The Politics of Climate Change

by Anthony Giddens

  Scepticism, to repeat, is essential to the scientific method, and there are some sceptics who are prepared to submit their work and their claims to the same rigorous process of examination by critics that they (rightly) demand of the mainstream scientific community. The trouble is that the majority are not, setting up a clear double standard. Attacks on science, or individual scientists, cannot only become quite vicious, but proceed in quite another dimension from that of science as such.

  The internet has a problematic and complex role in all this. On the one hand, it is a driving force for openness and transparency. Climate scientists will have to get used to making their data, and the grounds for the conclusions they draw, available for public scrutiny. In principle, the cause of science is advanced by such a process. Yet the internet also creates a world where anyone can be an ‘expert’, without having to master the canons of professional expertise – and can command a large following, as well as influencing public opinion.

  It is worth drawing a distinction between those climate change sceptics who are in the business of ensuring the scrupulousness of science and policy-making based upon it, and those who merit the name of deniers. Martin McKee identifies six tactics which deniers use:

  1 Portray a consensus as a conspiracy, alleging that agreement between scientists comes not from evidence, but from collusion and manipulation.

  2 Deploy pseudo-experts to support this contention – people with sufficient credentials to create a façade of plausibility, even if they may have no real credentials in the field in question.

  3 Pick and deploy evidence selectively, concentrating on whatever seems to support the case being made, ignoring or rubbishing other findings. Continue trotting out your own ‘evidence’, even after it has been discredited.

  4 Set completely different or even impossible standards for your opponents from those you yourself follow. If the opponent comes up with the evidence demanded, move the goalposts.

  5 Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then demolish the straw man that has been created.

  6 Repackage scientific uncertainty as doubt. Falsely portray scientists as divided when they are not, insist that ‘both sides’ must be given equal play and make claims of censorship if ‘dissenting’ arguments are rejected.20

  The radicals

  Risk and uncertainty cut two ways. The sceptics say the risks are exaggerated, or even non-existent, but it is quite possible to make the opposite case. There are some who say we have underestimated both the extent and the imminence of the dangers posed by climate change. They argue that the IPCC is in fact something of a conservative organization, which is reserved in its judgements exactly because it has to cover a wide constituency of scientific opinion and because of its bureaucratic nature.

  Fred Pearce, a writer for the New Scientist, says that the world’s climate does not go in for gradual change, as the past history of climatic variation shows. The climate (as the sceptics also argue) has undergone all sorts of changes in the past, long before human beings appeared on the scene and well before the advent of modern industrial production. However, Pearce draws quite a different conclusion from this observation to that of the sceptics. Transitions from one climatic condition to another are often very abrupt, and climate change in our era, he argues, will probably be the same. We can make a distinction, he says, between Type 1 and Type 2 processes of climate change. Type 1 changes evolve slowly and follow the trajectories outlined in most of the scenarios of the IPCC. Type 2 change is radical and sharp – it comes about when a tipping point is reached, which triggers a sudden lurch from one type of system to another. Such change does not form part of the usual models for calculating climate change risk.21

  The potential for Type 2 change today, Pearce says, is large. Some areas that were widely thought to be stable may in fact be dynamic and volatile – they include the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, the frozen peat bogs in Western Siberia, the Amazon rainforest and the weather pattern known as El Niño.

  The IPCC has suggested that, should the world warm any more than 3ºC, the Greenland ice pack could start to melt, a process which, once it gets under way, would be impossible to reverse. According to the IPCC this possibility is one for the distant future. Some specialists in glacial studies, however, as Pearce points out, warn that such a process could happen much faster. As warming proceeds, and in conjunction with certain natural processes, lakes form at the tops of the glaciers. These set up water flows which drain down crevasses in the ice and, at the same time, widen them so that, instead of water taking many years to reach the bottom of the glaciers, it can do so almost instantaneously. The result, it is argued, might be the fracturing of large areas of ice, with profoundly destabilizing consequences. Were such effects to become generalized, large-scale melting could take place in a matter even of a decade.

  The vast area of peat bog stretching from Western Siberia through northern Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska is covered by solid and seemingly permanent frost, but it has begun to thaw, a phenomenon ‘that makes even the soberest scientists afraid’.22 The Arctic permafrost holds down very large amounts of decayed vegetation, packed with carbon. As the frost melts, the leaves, roots and mosses beneath it start to decay, and release not only CO2, but also methane. Methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. One of the problems is that, so far, there have been relatively few studies of just how far these processes are advancing, largely because of difficulties of access to Siberia on the part of non-Russian scientists. One estimate is that the release of methane occurring from the West Siberian peat bogs is already equivalent to more than the greenhouse gases emitted by the United States in a single year.

  And then there is El Niño, linked to the so-called ‘Southern Oscillation’.23 The term refers to unusually warm ocean conditions that can develop in the Pacific Ocean along the Western coasts of Ecuador and Peru. ‘El Niño’ means ‘boy child’ in Spanish, referring to the infant Jesus Christ. The name came from the fact that the phenomenon normally develops during the Christmas season. It happens every three to five years and can have a major effect on global climatic conditions. As El Niño moves across the world, following a path along the equator, disruptive weather follows in its wake, causing storms and heavy rainfall in some areas and droughts in others. After some 12–18 months it usually abruptly goes into reverse, causing unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which also have disruptive effects upon weather conditions (moving this way around, it is known as La Niña).

  Little is known about the long-term history of El Niño, but in recent years it has occurred more often, and with increasingly severe consequences. As with so many other climatic changes, we do not know how far global warming is playing a part. El Niño may act to moderate warming, but – at least as likely – could serve to accentuate turbulent weather conditions.

  James Hansen, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is one of the most influential authors to argue that the dangers from advancing temperatures have been underestimated. It is a theme he has pursued for more than 20 years. He says that the goal of confining global warming to 2ºC, already very difficult to achieve, is not enough to prevent the dangerous consequences. The safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 350ppm – below that which already exists.24

  In his book Storms of My Grandchildren Hansen talks of ‘our last chance to save humanity’.25 The earth, he points out, is the only one of the three terrestrial planets that has the right balance of circumstances for life to exist. Venus is too hot, and Mars too cold. The latter planet has so little gas in its atmosphere that there is virtually no greenhouse effect. The atmosphere of Venus has so much CO2 in it that the greenhouse effect produces warming of several hundred degrees Celsius. At one time Venus was probably cold enough to possess significant oceans. They vanished as the surface of the planet heated up, the greenhouse effect of the water vapour serving to heighten the process of warming. Over the progress of time,
a ‘runaway’ greenhouse situation was created, with the water vapour eventually being lost to space.

  Could a runaway greenhouse effect occur on earth as a result of humanly created global warming? Yes it could, Hansen says. Recognizing that we have to be wary of computer-generated climate models, he nevertheless says they can be very useful in terms of measuring risk. The models he examines indicate how sensitive the earth is to atmospheric change – and how vulnerable it is to a runaway greenhouse effect. Until recently, Hansen says, he didn’t worry too much about such a possibility, but in the face of incoming evidence he has revised his earlier views. The reason is that mechanisms that were once thought likely to moderate warming will not have time to come into effect, given the speed with which it is now happening. As Hansen puts it: ‘I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse.’ If we also burn the tar sands, he goes on to add, ‘I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty’26 (tar sands can be used to extract oil on the large scale, but release far more emissions in so doing than orthodox oil production).

  A long way before such a cataclysmic happening materializes, and potentially in the very near future, there will begin ‘a chaotic climate transition’ as one or more tipping points is passed. Disintegrating in sheets, beginning in West Antarctica, will exacerbate trends already present. The ‘storms of our grandchildren’ will progressively intensify: ‘continued unfettered burning of . . . fossil fuels will cause the climate to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of their control’.27

  The British scientist James Lovelock is even more sombre. We have to understand, he says, that our existence as humanity depends on the living earth. Because of our burning of fossil fuels, the earth ‘is ever more at risk of changing to a barren state in which few of us can survive’.28 ‘I am not a willing Cassandra’, he says, ‘and in the past have been publicly sceptical about doom stories’, but he now thinks that, without major remedial action, climate change ‘may all but eliminate people from the earth’.29 We should not be taken in by the slowly rising temperature curve portrayed by the IPCC. Global warming – or, as he prefers to call it, global heating – he accepts with Pearce is non-linear and prone to producing sudden and dramatic change in the earth’s ecosystems.

  Far from driven by ‘alarmism’, as the sceptics like to say, Lovelock agrees that the IPCC is essentially a conservative organization, precisely because of its bureaucratic character. Good science, he says, is manipulated so as to reduce its more dangerous and problematic implications. In contrast to Hansen, but reaching similar conclusions, Lovelock argues that we should mistrust models. We have plenty of evidence from direct measures of the warming of the oceans, the rising sea levels, the melting of the glaciers and of the Arctic ice-cap to be perfectly clear that humanly created climate change is accelerating.

  Like the sceptics – but for completely different reasons – Lovelock is disparaging of attempts to establish international agreements to reduce carbon emissions. None of the technologies involved, with the partial exception of nuclear power – of which Lovelock is a great advocate – comes even close to being able to generate the energy on which our civilization depends. In all likelihood, Lovelock thinks, the advance of climate change will devastate large parts of the world and render them uninhabitable. The main reason will not be the ‘storms of our grandchildren’, dramatic and devastating though these will be. Rather, the damage will be done by prolonged drought.

  The combination of climate change, increasing population levels and other changes that are undermining global ecosystems will be lethal. Some parts of the world will remain habitable, such as the northern regions of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, and some islands, even in the tropics. But these will become like ‘continental oases’ and ‘lifeboats’, into which humanity will be compressed. We should do all we can to reduce carbon emissions, but concentrate mainly on adaptation, to prepare those areas of the world likely to be least damaged by climate change ‘as the safe havens for a civilised humanity’.30

  Conclusion

  What are we to make of the contrasting assessments of the risks posed by climate change offered by the sceptics on the one hand and the radicals on the other? I believe that the overriding principle is that we should stay close to the science. As mentioned in the Introduction, there is a chance that the sceptics could be right – that climate change will be relatively harmless in its consequences, or will prove the result of natural causes. However, the scientific evidence that global warming is proceeding apace, and that it is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is very substantial and detailed.

  Since they are not climate scientists, the majority of sceptics do not publish in peer-reviewed journals. As I have mentioned, most do not submit their own views and claims to anything like the same degree of intensive scrutiny and assessment of the evidence as do the scientists whose findings they attack. Scepticism is indeed an essential quality of science, and when so much hangs on the findings of a scientific body, those findings must be scrutinized intensively and in a continuous way. Even a scientific consensus could be flawed. Yet the ‘climate wars’ have made virtually no impact at all on the evidence about climate change and its dangers, which remains as well founded and convincing as it did before the episode of the leaked emails and the discovery of the errors in the IPCC report.

  I am not a scientist. It is up to the scientific community to assess the ideas of the radicals and decide how much weight to attach to them. The views of the radicals should count for more than those of the sceptics, since they themselves are practising scientists. As more detailed findings continue to come in, it should be possible to judge the validity of their major claims.

  One should remember that global warming is no ordinary risk. It is an awesome prospect to acknowledge that, as collective humanity, we are on the verge of altering the world’s climate, perhaps in a profound manner. Previous civilizations had an impact on their environment, but those civilizations were only regional, and that impact was trivial compared to what is happening today. No earlier civilization remotely intervened into nature to the degree to which we do every day, and on a global scale.

  2

  RUNNING OUT, RUNNING

  DOWN?

  Oil, gas and coal, the three dominant energy sources in the world, are all fossil fuels, producing greenhouse gases on a large scale. The industrial revolution in its country of origin, Britain, was fuelled by coal – or, more accurately, by the scientific and technological discoveries which turned coal into a dynamic energy source. The changeover from burning wood – previously the prime energy source – was not easy, since it meant a transformation of habits. By the mid-seventeenth century, wood was running out as a source of fuel; but many initially detested the sooty coal that came to replace it and which, in the end, actually helped create a whole new way of life based on cities and machine production.

  The turn to coal ushered in the world we now inhabit, in which the energy of the individual citizen or worker is of trivial importance compared to that produced from inanimate resources. As Richard Heinberg has observed in relation to the US:

  If we were to add together the power of all the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compare that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each American has the equivalent of over 150 ‘energy slaves’ working for us twenty-four hours a day.1

  Oil has never replaced coal, but it began to mount a challenge to coal’s dominance from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. For a while, in the early part of that century, the US was the biggest oil producer in the world and for a long period was largely self-sufficient in oil. During much of that time, the US was an anti-imperial power, with quite a differe
nt philosophy from the dominant imperial formation, the British Empire; for instance, the US opposed the Franco-British intervention in Suez in 1957, partly on strategic grounds, but also on moral ones. Of course, these roles were later reversed, as the US came to see the Middle East as more and more vital to its interests. Yet it is worth restating the obvious – the history of oil is the history of imperialism, in one guise or another.

  Britain’s oil derived mostly from its colonies in the Middle East, where it set the conditions of the relationship. The Anglo-Iranian oil company (later to become BP, aka ‘Bloody Persians’, ‘British Petroleum’ or, under the leadership of CEO John Browne more recently, ‘Beyond Petroleum’) was set up under a one-sided arrangement of ‘concessions’ – a system adopted also by US corporations. The country that needed the oil provided the expertise and technology to locate and extract it; the one that owned the oil was paid in terms of the volume extracted. The colonial or ex-colonial countries thus became ‘rentier’ states – income flowed into them without corresponding processes of economic development. Even within the oil industry itself, expertise was rarely shared with the host nations. These phenomena are at the origins of the much-discussed ‘curse of oil’ that afflicts so many oil-based states around the world, and to which I will return in the concluding chapter. The often vast wealth generated by the presence of oil and other mineral resources either is transported abroad, or ends up in the hands of local elites. It is not accidental that oil and gas resources are so widely concentrated in countries which are authoritarian and corrupt.