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Harry Browne
told my journalism students to
look for not two but at least three voices, just as a
start in getting at the realities of complex stories in
a complex world. So when I started to think hard
about the climate-change issue over the last few
years, I decided to follow my own advice.
It didn’t seem like it would be an easy task.
If ever there were an issue that seems to have
divided into two opposing camps, it’s the
debate about anthropogenic (man-made) glo-
bal warming, or AGW. The world splits, it seemed,
between “alarmists” and “deniers”, to adopt each
side’s derogatory term for the other. Neither side
seemed prepared to accept the other’s bona fides,
each adopting the sort of conspiricism - denial is
sponsored by Big Oil, alarmism is a way of foist-
ing global socialism on us - that is the antithesis
of real discussion.
Still, it seemed pretty easy for a leftist to choose
sides just by glancing over the cast of characters;
plus the alarmists seemed scientifically sound
seemed to have the moral edge.
But the more I looked at the politics and the sci-
ence (conceding my status as a slightly educated
non-scientist), the more it seemed there were all
sorts of reasons to conceive of this debate less two-
sidedly. On the science, for example, most of the
“deniers”, it turns out, accept that carbon dioxide
has caused and will continue to cause some warm-
ing, and in some cases their best guesses about
total warming fall within the (rather wide) tem-
perature range of the “scientific consensus”, albeit
at the low end. For another thing, some of the most
prominent “alarmists” distanced themselves from
talk of some future “tipping point” when global
warming will accelerate, well, alarmingly. In other
words, the science is not settled.
Science is an imperfect human activity. Climate
science is a young field. And some of its non-sci-
entist advocates do it no favours. I saw an inter-
view lately with journalist John Gibbons in which
he said that the academic peer-review proc-
ess is “how we got out of the caves”. (Actually, I
imagine the neolithic environment offered more
robust methods for testing hypotheses.) Then
there’s Frank McDonald, who recently asserted,
in yet another attack on the US right-wing denial
machine, that the fact that the last decade is the
warmest on record is incompatible with the notion
that warming has, roughly, stalled over that period.
This suggests Frank needs a basic course in statis-
tics: if temperatures rose through the s but
levelled out since, the Noughties would of course
be warmer than the Nineties, even without con-
tinued warming.
And, even minimising the uncertainty in the
science, I couldn’t see a clear logical reason why
even a precautionary approach to the possible
climate prospects should point uniformly to one
policy prescription: price carbon to make using
it less attractive (often by non-progressive forms
of taxation that punish people like taxi- and lor-
ry-drivers whose consumption arises through no
fault of their own), and trade globally in carbon
credits (rewarding brokers and investors whose
own footprints are irrelevant to the cash equation).
Plus frankly I was sickened by the Irish Greens on
their climate-change high-horse riding roughshod
over all their other alleged principles.
It also became clear to me that the conclusion
that a certain temperature change is “catastrophic”
for humans is not a scientific one — it’s political.
It assumes that the people whose poverty makes
them most vulnerable to change will stay poor. It
assumes poor defences against flooding and severe
weather, lack of irrigation, desalination, etc etc.
This year Haiti showed us, again, that “disaster” is
at least as much about politics and economics as
it is about nature. It seemed to me that too many
of the “best-case” scenarios about reducing car-
bon emissions were based on ensuring that the
poor world stayed poor, an echo of the Malthusian
contempt for the breeding masses that infects too
much green thinking.
In May, perhaps the most coherent outcry
to date from a potential “third voice” was heard.
Co-authored by academics from several nation-
alities and various science
and non-science fields, ‘The
Hartwell Paper’ (google it)
is a critique of the divisive
dead-end of climate poli-
tics to date, and an attempt
to “reframe the debate”.
It is by no means a left-
wing polemic, but it starts,
uncompromisingly, from
a position of global justice:
the billion-plus people
without electricity need to
get electricity. Then it sug-
gests how a concerted push
toward that target can be
made compatible with de-carbonising the world’s
energy system, but also with other important envi-
ronmental goals.
In other words, the desirability of the out-
come doesn’t depend on what version of AGW you
subscribe to; it depends on wanting your fellow
humans to enjoy some of the most basic amenities
that you do. And of course societies that are more
developed will be better able to adapt to such cli-
mate change as cannot be avoided.
No doubt there are logical flaws in their argu-
ment and serious obstacles to their ambitions. But
just perhaps they will help us away from the freez-
ing and warming poles of the climate debate.
“It seemed to me that too many
of the “best-case” scenarios
about reducing carbon
emissions were based on
ensuring that the poor world
stayed poor”.
There are more than
two sides to every story,
even Science
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