What it is safe to claim about climate change

This week's TCS exclusive:

The only way to save the planet is to distort the truth.

Sceptical? Good - there is life in democracy yet. But in discussions of global warming fact and fiction frequently blur.

Climate change is the single greatest threat to mankind in the 21st century. But specific weather events can rarely be explicitly linked to climate change; the troposphere is far to complex a system to allow such categorical connections. Nevertheless, those championing action to limit the impact of global warming often invoke specific weather events to buttress their case, and the public doesn’t seem to pay attention unless they do. Can a distinct lack of candour be justified if it serves to help avert global climatic catastrophe?

Scientists and politicians rising to the challenges posed by global warming face a dilemma: humanity has long taken Gaia as a resource to exploit rather than protect, and will only tolerate the inconvenience of saving her if it otherwise stands to suffer itself. The warnings of the scientific community, however, have never been enough. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt able to state in 1995 that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate”, and, by 2001, that “most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities”. Yet it took Hurricane Katrina to force the realities of global warming into the American popular consciousness, while current water shortages in Australia were similarly needed to stimulate our antipodean cousins. In making the case for a concerted response to the prospect of severe climatic dislocation, the persuasive effects of specific weather events have proved invaluable. Climate change is an otherwise diffuse, long-term and uneven process; extreme weather allows climatologists to illustrate its catastrophic potential. Shrinking glaciers simply don’t have the propagandistic value of devastated cities.

But is it dishonest to connect climate change with meteorology? Not if the link made is indirect. Climate models do indeed project extreme weather conditions of increased intensity and frequency as the earth heats up. Such was, quite legitimately, the central thrust of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. But we are on dangerous ground if we make the further claim of a direct causal link between recent global warming and specific meteorological disasters, for humanity has long borne crippling droughts, floods and hurricanes. Littering his documentary with references to the 2005 devastation of America’s Gulf Coast, Gore goes on to claim that “what changed in the US with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences”. His Oscar-nominated documentary demonstrates the worrying propensity for slippage between claims of direct and indirect connection. Far from an ‘inconvenient truth’, to cite Katrina as evidence of the impact of climate change is a convenient fiction. Concluding that Katrina was the consequence of global warming is blurring the facts to suit a political agenda.

But if doing so creates a mandate to mitigate climate change, perhaps muddying the issue can be defended. Being a stickler for accuracy today will seem a perverse luxury in 50 years time if central London is underwater. Scientists need to keep global warming in the news if politicians are to have a hope of convincing their citizens to make painful sacrifices. As the costs of climate change limitation begin to bite, and as other causes jostle with global warming for politicians’ and the public’s attention, there will be an ever greater temptation to bind all weather related news with climate change. But this would be profoundly disingenuous, and carries unjustifiable dangers. With climate-change sceptics ready to expose any fallacy, increasingly tenuous claims risk undermining the hard science on which global warming rests. Furthermore, human induced global warming may be the first truly global challenge humanity has faced, but it won’t - unless climate change cripples civilisation beyond recognition - be the last. We owe it to future generations not to devalue the notion of expert opinion. Climate change is a subject in which passions run high and immediate action is needed; the exaggeration of high spirits can perhaps at times be excused. But the truth should not be sacrificed along with our cheap flights and 4x4s.

The environment resuscitated

In the run up to the 2005 general election, the New Statesman led with “how the greens were choked to death” - “why the environment isn’t an election issue”. Lacking vision and leadership, green groups had been compromised and marginalised within Labour’s “big tent” after throwing their lot in with the government in 1997. By 2005, only the Liberal Democrat's had a manifesto presenting green issues as fundamental to their platform - Labour gave the environment only a few paragraphs at the end of its ‘International policy’ and ‘Quality of life’ sections, while for the Conservatives it was buried within ‘Accountability’. But, since then, we have had the Stern Review and a growing acknowledgement of the potential impact of climate change, while the Tories have reinvented themselves as the party of the scribbled tree.

Green issues have accordingly risen in prominence on the major parties’ respective websites. Labour now place ‘Climate change and energy’ fourth on their list of policy areas, while the Lib Dems place the ‘Environment’ fifth. The Tories’ ‘Quality of Life Challenge’, which unlike Labour’s 2005 manifesto namesake is more or less exclusively devoted to environmental concerns, is second in its set of six key policy ‘challenges'. But don’t bank on the environment as a decisive factor in any future general election. As the parties gear up for this years’ polls in Scotland and Wales, the Welsh Conservatives may hope that emphasising ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ gets them greater representation in the Senedd, but by burying their own track record on the environment the Scottish Labour party clearly doesn’t consider it crucial in determining whether they retain control of Holyrood. All parties want to talk tough on the environment, but none are going to feel particularly inclined to ask too many sacrifices of the electorate. The Conservatives at least seem likely to follow the Lib Dems in sweetening the pill of eco-taxes with tax reductions elsewhere. Labour are currently saying the least about climate change, but, after commisioning the Stern Report, expect Gordon Brown to make important announcements once Tony Blair steps down. 2006 was a year of environmental awakening, and it is hard to imagine a repeat of 2005’s electoral indifference to climate change. The main parties have accepted the prospect of global environmental catastrophe. But none yet seem ready to stake out a daring position to lead the electorate where they don't neccesarily want to go.