Horse Race to Disaster

Margaret Wente has returned to her Saturday spot with a column ("collapse") that reads like a typical, triumphant bit of climate change denial. But it's not; it's a bizarrely triumphant political analysis of the political horse race over whether any serious action will be taken on climate change in the foreseeable future. Ms. Wente argues for the negative, and, sadly, she may be right. But what's most interesting here is that, briefly and rather late in the column, she explicitly declares "None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid." This makes the eager spin of the political discussion that occupies the rest of her column just plain weird: various small 'scandals', blown out of proportion in the press and blown still further out of proportion by Ms. Wente's presentation, are damaging efforts to come to grips with the threat of climate change. Ms. Wente isn't denying that there is a threat. But she's utterly gleeful about detailing and, in fact, exaggerating the damage to the political case for action on climate change.

Since there are so many distortions and exaggerations in the column, this response will be far longer than I'd like. That's the trouble with what we call, in the parallel debate between evolution and creationism, the 'Gish Gallop': a debating technique famously used by creationist Duane Gish to discomfit his opponents, by rhyming off dozens of falsehoods, distortions and exaggerations in a quick few paragraphs, and leaving the other side the unenviable choice between examining and refuting each in careful detail (time's up, and the audience isn't listening carefully enough to follow anyway) or dealing with at most a few (what? you didn't say anything about claim 3 or claim 7 or claim 25). Since this is a blog and I can go on as long as I please (or my family will tolerate) I'll take a (modest) version of the first approach here. Please be patient.

Wente's column begins with the IPCC error regarding Himalayan glaciers, which are indeed melting, but not as quickly as a non-peer-reviewed report cited by the IPCC had claimed. "But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it", Wente remarks-- leaving the impression that a gross exaggeration was deliberately included in the IPCC's last report. This is, of course, false. The IPCC is a massive project, with separate groups examining different aspects of the issue. Working Group 1 addresses the basic science of climate change, Working Group 2 works on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and Working Group 3 studies ways to reduce GHG emissions and otherwise mitigate climate change. The world's top glaciologists are involved in the process, but this claim in the Group 2 report slipped past them-- no expert on the Himalayan glaciers (which are indeed threatened) caught the error.

From this exaggeration, Ms. Wente moves to a quick, cherry-picked evaluation from the "brilliant" Walter Russell Mead, an influential commentator on American foreign policy, a big supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq who warned of potential American economic stagnation--in 1992, just before the massive growth in jobs and employment of the Clinton Presidency. Mead claims, to Ms. Wente's approval, that "(t)he global warming movement as we have known it is dead." He may be right, but his track record on actual policy recommendations isn't encouraging. Further, and interestingly, Mead continues by claiming that a major international agreement was never in the cards anyway: his analysis is that the complexity and difficulty of agreeing to share the burdens of action on climate change is too much for the international system to cope with, raising serious doubt about whether there's any blame at all to be laid at the feet of the IPCC and scientists who are trying to warn the world about the consequences of inaction.

From here Wente's whirlwind tour moves on to the East Anglia email hack-- a propaganda success for deniers, perhaps, but no more than that: the only serious matter revealed in 13 years of emails were some inappropriate responses, at East Anglia, to repeated demands for the release of documents that had reached the level of outright harassment-- does Ms. Wente think she could continue to do her job while receiving and responding to tens of formal demands for access to her correspondence, notes and other materials monthly? All the other (widely cited but rarely examined) 'smoking guns' turned out to be quotes out of context and outright distortions of what was in the emails. But she declares her denialist reading of the emails just right: "these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide"-- a grossly unfair non-sequitur. If they did have a lot to hide, surely there would actually be some evidence of this in the emails and the data (pretty well all of it) that's been released?

Then it's on to citations of (small bits of) bad data from Chinese weather stations, in a report by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang. These data were part of the support, in IPCC 2007, for the claim that warming related to cities rather than climate change was insignificant. While the quality control of those data was apparently not as good as it should have been, similar comparisons have been made elsewhere, for example by the NOAA, and by testing various effects, such as a systematic difference between windy and calm nights in urban temperature records-- and the results are the same: the storied 'urban heat island effect' is negligible.

Another small problem for Working Group 2 is next, a possibly unreliable report on just how sensitive the Amazon rain forest may be to reductions in precipitation-- an article that one expert dismisses as "a mess". But how important is this? Multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature show that climate change may alter precipitation and dramatically change the nature of the Amazon forest.

Ms. Wente then turns to the latest 'scandal du jour', the debate over Dr. Regenda Pachauri's Energy and Resources Unit, which has received millions of dollars to study the effects of glacial melting in the Himalayas. Pachauri is the current head of the IPCC; Wente claims that these grants are based "on the strength of that bogus glacier claim". But again, this is a tempest in a teapot. That the Himalayan glaciers are endangered is not in question-- the mistake was the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Studies on the effects of glacial melting are needed, whether the complete loss of those glaciers is 25 years away or 75 years away--and our experience with rapid Arctic ice melt shows that things can turn out to be worse than even the most pessimistic scientists expect. When summer river flows from those glaciers decline, major agricultural areas in India, China and especially Pakistan will be in serious trouble.

The credibility of the IPCC has been damaged, says Ms. Wente. Of course this can be read in two ways: is the IPCC perfect? Of course not, and anyone who thought so was silly and (no doubt) disappointed. But is the IPCC a credible source of information and advice on the state of climate science, the risks and impacts of climate change and what measures might mitigate them? Yes, obviously it is. Like any large group of people dealing with massive amounts of information, it will make mistakes. But the IPCC process of detailed examination of the scientific literature by multiple experts, with input from many different sources carefully (even if, yes, imperfectly) reviewed is an admirable and important accomplishment.

Wente closes with a flourish: "By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement." But who's exaggerating? Are the certainties exaggerated by the IPCC? Does the existence of two small errors in the IPCC "impacts" report constitute a general pattern of exaggeration? Does the fact that skeptics have been criticized for their regular, gross distortions of the facts (from George Will's repeated nonsense about sea-ice levels to widespread claims of cooling based on cherry-picked starting and ending dates to Ms. Wente's own eager endorsement of of denialist attacks on Michael Mann's (sound and increasingly well-supported) 'hockey stick' graph), constitute 'demonization'? How imminent and severe must catastrophe be before it would OK with Wente to sound the alarm?

Yes, there are uncertainties in science, but scientists continue to work to resolve and reduce them. The historical evidence that Earth's climate is a sensitive beast is clear-- if it weren't, the Milankovitch cycles couldn't possibly explain past cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may take centuries, but once it's underway, we cannot stop it-- and nothing in the historical record shows substantial delay between climate forcing and the big melt. The climate forcing we're now imposing is much more rapid and much larger than the forcing that ended the last ice-age.

Before closing, I want to turn a more immediate question: what's going on here? There's an increasingly extreme double-standard at work, not just in this column by Margaret Wente, but in the world of journalism in general. It seems that scientists and organizations involved in climate change research and advocacy must be pure as the driven snow to avoid extensive, detailed, nit-picking and exaggerated criticism. But the lies and confusions and distortions and motivations of denialists are not even worth mentioning, let alone examining carefully or mentioning in the same breath with which climate scientists' reputations are blown away. Even journalists who are broadly supportive of the scientific consensus-- now more than a decade old and more firmly established than ever-- have accepted the double standard: they systematically examine and report even tiny flaws or errors in IPCC reports and the personal behaviour of every significant climate scientist, while passing over the dishonesty, zombie arguments and long-established P.R. campaign whose funding, whose main figures and whose motives have been laid bare over and over again, to yawns of indifference from Ms. Wente and her fellow-travelers. Cherry-picking errors and mistakes on the part of scientists and organizations who are worried about global warming and ignoring the regular pattern of mistakes, flawed arguments and outright speculation in work by the few remaining skeptics who actually do climate science, and the quick assumption that environmental activists' claims can be dismissed outright as suspicious because of their motives, while ignoring the role of motives amongst the skeptics-- surely there's something wrong here!

And last, I want to close on a different note-- a note that really rings false in Wente's column. If she's not denying the vast body of evidence that climate change is happening, if she's not denying that human activities are largely responsible, surely she ought to be worried if the political debate is really going as badly as she says. Is it good news, if the IPCC, the largest, most systematic effort to evaluate and report on the state of a scientific question in history, turns out to be a failure not in the sense of getting the science wrong, but in the sense of failing to persuade politicians and populations to actually do something about a real problem? Is the triumph of denialist propaganda, the general journalistic obsession with small errors by serious scientists and the apparent utter disregard for the documented dishonesty of climate change denialists, really something Ms. Wente should take pleasure and delight in announcing (and exaggerating)?

Is this an issue for cheering and booing? Does Wente think 'her side' of the public issue has won, and damn the consequences? The consequences we're talking about include, on the middle-of-the-road 3 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity, truly frightening prospects-- prospects that, failing serious action, will be locked in and unavoidable by the middle of this century, even if privileged middle-aged people alive today don't live to see them. Just to list a few, I'm talking about massive glacial melting, the collapse of southwestern and even mid-western farming in the United States and many other farming regions, the continued burning of Australia and the U.S. west coast, and a risk of ocean levels rising as fast as several meters per century, forcing migrations of hundreds of millions (and that's just a start). There may be a delay-- some these consequences may be left for our descendants in the 22nd century to cope with. But they will be inevitable if we don't act. Some will not be delayed enough to protect our children, and our grandchildren will remember us as the blind and selfish lunatics who destroyed their world. The longer action is delayed, the more costly and the less effective it can be-- and the more likely and more serious the disasters that we are risking become. I'm waiting for Margaret's other shoe to drop-- though I'm not holding my breath.