Why You Should Believe in Climate Change: Part I

Articles

by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.

This is the first part of a three part discussion about climate change. The second part, which deals with the risk management aspects of climate change, can be found here.

One topic that inevitably draws comments from readers of Futuresearch blog posts is any discussion of climate change. A recent comment embodies the sentiments of many of these respondents. The commenter said that I used to write about interesting things, but now “you seem to be completely sucked in by the political(and wrong science) slant of the
 IPPC [sic]”. (It’s actually “IPCC” – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)

This implies that I’m (a) stupid, and (b) a sucker for political hacks. Accordingly, I’m going to lay out as clearly as I can why anyone with an honest willingness to look at facts should accept that climate change is happening, and why, from a futurist’s point of view, it’s important for every one of us to start taking action on this issue.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a climate change skeptic. I came by it honestly, because my father, Dr. J. Lamar Worzel,  was a pioneering oceanographer and a professor of geophysics, first at Columbia, then at the University of Texas, and didn’t believe that humanity caused climate change. So I have been where honest climate change skeptics are now.

Since then, I have read and studied both sides of the argument. And because of who my father was, I have also been able to talk to researchers who are actively working in this field. My family background, plus my own formal education, means that I understand how science happens, how the politics surrounding science works, and the human shortcomings of scientists.

As a result of my quest to understand the issue of climate change, and a willingness to consider facts and reason, my views have gone through a complete, 180-degree turn. It is now absolutely clear to me that (a) climate change is happening; (b) humanity is, at the very least, a major contributing factor; (c) it is going to impose major, long-term economic, financial, and human costs on us, and (d) the longer we wait to start doing something serious about it, the more expensive and dangerous it is going to get. I have no ax to grind in this discussion, and nothing to gain by supporting either side. As Gandhi said, my commitment is to truth, not to consistency.

The science

The science of climate change has been laid out in enormous detail for anyone willing to read it. I’ll provide links to the IPCC report, and to a couple of readable lay summaries on climate in a moment. First, though, let me quote Dr. Martin L. Weitzman, a professor of economics at Harvard, as his comment gets to the heart of the issue:

“Can we afford the luxury of assuming that a small minority of climate skeptics are more correct than the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists? What is the probability of that?”[1]

This raises some of the critical issues in the climate change debate. It points towards the potential costs of climate change. It correctly identifies that the number of people who deny climate change (of those who are qualified to hold an opinion) is tiny compared to those scientists who accept it. It raises the question of risk management (which is where my field, future studies, comes in). And it poses the question: Why, if scientific opinion is so unified, is this debate still going on, and why is the public so far behind the science? I’m going to deal with these, and related issues below.

First, though, here are the links I promised earlier:

The Summary for Policymakers of the first part of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, issued in 2013.

The Wikipedia entry on the evidence for climate change.

A short, layperson’s summary of the evidence for climate change from NASA.

And a one-page discussion of the retreat of glaciers around the world, which is one of the most unequivocal indicators of climate change.

Can we believe the scientists?

In some ways, this is the most offensive part of the whole controversy. Why is it that people happily accept scientific opinions and scientific integrity on medicine (especially in things involving their own health), technology, computers, astronomy, genetics, and many other fields, but when it comes to climate change, people suddenly think that scientists are shady liars involved in a global conspiracy to fool us into believing something that is just not true? This is partly because people have a hard time believing that their lives are going to change dramatically because of something they don’t really understand, but it’s also because of a conspiracy perpetrated by groups with a vested interest in spreading confusion about climate change.

But let’s consider the question seriously: Can we trust the scientists to tell us the truth?

There are over 800 authors and editors of the IPCC report drawn from about 3,000 experts nominated for these positions. These people came from many different countries, and a variety of relevant disciplines, including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, and ecology, social sciences and economics.[2] Fundamentally, these authors and editors had to all agree on any assertion before it could be included in the IPCC report. And if someone in this group had a serious disagreement, it would have leaked out by now.

So, just using common sense, how would it be possible to arrange to get more than 800 people from a variety of countries and from differing backgrounds to review more than 9,000 research reports on any subject, then to engage in a giant conspiracy to lie about the results, and finally to write a report thousands of pages long to sell this gigantic lie? Oh, and by the way, they’d have to do all of this on a volunteer basis, without getting paid, when doing so would trash their scientific reputation in the bargain. Clearly this is a non-starter.

The only other reason for not believing the scientists is that you think they’re wrong about the science. That’s about as foolish as saying that you’re a better tennis player than Roger Federer. If so, prove it by beating him on the court. In this case, the court involves years of study, decades of research, long and careful thought, and finally the acceptance of your ideas by a skeptical group of peers. You can’t just assert that you’re right and the scientists (and the science) are wrong without sounding like a fool. Prove it if you can.

Are scientists lying to protect their funding?

Scientists are human, and they worry about protecting their rice bowl as much as any one else. And it is true that there are instances of scientists “sexing up” their reports to garner attention, and win financial support in competition with other scientists. But to assume that 97%[3] of the relevant scientists are lying just so they can beat their peers and get more funding is a statement that contradicts itself and collapses on inspection. If this was so, there would be a vast competition to out-do each other with ever-more outrageous claims in order to curry favor. That’s not how the IPCC report reads.

The other thing this kind of giant, funding conspiracy would have to involve would be for the funding agencies to be instructing scientists, directly or indirectly, that they would only get funding if they devoted their working lives to lying about their results.

I grew up surrounded by scientists, being my dad’s colleagues, and I can tell you that can’t work. When it comes to their work, scientists are cantankerous, opinionated, assertive people. You cannot get thousands of such people to surrender their beliefs, ignore their life’s passion, and passively agree to spend their time writing elaborate fairy tales. That’s beyond being foolish, it’s being willfully stupid.

And this conspiracy would also require that the primary funder, the U.S. government, be capable of orchestrating such a conspiracy, and have the motivation to do so. There are two, clear problems with this. First, the U.S. government, in this day of Internet revelations and whistle-blowers, couldn’t orchestrate a successful conspiracy to lie about the date of a weekend wienie-roast, let alone a massive conspiracy involving millions of people and decades of research. And those people outside government whose interests would be hurt, such as the oil companies, would shout about the conspiracy from the rooftops, and provide the mainstream media with mountains of data showing how the science was wrong with facts that could be verified.

Instead, there is a trickle of contrary literature, most of it pseudo-scientific and statistically suspect, using cherry-picked data, and drawing illogical conclusions.

Publication of large quantities of scientific evidence disproving climate change is not happening for the simple reason that climate deniers don’t have the facts to back up their claims. The most they can do is to confuse the public by misleading them, raising bogus questions, and perpetrating ad hominem attacks on the researchers in an attempt to avoid answering the science.

Moreover, what would be the U.S. government’s motivation in wanting to do this? And how has it been carried out under 5 presidents from both parties: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama? This is nonsense.

But the IPCC is a creation of the U.N.; can we trust the U.N.?

The IPCC may have been created by the U.N., but the scientists come from dozens of different countries, and the United States is the world’s biggest funder of scientific research. For this conspiracy thing to work, the U.S. government would have to be in it up to their necks, along with all the governments of all the other developed countries in the world. It won’t wash.

The science isn’t really settled, as the recent pause in warming proves

The science is settled. Go read the IPCC report, before buying into the whole conspiracy theory thing.

There is no pause in warming. Fifteen years is not enough to be a statistically significant sample in geologically meaningful terms. Go back 200 years and look at the temperature change record if you want to assess the trend. Meanwhile, the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest on record – hardly evidence of a pause in warming.

Moreover, the other relevant yardsticks for climate change, such as the persistently rise in sea levels, the retreat of the glaciers around the world, the accelerating increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, or the rising acidity of the oceans, all continue to point to a warming climate.

When 97%[4] of the world’s climate-related science says that climate is warming, that means the debate is over and the science is settled.

Does that mean scientists know everything about climate, climate change, its speed of change, or can accurately predict its effects? Absolutely not. The Earth’s ecology is the most complex system we have ever studied, and we will continue to find surprises and learn new things for decades or centuries to come. But everything we learn will be based on the foundation of what we know now, just as Einsteinian physics is based on Newtonian physics.

Why would anyone lie by saying climate change isn’t happening?

Why would a small handful of scientists lie by saying climate change is not happening? For the same reason they lied about the relationship between smoking and cancer: they are being paid to do so.

In a now-infamous 2003 memo, U.S. pollster and consultant Frank Lunz advised Republican politicians to cultivate uncertainty when talking about climate change: “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate,” wrote Mr. Lunz (the italics are his own). Nurturing doubt about climate-change science has become big business for public-relations companies and lobbyists[5]

There is an organized and well-funded propaganda campaign being waged to cast doubt on the science behind climate change. The tactics used were invented by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on the research that showed that tobacco causes cancer. Indeed, many of the scientists involved (who seem to be scientists who will support any position for the right price or the right ideology) are the same as those who cast doubts on whether cigarettes caused cancer. They take advantage of the fact that the general public doesn’t always understand that someone who is an expert in one area of science may have zero knowledge or credibility in another. So, despite the fact that climate change is settled science, this group of anti-scientists have been very successful at sowing doubt.[6]

But climate changes all the time. We’re not to blame for that!

This reasoning seems, on the surface, to make sense. Climate does change all the time, and has thousands of times over the course of the Earth’s history. And Nature is so big that it is hard to believe that what we do could matter. But there are now over 7 billion humans on the Earth, with almost a quarter of a million more born every day, each of us contributing to pollution and greenhouse gases (GHG). Collectively, we are definitely moving the dial.

But it doesn’t really matter if we’re to blame or not. When your house is on fire, you don’t throw gasoline on it. Putting more GHGs in the atmosphere is guaranteed to increase the speed and severity of climate change.

But if climate changes all the time, why should we worry about it? What’s different this time?

The last time the climate went through a major shift, as may be starting now, we lived in caves and hunted wooly mammoths with stone spears. We have no recorded history to guide us, and don’t know what to expect.

So there are two answers to why we should worry about climate change. First, you shouldn’t assume that just because climate changes have happened before that we will like the changes that happen next. There have been both hotter and colder periods in the Earth’s history that would have been very difficult, or even fatal, for us. A lot depends on how drastically the Earth’s climate changes.

Which brings me to the second point. No one, even the professional climate deniers, disputes that GHGs increase the amount of the sun’s heat that’s trapped. And no one disputes that humanity is dumping GHGs into the atmosphere at an unprecedented and ever-accelerating pace, unmatched in human history, and in quantities that are important in climate terms. But how much climate changes will be affected by the total cumulative amount of GHGs in the atmosphere, so the more GHGs we dump, the greater will be the change.

So what’s different this time is that humanity is giving climate change an almighty shove, and that has never happened before. Until the 20th century there weren’t enough of us to do much damage. But now there are, and the geologic record strongly suggests that we aren’t going to like it when climate shoves us back.

———–

Gandhi also said the only true miracle was changing someone’s mind. If the facts can’t change someone’s mind on climate change, I doubt that anything, short of the ocean lapping at their windowsill, will. So now let’s turn to my field: the future.

Find the second part of this series on climate change here.


[3] Cook, John; “The 97%: We have a climate consensus”, Financial Post, 25 September 2013. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/09/25/counterpoint-consensus-of-evidence/

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Nurturing doubt about climate change is big business”, Globe and Mail, August 12, 2006, pp. F4.

[6] If you’d like to read more about this, then I suggest you get hold of a copy of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010).

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Dan Reid Nov 4, 2013 Link

    Thanks for the succinct overview. I have two sons, both recent graduates from Canadian universities, with degrees in ERS (Environment & Resource Studies) and Biology. The discussion on global warming is a regular topic at the dinner table. Even then, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the science from the misinformation that is in mainstream news. I will share your article with them and others. I look forward to Part II.
    Thanks.

  • John Gile Nov 4, 2013 Link

    I think that the “denial” is fueled by “What can we do about it?” Just all the research and conclusions of change happening, and we concerned “watchers” can not really do anything about it.

  • Ray Nov 4, 2013 Link

    YOu lost me when you use the IPCC as your authority.
    I’m still waiting for the IPCC to have one of their holiday meetings in Churchill Manitoba, outside, in the middle of February. That would accomplish two things. They would realize very quickly that Polar bears are not dying off and two, that warm, is an indoor sport.
    You say you are reading both sides but I cannot believe that for a second. The Arctic ice mass at the end of this summer was virtually the same as 1972. The Antarctic ice mass is at modern records. There is not one “climate model” that is even close to reality in the last 17 years, well CO2 production, mostly in the Asian arena has continued unabated to increase CO2, that nasty pretend pollutant, it’s plant food. The fact is that current computer technology is not at a level that would allow anyone to predict accurately, anything about the climate. For climate modelers to be accurate they may want to wait for access to quantum mechanical computers. Even then it’s a wait and see. If computer technology was at that state one could predict accurately exactly what the economy, therefore the stock market, would do. The stock market is infinitely less complicated than the climate. The climate is suppose to change, that will never change.

    ps I like your stuff but I respectfully disagree with your consensus..

    Ray

  • Richard Worzel Nov 4, 2013 Link

    Reply to Ray:

    Thanks for your comment.

    You’ve managed to tangle up several different issues in one short response. Let me see what I can address:

    1) You don’t have to read IPCC, there are lots of other organizations, such as the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/), part of Columbia University, that publish materials that say essentially the same thing. Don’t shoot the message because you don’t like the messenger. Or is everyone involved in a conspiracy?

    2) If you read about what’s happening in the Canadian Arctic, you know that the climate is changing very rapidly indeed. Why focus on polar bears alone? This is a broad spectrum issue, and keying on one thing is a mistake. Even if some scientists were wrong about one aspect of climate change, that doesn’t mean all scientists are wrong about everything.

    3) Arctic sea ice is not the same as it was in 1972. It is up somewhat from 2012, but has been, on average, declining for more than 30 years. See, for instance, http://www.nsidc.org/acticseaicenews/

    4) You’re right that climate modeling is, at best, imperfect. I have a degree in computer science, and have done detailed computer modeling, mostly in the financial field, so I know how difficult it is to model complex systems. Moreover, climate is one of the most complex systems we know, so models are going to be approximate at best. That said, they’re the best tool we have, and at the very least, force the modelers to think carefully about the dynamics of climate. No one believes they give perfect answers. But the answers from the several different, serious models all point in the same direction: problems ahead.

    However, even if the models were better, climate is a chaotic system, which means that further out, it is beyond anyone’s ability to predict. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, because you learn a lot from the effort.

    I will be dealing with the risk management aspects of climate change in the second part of the blog. How do you deal with a system you can’t predict? There are specific techniques for that. More to come…

    Richard

  • Arthur Raymond Nov 4, 2013 Link

    I have no doubt that with 3 billion plus people on Earth presently, we are rapidly changing the climate. We are extracting highly toxic chemicals from the Earth’s crust just so that we can enjoy our new improved selfish lifestyles. LNG, methane, diesel fuels, nuclear materials just to name a few.

    But call me light-headed, naive and foolish for asking why Scientists have found fossilized tropical vegetation in our Artic regions dating back 65 million years. That is a major catastrophy but not even Fred Flintstone was around to be blamed. Also, I wonder about the effects of major 9+ Earthquakes, Solar flares and the occassional asteroid slamming in Earth, knocking the axis off kilter and what effects they’ve had on our changing climate.

    Finally, when I read about the “Secret side of Dr. David Suzuki” and his relationship with an Oil Company I couldn’t help but be a little skeptical about the scientific facts we are being fed by our monopolized media.

    I do believe that the rich-few are spoiling it for the poor-many. Thank you

    • Richard Worzel Nov 5, 2013 Link

      Reply to Arthur Raymond:

      I think you meant 7 billion people, and counting.

      Yes catastrophes have happened to the Earth before humanity existed, but this is the first time we’ve been numerous enough, and had enough impact, to actually help create a potential catastrophe.

      And I wouldn’t recommend focusing on any one commentator, like Suzuki, who is, after all, a geneticist. Look instead at the broad mass of climatologists, geophysicists, and related-field scientists for data and answers. There is, without question, uncertainty in this field, even though the broad outline of what’s going on is becoming clear.

  • Al Slinkard Nov 5, 2013 Link

    The fickle finger of fate hangs heavy over mankind.

    Humans are multiplying and demanding ever increasing levels of energy for heating, cooling, transportation and destroying each other that we fail to see the forest for the trees. Our emphasis and concentration on short-term goals and objectives prevent us from even thinking about the long term, let alone doing anything about it.

  • courtney Nov 7, 2013 Link

    Wow Richard !!!

    I luv your feisty rebuttal towards most of the “climate change” replies. I don’t think we’ve seen that side of you before !!! But i appreciate your sense of humor and respect your opinion always, simply because you base your work on facts and “common sense” which apparently is sadly lacking throughout most of society today, ergo most of the replies on this subject.

    It is most entertaining in a bad light to realize that we are 7 billion people (most without any common sense whatsoever) who can’t see the environment around us deteriorating exponentially with the moral decay of our society !! it’s as simple as that, no study required !!! Call me a pessimist but the reality is around us every moment of our breathing days, so people get with it and talk about it and don’t take any one persons’ opinion as the law, more importantly challenge everything around you and think for yourself, ultimately taking your path in society based on what you see everyday whether you like it or not !!

    Good luck to us all, we’re going to need it (well maybe not my generation) so run with it wisely people !!

    Cheers Courtney

  • Frederik De Wachter Nov 11, 2013 Link

    Hi Richard,

    I appreciate your article and I’ve shared it. It’s a great overview and rational argumentation. I was already convinced that climate change is caused by humanity and indeed a very serious threat to the future of our children. I look forward to the next steps!

  • Everett Hicks Nov 14, 2013 Link

    Yet the Daily Mail revision has dropped its claims about the long term trend to focus on the so-called warming hiatus of the past 15 years to produce an even bolder headline : “World’s top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought”.