20130923_RD
Source: Newsmax TV
URL: http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Darwall-Global-Warming-Climate/2013/09/23/id/527267/
Date: 23/09/2013
Event: Rupert Darwall on man-made climate change: "the science is weak because you can't falsify it"
Attribution: Newsmax TV
People:
- Rupert Darwall: Author of The Age of Global Warming: A History
- David Nelson: Newsmax anchor
David Nelson: The administration is taking on the coal industry with first ever carbon limits. Even the head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, says it's an aggressive move by the President to bypass Congress. Hello, I'm David Nelson, welcome to Newsmax. The debate surrounding global warming has been with us for decades, and Rupert Darwall has finished an exhaustive study on this subject and has come up with some answers, that has everyone talking. Rupert is a corporate strategist and author of a fascinating new book The Age of Global Warming: A History. Rupert, welcome, thank you so much for being with us.
Rupert Darwall: Thank you.
David Nelson: Rupert, first, congratulations on your book, but congratulations on the timing - you know, it seems to be centre-stage, right now, the whole concept of global warming. The President was out last week talking about carbon limits on power companies. Uh, first I've got to ask you, you know - what prompted you to write this book, and why now?
Rupert Darwall: Because I'd had a very old friend, a very eminent economist, and we sit down and talk about global warming, and I found the whole thing so frustrating - I felt the thing I had to do was write a book, and that you write a book and, kind of - you objectify, you put it down on paper, and what I tried to do in this book is to tell the story. And by telling the story, you, kind of, understand it better, and I hope that that is - that is conveyed to the reader.
David Nelson: Well, you know, as I said, really at the tie-off [?], you know, the international debate surrounding global warming has been with us for, gosh, a half century, you know, close to it. Uh, certainly over 40 years. Uh, where do you see the line in the sand, with this - really became a centrepiece of debate between, you know, environmentalists and those who, you know, are really looking to drive the economy?
Rupert Darwall: The key date is 1988.
David Nelson: 1988...
Rupert Darwall: And that is when - that is the date when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -
David Nelson: The IPCC.
Rupert Darwall: - the IPCC, which is producing its next report this week, it's when James Hansen gave his testimony to Congress, and it's when Margaret Thatcher made a speech on global warming. It's - it really was the year when everything came together and the politics really took off.
David Nelson: Well, politics played a crucial role, certainly has been the centrepiece of President Obama's administration - he ran on the environment -
Rupert Darwall: Yeah.
David Nelson: - he was supported by those, certainly the environmental lobby, ran against political hot buttons, things like Keystone Pipeline, but it's also been an important issue for other Presidents, even Nixon, in his second election - uh, running for the second term - was talking about the environment, and Ronald Reagan - you know, some credit him for some of the good things he did.
Rupert Darwall: Well, Nixon's a very interesting counter-example to President Obama. When Nixon was - his big State of the Union speech in 1970, which he put the environment centre stage, he told an aide "If it's a choice between smoke and jobs, I'm for jobs. But just keep me out of trouble on the environment". Seems President Obama is saying "I'm going to clobber jobs, I'm going to be good on the environment".
David Nelson [laughing]: I never heard it put quite that way. One of the interesting passages in the book is when you talk about Al Gore. And I wrote this down, because it really struck me. We're talking about his book Earth in the Balance, and you said "It was a fundamental rejection of two of its greatest accomplishments, the industrial and scientific revolutions" - that's an astonishing statement.
Rupert Darwall: He is - Al Gore is an ecologist - you need to - he is a very deep green, he was when he wrote that book. And he argued that scientific revolution led to a breach with nature, which led to the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust and Stalinism. So when Al Gore stands side by side with scientists, I find it incredible, because scientists should read that book, and they'll say he's accusing them of the Holocaust and Stalinism.
David Nelson: What was interesting is what came out of the Clinton administration, that you point out, was that, you know, advisers Larry Summers and Janet Yellen - two names that have a prominent role right now in our economy, Janet Yellen is likely to be the next Fed Chair - went to Clinton and actually said "You've got to pull back a little bit - the economy's slowing down".
Rupert Darwall: The secret of the Clinton administration is that it was highly pragmatic in its approach to climate change - it was really about symbolism. So what they did was: they did, it's true, they launched a war on Big Oil and they lost that, but they didn't take on coal, because the Senate, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate was from West Virginia and they weren't going to take on the coal industry. And in the - their approach to the climate change negotiations was "We need escape hatches, so if it becomes a bit painful, there are escape hatches so we don't damage the economy". A very pragmatic approach.
David Nelson: There are two terms that appear quite often in your book, and I'd like you to define them. One of the things I find interesting, you know - for a very long time we've heard about "global warming". I've almost taken it as verbatim - this is what I see on TV, and the Earth is getting warmer. And that seems to have given way to another word, "climate change", in here. First: is the world getting warmer? Is there - is there science to support that?
Rupert Darwall: The world did get warmer, through the 20th century. There were - there was a rise in the first half, in the world, to about 1940. It then cooled down, and then it warmed up from about the mid-1970s and peaked around 1996-'97-'98. But of course, as people are becoming more aware, there's been very little warming since then, which has given the IPCC a huge dilemma, to explain what they believe should happen hasn't happened.
David Nelson: Is that the reason that I'm hearing the term "climate change" more often than I hear "global warming"?
Rupert Darwall: Yes, and you hear terms like "global weirding", so that any event can be explained by this phenomenon. So: it doesn't snow - that's global warming. There's a big dump of snow - that's climate change. So it's really been set up so that virtually any evidence can support the hypothesis.
David Nelson: Let's talk about the science, for a second. Because I've heard you speak, in the past, and you've - I've heard you say that the science isn't necessarily wrong, but it's weak. Talk about that.
Rupert Darwall: Yeah, the science is weak because you can't falsify it, and there's a very strong criterion developed by the philosopher Karl Popper, that scientific theory needs to, in principle, be falsifiable through experimentation. And global warming doesn't meet that test. Global warming is about assembling evidence, and Karl Popper pointed out you can get evidence for virtually any proposition you want. So the science is inherently weak.
David Nelson: Well, let's talk about that, because there's an astonishing part of your book where you talk about the falsification, possibly, of scientific data - you call it "Climategate", and you say that there's even a smoking gun, in the form of emails. Please talk about that.
Rupert Darwall: Yeah, Climategate was a batch of emails that were found in a British university, which is one of the bastions - the Climatic Research Unit, which is one of the bastions of the orthodoxy. And what I found most striking about those emails was not so much any individual email that says, you know: here is - you know, here it shows there's a great conspiracy. It was more that the scientists in private were far less certain about the science that they were maintaining publicly.
David Nelson: What are the implications of that? I mean... You know, I'm trying to put it in a way that most of our viewers would understand. If they would go as far as to, you know, alter the data in some way, how can we trust scientists, in the future?
Rupert Darwall: I think it's less alteration of data than overstatement as to what the data tells us. And that has been - there was one case, there's the famous case of the Hockey Stick, which was based on a faulty algorithm, which was the centrepiece of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. And what was really important about that episode is that the National Academy of Science and all the big science bodies all came out in favour - you know, of publicly supporting, when many of them knew privately of the flaws in the Hockey Stick. And, to me, that was a very important episode, because what - it's a problem when science becomes agenda-driven. And we've had agenda-driven science. And that means that you end up with spin and all the artifacts and tricks that we know from politicians get imported into the science.
David Nelson: Let's bring it down to numbers - I'm an analyst, by trade, so I try to focus on numbers. Has any study been done that talk [sic] about the possible reduction in GDP from the regulatory environment that we have right now?
Rupert Darwall: What is interesting is that the administration and the EPA can't point - hasn't got the data to point to: what are the benefits, to the US, of taking this action.
David Nelson: You talk about that a lot, in the book, and you talk about it in the various conferences that have taken place. One thing that I found very interesting was that in the end, when they had these big international meetings - Kyoto and others - that the Third World, emerging market nations, were really saying "No, we're not going on board".
Rupert Darwall: David, this is a big theme of the book - ever since the first big UN environmental conference, which was Stockholm in 1972, the Third World has consistently said "Environmentalism is for the First World - insofar as you want us involved, it is conditional on not fettering our economies". And that has been a consistent theme since 1972. So it should come to [sic] no surprise to anyone that in 2009, Copenhagen flamed out because the Third World wasn't going to sign on to a global carbon cap.
David Nelson: Is the reason that they're not signing on to a carbon cap because "Look, you guys did it, through your Industrial Revolution"? We certainly didn't have environmentalists in, you know - well, maybe we did. I don't know - you're the person to ask, but it was a different environment in the '20s, '30s and '40s, during our Industrial Revolution.
Rupert Darwall: Yeah, Third World - the Chinese and the Indians say "Look, you created this problem, you industrialised first, it's your moral responsibility to solve it". But also I think there's another thing, that fundamentally, what is important to them is getting - is economic growth. And that's a big difference from the environmentalism of the West.
David Nelson: We only have a couple of minutes left and I want to take the other side, for a second, because a lot of people talk - certain critics talk about this study that was done to examine global warming over the last - the rise of global temperatures over the last 15 years, and they point to the year 1998, when this study was started, and they say that it was an exceptionally warm year, that if you just move the starting point a year or two, like, forward, the data comes out a bit different. What are your thoughts, there?
Rupert Darwall: Well, as I said, the science is weak but it also looks like the effect of global warming is weak, because the hypothesis, if you like, is that more CO2 in the atmosphere will overwhelm natural variability, and what you've talked about - well, if you move '98 to - if you move the years a bit - you're talking about natural variability. And throughout -
David Nelson: It's the margin of error?
Rupert Darwall: It's not a margin of error, it's - the climate system is chaotic. And it's just the natural - if you like, it's the band in which the temperature oscillates and moves around, in a fairly, kind of, chaotic way. And critics of the IPCC, such as M.I.T.'s Richard Lindzen, have consistently criticised the IPCC for underestimating the band of natural variability.
David Nelson: Uh, we have one - this is my last question for you because we only have a minute left, and it's one that I'd like to try to, you know, get it out for our viewers. What's government's role, here? Certainly, government has to have some sort of role - we just can't, you know, let industry and power companies control themselves. So government's got to have a role, here. You've done the hard work - this book, right here, you've got over 80 pages of notes, and an index and a reference in it. What are your conclusions, there?
Rupert Darwall: Well, I think there's a massive irony, with the US position, because the US, correctly, didn't sign up to Kyoto and the Kyoto carbon limits, the reductions. But the irony is: because of the fracking revolution, it's possible that the US would meet those limits. Now, that didn't happen because of the Federal government - no-one anticipated that. Yet you get a good outcome, purely because of, if you like, American capitalism, the innovation - well, fracking. This technology - no-one knew about, or they didn't realise what it could do, in 1997.
David Nelson: I've been an analyst, now, for 10 years - I can tell you, nobody even considered it. We, you know, we thought we were going to run out of oil, and that was it, and now we have this whole, you know, new-found source...
Rupert Darwall: If you think of what would have happened if the US had ratified Kyoto, all the regulations, the court - the litigation... It would have been - the US economy would be mired in tape and taxes and cap-and-trade, and all these... This wouldn't have happened.
David Nelson: Rupert, we're out of time. It's fascinating - I'm going to have to have you back again. Thank you so much for coming in.
Rupert Darwall: Thanks, David.
David Nelson: We've been talking with Rupert Darwall and about his book The Age of Global Warming: A History. Thanks for joining - I'm David Nelson, for Newsmax.