Andrew Lilico: Things to believe and to disbelieve about climate change

Until perhaps two years ago, whether climate change was occurring and whether it was anything to do with human activity were topics that politically-minded people debated.  Greens urged that the burning of fossil fuels was going to heat up the planet, raising sea levels, expanding deserts, and causing much misery.  Climate change sceptics urged that the evidence was not there, and that we should not shackle the Market, undermine trade and limit the development of poorer nations on the basis of scare stories and hype.

In my view that debate went on rather longer than was fruitful, and because some people still cling to the most sceptical positions there, the real debate that we should be having has been seriously hobbled.  I shall explain.

I know lots of very smart people who still don’t believe there is any good evidence of human-induced climate change.  I understand why, as intellectually-confident individuals with lots of letters after (an sometimes before) their names they feel able to defy the overwhelming consensus of a scientific community.  Presumably many people that have become environmental scientists in the past twenty years took up research in that area precisely because they already believed that there was human-induced climate change, having been influenced by the concerns of green writers in the late 1980s.  That their subsequent research has confirmed their initial prejudices may make figures along the lines of “99% of all climate scientists think that…”  My guess is that the proportion of experts in feminist ethics who think that women had a good deal in the 1950s or that the husband is the head of the wife will be rather small, also.

But although, given the likely biases in the climate change research community, I think it appropriate to be polite to listen to my very clever friends’ scepticism, the fact remains that we forfeited our right to be listened to concerning the details of this debate when we chose not to do environmental science.  So now our entertaining dinner table debates cannot hope to influence policy.

In my view, the scientific consensus on this topic has been long past adequate to demand a policy response of some kind for perhaps ten years.  I take it that, for policy purposes, we should believe the following two propositions (even if we are still prepared to debate them in the privacy of our own homes):

(a) The planet is warming up;
(b) Human activity, including (though not necessarily restricted to) the burning of fossil fuels is a material contributory factor to this warming.

Now for many people, once (a) and (b) are accepted, the debate concerning action is over.  If humans are causing the planet to heat up, they believe we should stop doing so.  But this is a classic error in policy formulation.  When formulating policy, we should always bear in mind a number of principles:

• It does not follow, from the mere fact that we can tell a story that something is wrong that anything needs to be done about it.  For example, I could tell you a story about car repair shops, according to which consumers are relatively ill-informed about car repair compared with car repair shop-owners, and as a consequence are vulnerable to exploitation (e.g. by having unnecessary work done on their cars, or work that is deliberately shoddy so that it will need to be done again more quickly than is necessary).  Does the fact that I can tell such a story mean that car repair shops should have a regulator — like the FSA — or perhaps be subject to economic regulation — like the water industry?  Of course not.  For the Market may offer its own solutions to the problems we identify.  It is only once we have a compelling account of why the market cannot solve these problems that our analysis even gets going.
• Next, it does not follow, from the mere fact that there is a problem that the Market cannot address, that intervention by the government can address the problem any better.
• Next, it does not follow, from the fact that the government could, in principle, intervene to make things better, that any particular intervention is actually one that makes this problem better.
• And finally, even if a specific intervention would, indeed, make things better, it does not follow either that it is the best intervention available or that it will not have other impacts (costs and risks) that are worse than the problem it is trying to solve.

To summarize, if the government is to act, we need to know that any particular measure will actually improve things in a way that the Market would not, and that it does not create more problems than it solves.  Now this is no longer a scientific question.  It is an economic and policy question.

In the case of climate change, economists have been looking at the issue for a while.  Up until the Stern Review, although the analysis was still underdeveloped, there was a growing consensus that even though climate change might well have material impact, the costs of trying to prevent it (in the jargon, “mitigation”) were enormously greater than the costs of trying to live with it (in the jargon, “adaptation”).  The Stern Review was in many ways the most serious attempt to consider the costs and benefits calculation that had been done up to that point, and of course we all know the headline figures: Give up 1% of GDP today to get 20% of GDP back in the future.

Now the Stern Review has been subjected to extensive methodological criticism, and I think it’s fair to say that the position amongst economists is something like the following:

• If we want to do any work on environmental economics for any government agency, we take the results of the Stern Review as given and unquestionable.
• When we are down the pub, or chatting in meetings with other economists, almost no-one takes any of its results seriously.

I shan’t bore you with most of the critiques economists have offered of the Stern Review.  Indeed, for what it’s worth I consider many of them unfair, for I think the Stern Review should not be considered as the end of a research programme, but the beginning.  It proposes some interesting radical ideas about how we should think through certain problems, and the thing about interesting radical ideas is that most of them are stupid — but that’s okay, it’s how we make progress.  The problem only arises with the Stern Review if policy-makers misunderstand the robustness of its conclusions and take them as having proved that certain policies are desirable — for it does not achieve that.

There was one issue on which the Stern Review may have seemed radical to some readers, but in which it actually reflected a common kind of thought — one that is badly wrong.  Mainstream climate models and economic analysis associated with them suggest that the costs of climate change might, in a century’s time, be perhaps five percent of GDP.  To place this in context, people at that point are expected to be five times as wealthy as today if it were not for these costs of climate change, so the effect is that they are only 4.75 times as rich as us.  Since they are expected to be much richer than me, one might not think it too problematic if they pay for the costs of adjusting to climate change, rather than me — they aren’t planning to pay me for my research and development and capital accumulation, all of which will be important drivers of their wealth.

If we think about the claim that current climate change is the result of human-induced CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution, we can see the idea.  The deal is this: Tuvalu sinks beneath the waves, there is even more flooding than usual in Bangladesh, and in exchange we get pharmaceutical medicine, TV, Reeboks, McDonald’s, air travel, computers, blogs, and all the other apparatus of modern life.  That’s a no-brainer.  And in a century’s time, perhaps our great grandchildren will be sitting in their climate-controlled domes on Mars thinking “The deal was this: London flooded, the Mississippi overflowed even more than usual, and in exchange we got the cure for cancer, interplanetary travel, a life expectancy of 200, eyelid head-up-displays, telepathy, and all the other apparatus of modern life.  That was a no-brainer.”

So in principle there is little to apologize for if we decide not to bear additional costs today so that our great grandchildren will be “only” 4.75 times as rich as us.  Stern tried to deal with this partly through a very non-standard and highly criticized use of discount factors, which we shan’t go into, partly through evaluating non-financial losses to nature (ditto), and partly through placing some weight on scenarios in which matters went much worse than the (reasonably conservative) mainstream scenarios he considered.

This is the issue I wish to engage with.  Climate change will have an impact, but I believe that we should place zero weight on truly disastrous scenarios for that impact.  Why?  Well, throughout human history there have always been terribly clever people who would offer us terribly clever arguments as to why the world is about to end and the gods can only be assuaged by sacrificing a few virgins.  And, of course, from a policy perspective it can be quite attractive to acquiesce.  After all, when the world does not end we can point at the dead virgins and say: “Well, we took the hard decisions, and were criticized at the time, but all has turned out well in the end.  We have been vindicated by events.”  But the truth, I submit, is this: if your model predicts the end of the world, that is not an interesting discovery about the future path of things; it is a discovery about model, viz that it is flawed.

Doubtless there are some terribly clever climate change modellers who want to tell us that matters will be disastrous unless we reduce carbon emissions by — who knows? — 70 per cent.  And they get lots of airtime and politicians make lots of promises.  But, be their models ever so clever, they are wrong.  And that is not because I have some critique of the detailed workings of their models.  It is because the answer is just wrong.  The world isn’t going to come to an end even if we spend the next thirty years doing our utmost to increase carbon emissions. The world isn’t going to come to an end at all.  Of course the climate will be affected.  Of course the landscape may alter radically — as it has done many times through human history.  But the world will not come to an end.

That your climate change model tells you the world is going to end is a useful scientific result, for it tells us that there is something wrong with the model.  In the same way I sometimes see slightly sad articles in science magazines telling me that certain models of General Relativity predict that travelling backwards in time is possible. Indeed they do, and what that tells us is not that time travel is possible.  It tells us that those models are wrong.  And that is not because of the detailed workings of the model.  It is because of the answer.

In exactly the same way, climate models that tell us that the earth is likely to flick into a “white earth” scenario within a few centuries, or any other “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” scenario, are wrong.  We should not place any weight on such models, any more than we would place weight on models that predict we can travel backwards in time. They are interesting and useful precisely because, and only insofar as, they are wrong.

Mainstream climate models do not predict that the world will end. Consequently we are not faced with a desperate race against time in which we aim just to do as much as we possibly can, hoping that tomorrow we will be able to do more.  Rather, we are in the situation of normal policymaking, in which it may well be that there is a policy intervention that makes the world a better place by reducing the impact of climate change at fairly low cost, but each intervention needs to be judged on its own merits.  Climate change is not a special issue to which the normal rules of policy-making do not apply.  As in all other settings, we need an account of exactly what the problem is supposed to be, why the Market will not address it itself, and why this particular policy option on the table is the one to follow.  Then perhaps we can stop trying to “save the planet”, and instead stick to the more modest goal of “making the world a better place.”

Comments

[James]

"I sometimes see slightly sad articles in science magazines telling me that certain models of General Relativity predict that travelling backwards in time is possible. Indeed they do, and what that tells us is not that time travel is possible. It tells us that those models are wrong."

Andrew, I find most of what you write to be intelligent and well thought through, as is most of this article.

But sometimes you drop in the odd sweeping statement as if it is self-evidently true, like this one.

So General Relativity is wrong and time travel is not possible...because? Because Andrew doesn't think so?

I know that time travel isn't the theme of this thread, so sorry for starting off with what was for you a throw away comment, but it is relevent given the point you make with it.

Time travel may well be possible - there is nothing in General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics or String Theory to prohibit it. Just because it is counter-intuitive doesn't make it wrong.

The same, sadly, is true of your comments on the end-of-the-world climate models. No, of course the worst case scenario won't mean the end of the planet, or even the end of life - but they could mean the end of civilisation. Run away global warming has more than just a computer model to show it can happen, it has an example - Venus.

Personally, I don't believe this is likely, but I don't dismiss it out of hand as you appear to.

[I'm sorry, Aristotle. I understand your theories that the Earth is round (due to the shadow cast on the moon during a Lunar Eclipse, and the changing positions of the constellations when you head south). But frankly these don't prove the Earth is round. They prove that your methodology is wring. Every one knows that the Earth is flat. This is as self-evident as the fact that you can't travel backwards through time].

[A.T. Watt]

It should be obvious to any right thinking person that climate change is nothing but a SHAM, albeit one involving most of the world's climate scientists. However, this only goes to show what a massive fraud the whole business is - a point of logic that has escaped Mr Cameron.

[Alex Swanson]

The issue is not one of science, it is one of trust. Most people do not have access to the relevant data, and do not have the time or skills to analyse it even if they did. So we have to decide whether we trust the kind of people who are telling us about it.

This prompts two questions:
(a) Are they the kind of people who tell us the truth in other areas?
(b) Do they themselves act as if they believe it and modify their own behaviours even if it costs them to do so?

Further comment is really unnecessary.

[Dale]

Who is this guy and why are we suposed to listen to him.

[Dale]

Who do i see about getting the last 5 minutes of my life back?

[Benet Northcote]

You are missing the moral dimension to climate change. The World Health Organisation predicts that 150,000 people a year die from temperature increases we've already experienced. That figure will rise as temperatures increase further.

Surely policy makers need to respond to immediate needs of individuals? We demand policies on health so that people live longer. Why not climate policies that will help people live longer?

Also, you seem to imply that tackling climate change means we cannot make any technological improvements in our lives ("The deal was this: London flooded, the Mississippi overflowed even more than usual, and in exchange we got the cure for cancer, interplanetary travel, a life expectancy of 200, eyelid head-up-displays, telepathy, and all the other apparatus of modern life. That was a no-brainer.")

Why can't we tackle climate change and improve our technology? Indeed, the urgency of reducing our CO2 footprint is more likely to spur on technological development.

Fighting cancer is expensive today, but it is the right thing to do as it improves the human condition. The same is true of fighting climate change.

[Tony Makara]

It is unfortunate that the subject of climate change has become a political football with seemingly those right-of-centre willing to dismiss climate change as being some sort of left-wing conspiracy theory.

I am not a scientist but I am someone very interested in nature and particularly the wildlife that comes with it. I certainly have noticed a change over the last decade or so. The fly season which is usually set between may to september is now running from early april to late october and my garden seems to be growing quicker and faster each year. I've also noticed large numbers of dragon flies in the village where I live in august/september, at one time these dragon flies could only be seen down by the nearby river Irwell, but now they are spreading their territory.

If we are to make sense of climate change, we need to look for signs in a nature. The natural world only responds to stimuli and the fly season starting a month earlier and finishing a month later than it did ten years ago indicates to me that there has been a change in the seasons.

[Michael McGowan]

"150,000 people a year die from temperature increases we have already experienced." How does one begin to prove this? Even if it were true, has anyone asked which people/regions have benefited from a general rise in temperatures? I strongly suspect that there are both winners and losers from climate change, which has been a recurrent feature of the Earth's history.

If we really believe that human activity has such a drastic effect on climate change (which I doubt), then the solutions are obvious: (a) a drastic reduction in the soaring population of Planet Earth; and (b) a massive reduction in the amount of meat we eat, because livestock produce far more emissions than cars and aeroplanes. (b) would also slash cancer and heart disease rates. We should also be embracing nuclear energy. Of course, you will never hear these recommendations from the anti-capitalist zealots in the green lobby because they mainly see climate change as a pretext for curtailing the freedoms and prosperity of liberal free-market democracies.

Generally, I am sympthetic to environmental concerns but am tired of politically-motivated attempts to intimidate people into conformity over the climate change issue. Al Gore behaves like a 15th century Pope: living in opulence, criss-crossing the world by executive jet while rebuking the peasants about their depraved lifestyles.

[Sam S]

Is A.T Watt a scientist...?

Errr, methinks not.

[Timothy]

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.- Michael Crichton

As a scientist I agree with Mr Crichton wholeheartedly. Scientists rarely have a consensus on anything. We constantly bicker, adjust, argue and then do some more experiments and find out that things are not as they seem.

I do not think that there is no evidence of climate change occuring, rather, I think there is little to link it to human activity. When data is released showing surface temperature increases, and one looks at the data, one can see quite quickly that it has been, for want of a better word, fiddled. Some of the mathematical models that are commonly used demand an increase in temperature regardless of CO2 increase, decrease or indeed even if they stay the same. Sometimes 'adjustments' are added in to compensate for 'ground cooling' (nope, no one has explained to me why we need to factor this in), which then skews the data upwards.

What really frustrates me is that when I try to point out some logical errors in people assumptions I am labeled a heretic. This is not science, but pseudo-religious fevour. If we are to convince people to change their lifestyles and pump out less carbon then the evidence must be open to scrutiny and scientists have to be able to defend it openly, not keep shouting until everyone gets bored and can't be bothered any more. I have yet to see this. The political interference with the science and the arrogance of some climate scientists has not helped their cause.

[James Sproule]

The problem of climate change is that it is a faith, and many of its adherents are as open to argument as medieval monks. Would the IPCC fund any scientist who disagreed with it? Would any government body fund research which cast doubt upon that bodies need to exist? For at least some of the scientists, and a substantial proportion of the NGO activists, climate change scepticism is a threat to their professional lives. The opprobrium cast on the Channel 4 show on climate change shows us how they respond to such a threat.

Climate change scepticism comes in many forms, from those who are sceptical about climate change at all, to those who may accept that it is happening, but doubt that man has much to do with it, or those who accept man may be to blame, but there is little we can do about it.

Any ideology which proclaims a global emergency that must be acted upon immediately, with no time for debate should immediately be suspect. I am Conservative precisely because I doubt the wisdom of big government. I understand that the immediate battle has largely been lost. But so was the battle over the need for an intrusive welfare state, that did not stop Hayek objecting to it, and in the process winning the war.

[A.T. Watt]

Sam S:

"Is A.T Watt a scientist...?

"Errr, methinks not."

Sir, or possibly Madam,

When one is SOUND, science is superfluous

[Michael McGowan]

I am sure the Head of the Inquisition said much the same thing to Galileo and Copernicus. Didn't the Committee of Public Safety tell Lavoisier as they were sentencing him to death that the Republic had no need of scientists?

[Rod Sellers]

"If we really believe that human activity has such a drastic effect on climate change (which I doubt), then the solutions are obvious: (a) a drastic reduction in the soaring population of Planet Earth; and (b) a massive reduction in the amount of meat we eat, because livestock produce far more emissions than cars and aeroplanes. (b) would also slash cancer and heart disease rates. We should also be embracing nuclear energy."

Michael McGowan has it exactly right.

If People Pollute - then More people Pollute More.Therefore national Policy that 'encourages' population growth (through family benefits, lack of family planning, immigration levels beyond the ability of indiginous resources to cope) is counter productive and wipes out any possible benefit from reduction of carbon emmissions. The sensible argument that everyone can understand is the avoidance of waste of declining natural resources for its own sake - not wind turbines or armageddon !!!

[Derek]

I accept the point that the world has warmed a little over the past 35 years, though there has been no increase over the last decade. There is no proof that man is the cause, and there is no consensus among climate scientists. That is the position today. If you don't believe me visit climatescience where you will find a mass of evidence to show it.

[Andrew Lilico]

James@09:23

Okaaay... At the extreme peril of going off at a tangent, and with prior apologies for something that has nothing directly to do with politics...

Non-nerds should look away now!

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In the unlikely event that anyone is interested in whether time travel is possible, here is one fairly precise reason why not.

Time is an ordering on events. The ordering relation is defined such that if event A precedes event B then, in principle, event A could have an effect (as efficient cause) upon B but event B could not have an effect (as efficient cause) upon A. If two events could have effects upon each other, or neither could have any effect on the other, then the events are simultaneous.

Since efficient causation by definition involves cause preceding event, this means that all events within a "time loop" (the period between when something from the future "arrived" in the past and when it "set off") would be simultaneous.

***********************************

[Tony Makara]

Time-travel can't exist because time doesn't exist. Time is a man-made concept, it is not a thing as such. Time exists as a thought, that is, in our heads, but it doesn't exist in reality. We create time as an instrument to qualify cause and effect but in reality there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, there is only now, and now is permanent. It our minds that trick us into thinking that time exists.

[Malcolm Dunn]

I am not scientist and therefore do not know whether the overwhelming majority of scientists who claim that the current rises in the Earth's temperature are a man made phenomenon are right or not.
I think it unlikely however that so many eminent people are wrong.Arguments such as those advanced by AT Watt are simply moronic, sadly I've heard similar too many times at Conservative debates.
Michael Mcgowan probably has it right when he states that there are far too many people in the world for the finite rescources Earth offers.No politicians of any hue ever seem to acknowledge the fact.

[Tony Makara]

Malcolm Dunn, population certainly is a worry. I've always believed that contraception is one of the finest inventions. I have to say that the Chinese were very wise in their birth control policies, same goes for the Indian government's attempts to encourage birth control. Any change in the climate can have catastrophic effects on crops and related foodstuffs. More study needs to go into the question of population and contraception should be made freely available to problem areas.

[Andrew Lilico]

Most of these comments reflect what I take to be an unhelpfully sceptical mindset. Without wanting to say that the debate is closed - few scientific debates ever are - it does seem to me that on the two key points that I made - that the climate is changing and that human-induced fossil fuel emissions are connected to that heating - we should have ample confidence for policy purposes.

But I urge again, it does not follow from the fact that the climate is changing and that human action has something to do with it that we need to do anything and everything we possibly can to stop it.

[William Norton]

What a thoroughly rewarding and interesting article. Some reactions to previous comments:

(1) What everyone forgets is that Copernicus was actually wrong: he said the planets described circular orbits around the Sun, when most of them don't - a fact clearly recognised at the time. (The orbits are elliptical, which wasn't realised until Kepler: until then Ptolemy's system was predictively better.) On the balance of the available evidence at the time, Galileo could not prove his theories: see the letter by St Robert Bellarmine following his conversations with Galileo (NB: Bellarmine also made the point that Galileo's theiory wasn't heretical, and they weren't why he was condemned).

(2) General relativity/time travel: since the point cannot be decided one way or the other without a convincing theory of quantum gravity perhaps people should stop contributing here and instead contact the Nobel Prize committee?

[Adrian Peirson]

It's a Global Neo Con Tax Scan...Look Why not ask Gorgon to suggest that at age five, every child arrange with their family and friends and their local church a tree Planting ceremony where they plant five trees in their Local Community.

Think the Neo Cons & Socialists in Westminster will go for that.

I didn't think so, I mean, where is their slice of the action.
Its a Tax Scam.
Are they even considering trees as a means of soaking up CO2, Nope...Would the World not look better with More Trees ?

They are not interested nor focussed on CO2 they are focussed om MONEY.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977182500
http://www.globalwarminghysteria.com/blog/2007/3/8/jupiter-neptune-pluto-and-mars-are-all-warming.html

[Serf]

The World Health Organisation predicts that 150,000 people a year die from temperature increases we've already experienced.

Millions die from Malaria every year.

Cost of massive reduction in Malaria deaths ... a few pounds per Mosquito net.
Cost of tackling global warming..... untold trillions, plus indirectly killing people whose health would have benefited from faster economic growth.

Spending Millions on saving 150.000 lives, when the same money could have saved millions of lives, is statistical murder.

I am sure that we need to take sensible steps to reduce our environmental impact on our planet, but this extremist hysteria will actually kill people if it goes unchecked.

[Eli Rabett]

If you want the detailed version of why you should care, read the Working Group II report from the IPCC titled Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. If you want it in pictures, ok, diagrams, look here

The controlling point is that costs increase non-linearly with increasing temperature, so that, for example, a 6 C temperature increase is a world wide disaster, while damage from a 2 C increase is local and there are places that benefit. However, we are currently on track for the higher range by the end of this century or shortly thereafter and that would not be the stopping point with business as usual.

[VRWC]

Concerning; "The World Health Organization predicts that 150,000 people a year die from temperature increases." The WHO will also tell you that far more people die from cold each year than heat, thus, more people will be saved by rising temperatures than killed.

But this is not even close to the worst outrage perpetrated by the GW worshiping crowd. Close to 2 billion people on this planet live in abject poverty, with no regular sources of electricity, despite the fact that many of them live on top of abundant reserves of coal and natural gas. But no one in the first world will help those poverty stricken billions develop these resources because the Global Warming addled Greens have forbidden it and hold a monopoly on Western development funds.

Most of these poor people heat their homes and cook their meals with the nearest fossil fuel handy...usually wood, leaves, tree bark or animal dung. That fact that this releases much more carbon into the atmosphere per person, not to mention denuding nearby forests, than a clean burning natural gas plant would release, does not trouble the Greens because preventing coal and natural gas plants from being built is the GW religion’s First Commandment.

The WHO estimates that up to 5 million children under the age of 5 contract respiratory disease each year, and over 1 million die, because of their exposure to this smoke in their homes.

But the Greens tell them, "No fossil fuel plants for you! You may only have Solar or wind power." Which, being the most expensive source of power, means no power at all.

So, third worlders, the message from environmentalists is; Thou shalt not burn fossil fuel. Go choke on the smoke in your hovels and watch your children die. You can't have access to the power sources that brought our economies out of poverty because we'd rather feel good about ourselves by pretending to do something about imaginary climate change than worry about you.

Sickening...