TWO CHEERS FOR UK GOVERNMENT’S NET ZERO STRATEGY.

 

Many observers will rightly point to gaps and perceived weaknesses or inadequacies in the the Net Zero strategy. But the general direction is better than we might have expected from a collection of former science deniers, and will need to be defended against sustained attack from groups of Tory backbench reactionaries.

“More joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth ….”

The transformation of some of our political leaders from positive hostility to the findings of climate science, to at least a grudging acceptance of its realities, or even apparent enthusiasm for a Green future, is remarkable and welcome.

Let’s not forget, though, the past role of such as Nigel Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation, or “think tanks” such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, among many others, in obscuring the issues, and delaying general acceptance and understanding of the truths that have been evident to most scientists and intelligent observers for at least twenty years. This historic guilt can certainly be found in the present Cabinet and there are many unreconstructed MPs in the governing party who cannot be relied upon to support net zero policies when the going gets tough, as it will.

Even our PM’s recruitment to the crusade against greenhouse gas emissions is, he admits, recent. It is not so long since he himself was querying the scientific consensus, dabbling in crackpot theories about sunspots, and disparaging windfarms. The real test will arrive when he has to confront opposition from the climate sceptics within his own party. That will start soon. 

Defeated on the science, the sceptics and fossil fuel lobbyists are now regrouping under the banner of climate action as “too expensive”, and we can expect to hear more from that caucus of MPs – the “net zero scrutiny group” – as the requirements become more apparent.

Two Cheers.

It’s quite clear, and not just from the Net Zero paper itself, that the government does grasp the main priorities for policy, unsurprising since they have the benefit of years of reports from the Committee on Climate Change. Decarbonising the power sector, through some combination of nuclear and renewables, is the crucial first step. The ambition to fully decarbonise by 2035 is welcome.  Then comes the switch from internal combustion (ICE) to electric vehicles (EV). This is now gathering momentum, and not just in the UK.

But the third major building block has to be residential heating. This will be slower, more expensive and more difficult, and will be more contentious while heat pumps remain expensive and largely unproven. Slower progress in this area is the only realistic prognosis, and household fears for the cost and efficacy of low carbon heating are already surfacing. Progress here will necessarily be a marathon not a sprint. This is the area with the most problems to be resolved and where we are most in need of more coherent plans.

Economics and Finance. The Gaps.

The government’s ideological position emphasises the role of the market. Important though this may be, every innovation, from heat pumps to small nuclear reactors, will also depend on government financial commitments. Indeed that commitment is already necessary to ensure sufficient generating capacity of any kind. A solid regulatory framework is also necessary to underpin private investment and provide consumer tariffs that allow consumers to make low carbon choices.

“Public money is essential to kickstart the net zero journey and turn expensive new technology into affordable everyday infrastructure.” (The Guardian) There are signs of tension between the Treasury and other departments over the pace and cost of the government's net zero plans.

The Net Zero Review does not appear to have given too much ammunition to government critics by overstating costs of a net zero transition. The final version of the report, while not presenting a formal cost-benefit analysis, argues that a well-managed net zero transition can deliver net economic benefits to the UK. “Global action to mitigate climate change is essential to long-term UK prosperity," the review states. However this is unlikely to deter the dedicated opponents of any effective action to counter or mitigate climate change.

Political battles ahead

Indeed the “net zero scrutiny” group are already busy inventing their own facts, as I demonstrated in a recent post on infrastructure requirements for EVs, and making extreme claims about the supposed injustices of policies, such as those on EVs, to promote decarbonisation. We should expect a spate of scare stories and misinformation related not just to EVs but to any new technology that moves us away from fossil fuel. These are likely to focus on heat pump plans in particular, where there are some real practical and financial issues, and net zero aspirations are most vulnerable, or may at least take longer to achieve.

Despite whatever reservations there may be as to the sufficiency of the government’s plans, however, the immediate challenge will be to maintain and strengthen the wider public consensus that recognises the gravity of the climate crisis and the need for action.

TIME TO DEMOLISH SCEPTICISM OVER CLIMATE SCIENCE.

If effective policies to reduce emissions catch the popular imagination we can expect a counter from the vested interests, both financial and more importantly ideological, opposed to any action. We can expect the reiteration of bad arguments and untruths, so let’s try to clear up some of the sillier bits of misinformation that keep doing the rounds.

There are at last a few signs (school climate strikes, activist demonstrations, and some belated political recognition of an “emergency”) that the issue of climate change is starting to gain popular traction. The climate sceptics are still, sadly, out there, although many are currently keeping very quiet. This silence is unlikely to persist as policy debates unfold, so it may be a useful time to reflect on and counter the classic techniques of disinformation, fallacious argument and political rhetoric that they employ. I have chosen a 2017 piece by Melanie Phillips  as an illustration, partly because the author (MP) is a well-known, articulate and persistent sceptic, and partly because a relatively recent 2017 posting illustrates in a short comment a number of typical fallacies and untruths about climate. But the same approaches to argument are very widespread in much of the popular and political discourse on climate issues.

One feature is routine abuse. Words or language such as “climate hoax” (Trump), “scam”, “climate alarmism” or “conspiracy” are regularly used in attempts to discredit both a serious body of science and the great majority of scientists. More subtly, a “dogwhistle politics” approach is used to associate climate science with religious belief, the implication being that the science is based on personal faith rather than hard evidence, or with political ideology.^[1]  And the latest “Brexit era” abuse, when it comes to discussing possible policies on climate, has been clearly illustrated by the personal attacks on teenager Greta Thunberg.[2] The slur is of course that this is an “elite” obsession, as if only middle class, Waitrose shoppers were concerned about the future of their children or grandchildren.

But fallacy and dishonesty begin in earnest with the construction of the “straw men”, the attribution of opinions or statements not actually held or expressed by any serious climate scientist but which the author (in this case MP) feels able to refute. 

Create straw men and misrepresent your adversary.

Global warming theory rests on the belief that rising CO2 levels drive up atmospheric temperature. (MP). Wrong. It does not rest on “belief” (note the word used), but on the certain knowledge that particular gases, of which CO2 is the most relevant, have a significant radiative forcing impact, and the certain knowledge that anthropogenic emissions have been and are increasing atmospheric concentrations of many of those gases. This then leads to analysis based on a broadly based and growing body of science, and study of two complex and closely interrelated systems, the climate system itself and the natural carbon cycle. The results are estimates of the projected future impact on global temperatures and climate, and hence the nature of the associated risks, associated with policies that fail to mitigate GHG emissions. So far those estimates, despite natural cycles and other statistical noise, have been disturbingly close to actual observed trends[3].

But there is no straightforward link between CO2 and temperature. (MP).  And no climate scientist ever claims the link is straightforward? The science has never claimed either that CO₂ is the sole determinant of climate, or that there are not substantial natural cycles, significant time lags, measurement error, or that there is not consequent “noise” in climate data. Both the climate system and the carbon cycle are intrinsically complex. They are interrelated. Outcomes, and hence comparison with any predictions, can be affected both by unforeseen elements such as volcanic activity, variations in solar radiation, and errors in measurement or in assumptions, for example on future GHG emissions. But naturally the pretence that climate science offers a simple relationship makes it easier to generate spurious evidence that appears to falsify (following Popperian principle) the core finding, that GHG emissions are the likely cause of currently observed warming and a large threat for the future. 

Just invent some alternative facts.

Observable fluctuations in global temperature are within the normal historic pattern of atmospheric variation. (MP)

This is clearly untrue, and rather obviously so. Systematic annual global temperature records are of course a relatively recent phenomenon.  Comprehensive global temperature data only dates back to 1850, and estimates of global temperature earlier in history are to a large degree speculative[4]. As can be seen from the chart below, the world has now moved well outside its 1850-1980[5] range. Within the “historic pattern” available to us, a casual observer might argue that there had been little or no significant change between 1880 and the late 1970s, followed thereafter by an apparently rapid trend increase. This description of a broad pattern happens to fit quite neatly, with an expected time lag, to the explosive growth of emissions from the 1950s, and consequent rise in GHG concentrations. 

………………….

This brings us to the next tool of the sceptic trade - selective use of irrelevant information to make absurd comparisons. The MP article has some good examples, much of which is related to interesting real science even if it is beyond the periphery of what is currently most relevant. These include introduction of geological or cosmological timescales that are largely irrelevant to human concerns, and focus on peripherally significant indicators such as Antarctic sea ice or polar bear populations.

An entirely different timescale

Historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Moreover, there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterised not by warming but by glaciation. (MP)

Introduction of this comparison as relevant evidence is absurd. Planet Earth, and a climate with CO₂ at 16 times current levels, describes a planet and solar system of 400 million years ago or more. This is an interesting subject but it was a world very different from our own. Solar radiation from a younger sun is estimated to have been significantly lower, and in consequence consistent with much higher CO₂ for any given temperature. The carbon cycle, at a time when plants were still colonising the land, would have been completely different. Known carbon removal mechanisms (eg from temperature to weathering rock) are very relevant to explaining changes over tens or hundreds of millions of years. But these are processes operating on geological or even cosmological timescales. Their parameters have rather less importance in understanding the timescales with which most of current climate science is concerned.

Other measures indicate that CO₂ concentrations (see NOAA ice core data above) have been substantially below current levels throughout the last 800,000 years. The most important climate science, as one might expect, is concerned with the parameters of our planet as it is now, with what is observable on human timescales, and with effects on human timescales.

Cherry pick statistics from secondary indicators.

The icecaps are not generally melting; Antarctic ice is actually increasing. (MP)

Polar ice is, for NASA, one of the “vital signs” of climate. But it is always dangerous to base an argument by cherry picking among secondary indicators, at least without a good understanding of their limitations. Antarctic sea ice is a favourite choice for supposed contra-indications. Without pursuing the subject in depth, this indicator is generally considered  subject to significant natural variation, even in the absence of warming. As it happens, Antarctic sea ice area in January 2019 was the second lowest of any January since the start of the data record in 1979. This would therefore appear to signify the opposite of MP’s conclusion, but the fall is not currently seen by climate scientists as predominantly due to overall warming. 

Arctic sea ice is the more significant factor in amplifying warming tendencies, by reducing the albedo (reflection) effect, and has shown more dramatic and consistent reductions over a longer period, something easily verified from aerial mapping.  

As for land ice[6], the most recent data from NASA's GRACE satellites show that the land ice sheets in both Antarctica (upper chart) and Greenland (lower) have been losing mass since 2002. Both have seen an acceleration of ice mass loss since 2009. One previous (2015)  NASA study (Zwally et al), used different methods, and did appear to contradict previous measurements of Antarctic ice. However even at the time the lead author of this study was at pains to point out that the results, assuming they were accurate, did nothing to contradict the scientific consensus on climate change, or the view that sea levels would continue to rise. He astutely predicted that climate science deniers would distort the study.

Polar bears are increasing in number. (MP)

Polar bear numbers are hard to measure and there appear to be no reliable statistics. Other factors, such as restrictions on hunting, or available food, are present. Bears may or may not be able to cope with reduced ice cover, but bear numbers are not per se a measure of climate change, either as victims or beneficiaries.  

There is no upward trend in the occurrence of virtually any extreme events …. (MP)

Extreme events do not “prove” climate change, and it is impossible to attribute an individual weather event to climate change. But greater frequency or severity is entirely consistent with it. A priori the injection of more energy into any system (which is what warming amounts to) will tend to produce more turbulent outcomes. More recent science has attempted with some success to draw an explicit link in terms of probabilities. The chart below shows one particular example.

Finally, disbelieve human capacity to find meaning, understanding and order in complex and chaotic systems. 

The assumption that highly complex natural systems can be predicted at all, however, is absurd. …. Computers cannot accommodate such myriad variations. (MP).

It is strange then that science, relying heavily on computers, has achieved such success in fields such as genetics or mapping the human genome, with complexities and random or unpredictable elements (mutations) that arguably dwarf those of climate systems. The point is that one does not need to explain or predict the infinite complexity of everything in order to achieve useful results that can be accepted with confidence in the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of human genetic conditions. The same is true of climate science.

Conclusions

We can generally observe on this side of the climate debate, a high degree of sophistry, the use of clever but false arguments intended to deceive, together with a cavalier attitude towards evidence. This is not exactly unknown in the world of politics, but in relation to existential threats such as climate change it has an almost unique degree of irresponsibility.  If it is ideologically inspired, as many suspect, we would do well to ponder the example of the Soviet geneticist Lysenko, whose ridiculous but politically driven theories on the genetics of wheat resulted in mass starvation in the 1930s.

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[1] The science has been “… yet another variation of Leftwing, anti-American, anti-West ideology which goes hand in hand with anti-globalisation and the belief that everything done by the industrialised world is wicked”, according to Melanie Phillips; Daily Mail, 12 January 2004.

[2] There is however a remarkable correlation between denial of the science, support for Brexit, and ideological opposition to any state or inter-governmental interventions of the kind that any action to limit GHGs implies. But again the demonstration of this kind of motivation is not part of any scientific argument, although it has serious and disturbing political implications.

[3] As observed in the immediately previous posting. CLIMATE CRISIS. TRUSTING THE SCIENCE HAS NEVER BEEN MORE IMPORTANT.

[4] There is for example no evidence that the so-called “mediaeval warm period” was significantly different in global temperature from the second half of the twentieth century. But we shall never know.

[5] !980 is chosen in this context only as an approximate date for the development of widespread scientific concern over global temperature and GHG trends

[6]On a long term perspective it is the melting of land ice that is much more serious in contributing to sea level rise. 

And, finally, to avoid the accusation of selective misquotation, here is a fuller extract from the Melanie Phillips article:

Trump is being accused of being anti-science. On the contrary: it’s the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scam that’s anti-science. Here are some elementary facts.

• Observable fluctuations in global temperature are within the normal historic pattern of atmospheric variation. The world has always warmed and cooled; the climate changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly.
• From 1860 to 1875 temperatures rose, then decreased from 1875 to 1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918, rose dramatically until 1941, then cooled until 1976.
• Historically, temperature increases have often preceded high CO2 levels, destroying this theory of cause and effect. Moreover, there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterised not by warming but by glaciation.
• The warming that was observed between 1978-1998 has stopped and global temperatures have plateaued. This disproves the entire theory that carbon emissions – which have been rising – inexorably drive up global temperature. Faced with the consequent contradiction in the IPCC prediction of an 0.3°C global average temperature rise over a decade, AGW proponents claimed that the prediction allowed for pauses. It didn’t.

• The seas are not generally rising any more than they have done for thousands of years.

• The icecaps are not generally melting; Antarctic ice is actually increasing.

• The polar bears are not dying out but increasing in number.
• There is no upward trend in the occurrence of virtually any extreme events such as tornados, hurricanes, droughts or floods, and some are in fact decreasing.
• Predictions of planetary temperature apocalypse derive from computer modelling.

The assumption that highly complex natural systems can be predicted at all, however, is absurd. And climate change is arguably the most complex system there is: coupled, non-linear, chaotic. The number of feedback mechanisms involved is vast. Computers cannot accommodate such myriad variations.

CLIMATE CRISIS. TRUSTING THE SCIENCE HAS NEVER BEEN MORE IMPORTANT.

What do Scientists Really Know? Why the Philosophy Really Matters.

This column does not often stray into the philosophy of science, but there are occasions when it is useful to reflect on just why we consider certain things to be true and with what evidence. Nowhere is this more true than in evaluation of what science tells us on climate change. Given the superficial and inaccurate material that continues to flow from the many political opponents of action on climate issues, it is worth dissecting some of the fallacies and misunderstandings that find their way into popular debate. One of these is the notion that the nature of scientific knowledge is always provisional, with the additional assertion that it cannot therefore be relied upon in matters of policy. This is a misreading of the nature of scientific method and the philosophy of science. It is often combined with the false claim that climate science has lacked predictive power and in particular failed to anticipate the actual warming that we are now observing. These arguments owe little to logic or fact.

…………………………………………………………..

“Science is never settled. History tells us that!”

“We can’t even find models that forecast tomorrow’s weather, so there cannot be any basis for predicting the climate decades ahead.”

A lot of the popular discussion on climate (and other) science stems from low level interpretations of the work of Karl Popper, and in particular the criterion of falsifiability as a necessary condition for any proposition to be considered as science. So it is worth describing briefly the nature and status of Popper's philosophy. Loosely summarised, Popper's essential thesis was that no proposition could ever be finally proved, but that proper science could be defined by our ability to set tests, often of a predictive nature, for it to pass. Hence falsifiability, or the capability of being disproved, was the test of proper science. Popper has always been popular among political commentators, especially on the Right, because he usefully demolished the pretensions to science status of many Marxists. He observed that they failed, or refused, to produce testable, and hence falsifiable, propositions based on their ideas.

These ideas, taken in isolation, characterise science as proceeding by a series of hypotheses, each of which may or will in turn be falsified and replaced by a better  hypothesis. This is the feature that excites the interest of climate science sceptics. The idea (incorrect, as we shall argue later) that scientific propositions are always provisional supposedly implies that they can and will be found to be false, and are therefore not reliable as a basis for policy. Needless to say, this is an attractive argument for anyone faced with what they may regard as an “inconvenient scientific truth”.

So far, so good. Popper made an important contribution, at the very least as a codification of what had always been present in de facto practice of science since the days of Isaac Newton[1]. But his insight is not the whole story, although it is sometimes treated as such in a political context. Nor is it a complete description of how science works, and Popper is certainly not the ultimate court of appeal or the last word on scientific method.

One excellent source on this subject is the work[2] of Brian Davies, referenced below, which gives a much more coherent and comprehensive account of the nature of proof and knowledge in mathematics and science, fully acknowledging the contribution of Popper among others, but putting it in its proper historical, scientific and philosophical perspective. Another interesting article by Richard Lawson[3] makes a further interesting contribution on the application of Popper’s approach to validation of climate science

Popper and Evolution. Scientific understanding of evolution has had an enormous impact on human thought and on practical science since these ideas developed more than 150 years ago. Comparison with climate science, which threatens to be an issue of similar scale, is therefore instructive, not least because there is some overlap[4] between the sceptics on both issues. However, Popper’s judgement on matters scientific is called into question by his earlier failure to recognise the theory of evolution as science under his criterion. JBS Haldane is famously attributed the answer: “Show me a pre-Cambrian rabbit, and my confidence in the theory of evolution is lost.” Popper later and sensibly retracted.

Not all science provides a basis for future prediction. Falsifiability does not depend on and cannot be equated with the ability to make accurate future predictions. Evolutionary biologists may understand perfectly the mechanisms of genetic mutation but there is no way they can predict, or we test, exactly how random mutations might lead over many millennia to the evolution of new species under the same or changed environmental conditions. Similarly, weather, the day-to-day manifestation of climate, is intrinsically unpredictable for more than a few days ahead. But this is much less likely to be true of climate, the composite or “average” of weather over a long period.

Prediction and falsifiability. The reality of science is in practice much more nuanced and complex than a simple move from predictive failure[5] to falsification. Where a prediction made from an apparently well-established theory fails, the first response should normally be to look for what has gone wrong with the data or the experiment, or what other factors have affected the result. It should not be immediate rejection of a well-established theory.  Otherwise the laws of chemistry and physics would be disproved on a daily basis in school laboratories.

At a higher level, discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus revealed the existence of Neptune, not the failure of Newton’s Laws. Small discrepancies for Mercury, on the other hand, could only be explained after Einstein’s theory of relativity had overtaken Newtonian physics as a more complete description of the universe. The clear parallels in climate science have been critical examination of apparent anomalies in global temperature data (compared to model predictions), together with the impact of unpredictable events such as particular large volcanic eruptions. The normal scientific process of seeking increased understanding has, in this context, absurdly been characterised as data fraud, as part of the politicisation of the policy debates. Perhaps fortunately for Einstein and the general theory of relativity, views on the orbit of Uranus did not disturb as many vested interests.

Science may never be complete, but it is not always provisional. The absence of complete knowledge and understanding does not imply the absence of useful knowledge and understanding. Most of conventional science is for all practical purposes providing facts that we can and do treat as certain. Our understanding, even of the principles of quantum physics, and however incomplete, enables most of the advanced technologies of the modern world that we take for granted.

Popper’s characterisation of scientific knowledge as always provisional, is more relevant to particular parts of physics (quantum mechanics or astrophysics) than it is to many other sciences.  Theoretical physics does indeed include speculative interpretations, such as string theory or parallel universes (though it is questionable whether either is capable of being tested and meeting Popper’s falsifiability test). But much of science, especially in relation to the natural world, is descriptive and observational.

Science gives us a huge amount of fact that is certain. There are many more things that we “know” with certainty as a result of scientific observation, that do not need to be regarded as “provisional”, and are fundamental to any sensible consideration of public policy. This is true of much of climate science, which will be essentially concerned with careful observation of known phenomena such as parts of the carbon cycle or heat exchange within the oceans and the atmosphere.

 “Science is never settled. History tells us that! “

This is an absurd generalisation and history tell us nothing of the kind. Science provides vast amounts of knowledge that we can and do, for all practical purposes, treat as certainty. We know that the basic theory of tectonic plates is true. We know that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, and malaria by mosquitoes. We know that mass vaccination can protect populations from lethal diseases.

The anti-science brigade, from the Trump and Pence core vote on measles, or tobacco companies denying the links between smoking and lung cancer, or Melanie Phillips on MMR vaccines, or African leaders in denial on HIV/AIDs, and more recently anti-vaccination activists on Ebola, must over the years bear responsibility for huge amounts of human suffering.

The basic building blocks of climate science, in terms of the radiative forcing effects of various greenhouse gases, have well established parameters, and we have, at a minimum, an awareness of most of the other major factors involved in the carbon cycle and the climate system. And the knowledge is constantly improving. Climate science as a distinct discipline consists of the application of knowledge from a large number of separate but related fields of knowledge and observation. Putting the pieces together to form a full understanding of climate variation is a complex application of known science along with some known uncertainties. And of course it necessarily includes numerous year-on-year effects such as variations in solar variation and climate cycles such as el Nino, which do not have a human cause, as well as the possibility of sampling error in climate measurement.

 “We can’t even find models that forecast tomorrow’s weather, so there cannot be any basis for predicting the climate decades ahead.”

This is a popular myth with no basis in reality. Today’s short term weather forecasting, along with associated probabilities, is good enough to be extremely useful. In farming and shipping, not to mention storm alerts, it is regarded as a crucially important service. Forecasts will always have a margin of error, and will always be revised to reflect additional information and unforeseen extraneous factors, but in various forms it is an essential part of almost every human endeavour. 

The reality is that scientists have also proved remarkably consistent in their assessment of the determinants of climate, which is necessarily measured over much longer time scales than weather. This includes the global temperature impacts of greenhouse gases. These forecasting efforts are very well summarised in a Carbon Brief article that starts with some relatively simple calculations in the early 1970s.

In a paper published in Nature in 1972, Sawyer hypothesised that atmospheric CO₂ would increase by 25% and that the world would warm 0.6^oC between 1969 and 2000. Sawyer argued for a climate sensitivity – how much long-term warming will occur per doubling of atmospheric CO₂ levels – of 2.4^oC, which is not too far off the best estimate of 3^oC used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today, on the basis of much more information and sophisticated analysis.

In some instances, the forecasts have under or overestimated current observed warming because they were based on assumptions that under or over overestimated key parameters such as CO₂ emissions, and other factors such as unusual volcanic activity. But of course the real purpose of forecasts is not absolute precision but a reasonably accurate picture, including the risks and uncertainties, of the impact of policy alternatives, such as the effect of allowing uncontrolled emissions or adopting measures for their limitation.

Rejection of known science is both foolish and unjustified. It has also become perhaps the most dangerous intellectual fallacy of our age.

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[1] Popper had never read Principia Mathematica. Had he done so he might have found Newton’s ideas on science closer to his own.

[2] Science in the Looking Glass: What Do Scientists Really Know? E. Brian Davies Oxford University Press, 2003. 288 pages, ISBN 0198525435. (Useful review in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.) Inter alia this remarkable book provides a good description of Popperian ideas on falsifiability, both their positive contribution and their limitations.

[3] Climate Science and Falsifiability. Philosophy Now, 2014. Richard Lawson shows how Karl Popper can help settle the climate debate. This article by Richard Lawson provides a usefully brief discussion and turns the sceptic argument on its head by imposing a falsifiability test on the sceptic position.

[4] Christopher Booker. Trump and Pence.

[5] It is of course only in very specific conditions, such as astronomical observation or highly controlled laboratory experiments, that truly precise predictions and measurements are relevant. In most practical circumstances outcomes can be significantly affected by complex boundary conditions, eg the precise shape of the land mass and its contours.

HEAT RECORDS FALLING, AND WILDFIRES ACROSS THE GLOBE. AT LAST A DEMONSTRATION THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL.

No! We had that long ago. It’s just that we are now starting to see the impacts “play out in real time”.

We have had heatwaves and long hot summers before, even in the UK. But record-breaking weather on its own, especially when confined to particular locations, demonstrates very little. Even so the coincidence of heatwaves across North America, Europe from the UK to Greece, and Japan, and, even more dramatically, the extraordinary temperatures observed in the Arctic.

Scientists, as opposed to much of the media, have always preferred to concentrate on careful and painstaking analysis of global average temperatures, rather than extreme events. The evidence of that is clear from temperature measurements showing a steady upward trend over many decades, and a trend that aligns closely with the predicted effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG). The serious nature of human-induced warming has been well established for at least twenty years. More on the scientific debate can be found on other pages on this site.

But the science is now starting to go further. It has long predicted that global warming would significantly increase the number and intensity of heatwaves, but improved analysis is now getting much closer to assigning the causation of particular extreme weather events specifically to the signal of climate change, at least with increasingly strong probabilities.

The heatwave currently scorching northern Europe was made more than twice as likely by climate change, according to one initial assessment. Even more extreme conditions could be occurring every other year by the 2040s. “The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,”  Friederike Otto, at the University of Oxford, is reported as saying.

“We found that for the weather station in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, the current heatwave is just extraordinary – unprecedented in the historical record,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

The Guardian reports that previous attribution analyses have shown very strong connections between climate change and extreme weather events. The scorching summer in New South Wales, Australia, in 2016-17 was made at least 50 times more likely by global warming, meaning it can be “linked directly to climate change”. The “Lucifer” heatwave across Europe’s Mediterranean nations in 2017 summer was made at least 10 times more likely by climate change, while the unprecedented deluge delivered in the US by Hurricane Harvey also in 2017 was made three times more likely by climate change. However, other events, such as storms Eleanor and Friederike, which hit western Europe in January, were not made more likely by climate change. Serious climate change is “unfolding before our eyes”, according to Professor Sutton, at the University of Reading.

But disputing the science, and the measurement of change, is an ideological obsession. The same team is trying to bring you Brexit.

What are the common factors linking the following?

·        The Institute for Economic Affairs.

·        Nigel Lawson. John Redwood. Jacob Rees Mogg.  (Conservatives – to name just three)

·        Graham Stringer (Labour).

·        UKIP and Nigel Farage.

·        Melanie Phillips. Christopher Booker. (Journalists)

·        Donald Trump

All have displayed strong or passionate opposition to the evidence and logic of climate science, or to any action to mitigate it.  All have also been passionate advocates of Brexit. Stringer was one of four Labour MPs voting with the government on recent crucial Brexit votes, and is also involved with Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation - Lawson of course was a lead figure in the Leave campaign.

Phillips also has strong anti-science form, supporting disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield  on the subject of MMR vaccination, a subject where the provision of flawed and inaccurate information to the public has caused huge damage. So does Booker, on the subject of evolution. To be fair, on Brexit, he has partially recanted.

I could create a much longer list (see my earlier comments on Brexit and Brexit economists), but one interesting question is simply this. Why is there such a strong correlation?  Is it the absence of any ability to deal rationally with fact and logic, or to comprehend the sophisticated nature of scientific method, or is it pure ideology?

And when are we going to hear more from some of the above on the subject of global warming?

TRUMP, MORE NONSENSE ON CLIMATE, AND THE ARGUMENTS MOVE ON

Apologies to readers for a longer than usual gap. This has been the result of travel commitments and the diversion of my time into writing a rather longer piece for another publisher.

The Trump caravan moves on. The recent G7 meetings are reported to have included tense conversations between Trump and other leaders on climate policies. Hitherto Trump’s lack of consistency on the subject has been encouraging, as campaign slogans promoting coal interests meet some wider global realities. And Trump’s unpredictability (to use a kind word) means that even if he eventually comes down on the anti-science side of the argument, the US position will carry less weight in the rest of the world and is less likely to undermine the Paris agreement.

However it is clear that the “refute the science” camp epitomised by climate sceptics such as Trump[1] and the UK’s own Nigel Lawson is increasingly in disarray. In recent years they have relied heavily on the cherry picking of global temperature statistics purporting to show a pause in “warming” since 1998, an unusually hot el Nino year. The statistical analysis was always laughable, but the last two years, coinciding with another el Nino, have driven the last nails into the coffin of this particular piece of sophistry and spurious argument.

The result is we now see the sceptics retreating to another line of defence, essentially that the outcome of increasing CO₂ might not be as bad as predicted and therefore might not justify “expensive” action in mitigation. Jonathan Chait reports one such line in the Daily Intelligencer of 1 May, picking up a column from the New York Times in which Bret Stephens, whom he describes as “a conservative refugee from the increasingly Trumpist WSJ”, argues that the certainty of climate science is overrated, while still admitting the reality of warming and the human influence on it.

This at least is progress of a sort. Pre-election Trump treated the science as one of the great hoaxes of all time, so at least there is some recognition of the science. And it is also true that the science is anything but certain in estimating the climatic impacts and their economic and social costs. However this argument, which is developed to suggest that we cannot afford to abandon or reduce our fossil fuel consumption, ignores the reality that the uncertainties over outcomes runs in both directions.

The problem is the implicit argument that the risk is one-sided.  Climate Shock, a 2015 book by two very serious economists, Wagner and Weitzman, argues that we pay too much attention to scientists’ best estimate of the “likely” global warming outturn. What should really concern us is possible underestimation of climate change. The best estimates are both dangerous and expensive.  But the more extreme but still plausible possibilities are terrifying, threatening human civilisation in any form to which we have become accustomed and almost certainly implying a massive involuntary reduction in population.

It is also worrying that the evidence hitherto is to suggest that scientists have if anything erred on the side of not appearing to be alarmist, and that their predictions have proved right, within a range of uncertainty, or have underestimated the warming that has actually occurred.[2]

We do not accept a 10%, or even 1%, chance of a fatal outcome when we take a flight.  Nor should we collectively accept such risks in forming our energy choices. Nor is the cost of effective action impossibly high (although it might become so if we wait too long). It is broadly assumed to be of the order of 1 to 2 percent of GDP, roughly speaking the equivalent of assuming we might reach a given standard of living inn 2050 instead of 2049. It is also, for individual economies, within the boundaries of impacts (on standard of living) brought about by short term fluctuations in the oil price, or by significant changes in government fiscal policies.

We should expect more dubious arguments along these lines from conservative commentators such as Stephens, Lawson, Trump and others. The ideological objective is small government, and fact and logic are twisted to reach the desired political conclusion.

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[1] Trump, like our own Daily Mail climate science specialist Melanie Phillips, has form on matters scientific, having got into deep water on the subject of vaccination and autism. This is another area where the promotion of absurd and indefensible positions has caused huge social damage, but this blog confines itself mainly to energy matters.

[2] Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama.  Brysse, Oreskes, O’Reilly, and Oppenheimer. Global Environmental Change. Volume 23, Issue 1. February 2013

OVERTURNING THE OBAMA LEGACY ON CLIMATE. OR IS TRUMP UNLIKELY TO TRUMP PARIS ?

END OF THE ROAD FOR FOSSIL DINOSAURS AND THE ANTI-SCIENCE BRIGADE.

The new US administration has been assumed to be bad news on climate issues. The Trump constituency, and indeed much of the Republican voting base, has been built around an improbable coalition that, inter alia, includes substantial direct vested interests in the form of the oil and coal business lobbies, right-wing ideologies and evangelical movements that reject a now incontrovertible climate science as an “inconvenient truth”, and a significant number of constituencies of the “left behind” in America’s rustbelt, where declining industries have been major employers of labour.

As an aside, there are some unsurprising parallels with the UK – Redwood, Rees-Mogg, and Lawson being just a few of the examples of a virulent and quasi-religious climate science denial,  and quite strong fundamentalist views on other political and economic issues. Brexit like Trump represented a coalition of particular "free market" political ideologies and a "left behind" rejection of a perceived elite. The current trio of Brexit ministers - Davis, Fox and Johnson, despite some equivocation for political advantage, have a distinctly flaky record on this subject.[1]

Ironically it has been reported (FT. 27 March 2017) that the ever unpredictable Boris Johnson is trying to persuade Trump not to withdraw from the Paris agreement.

Trump Follow-through on Climate Policies

The recent news on Trump regime activities has been more cheerful than might have been expected. Although his appointment of an apparently rabid sceptic, Scott Pruitt, as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator(EPA), was met with dismay, Pruitt has been refusing to overturn the so-called “endangerment finding" of the agency in 2009[2], and suffering considerable pressure from conservative Republicans as a result.

There is no doubting Trump’s dislike in principle of climate policies, but as with his dislike of Obamacare, it is proving slightly more difficult to express this in practical terms. His Secretary of State, former ExxonMobil executive Rex Tillerson, wants to keep the US in the Paris Agreement, and ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil and gas company, is urging the White House to do just that.

The most powerful argument for the USA not to abrogate Paris is likely to be, sadly not the overwhelming human importance of climate change as an existential threat, but the damage to the US standing in the world, together with the loss of opportunities for US businesses in relation to low carbon technologies.

A Missed Opportunity

There was also an emissions reduction strategy that Trump could have followed to the benefit of his rustbelt constituents. It would have been to target infrastructure spending to the benefit of areas heavily dependent on basic industries and coal in particular. Carbon capture and storage would have been a natural choice and might even have offered a lifeline of sorts to a declining coal industry.

Limitations on Trump Damage

Trump is clearly not good news for ambitious climate policies, so a corollary of his current troubles is some degree of relief among those who do worry about future climate. But, apart from expectations of his possible impotence in key policy areas (cf Obamacare) the following considerations might allow us to be slightly more cheerful.

-The Obama achievements within the US were in any case quite limited. The practical consequences of a possibly quite short Trump presidency are therefore less important than they might have been, particularly if much of the US and indeed US business continues to “get on with the job”

-The real importance of Paris did not reside in achievement of legally binding targets (it failed on this) but in the universal recognition of the issues and the degree of commitment shown, at least in principle.

-US backsliding is unfortunate, but is very unlikely to be copied by China or other major emitters. It will, like most Trump policies, diminish US influence, but it will not derail the Paris process of gradually ratcheting up commitments.

                                                                                                          .

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[1] David Davis 2009. BBC report. He said evidence suggested the earth was cooling, not warming, and that recently leaked e-mails had shown leading scientists "conspiring to rig the figures to support arlly their theories". [a wholly untrue allegation as shown by subsequent inquiry]

Liam Fox has generally voted against measures to mitigate climate change.

Boris Johnson. Telegraph article. I am speaking only as a layman who observes that there is plenty of snow in our winters these days, and who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility — however remote — that Corbyn [Brother of Jeremy and well known unofficial weather forecaster and contrarian on this subject] is right.

[2] The endangerment finding declared that greenhouse gas emissions threaten human health and welfare and made EPA legally responsible for regulating carbon dioxide. It later set in motion much of former President Barack Obama's climate agenda.