Hacking the Climate Da Vinci Code
Eric Gisin
November 23, 2009, 13:29:20 | Editors
Unless you live a fully sustainable life in a cave without any internet access, you will no doubt
be aware of the hacking into a UK climate research institution's computer system, and the release
of emails between prominent figures in the small world of climate science.
This is, of course, immensely good fun, and intriguing, and is already leading to questions being
asked about what the small group of individuals involved were up to. The question in the sceptic's
mind is naturally whether this data will reveal the smoking gun, leading to the discovery that
liberties have been taken with certain facts. Certainly, some embarrassing prose has been
exchanged, and now exposed. But it requires a degree of interpretation to make it stick. It is
highly unlikely that this will render the entire climate debate over and done. But let's imagine,
for the sake of argument, that there was something terribly damaging in the emails that have
surfaced. Would it bring the house of cards down?
We don't think it would.
The putative certainty that the 'hockey stick' provided for climate politics has not yielded the
momentum the environmental movement et al think it entitles them to. Domestic climate politics has
not won either the hearts or minds of the public, and climate policies remain the object of much
scepticism, suspicion, and cynicism. The institutions that have been created seemingly in order to
'deal with climate change', at local, national, and international levels, have not been created
though normal political processes, nor after having their objectives or principles tested
democratically. As we argue here, these institutions have more likely been created because of a
lack of public sympathy for environmentalism, than merely in spite of it. (If the greens had really
won the argument, why would they not try to give the institutions that have been created in its
name the legitimacy of a popular mandate, as well as blessing it with scientific authority?)
Environmentalists naturally seek to explain their political failure as a deficit between the
public's
understanding of the issues and 'the science'. Politicians, too, enjoy appearing to be responding
to a crisis that exists above and beyond politics than responding to anything within it. Politics
is suspended in order to 'save the planet' at the politicians convenience. Democracy is postponed
until further notice. But not because of the hockey stick. In fact, the document that has been
central to the ascendency of environmental politics owes little to scientific certainty:
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States
according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of
full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to
prevent environmental degradation. - Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development
Published nearly a decade before the hockey stick's appearance, this agreement, which is even
signed by George Bush Sr, aims to be the framework which will lead to:
. international agreements which respect the interests of all and protect the integrity of the
global environmental and developmental system
The foundation for this framework is belief in the 'integral and interdependent nature of the
Earth, our home', and that:
Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a
healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.
Piecing these together. First, it is not necessary for there to exist a coherent argument that the
Earth's nature is 'integral and interdependent'; the precautionary principle waves the Rio
Declaration's first premise past any scrutiny. Second, its unstated conclusion - the corollary to
human beings' entitlement to 'a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature' - is that
humans aren't entitled to a life that is not 'in harmony with nature' as it is conceived according
to the tenets of 'sustainable development'. By virtue of the 'integral and interdependent nature of
the Earth', any life that is not 'in harmony with nature' is depriving another of its right to
exist 'in harmony with nature'. Never mind that 'nature' and 'harmony' are, at best, entirely
nebulous, if not mystical concepts, this is environmentalism's Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, only
it leaves us humans with very little.
What's this got to do with the CRU hacking, you say? Well, the point is that it is not necessary to
peek behind the firewall to get an understanding of what kind of beast environmentalism - or any
form of eco-centric political philosophy - is. What research such as that produced by the authors
of the exposed emails does is supply the kind of framework expressed by the Rio Declaration with
some parameters, merely so that it can narrate itself. That is to say that the politics of the Rio
Declaration are prior to the Hockey Stick. Moreover, by virtue of the deployment of the
precautionary principle, the conclusion of the Rio Declaration is its own premise. It's got its
head up its own arse.
The point is that any detected or projected rise in temperature does not speak for itself, no
matter how sound the science behind it actually is. Any such data needs to be interpreted. That is
to say that before you know what 'science says', you have to know what has been asked of it. As the
Rio Declaration demonstrates, the question of what a rise in temperature means has already been
given, or rather assumed. In the logic of environmentalism, the sensitivity of climate to CO2 is
held to be equivalent to the sensitivity of society to climate. But this, again, has no basis in
science. Instead it is an entirely political, or ethical precept, centered on the concept of
'balance' and 'harmony' with 'nature'. The function of 'science', in what follows from
environmental logic, is the search for 'evidence' of the status of this mythical balance. But,
again, 'evidence' does not speak for itself, because, again, it requires interpretation. Anything
that is not 'normal', implies 'imbalanced' in this way of thinking.
The mistake many sceptics have been making appears to be the mirror of the mistake that
environmentalists have been making - they both assume that the argument for environmental politics
emerges from environmental science, either correctly as a process that produces objectively sound
analysis, or as an institution prone to corruption. It doesn't. It is only recently that arguments
emerging from the environmental movement have attempted to give themselves weight by appealing to
what 'science says.' and that from this scientific fact emerge an array of ethical imperatives and
its special form of politics. Previously, environmental arguments were expressed in terms of
'precaution'. As we can see, the Rio Declaration posits a prior relationship with nature before a
scientific conception of that relationship, making an institution of the precautionary principle
well in advance of putative certainty.
Of course, the emergence of the hockey stick in IPCC TAR began to alter the language of the
discussion away from precaution and towards scientific certainty. As such, it has become the focus
of sceptics and of warmers, for a variety of reasons. And there are very good reasons - relating to
both the scientific methodology, and owing to the behaviour of those that produced it - to doubt
the hockey-stick's prescience, never mind its hindsight. As a purely scientific exercise, it may
well have its own merits. But those involved in its creation, and its uncritical reproduction
across the climate discussion - the politicisation of climate science - brought the
hacking-attempts upon themselves. Because once this graph was given such totemic significance to
the political process - ie, once so many arguments about so many futures were seemingly based on
this document - its authors should have either managed expectations of science, or fully opened up
every aspect of their research to scrutiny. There is no legitimate reason for hiding any aspect of
an argument which demands a course of action to 'save the planet'.
In spite of the apparent certainty offered to the debate about climate change, however, the debate
was not over. Even if the Hockey Stick graph really did demonstrate anthropogenic climate change,
the argument about its consequences remain unresolved. As we have discussed in recent posts, the
premise that the sensitivity of both human society and the climate are equivalent is unsound. For
instance, it is claimed that 'climate change will be worse for the poor' in an attempt to
naturalise the phenomenon of poverty. This assumes that not driving our cars will do anything to
change the plight of the world's poor, and fails to address the matter of poverty. The point here
is that the environmentalist's conception of humanity's relationship with nature is not premised on
material evidence.
A conclusive debunking of the 'hockey stick' graph will not debunk the framework through which the
environmentalist sees the world. It will not challenge the basis of environmentalism. And it will
not disturb the foundations of the institutions that have been established in order to 'save the
planet' (ie, to reproduce environmental ideology). Copenhagen will not be built on hockey sticks,
just as Kyoto wasn't. It, like the Rio Declaration, was created before the IPCC produced any claims
regarding conclusive detection of an anthropogenic signal in the temperature record.
Our argument here on this blog has been that in order to understand the ascendency of environmental
politics, it must be seen principally as a political phenomenon. The politics is prior to the
science. It's not as if environmentalism is new. Eco-centric ideas have operated in political ideas
throughout history. They didn't persist in Malthus's era. Romantic forms of socialism such as
Morris's failed to thrive. The blood-and-soil environmentalism of the Nazis did not survive. Paul
Ehrlich's dire prophecies did not materialise. The question sceptics need to address is why this
kind of thinking stuck in the era roughly spanning the late 80s to the present. Until we can do
that, no amount of scandal and debunking of exaggerated scientific claims will substantially alter
the debate.
There is no need to explain the phenomenon of environmentalism and its success in influencing
political institutions throughout the world as a conspiracy between a small number of people. It is
evident that the greening of Western governments has occurred almost entirely without the ideas
pertaining to this transformation ever having been the subject of democratic testing. It is
transparent that the institutions that have been established are not populated by accountable
individuals, and have been located outside, above, or beyond the reach of normal domestic politics.
Politicians who have been instrumental in creating the green future have emphasised the scare
story, rather than openly discussed what kind of future it is that they are creating. Whatever
failures of scientific methodology or fraud these emails represent, exposing them will not expose
the phenomenon of environmentalism and its causes.
None of this is intended to pour water on the arguments made in the debate by those who are
focussed on the science. It is essential to scrutinise the science produced in this debate in order
to show that there are problems in the political argument that they seemingly support. The point is
that no amount of science can sort the debate out, because it is not principally a scientific
debate.
Environmentalists claim that their argument is grounded in scientific objectivity. But this is only
possible because they fail to see their argument as political. Writing on Friday about the CRU
hacking, our old friend, Bob Ward, wrote in the Guardian:
More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the
greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration
in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and
rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed
to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.
Those making scientific arguments for political action on climate change cannot complain about
confusing the public, and ought to focus instead on their own confusion. What Ward and those
engaged in making arguments like his haven't overturned is the idea that small changes in climate
are easily coped with by wealthy, industrialised, economies. The premise that they operate on is
that they cannot, and this is the basis of their political and 'ethical' outlooks. As such, their
environmentalism turns into an argument against development, and against humanity itself. They
betray this much when they attempt to explain any failure of their political ideas to resonate with
the public. Ward continues:
Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate
scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their
reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate
researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of
fraud.
It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that
the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There
is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.
Ward neglects to offer us any idea about which sort of scrutiny is legitimate, and which isn't. The
implication is that the good guys want to save the planet, and the bad guys want it to be
destroyed. In Ward's view, goodies and baddies populate the debate. Any attempt to scutinise the
basis of an agreement at Copenhagen is, in Ward's view, illegitimate, and will be answered by Ward
accusing people of fraud, or some such illegitimate interest.
What this betrays is the fragility of the environmental argument and its premises. There is no need
for sceptics to attempt to locate conspiracies, fraud, or deception. Because the reality is that
environmentalism has thrived in an era in which any purposive political action - least of all the
execution of a conspiracy - is impossible. Environmentalism has influenced public policy not
because of fraud, but because of the intellectual vacuity of politicians. And it is beyond the ken
of most commentators, journalists, and eco-PR bods such as Ward to deceive the public, because they
don't even reflect on the coherence, consequences, or political character of their own ideas.
Fecklessness is rife, and that is why the world is greening.
Ouroboros Rex
george
What?
For pointing out the 'children are going to die' scare tactic?
You obviously didn't read the article
I M @ good guy
wrote:
See those two dots before his words, that is
supposed to represent the chirping of a parrot
before it says the only words it knows.