An inconvenient argument
25-Nov-2009

If the evidence for global warming is so overwhelming, why are its detractors – the so-called ‘climate sceptics’ – so influential? Is it because science is by nature conflictual? Or is it because politics panders to populist versus minority causes? Or because of media-induced debate (where really, there is none)?

World opinion on the subject is being shaped and reshaped daily. Hardly a news bulletin issues without some summary of the latest evidence for global warming. But is it evidence or speculation? Is human activity really responsible for global warming? How much of it? Is anthropogenic carbon emission the real culprit? Or is it just one of many – some avoidable, some inevitable; some deliberate, some cyclic?

The answers to these questions are not easily settled. Perhaps the media is at fault.

Perhaps we are raising the alarms by elevating a scientific debate about grey issues into black and white absolutes? Maybe we are guilty of reductionism. Of taking complex theoretical hypothetical modelled relationships between many variables and simplifying them for our readers into an ‘either-or’/zero-sum game that makes for easy understanding, but which overstates and therefore dramatises the actual reality.

Or is it science itself? Is it that, as in so many things, the scientific jury is actually still out (on the extent, causes and prospects of global warming), but that politics has taken over and made moot science seem like settled science? Or is it inevitable that scientists in pursuit of scientific adulation and scientific funding dollars have taken their cause and elevated it to political-football level in order to prove their worth?

Perhaps that is too cynical a view, but if scientists and politicians cannot agree about the causes, extent and future for global warming, how can the rest of us, ordinary citizens, reach intelligible and reliable conclusions?

The climate sceptics lobby believe that global warming is a cyclic pattern of the natural world and that human activity contributes little, if anything, toward it, and that global warming scientists are politically motivated to overstate their case.

Global warming scientists tell us, on the other hand, that human activity is at the centre of current global warming patterns and unless carbon-emitting human activity is substantially reduced, something like the catastrophes depicted in the recent film ‘2012’ may befall us.

Climate sceptics respond that the consequences of that thesis will be to put a brake on the industrial progress and living standards of westernised developed peoples, while industrialisation will continue unabated, they allege, in emerging powers such as China and India and the so-called ‘Second World’ of nations.

Meanwhile, pro-global warming lobbyists and activists are busy elevating their science into near-religious hysteria. Their clamour for global agreement about global warming is undoubtedly sincere, and deserving, but their campaign of political disruption has the hallmark of a quasi-religious Inquisition about it – that unless one subscribes to their particular set of facts and worst-case scenarios about global warming, one is a traitor to the cause of humanity.

Against that virulent dogmatism, the release yesterday of hijacked decade-old emails passing between global warming scientists at a British university will do little to restore confidence in that thesis and allay suspicions that politics is taking over science. The emails allegedly represent the scientists as ideologically bent in the global warming position and willing to skite about it.

As Copenhagen approaches, the divergence between global warmers and climate sceptics is also meeting a nadir of sorts across the Pacific in the Australian parliament where the Rudd government seems united on the side of global warming and the need to address it, while the Opposition Liberal-National coalition is split between global warmers and climate sceptics. All of which is making it impossible for the Australian PM to take a national consensus position to the Danish talk-fest in a couple of weeks without substantial compromises toward the climate sceptic position.

And none of which is doing anything to pacify the concerns and address the practical realities of ‘climate refugees’ – potentially the world’s first – right here in the Pacific. While science remains contested, while politicians debate and make long-term promises, and while mass media project the alarming theoretical consequences of global warming, our very own indigenous Pacific peoples on low-lying remote islands will likely be first to suffer and last to know the truth about global warming – inconvenient or not.