The Politics of Climate Change (5 page)

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.
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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.
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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.'
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A similar statement was put out by members of the US National 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.
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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.

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:

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.
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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'.
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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 CO
₂
, but also methane. Methane is many times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO
₂
. 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'.
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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.
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In his book
Storms of My Grandchildren
Hansen talks of ‘our last chance to save humanity'.
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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 CO
₂
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'
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(tar sands can be used to extract oil on the large scale, but release far more emissions in so doing than orthodox oil production).