We are told by scientists working in climate-related fields that our individual lifestyle choices need to be aligned with responsible stewardship of Earth’s resources, or we will face dire consequences. So we need to make up our minds about whether or not this requires behavioural change.
Which would be fine, except that governments and society as a whole have failed to reach agreement after decades of trying. There are people who say that the findings of scientists have converged on a clear message – if not on what to do about a changing climate, then at least on the need for action to stop our harmful behaviour. And there are those, like Keith Bryer writing in Business Report, who say it’s all hogwash. We can’t all be experts, so who do we believe?
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) undertakes the biggest, most comprehensive effort to identify and assess research related to climate change.
There is no unified “climate science”, because our understanding of climate and climate change comes from approaching it from many different angles and using different kinds of evidence to piece together an extremely complex puzzle. As new answers are found, new questions arise in an endless dance among scientists who follow leads and retreat from unhelpful lines of inquiry. So we need the IPCC to continually update the world on current understanding.
The problem is not, as some sceptics claim, that scientists are engaging in a massive conspiracy to keep milking the teat of the climate change cow. The problem is that commentators think there should be some magical unanimity among an incredibly diverse set of researchers who, in the nature of scientific inquiry, improve our understanding of the climate in fits and starts.
Not only is there an unrealistic expectation that scientists should speak with a single voice, but whatever discord there is in this voice is amplified and further distorted by the tendency of reporters and columnists to comment on the comments, not on the source itself.
A group of UCT scientists has just departed for the South Atlantic on the SA Agulhas II to retrieve data from instruments recording deep ocean currents: their temperatures, salinity and flows. This is just one contribution to understanding the relationship between oceans and climate.
There are thousands of other researchers looking at carbon in ice cores, methane escaping from melting permafrost, variations in the flow of water from high-altitude glaciers, plant growth in relation to levels of atmospheric carbon, the intensity of storms, links between volcanoes and mass extinctions, the behaviour of El Niño… The list is endless. Many would – and should – do their work out of scientific curiosity even if climate change were not a concern.
Over the years and decades, these studies refine our knowledge of what happened in the past and what is happening now, and what is likely to happen in the future as a result of a combination of natural and human processes. Some of them will confirm previous findings, some will disprove hypotheses, and others will produce outright contradictions with previous work. This is the way science works.
The debate about what these findings mean is part of what the IPCC does as it distils the research into a synthesis of the current state of our scientific knowledge.
So it is complete nonsense to claim, as Bryer does, that an apparent contradiction (in his case, the evidence about whether the arctic sheet ice is increasing or decreasing in size) should be seen as an inconvenient fact that sends climate scientists packing.
What is perhaps worse than citing the contradictions and uncertainty as reason to disbelieve the scientists, is the claim that we therefore can ignore the IPCC’s warnings.
Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, puts it very well: Lack of certainty is not a reason to do nothing, because the fact that we have only one planet means that “even a risk with very low probability becomes unacceptable when it affects all of us… Without any precise models, we can still reason that polluting or altering our environment significantly could put us in uncharted territory, with no statistical track-record and potentially large consequences.” Once it is shown that the scale of the effect can be large (and it has been), “the burden of proof of absence of harm is on those who would deny it.”
@carbonsmart