Archives for posts with tag: climate change

My last blog post brings me nicely to a recent debate on climate change on RTE Prime Time (an Irish current affairs programme).

On the panel were Kevin Humphreys (Junior Minister in the Dept of Social Protection), Ray Bates (Adjunct Professor at the Meteorology and Climate Centre in UCD), Oisin Coughlan (Friends of the Earth) and Eamon Ryan (Green Party).

While, I think, two of the panelists (Humphreys and Coughlan) did creditably well to represent their positions, the other two, Bates and Ryan, were awful, and for two different reasons.

Maybe I should get the worst of them out of the way first. Eamon Ryan came across as shrill, ill-tempered and preachy. He butted straight into other people’s talk time, listened to no-one, waved his hands and acted like a small boy in a sweetshop whose parents wouldn’t buy him a pack of bonbons. He might feel really, really, really strong about this issue (and I don’t blame him for that), but his style completely overruled content on the night. Humphreys only had to roll his eyes a few times, and Miriam O’Callaghan to politely reprimand him, for us all to realise that Ryan’s emotions had let him down badly. He should be long enough in this business by now to realise that dogmatism and rudeness does you no favours in a TV debate, nor does it help the credibility of your party.

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Eamon Ryan in full flight

On the opposite side, Ray Bates was a model of civility and patience. He was considered. He didn’t lose his temper. Which was unfortunate, because Ray Bates was, by far, the most problematic person on the panel.

Now, to be fair to Bates, he is not what I would call a First Degree Denier. He accepts anthropogenic climate change (ie. we’re responsible for it), but he disputes how bad it’s going to be and how long it will take.

Bates took pains to advertise his scientific credentials. Indeed, He mentioned them a few times. But what I heard was something slightly different than what I might expect most scientists to say. He spent his time picking some IPCC findings that suited his argument: that the margin of error was greater in 2013 than in 2007, or that 2015’s warming was less in the higher atmosphere than the lower atmosphere, or that climate models were out by a factor of 3. Pick, pick, pick. It’s like he was reading all the data, then looking for a small number of anomalies that he could use for the purposes of spreading uncertainty. That’s curious.

So here’s the thing. If you are fairly clueless on the details of global warming like most of us are, you would be left with the impression that all scientists have the same viewpoint as Ray: that they think it’s serious, but it’s not something to worry about too much. He was the only person on the panel with real scientific credentials – others were political and activism based – so that lent his view a certain amount of gravitas in the circumstances.

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Prof. Ray Bates – climate models are the best we have, but sure, we can pick and choose.

But the fact is that he is very much out of step with most of his peers around the world. It’s not because they are all have some chip on their shoulder, or he’s not invited to the right parties; it’s because they are reading the data differently to him. The issue really is more urgent than he is making it out to be. After reading John Gibbons’ article about him, I tend to concur with the view that he is somewhat more protective of the Irish agricultural position than a totally independent actor should really be. I think he has an ideological position in this matter – otherwise why such a pro-agri stance? Why use the airtime to water down the findings in favour of the status quo?

I’m unhappy that Bates was the only scientist that RTE could find on this subject, because he badly misrepresented the scientific position on this. RTE needs to start getting away from the climate denier spokespeople – who are always available to talk – and start hearing more from other scientists who can better speak to the likely downstream issues caused by a rapidly warming world.


Let’s say you were watching a programme on house building, but every time the builder spoke up about using concrete blocks, the camera panned afterwards to a person who believed that instead of concrete, Christmas tinsel should be a better building material.

Or, you were watching a motoring programme with a mechanic talking about putting oil in the engine to keep the parts moving. After he had spoken, the programme sought the views of a person who felt that Fanta Orange was a much better alternative than oil to lubricate the engine.

Imagine, in both cases, how the builder or the mechanic would feel about this. Imagine what they would think about the programme makers. “Short changed” would be putting it mildly.

With due consideration to the Christmas Tinselists and Fanta Orangeists out there, we might consider it completely mad for a programme to devote time to people who clearly were off the range as regards issues that are generally accepted as mainstream ideas. Not only that, but it would be seen by many as sowing confusion and distraction where no such thing was warranted.

The principle of balance is ingrained into most broadcasting organisations. To be fair to all sides, they will often invite people with different viewpoints to debate particular points. This is a good principle in the main. It minimises the chances that we are being excluded from hearing important contrary information when making your mind up about various issues. It also makes for good, entertaining TV and radio.

In the cases above, however, you can see that the principle of balance can be overextended, particularly when subjects are largely decided and incontrovertible. In many situations, therefore, the broadcaster is not required to create a “balanced” debate; they are perfectly entitled to represent the single accepted position and get on with it. This is the picture acknowledged by most experts in that field. It’s accepted because there is overwhelming support for it. Why create debate when there is none?

Take evolution for instance. There are people in this world who deny evolution, primarily for religious reasons. That’s their choice. It is a nonsense, however, to employ the principle of balance when discussing evolution, because unlike evolutionary scientists, creationists have no real evidence supporting their position. In the many decades since Darwin first published his ideas, creationists have utterly failed to provide reliable support for an alternative, while the scientific underpinning have multiplied in size. The scientific evidence is so overwhelming that it’s a complete nonsense to suggest that a debate even exists. Pitting a creationist against an evolutionary scientist – no matter how many people feel there is a debate to be had – is quite ridiculous. It only serves to elevate a faith based position to be seen as a plausible alternative to the scientific research – a position it does not deserve.

After so much debate and so much evidence, we are also entitled to question the motives of those who would continue – to this day – to promote creationism or intelligent design as credible alternatives on a par with evolutionary science. Since their positions have been refuted in so many ways and for such a long period of time, we can safely say that such people are no longer interested in an honest pursuit of the truth. Denial has a propaganda value. Thus, it’s not just false balance: anyone organising a debate between creationists and evolutionary scientists nowadays must accept that the creationists are not coming to the table with pure intentions, despite what they might say publicly.

Such is also the case with climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists are in agreement that a) CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are warming the planet, b) that intensive human activity is the major factor in this warming and that c) this issue needs to be tackled urgently. Deniers take issue with some or all of these statements, but their arguments have little scientific merit. Pitted against decades worth of evidence building and hypothesis testing, the denier community has come up short. They are losing and they know it. Having singularly failed to develop a plausible scientific alternative, they resort to sowing doubt and muddying the waters. It’s the Creationism vs Evolution debate all over again. Because it too has only got worse for deniers in the past years, we have to ask ourselves what the underlying motive for maintaining their stance might be.

It’s for these reasons that I don’t think it’s useful to be giving a platform to climate change deniers on broadcast media. Like Christmas Tinselists or Fanta Orangeists, they have no scientific argument to make and thus they are a distraction from the real issue. But more than this, just like creationists, I have a problem with their motives. When the evidence is so overwhelming, there has to be an underlying reason for maintaining their stance. An honest debate in such circumstances is impossible.

I have rarely witnessed such passion and venom as currently besets the ongoing debate on climate change. It seems as if everyone has a view. Surprisingly for me, a very large section of opinion makers are firmly on the No side of the argument. They believe global warming is bunk.

Sifting through the rhetoric, it seems that many commentators see climate change as the ultimate liberal conspiracy. According to this viewpoint, 1990 saw an end to Communism but instead of throwing away the placards, the socialists threw their lot in with the new cause célèbre: environmentalism. Twenty years on and our leaders are in Copenhagen, addled by decades of left wing fear-mongering. They will willingly throw away any chance of future prosperity on a mirage, a dream that will never happen. It’s an understandable argument, but it misses a key point. The protesters don’t matter. The politics doesn’t matter. All that matters in this debate is the science.

I’m not a huge fan of militant activism, because activists often jump to huge conclusions based on relatively few facts. Activists have got many things wrong in the past, which leads to the conclusion that just because you are passionate about something doesn’t make you right. The corollary is also true, however. Passion in itself doesn’t make you wrong either.

Another view is that Climate Change is just one big bandwagon, upon which many people, who don’t understand the science, have crept aboard. This is quite true, but for the same reasons as above it is also irrelevant to the debate. The fact that it is a bandwagon issue doesn’t make it implicitly untrue.

The only thing that matters in this debate is the quality of the science. Climate scientists from many different fields, using multiple lines of evidence, sophisticated measuring devices, supercomputers, myriads of data points and complex statistical models, have paintakingly arrived at a conclusion that the world is warming and that a significant part of that warming is man made. If you want to argue this, you need to argue the science. This is not at all easy, which is why so few people in this debate, on both sides of the argument, are qualified to talk about it at all. Right now, there is plenty of heat, but very little light.

So, unless I hear that there is a reasonable alternative theory that addresses the data and the multiple lines of evidence in a coherent way but yields a contrary outcome, I will stay with the consensus view. Ultimately, scientists are reasonable people. It’s not normally in their interest or their nature to reject the evidence in favour of political dogma. Talk of a conspiracy among scientists is unlikely in the extreme.


Global Warming


Killer pandemics


Next in line: The economy.

Phelim McAleer is a film-maker who has produced a documentary challenging the climate change consensus. He appeared on an Irish political program this evening to  debate with a climate scientist, Dr. Kieran Hickey. Now I haven’t watched much of this guy’s documentary yet, but even so, his argument was full of glaring logical fallacies.* 

1) A key plank of McAleer’s argument by the sounds of it is that because the scientific consensus got DDT so badly wrong that they must be wrong this time. 

Rubbish. Even if the scientists did get DDT wrong (and I’ll bet there’s a bit more to this story than meets the eye), that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong on climate change. Methinks there is some selective thinking going on here. What about other scientific consensuses he omitted to mention? The connection between HIV and AIDS? Cowpox vaccination and Smallpox? Microbes and cholera? Smoking and lung cancer? Indeed, when it comes down to it: Gravity, Genetic theory, Plate Tectonics, Quantum Mechanics and Evolution are all scientific consensuses. It’s just a classic case of poisoning the well

2) Scientists have an agenda. 

The allegation here is that climate change is a big liberal conspiracy. This is an odd one, because the biggest vested interests in the climate change debate have always come from the other side! Get this: the combined revenue of the top 5 oil companies last year was 1.5 trillion dollars. 1,500,000,000,000 dollars. 1.5 million million dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of Canada. Climate scientists were persona non grata in the White House for most of the last 8 years of the Bush presidency. If it’s a big conspiracy the financial backers must be an odd bunch indeed. Just because scientists are (according to you) bad people, it’s doesn’t make them wrong, Phelim. 

3) Climate change is a fad.

Apparently Phelim was taught in school in the 1970’s that the Ice Age was approaching in our lifetimes. In between there have been lots of fads, many of which have never come true. This argument attempts to conflate fads with real science, which is just ridiculous. Many of these fads never had any sort of consensus scientific backing. They were just media baubles – minority views that caught the imagination of the press for a period of time. Climate Change originated in the 1970’s as a seriously minority view. There was an activism bandwagon on climate change in the 1980’s which was often shone more heat than light. Cultural fads like this come and go, but the difference in this case was that real science began to weigh in over the past 20 years or so. This has swung the pendulum away from pure fad and into the realm of fact. An analogue is Wegener’s continental drift model that began as a minority view, but became in time accepted as a valid scientific theory when the science began to validate many of his arguments. Fads are not science. They lie on the margins, waiting to be validated or disproved. A lot of hard work needs to take place for a fad to become science, and in the case of climate change, this work has been carried out, with the argument pointing in no uncertain terms towards a deeply worrying future for us all. 

Here’s my biggest gripe with the whole thing. Debates are good when one person’s opinion is pitched against another person’s opinion. So if you bring the audience around to your point of view, you’ve won. Well done. A big prize to you. However, when you have a debate against a scientific consensus, then it doesn’t work so well. Even if the audience all agree with you, even if they carry you around on their shoulders in adulation, that doesn’t make your argument right. Science is not determined from public opinion. It has nothing to do with public opinion. It’s based on evidence, and the only way to challenge the science is to use the tools of science against it. These challenges do happen, but they don’t take place in public debate forums. No, they happen in scientific journals, conferences and papers, where each piece of evidence is scrutinised and debated until, you guessed it – a consensus emerges. So, even if the science is wrong in this case, Phelim, what is your alternative? Film-making?

* If you have never heard much about logical fallacies, I recommend you to take a look through this site. It may be the most educational hour or so you will spend this year.

What if humans no longer existed? What if one day, all the animals woke up to find us no longer here? What would happen to the Earth then? Here’s an account that speculates about what might happen next.

I’m fascinated by these things ever since I read a book that associated the rise and fall of human society in Ireland with pollen samples taken from ancient soils.

Flikr image by 3water. Reproduced under Creative Commons license

A new cinema is opening in my home-town today, and one movie I really want to see is the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth“. I’m sure I’ve got a fairly good idea of the content already without knowing much about it: things are looking bad, here’s one piece of evidence, here’s another, here’s another (oh no), here’s another (enough already), here’s another (oh please, please), here’s another (aah – where’s the razor blades?), here’s what we are doing about it at the moment (not very much), here’s what the major powers are doing about it (climate change, what climate change?), here’s what it all means if we continue to ignore it (death, and doom and destruction and lots of awful yucky things), and finally the inevitable “here’s what we can all do about it”.

Now it’s the last bit that intrigues me the most. What can we do about something like this?

The stock answer is simple. We all get together and co-operate to make things better. Simple in principle. Devilishly complicated in practice.

When I was a kid, the priest at Mass would exhort us to be better people – to reach out to poor people who were less well off than us. They used to plead to people about making changes in their lives to create a more just society. And do you think people listened? Did they heck…

Arguments and exhortations to change are just not very effective. Treaties and agreements are often short term in nature, breaking down when the circumstances change. There are around 200 countries in the world, and do you think they can agree on anything? Not particularly. The Kyoto protocol, itself a badly watered down compromise, is already practically irrelevant. Indeed, even the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, a common-sense corner-stone of how people should be treated, is blissfully ignored by many governments around the world. The same is the case with the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, along with many other international agreements that are gathering dust as a result of governmental inaction. It’s not just governments who do not co-operate to make things better. On an individual level, SUV sales have never been so brisk, obesity levels are going through the roof, and none of the major tobacco companies have yet gone bankrupt. It’s the price we pay for having high levels of freedom. We co-operate when we see a personal (often short-term) advantage in doing so, otherwise we are perfectly free to opt out.

Long term agreements to co-operate are ineffective because they often go against very fundamental dynamics in our society. Free co-operation is difficult to achieve, because all you need is one defector to upset the apple-cart. The desire to compete for personal gain and to protect what is ours practically define us as humans. Co-operation often makes sense within this context, but when circumstances change and the effect of co-operation becomes self-defeating, the parties to the agreement quickly start looking for a way out.

The only way long-term co-operation seems to work is when it is imposed from a higher authority. The higher authority says “this is how you must behave”, and if you defect, the higher authority imposes strict penalties against you. To meet the challenge of global change in this context, it seems to me you would need a single world government, and a pretty dictatorial one at that. I’m not sure if too many people would be very happy with this. I certainly wouldn’t be.

Is there an alternative to this? Whatever the answer, it needs to comply with social dynamic models – how humans as a group behave in a relatively free environment. Otherwise, it’s probably a failure from the start. For a solution to be effective in the long term, it needs to be economically valid as well as environmentally valid. Economics will always win if there is a conflict. I think there is an alternative, an incomplete and potentially unjust one, but nevertheless quite an effective one.

Human nature is not that prone to major change, but there is one thing in society that changes at breakneck speed. Because of it, each generation often experiences very different and often improved circumstances, compared to the preceding one. The phenomenon is technology: our ability to bend the natural environment to do our bidding – arguably one of the few core competences that sets us apart from other animals in this world.

Technology is an interesting phenomenon in this context because it changes rapidly, it changes the world rapidly, and most particularly because it fits in with human social dynamics. It thrives in conditions of competition and collaboration and it meets a very basic need within us all – the need to make things better. The advances in computing, genetic engineering, space-science, communications, food-science, medicine and materials science are bewildering and beyond the ken of even the greatest 1930’s science fiction writer. We have achieved massive quality of life improvements in our society in just a few generations by letting the tinkerers free to build on ideas from their peers and fore-runners. Why not see how this impressive intellectual capability could be applied against the greatest threat we face to our existence?

Of course, technology has both good and bad aspects to it. It could be argued that the climate change problem itself is a result of technology in the first place. If we had not discovered the industrial potential of coal and oil, things might be very different today. But, if it has caused the problem, then it’s probably a good starting point for finding some solutions too. Technology already has had a huge effect in changing the environment for the better. We have lower emissions from cars and planes, much more efficient fuel consumption, lower levels of industrial pollution, and many alternatives to oil are already available. Compare, for example, the huge coal-burning industries of the start of the century to the much more efficient modern factories of today.

I’m not saying that we should support technology as a solution to our problems because it is the ideal answer, but because it is probably the most effective answer. Technology has a potential to improve societies that can afford it, while ignoring those that are too poor to do anything about it. It also can make very small numbers of people fabulously wealthy, while huge inequalities exist around the world. It’s not perfect, but what it does have the potential to do is to achieve change rapidly. Technology, combined with a degree of governance, can help to quell some of the excesses.
Where governments and powerful organisations fit in is in helping to create the context within which research into these technologies can be fostered. In normal circumstances, this should have happened already, but the current US administration, in its refusal to accept the dire warnings of the IPCC, has put back the effort by a decade. Vital years have now been wasted that could have been productively spent researching and testing technological solutions and alternatives. The reason I single out the US is because of its position of prominence in world economic thinking. When the US commits itself to a goal, other countries swiftly follow suit, particularly if they sense an opportunity to make money.

So, to meet the challenge of rising sea levels and desertification and all the bad things that are predicted, we need to start thinking about economically valid solutions to the problems we face. I think that these solutions can be found, not through ineffective exhortations to cooperate, but through an environment that gives technologists the resources and freedoms to address the problems of the future.

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