Climate Change

New Research Centre aims to establish the facts about climate change.

The main driving force behind commercial windfarms in our countryside is the perceived danger from global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The need for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels one day  doesn’t seem to catch the public's attention. The breakdown of the climate change talks at the Hague (25 November 2000), which were supposed to finalise the details of how the Kyoto Protocol will work, will be seen by many as a disastrous failure to come to terms with global warming. But there is another way of looking at it. It is just possible that it will lead to a sober re-assessment by the politicians of the actual scientific basis of global warming.

There is some evidence that this was beginning to happen anyway. The University of East Anglia is one of the academic centres which has benefited from research funds from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On November 9^th, the University of East Anglia opened its new Tyndall Centre for Climate Research. According to its director, Dr Mike Hulme (New Scientist 4 November 2000) it will be trying to answer three questions:

1. How can we tell what rate of climate change poses appreciable dangers to human health and the environment?Can we control climate in a way that avoids such dangers?
2. If the answer to the second question is no, then can we shape our future world to accommodate the expected climate change?

This seems at first sight to be an admission that all the talk about a 'scientific consensus that climate change has occurred as a result of human activity' is being questioned, but Dr Hulme assures us that what he is really trying to do is provide a proper scientific foundation for the global warming hypothesis. Nothing necessarily wrong in that, bearing in mind that science progresses by one group of scientists putting forward a hypothesis, which is then attacked by other scientists, the end product of which may be anything between complete refutation and complete acceptance of the hypothesis ¹. However Dr Hulme then goes on to cast a critical, and prophetic eye on the issues at that time still facing of the Hague Earth Summit.

• On emissions trading, "the idea (is) that rich countries that emit more than their allowed quota of carbon dioxide or methane can buy the entitlement to do so from countries that emit less. But delegates will discuss this without knowing how much carbon or methane in the atmosphere poses real dangers"
• "Similarly, the US and some other countries would quite like to be allowed to plant forests in place of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The idea here is that the trees will suck carbon from the atmosphere. But, as any climate scientist will tell you, predicting trees' carbon uptake is a very imprecise science"

Dr Hulme goes on to say that the Kyoto Protocol is based on the assumption that "something, anything, must be done and done quickly. It is an application of the precautionary principle: we may not have all the evidence to know precisely how climate change is harming the planet, but the risks associated with doing nothing outweigh the risks associated with taking action. But I think we can do better than this. In this important area of environmental policy, science can deliver - and here's how". He goes on to ask the three questions quoted above, and describes how he is going to try to find scientific answers to justify the Kyoto Protocols.Question 1. Acceptable limits"Many researchers believe that we need to limit global warming to no more than 2° C and that it is dangerous for CO ₂ concentrations to rise above 550 parts per million by volume or twice the level before the Industrial Revolution. But not everyone agrees on this target…..a certain degree of warming could be catastrophic in some places while barely inconveniencing others". Dr Hulme goes on to make some very important points about evaluating risk: "Danger implies unacceptable risk. And to assess risk we need to know both the probabilities of particular outcomes and the consequences of those outcomes. The reality is that at the moment we do not know what those risks are….. "Question 2. Climate control"Can we control climate sufficiently to prevent warming reaching this 'dangerous ' level?" Dr Hulme points to the Kyoto debate raging around the emissions targets, which require the richer countries to reduce their greenhouse emissions by 5 per cent before 2012. These will require "changes in the way ordinary people and businesses people live and make money… research into the dynamics of technological change… and the psychology of human behaviour". For example "why are Western societies so reluctant to consider nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels…so opposed to taxes on fuel even when we know that some of the money will be spent on energy efficiency improvements". "We need evidence-based policy"Question 3. Living with climate change"What happens if we cannot reduce the rate of climate change. Can we adapt our institutions, our regulations, our behaviour to somehow accommodate more rapid climate change? Such questions have hardly been raised within the UN Climate Convention. Even talking about them is seen as defeatism, or at best a diversion from the central issue of slowing down climate change" Dr Hulme points out that we need to identify an 'insurance policy' to manage climate change, and that this is 'an entirely rational response to the problem.'He concludes:"To shape a global community that can evolve with a changing climate, we need to strengthen links between knowledge producers and the UN Climate Convention. The real challenge for climate change science in the end is not to be able to predict future climate; rather it is to give society the options to choose its own climate future".It will be interesting to see what response Dr Hulme gets from the politicians and environmentalists whose whole case is based on the assumption that there is little or no argument at a scientific level about these issues. At a conference he attended recently he said that international action on greenhouse gases remained crucial "Those who disagree will have to explain what will happen to all that carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, which we know produces a warming effect". But in all the literature scientists agree that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas and may have a warming effect, and none of the global warming sceptics, scientist or otherwise, disagrees - these are issues of basic atmospheric chemistry. What the sceptics are angry about is:

1. The climate system is immensely complex and we are years away from understanding what determines even the reference level of natural climate change, which has clearly fluctuated widely in the past without the burning of fossil fuelsBecause of the undoubted difficulty of carrying out physical experiments on the climate, mathematical models are used as research tools - which is quite valid, so long as the insights of Chaos Theory² are respected - but these model-based predictions are then grabbed hot from the press by the greenhouse lobbyists. So a modest conclusion that there may be evidence that some effect may be at work which may be caused by increased levels of CO₂ and which may result in global warming most likely to be around 1.5. degrees C, with statistical confidence limits at the 95% level between 0° C and 3.0° C bursts onto the headlines as "Global meltdown likely to be as much as 3.0° C, enough to flood London and Bangladesh".The scientists involved don’t do enough to put the record straight.
2. Vast resources are being used up (or would be if the Kyoto Protocols were ever implemented) on the basis that the science is cut and dried.

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, named after the British scientist who pioneered the study of greenhouse gases, is a step in the right direction. The Precautionary Principle, if soundly based on an understanding of the natural and man-made determinants of climate change, plus the application of a science of Risk Analysis, will then make it possible to decide about how far (if at all) it is valid to destroy the environment (e.g. with windfarms) in order to save it.

References:

1.  The generally accepted framework for this process is Karl Popper's Falsifiability Principle, which requires that a scientific proposition is one which could in principle be disproved by empirical scientific methods. Other propositions which don't reach this standard are worth making, by scientists and other informed people, but they don't have the status of a scientific proposition. Identifying the causes of climate change has some problems with Popper's Principle:

1. The climate is massively complex and not susceptible to experimentation in the laboratory. Instead mathematical modelling is used, an important research tool which has some difficulty in achieving credibility, and very prone to misrepresentation.
2. There is a problem in identifying who decides the case in the end - do we take an opinion poll of scientists? If so which scientists qualify? What amounts to a 'consensus'?. Galileo had this problem when dealing with critics of his experimental observations of comets, "..(who) persist in trying to prove by means of witnesses something that I may see for myself at any time by means of experiment" He went on to say that "the testimony of many has little more value that that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than those who reason badly".(Galileo. The Assayer)
3. The very valid and vigorous adversarial debate which ought to be carried on in academic conferences and journals, unfortunately escapes into the world of environmental politics, rather as a football match is often carried on off the field by excited spectators, with damaging results.

2. "Chaos Theory …. - a branch of mathematics that attempts to describe irregular, unpredictable systems - that is, systems whose behaviour is difficult to predict because there are so many variable or unknown factors. Weather is an example of a chaotic system." The Hutchinson Dictionary of Science Second Edition 1998.