he says, ‘is whether hysteria and headlong spending on extravagant CO2-cutting programmes at an unprecedented price is the only possible response’.7 Lomborg questions the idea that climate change risks must inevitably take precedence over all others. For the moment, world poverty, the spread of AIDS and nuclear weapons pose greater problems.

  The arguments upon which Lomborg builds his case have been examined by Howard Friel, in his book The Lomborg Deception. Friel looks at Lomborg’s book citation by citation and finds it seriously wanting. Lomborg’s main thesis (echoed by some others of the more moderate sceptics) is that climate change ‘will not pose a devastating problem for our future’.8 Friel documents how selective are the materials Lomborg cites, as are his interpretations of them.9 Presumably partly in response to such critiques, Lomborg has modified his earlier position, or appears to have done so. In a book published in 2010 he says that ‘we all need to start seriously focussing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming’.10

  Other authors, writing about risk more generally rather than only about global warming, have suggested that we live in an ‘age of scares’, of which climate change is one. Our worries and anxieties, as Christopher Booker and Richard North put it, mark the emergence of a ‘new age of superstition’, resembling episodes of mass hysteria in the past, such as the witch-hunts of the post-mediaeval period. Scares, nearly all of which have turned out to be unfounded, have become part of our everyday lives, ‘from mysterious and deadly new viruses and bacteria in our food, or floating about in the environment, to toxic substances in our homes and workplaces; all culminating in the ultimate apocalyptic visions conjured up by the fear of global warming’.11

  Should one pay any attention to what the sceptics say, given that they are a small, albeit vocal, minority? Many scientists believe their writings are irresponsible, since they convey to the public that there is extensive space for doubt about the origins, and probable consequences, of warming, when in fact there is little. There was a furore when the UK’s TV Channel 4 produced a documentary in March 2007 called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which featured several of the most prominent sceptics.

  Yet the sceptics do deserve and must receive a hearing. Scepticism is the life-blood of science and just as important in policy-making. It is right that whatever claims are made about climate change and its consequences are examined with a critical, even hostile, eye and in a continuing fashion. There is no doubt that ‘big science’ can attain a momentum of its own. The IPCC is not simply a scientific body, but a political and bureaucratic one. The sceptics are right to say that in the media, and sometimes in the speeches of politicians, climate change is now often invoked as though it explains every weather episode: ‘Whenever there was any kind of unusual weather event, heat-waves, storms, droughts or floods, some broadcaste
r could be relied upon to describe it as “further confirmation of climate change”.’12

  However, the sceptics do not have a monopoly on critical scrutiny. Critical self-examination is the obligation of every scientist and researcher. The fact that the findings of the IPCC are almost always expressed in terms of probabilities and possibilities gives due recognition to the many uncertainties that exist, as well as gaps in our knowledge. Moreover, the scientists contributing research findings to the IPCC have differences among themselves about the progression of global warming and its likely consequences.

  The ‘climate wars’

  The conflicting views of the sceptics and the mainstream scientific community reached a new level of intensity when emails emanating from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009 were hacked and their contents made public.13 More than 1,000 emails passing between a group of climate researchers working in the UK and the US were leaked in this way. The emails were released only a short while before the UN meetings at Copenhagen, at which world leaders gathered to try to reach agreements on curbing carbon emissions (see below, pp. 185–95). It is not known who hacked into the scientists’ computers, or why, but the timing strongly suggests that the endeavour was an attempt to undermine the summit by casting doubt upon the scientific findings underlying it.

  To the sceptics, the emails showed that the scientists in question were deliberately manipulating their data to bolster their thesis that humanly induced climate change is occurring. The scientists also seemed to be reluctant to make public the full range of research findings on which their claims were based. In addition, the critics argued, they sought to manipulate the peer review process so as to block the publication of papers critical of their work.

  The whole episode received a great deal of attention in the media across the world. Two of the scientists concerned, Professor Philip Jones of the CRU and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in the US, found themselves at the centre of the storm of controversy thus provoked. In both cases, the universities involved were swamped with emails, phone calls and letters accusing the scientists of deception and even fraud.

  Each was subject to several investigations. Professor Jones appeared before three such inquiries – the House of Commons Science Select Committee; a committee of inquiry chaired by the scientist Lord Oxburgh; and a tribunal set up by the University of East Anglia. Pennsylvania State University established an investigatory committee to examine the conduct of Professor Mann.

  All the inquiries exonerated the scientists from any substantial misconduct. The University of East Anglia report underlined the ‘rigour and honesty’ of the scientists. The investigatory committee in the US concluded that Professor Mann ‘did not engage in . . . any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities’.14

  The scientists didn’t escape all censure. The Pennsylvania inquiry commented, for example, that it was ‘careless and inappropriate’ of Professor Mann to share unpublished manuscripts with third parties without having received permission from the authors of those manuscripts to do so. The East Anglia report criticized Professor Jones and his colleagues for insufficient openness in response to requests for their data sources. The report also made the observation that, in the age of the internet and legislation about freedom of information, there is a ‘transformation in the need for openness in the culture of publicly funded science’.

  Jones and Mann were among the many scientists contributing to the work that produced the publications of the IPCC. Independently of the affair of the emails, but overlapping in time, the IPCC also became embroiled in controversy. Two errors came to light in the 2007 IPCC report on the progression of, and dangers represented by, humanly induced climate change. It was stated that the glaciers in the Himalayas might disappear by 2035. In another place the claim appears that 55 per cent of the Netherlands lies below sea level, and hence is particularly susceptible to flooding if and when overall sea levels rise across the world.

  In fact, were the Himalayan glaciers to vanish by 2035, they would have to melt 25 times faster than currently is the case. In the case of the Netherlands, the report should have read that 55 per cent of the country is prone to flooding – 26 per cent of the country is at risk because it lies below sea level, while a further 29 per cent is at risk of being vulnerable to river flooding.

  Partly because the discovery of the mistakes coincided with the debate over the leaked emails, they also provoked something of a furore, and were very widely reported. To many of the sceptics, they confirmed suspicions about the lack of objectivity in the IPCC procedures – in spite of the fact that these were isolated errors in a very large and detailed volume.

  The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency launched an investigation into the 2007 IPCC report in order to see if further questionable statements could be unearthed. The Agency found nothing that would place in question the main conclusions drawn by the IPCC. The IPCC methods and findings were found to be ‘robust’ and ‘well-founded’. The inquiry noted, however, that the summaries in the IPCC report ‘tended to single out the most important negative aspects of climate change’. For instance, the possibly positive implications of climate change for forestry in North Asia are indicated in the body of a chapter, but are not referred to in the summary that appears at the end. The investigators concluded that more could be done in future IPCC publications to heighten transparency and clarity as to how the experts had reached their specific judgements and assessed different risk scenarios.

  It seems unlikely that the IPCC procedures will remain intact – not because of the errors or other problems that have come to light, but because of their cumbersome and slow-moving character. The IPCC’s vast reports appear about every six years. For the 2007 volume, governments and reviewers submitted some 90,000 comments on the draft text, all of which had to be assessed by the expert panels. Some scientists have called for shorter reports, to be produced more frequently, and which would therefore be more able to keep abreast of the flow of new research and data. Others have proposed a review process based upon Wikipedia, allowing free access to data. Yet it is difficult to see how entries could be scrutinized and monitored for reliability or accuracy.

  Since the episode of the leaked emails, not just Jones and Mann, but other prominent climate scientists too have received emails and other communications threatening them and their families.15 In a television interview, Michael Mann described the following as typical of some of the emails he had been receiving: ‘Six feet under with the roots is where you should be. I was hoping I would see the news that you’d committed suicide. Do it, freak.’ Jones received many death threats, as well as other highly aggressive emails, and at one point he felt so much under attack that he contemplated killing himself. A well-known climate scientist based at Stanford University, in California, stated that he received ‘hundreds’ of abusive emails when the debate about the leaks was at its height. Together with other climate scientists, his name figured on a neo-Nazi website where threats were made against them because of their Jewish ancestry. Clive Hamilton has described comparable hate mail received by climate scientists in Australia.16

  In response to such attacks, groups of climate scientists have published statements affirming the need to defend science and the scientific method. In Britain, scientists from 121 universities and scientific institutions signed a statement ‘from the UK science community’. It stated that they ‘have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities’. ‘The evidence and the science’, they continued, ‘are deep and extensive . . . coming from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest standards of professional integrity.’17

  A similar statement was put out by members of the US N
ational Academy of Sciences. It declared:

  We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and climate scientists in particular . . . Many recent assaults on climate science . . . are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. . . . There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.18

  The activities of at least some of the sceptics have been not only funded, but directly organized, by special interest groups. The author of one study of such groups says that, although they knew of these links before they started their research, they never expected to uncover, as they did, a campaign so ‘huge, well-funded and well-organised’.19 Several of the large oil and coal companies have been directly involved, as well as a range of other corporations and political groups. Their concerns have not been to promote open and rational debate, but to exploit uncertainties surrounding the dangers posed by climate change to create the impression that the scientific evidence is far more suspect than it actually is.