Sandy Starr
posted 20 February 2006

Rarely does a day go by without some warning about catastrophic climate change – the evidence and prospective consequences of it – appearing in the news. And after many years of being told that this is our last chance to do something about it, we're now seeing more news stories to the effect that things are already too late, and the best that humanity can do is batten down the hatches. Is this dire prognosis accurate?

Proposing the debate's motion were two prominent environmentalists – Michael Meacher, former environment minister and Labour member of parliament for Oldham; and Tom Burke, an academic and environmental policy adviser involved with many green initiatives, including Third Generation Environmentalism. Opposing the motion were Bjørn Lomborg, political scientist and author of the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist; and biogeographer Philip Stott.

Meacher began by arguing that the motion did not go far enough – he believed that dealing with global warming should be the top priority for humanity. He cited evidence of the extent of climate change, and gave us a litany of adverse consequences, such as the spread of disease and burgeoning numbers of refugees. His argument that global warming should be tackled as a problem in its own right, through reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, was unconvincing. If anything, the diverse problems he described seemed to point to a need for thoroughgoing industrial and economic development around the world. Furthermore, his rhetoric – at one point, he claimed that humanity was 'raping the Earth' – didn't exactly endear him to this humanist.

Lomborg reiterated some of the most useful points from The Skeptical Environmentalist– most notably that the Kyoto Protocol, the international policy mechanism for committing governments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is a very expensive and inefficient solution to problems associated with climate change. But he seemed to be on shakier ground when he cited his subsequent book Global Crises, Global Solutions, and the related initiative the Copenhagen Consensus, which asked a selection of Nobel-winning economists to prioritise the world's problems and possible solutions in terms of value for money. Controversially, dealing with climate change came low on their final list of priorities.

The Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting exercise, but I had some reservations about the way that Lomborg shifted the climate change discussion from the realm of scientific findings to the realm of economic cost/benefit analysis. Both science and economics are very important to the discussion, but surely the domain in which our response to climate change must ultimately be decided is politics?

Burke was condescending to Lomborg and others who question climate change orthodoxy, characterising them as passing through the various psychological stages of denial. He argued that if the evening's debate were seen as a wager, then the consequence of endorsing the motion, should it transpire to be false, would be a sustainable world full of innovative technology; whereas the consequence of opposing the motion, should it transpire to be true, would be the extinction of humanity.

Advocates of sustainability frequently wrongfoot their opponents in this way, by arguing that at the end of the day, living unsustainably is too scientifically risky to countenance. But again, there is a political aspect to this discussion that seems to have been sidestepped. The concept of sustainability involves political assumptions about how and why we conduct our affairs and what constitutes innovation. As such, the merits and demerits of sustainability should be argued on the relevant political grounds, before its critics are shot down for bringing about the apocalypse.

Stott began his contribution by describing the complexity of the Earth's climate, and the difficulty of predicting changes to it with any certainty, much less instigating such changes. He claimed that the models of climate change bandied about in public discussion are often neither as reliable nor as uncontested as environmentalists would have us believe. And he argued that the concept of 'global warming' has a cultural significance quite separate from the science of the issue. These were all useful correctives to the fear that tends to surround climate change. But my concern with Stott's perspective was that it seemed at times to border on relativism – the notion that there is no objective, universal truth worth speaking of. Uncertainties notwithstanding, is it not both possible and necessary to discover objective facts about the climate, and to interpret these facts meaningfully?

The debate was further confused by the fact that some of the best points made on both sides were own goals. For instance, when a questioner in the audience launched into an tirade likening environmentalism to Nazism and communism, Burke responded that 'it is always a sign that someone has lost the argument when they invoke conspiracies and suspect motives'. The only trouble with this was that Meacher had already accused those sceptical about climate change of being covertly sponsored by the oil giant Exxon. Does this accusation not amount to 'conspiracies and suspect motives'?

On the other side of the debate, when it was put to Stott that a scientific consensus supports the existence of global warming, he responded that 'science isn't about consensus and it never has been'. Fair enough, but where does this leave Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus? If climate scientists can't be said to have formed a meaningful consensus around a question, then can economists, Nobel-winning or otherwise? Perhaps the underlying problem here, on both sides of the debate, is the attempt to claim a political consensus on the basis of narrow scientific or economic expertise.

One of Stott's more forceful arguments against those proposing the motion was that their suggested measures for countering climate change exhibited 'the hubris of control'. It's undoubtedly true that many environmentalists wish to exert a degree of control over the environment, but it seems to me that the control they aspire to is not hubristic in form, but self-abnegating – always seeking to mitigate our influence upon nature, rather than imagining how this influence might be exerted more ambitiously to our own ends. When it comes to understanding and dealing with the climate, perhaps a bit more hubris wouldn't go amiss.