Science as a Contact Sport

SCIENCE AS A CONTACT SPORT: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate

By STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER

National Geographic Society, 2009, 295 pp, $43.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Mark Twain once joked that whilst everyone complains about the weather, nobody does anything about it. Stanford University climate scientist, Stephen Schneider, turned this on its head in 1973, quipping that “Mark Twain had it backwards. Nowadays everybody is doing something about the weather but nobody is talking about it’. He was reflecting on the serious heating being done to the planet from fossil fuel use whilst few were discussing the problem back then.

Four decades later, Schneider would now add that whilst everybody is at last talking about global warming, nothing is being done about it. This is partly due to the fact, as he recounts in Science as a Contact Sport, that much of the talking is being done by fossil-fuel-friendly climate change denialists.

Schneider has long been targeted by the denialist lobby who still think they have him pinned as an bandwagon-jumping alarmist because, back in 1971, Schneider, like most scientists, thought air pollution haze would outweigh warming from CO₂ and result in global cooling. When Schneider, however, realised that this conclusion was faulty because it left out the warming effects on the stratosphere (the layer above the pollution-riddled troposphere), he changed his mind – all in the best scientific tradition of revisiting one’s theoretical assumptions in the light of new evidence.

Schneider’s specialty is climate modelling and his first battles were with the scientific empiricists who were dismissive of computer modelling because it went beyond observation and measurement into the uncertainties of predictive statistical methodologies. Schneider replied that modelling is necessary to be able to forecast impacts of changing variables such as atmospheric concentrations of CO₂. You can’t measure the future – until it becomes the present and then it could be too late.

When, in 1988, severe heat waves gripped the US, sparking political interest in global warming, Schneider found a second battle front had been opened by an altogether less scrupulous opponent – “corporate interests”. The fossil fuel industry set in train a global warming denialist apparatus seeking to discredit a science they didn’t like.

Big oil, big auto, big banks and the US Chamber of Commerce formed the Global Climate Coalition whose mission, in the tradition of the Tobacco Institute set up by tobacco companies to discredit the smoking-cancer link, was to spread doubt about global warming. Leaked internal documents showed their deliberately deceptive strategy was to ‘reposition the debate’ as ‘theory, not fact’, creating public uncertainty by pushing the minority views of contrarians.

The armoury of all subsequent denialist groups includes attacking the honesty and integrity of climate scientists (hacked emails, taken out of context, are their latest fools’ gold). Denialists are also selective concerning scientific evidence, for example highlighting short-term climate runs which show no warming even though these have little to do with long-term climate trends.

Denialists also get science wrong - Martin Durkin’s documentary Great Global Warming Swindle, a favourite of the late Howard Government in Australia, made, amongst hundreds of errors and misleading statements, the absurd claim that CO₂ is such a small percentage of the atmosphere that it couldn’t possibly do any harm. As the Australian climatologist, Andrew Pittman, noted, on this logic a little bit of Ebola virus is also safe.

The old chestnut - the sun did it – also gets a regular airing from the denialists even though planetary temperatures have risen to unprecedented record levels in the last two decades whilst sunspot activity has actually suggested a cooling effect from solar radiation.

The denialists rely on a complicit and facile media to strike a ‘media balance’ by giving equal access to both the proponents of global warming and the denialists. To the uninformed in a complex scientific discipline, the pro and con position, if treated as equals and confined to a superficial ten-second sound-bite, can be made to seem equally credible - ‘if the experts don’t know, how can I know! Let’s wait until they figure it out’.

Unlike legitimate sceptics, the denialists simply ignore the “preponderance of evidence” established by rigorous and extensive peer review, says Schneider. The periodic Assessment Reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) distil the state of climate science (conservatively, given the political influence over their authors) and have a cast of thousands - the fourth report in 2007 had 174 lead authors, 222 contributing authors and 1,183 expert reviewers. The number of errors was one but contrarians cherry-picked this and a tiny handful of mis-citations in a desperate attack to undermine the undisputed basics of the science of anthropogenic global warming.

One of the denialists’ favoured tactics is to raise a laundry-list of disputed specifics (How much will sea levels rise? Did global warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Was this or that hurricane caused by global warming?) to obscure the basics of anthropogenic global warming and its consequences which have been settled at ever higher scientific confidence levels.

The standard of total scientific consensus on global warming before it can be declared a reality, as demanded by the denialists, is a fictitious one, says Schneider, especially if those scientists who are not climate specialists, and those on fossil fuel/oil industry payrolls, are to be included, let alone non-scientist denialists like Michael Crichton, the sci-fi author of Jurassic Park, who accuses the scientific establishment of persecuting ‘sceptics’ as the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo. The denialists may be lonely but they are more spoilers than brave Galileans.

The denialist aim, says Schneider, is to shift the focus from debate over what to do about global warming to whether there is a problem in the first place thus delaying any policy which might harm the “special interests vested in the status quo” (Schneider’s cautious term for fossil fuel industry profits).

The denialists have been active in various UN-sponsored forums on climate change, finding willing ears in certain countries’ delegations, namely the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and often China and Russia (all giant fossil fuel addicts). The four Assessment Reports of the IPCC have been bedevilled by denialists stringing out cantankerous debates over wording into the wee small hours. Even though some of the US scientists personally believed in anthropogenic global warming, their marching orders from their political masters were to deny, obstruct and delay (‘we agree with you’, said one to Schneider, ‘but we work for them’, the Bush administration).

With their review by governments, and appointment of delegations by governments, the IPCC Assessment Report meetings and the Conferences of Parties (COPs) meetings (most recently at Copenhagen in 2009) sometime make Schneider, an active member of the IPCC, wonder privately “whether the framework of an international panel operating by consensus could ever be successful” and whether “targets without teeth” are worth the hassle. Unlike their acronym, none of the COPs have policed environmental criminality. Schneider remains, however, hooked on the adrenalin rush from the drama of negotiations, and wedded to the IPCC process.

Schneider’s remaining set of battles are, more disappointingly, with environmentalists. An advocate of market ‘solutions’ such as emissions trading schemes, as well as ‘clean coal’ and “well-designed nuclear expansion”, Schneider finds himself offside with the likes of Greenpeace and the European Green parties over more radical greenhouse reduction targets, timeframes and strategies.

He criticises, for example, the environmentalists’ “ideological rant” against REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) schemes which allow polluting countries to offset their carbon emissions by paying for forest protection overseas, a scheme which offers an excuse not to cut industrial emissions at home.

Schneider talks the language of business and is often invited into their tent but even his ‘realistic’ brand of politics is too extreme for the fossil fuel ‘special interests’ whose power over capitalist governments is the major obstacle to the massive, and immediate, public investment in sustainable energy technologies that Schneider, and the science, says are needed to avoid the global warming tipping points and their triggering of potentially abrupt, dangerous and irreversible environmental changes.