Climate Resistance

Few arguments in favour of action to mitigate the effects of climate change begin without claiming that ‘the science is in’. James Garvey’s The Ethics of Climate Change is no exception. There begins an account of the ‘science’ which forms the basis of an unassailable consensus that the world faces a terrifying future. The account is a breathless list of tragedies that await us: sea-level rises, species-extinctions, glacial retreat, resource wars, and climate refugees, all of which will be worse for the poor, and most of which have been caused by the industrialised world. We face ‘planetary upheaval, the deaths of countless living things, human suffering on an enormous scale and all sorts of other horrors’, Garvey tells us. Be very afraid.

This scientific account generates the imperatives that we, in this perilous world, are supposed to respond to – if we want to be ‘ethical’, that is. But, as Garvey goes on to point out, ‘scientific facts are a necessary part of reflection on climate change, but they are nothing near the whole of it’. The moral philosopher is on hand to help us navigate the awkward journey, beset by doom, catastrophe, and other unimaginable horrors, toward a future of mere survival.

With the science of the horror stories established and given credibility and authority by a host of international scientific organisations, Garvey asks us to consider ‘inequality’ in the world. Not, as we might expect, inequality as the unequal distribution of capital, but as the distribution of access to ‘carbon sinks’ – natural biological and geological processes, which remove carbon from the atmosphere, and maintain the ‘balance’ on which climatic security supposedly depends. According to Garvey, from our privileged, moneyed, positions, we in the industrialised world have been able to secure unfair access to these sinks, depriving the poorer inhabitants of the planet of their natural birthright. Worse still, we have overloaded the capacity of these sinks to absorb carbon for some time to come.

Producing carbon dioxide – that is to say, using more than our fair share of carbon sinks – is not simply a moral wrong in the present, according to Garvey. What we do now carries consequences into the future. Accordingly, he challenges us to consider that moral responsibility isn’t limited by any kind of proximity. We have as much a duty to reduce our carbon emissions for the sake of the starving child on the other side of the planet as we do the starving child a thousand years into the future.

But Garvey’s moral calculations are easily challenged. How might the same starving child, were he standing right in front of us, be helped by us reducing our CO2? To suggest that it would help would seem entirely uncaring, and not at all ‘ethical’. Garvey might answer that CO2 emissions are what have caused hunger and injury. But this would seem to forget that famine, drought, and disease have historically always been part of life for individuals and communities living at the edge of society. Such forms of poverty are not new, but they are ‘natural’. If we can’t say that reducing CO2 emissions would help this child, it is hard to see how Garvey’s argument against proximity can be sustained. If, in a wealthy country, we were to stumble across some case of poverty, we would not say that the conditions people were living in were the result of climate change. We would not, as Garvey does, say that it was a consequence of our ‘moral failure’ to consider the connection between our CO2-producing actions, and their consequences. We would instead suggest that it was a social problem, arising out of material inequality. So why aren’t the problems faced by Garvey’s victims, thousands of miles away, not also problems of material inequality? Why are our responsibilities to people thousands of miles away different to our responsibilities to people right in front of us?

This concern about equality in the world – as the distribution of carbon sinks – conveys a bizarre understanding of ‘equality’. Equality seems to be no longer understood as a matter of the relationships between humans through economics, politics, or through any social structures, but through geological and biological processes. The morality of actions in the unequal world are explained in ‘scientific’ rather than social terms; your desire, the big car, the combustion, the CO2, the greenhouse effect, the warming, the climate change, the drought, the poverty, the suffering. It’s as if material inequality were as inevitable as, say, rain or wind. Stranger still then, that it is supposedly the weather which we have altered, and that we seek to control, rather than the inequality. Garvey does not consider how different the outcome might be, were we to make an ethic out of, perhaps, solving inequality.

Garvey’s argument depends rather heavily on proximity – both geographical and in terms of time – in order to generate a sense of futility about any other approach to the plight of others that might involve us. The further away that victims of climate change exist, the more plausible is Garvey’s claim that we are unable to help them in any conventional way. On the one hand, Garvey wants them to be in front of us, so that we can witness their suffering as a direct consequence of our ‘unethical’ lifestyles. On the other, he wants them to be as far away as possible, so that we can’t actually help. All that we can offer is that we won’t make life any worse for them by emitting any more CO2, as though the only thing connecting people is the atmosphere.

In this way of looking at the world, every action becomes just a different degree of bad according to how much CO2 it produces. Our conception of ‘good’, is accordingly negatively defined as ‘not bad’, or disappears altogether. But in this world, no moral calculation could be achieved by an individual engaging his own moral sense. Instead he has to defer to carbon footprint calculators, science academies, and the environmental movement’s constant barrage of nauseating scientific and ‘ethical’ factoids. But how could the brutal logic of the carbon calculator weigh the value of acts of genuine human solidarity against the environmental impact they might cause? Must acts of solidarity be rationed according to the limits of what the ‘biosphere’ can absorb? What right do we have, under this system of ethics, to perform our own cost-benefit analysis? Would it be wrong to rush that injured child to hospital in a 4 by 4 car? Or must we take the bus? Should ambulances be run only from renewable forms of energy, and constructed only from ‘sustainable’ sources? Is a hospital still a good thing, if it fails to be carbon neutral? Since carbon is not, in fact, the root of all bad in the world, it is inevitable that ‘the ethics of climate change’ will clash with the business of doing good things in other ways – not good things as simply the avoidance or correction of bad things, but things which are positive.

Garvey’s portrayal of the remote, poverty-stricken victims makes use of the environmentalist’s maxim that ‘climate change will be worse for the poor’. But the sense of responsibility that Garvey appears to wish us to understand is not responsibility in the sense of commitment, or duty, but culpability. We are asked to engage with Garvey’s view of the world as culprits. And as culprits, we are asked to stop what we are doing, and ‘give’ back to the poor what is theirs by some kind of right. In this relationship, the poor are like puppets that Garvey uses to act out a kind of morality play to elicit our sympathy – or guilt – for his cause. And just as Garvey needs distance, and poverty on this stage, he also needs victims to make his case. After all, where is this system of ethics, if there are no victims? He does not allow us to consider how we might begin to change things so that people are not poor – to make things better – but how we can avoid being responsible for making things worse.

But surely if the whole population of the world were wealthy, it would be easier to adapt to the problems caused by the climate change that Garvey says we face? With sufficient wealth, doesn’t the problem of sea-level rise becomes a matter of deciding where you’d like to move to, rather than being displaced as a poor person? Accordingly, problems of ethics, with sufficient resources, can just become matters of engineering. Just as Garvey’s argument depends on the proximity it claimed it didn’t, it also depends on the very poverty it claims to to wish to avert.

Garvey tells us, ‘the larger moral problems won’t really bite unless you know something about our prospects, the prospects for us as a species, in the face of climate change. Those predictions are not rosy’. But without the dark vision made plausible by science, Garvey would not be able to make a case for such crude moral calculations – goodies, baddies, tragedies, poverty, victims and culprits – all of which act to displace from the discussion, a political understanding of equality. So much of Garvey’s view of the world depends on the science providing the most hideous nightmare, from which there is no escape, that it’s hard not to wonder if, in spite of his claim that there is more to his argument, the science is the ‘whole of it’, and is little more than storytelling.

We’re never allowed to interrogate the claim that we will not be able to cope with the effects of climate change, nor explore the idea that it will not be as bad as many bogus statistics suggest it will be. All such challenges to the ethical system get deferred to science. Garvey flatly refuses to consider the possibility, and insults anyone who might dare to. As with any challenge to climate change alarmism, the answer is ‘but the science says…’ In this sense, science is environmentalism’s fig leaf. How ‘ethical’ is that?

‘We are armed only with peer reviewed science’, declared the banner at the head of the Climate Camp march along the proposed route of the third runway at Heathrow in August. And in one sense they were – literally. The protesters were wearing gloves made from photocopied research papers and waving them at the police and television cameras as though nothing more needed to be said. For anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that behind the gloves was a careful argument for why the runway should not be built, Climate Camp spokesperson Timothy Lever was on hand to put them straight. ‘It’s not us saying you need to stop flying’, he said, ‘it’s the science that is telling us that we all need to fly less.’

There are, of course, no scientific studies that show that Heathrow should not have a third runway, just as there are no scientific studies proving that we should fly less. These are political and moral questions, which can be informed by the best available science but not dictated by it. Science can no more tell us that air travel is wrong than it can help us navigate the ethics of evicting people from their homes to make a runway, or any other civil infrastructure. But that didn’t bother the protesters. Or anyone else for that matter. Because when it comes to climate change, science is being used in a similar talismanic fashion – and for similar ends – right across the political spectrum, and by the scientific establishment itself.

The Heathrow protesters’ running battles with the police might give the impression that the protest was radical, and its aims at odds with the establishment, but Climate Camp’s ultimate goal of 90 per cent reductions in UK CO2 emissions by 2050 is only 10 per cent more than the Conservative party has pledged. And the Tories, too, tell us that it is the science that dictates the way forward: ‘The politics must fit the science’, says the party’s Quality of Life Challenge report, which prompted the pledge (Hurd and Kerr 2007: 2). (Next to the Liberal Democrats, who promise a zero-carbon Britain by 2050 and petrol cars banished from our roads by 2040, the protesters almost appear like climate change deniers.) Even those to whom we might think to turn for a cool, calm, detached appraisal of the scientific evidence – our very own scientific academies – are bestowing scientific papers with totemic significance. Hence the Royal Society’s press release – headed ‘The Truth About Global Warming’ – that accompanied its publication in July of a paper countering the claims made by the infamous TV programme The Great Global Warming Swindle that recent variations in global temperature are better explained by solar activity than by CO2 emissions. (The reaction of the scientific establishment to the Swindle has been so much more interesting than the film itself.) Since when has a single scientific paper constituted ‘the truth’ about anything?

A further indication that the Royal Society now sees itself as some sort of new-fangled custodian of scientific truth can be seen in its recent efforts to rebrand itself. The Society’s motto ‘Nullius in Verba’ has, since 1663, been translated as ‘on the word of nobody’. It distanced science from the scholasticism of the ancient universities, and stressed that scientific knowledge is based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than to the word of authority figures. But in the twenty-first century, the Society has dropped all mention of that translation. According to Robert May, former president of the Royal Society and ex-chief scientific advisor to the UK government, the motto is now best translated as ‘respect the facts’ (Pile and Blackman 15.5.2007). Like any political body, the Royal Society would prefer that policymakers and the public take the word of nobody but itself.

It is not alone. Amateur climatologist Steve McIntyre, who recently identified a significant error in the calculations behind the very temperature records that tell us the world is warming, reports that NASA and the UK’s Climate Research Unit – institutions charged with compiling those records – are now refusing to make their methods available for scrutiny (McIntyre 11.8.2007). In what other scientific discipline would this be remotely acceptable?

The custodians of the facts will jump on anyone they deem guilty of not respecting those facts. The Royal Society and its most prominent members have recently been taking it upon themselves to make statements – via open letters, the media, and public debate – about the moral character of those who dare to challenge the climate orthodoxy. And in doing so they often display a flagrant disregard for the facts themselves. Speaking at an environment festival in Oxford in June, Robert May told an audience of 250 people that Swindle producer Martin Durkin had previously been responsible for a series of three films denying the link between HIV and AIDS (Pile and Blackman 1.9.2007). Durkin has made no such films. Other so-called ‘deniers’ are, the Royal Society tells us, the work of the Devil, or at least his modern, secular equivalent, ExxonMobil (Ward 4.9.2006; Royal Society 2005).

Such attacks are less about the science on offer from dissenters, and more to do with singling out those who go against the political consensus that the world is doomed unless we reduce our carbon footprint now. Indeed, Bjørn Lomborg, who believes that global warming is real, anthropogenic and a problem, attracts the ‘denier’ label simply because he doesn’t conform to the mainstream view of what we should do about it, not because he questions the science underpinning climate change.

Some go further than that. Dissenters, they say, are not just corrupt, or disrespectful of the facts, or plain old-fashioned wrong – they are deluded or ill. There are even research papers available for anyone wanting to ‘prove’ it by fashioning a pair of gloves out of them. German psychologist Andreas Ernst has developed a theory that people who fail to act to reduce their CO2 emissions are similar psychologically to rats (Deutsche Presse-Agentur 3.5.2007). And in an editorial earlier this year in the journal Medscape General Medicine, Professor of Psychiatry Steven Moffic proposed the use of aversion therapy involving ‘distressing images of the projected ravages of global warming’ to encourage responsible environmental behaviour among sceptics (Moffic 2.9.2007). This is less A Clockwork Orange and more Clockwork Green.

Meanwhile, the Climate Campers can carry on with their own misrepresentations of the science safe in the knowledge that nobody will pick them up on it. And so can anyone else, just so long as it does not bring them into conflict with the political consensus. So, speaking on the BBC’s Question Time recently, Independent MP Clare Short could confidently assert that ‘The UN has a panel of all the best climate scientists in the world, and they’ve issued report after report after report…and they say that if we don’t act now, we’re in desperate trouble’, despite her comments being at complete odds with the scientific reality. As Myles Allen, head of Oxford University’s Climate Dynamics group, told the Battle of Ideas last year, the arguments for immediate action on climate change are economic ones rather than scientific.

You can get away with contradicting the scientific ‘consensus’ only if you don’t challenge the political orthodoxy. So, in July, to expound his theory that the world will witness sea level rises of five metres this century (the IPCC estimates between 18 and 59cm), NASA’s James Hansen gets a 3,000-word feature in New Scientist (Hansen 25.9.2007). In contrast, when the same magazine, in the same month, reported on Harvard scientist Willie Soon’s paper in the journal Ecological Complexity, which challenged received wisdom that climate change is imperilling polar bears, the scientific argument was ignored in favour of speculation about Soon’s alleged links to the oil industry, and that the research was part of an orchestrated campaign to undermine the environmental movement’s use of the polar bear as an icon (New Scientist 1.7.2007). The ‘consensus’ is fair game, it seems, as long as the challenge pushes things in a more apocalyptic direction. The rhetorical power of the consensus flows not from its content, but from the fact of its existence.

A few climate scientists do speak out about exaggerated climate change rhetoric. But even they do so for dubious reasons. One is Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia, who has criticised the alarmist language of some scientists, the media and politicians. But his objection is not that society needs the best information available to make difficult decisions about its future, or that scientists should not be confusing scientific knowledge with science fiction, or that we need to be able to distinguish science from politics. He is merely worried that it is politically counter-productive: ‘if those dangers are presented in too catastrophic a way, on too large a scale, then people just distance themselves and are less likely to take actions to reduce their own carbon emissions. That’s our concern’ (Hulme 2007).

Martin Rees, current President of the Royal Society, has no such reservations. He tells us in his book Our Final Century? that humankind has a 50/50 chance of surviving the twenty-first century. That judgement has nothing to do with science – scientists are still struggling to model the climate, let alone the future course of human history. And yet it has scientific authority on the basis that its author is president of the Royal Society. And the Royal Society – as they themselves tell us – are the custodians of the facts.

Science: available in any colour, as long as it’s green. It would be easy to see all this as the work of a conspiratorial network. But the reality is far more depressing. In a world that no longer divides so neatly into left and right, East and West, environmentalism has provided a new magnetic north for disorientated politicians, activists, scientists, journalists and society as a whole. Rather than being an organised conspiracy, the sense of crisis created by the consensus that the future is bleak is haphazardly exploited for political legitimacy and authority. In this limited view of the future, the role that is cast for science is as an external force, above politics, and above the petty aspirations, interests and needs of mere humans, which tells us how we ought to live. But it is orthodoxy not understanding that has been generated.

Back at Climate Camp, a final irony is that the ‘peer reviewed science’-cum-gloves worn by the protesters as a symbol of their unassailable righteousness wasn’t peer reviewed science at all. It was the front page of a report by the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University that developed policy recommendations for a low carbon future (Bows et al. 2006). Even more ironic, in the light of the fuss made over the corrupting influence of oil money, is that it was commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Cooperative Bank. But again, don’t expect anyone to worry about such details. Because this isn’t really about science – it’s about climate science. And as the Heathrow protesters, the Royal Society, NASA, journalists and politicians demonstrate, climate science can be anything you want it to be.

References
Bows, A. et al. (2006). Living within a carbon budget. Tyndall Centre Manchester.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (3.5.2007). Thinking like rats: why humans fail to act on climate change. Earth Times.
Hansen, J. (25.9.2007). Huge sea level rises are coming – unless we act now. New Scientist.
Hulme, M. (2007). BBC TV News.
Hurd, N. and C. Kerr (2007). Don’t give up on two degrees. Quality of Life Commission.
McIntyre, S. (11.8.2007). Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”? Climate Audit.
Moffic, S. (2.9.2007). Can Psychiatric Approaches Help to Address Global Warming? Medscape General Medicine 9(3): 2.
New Scientist (1.7.2007). Climate change sceptics criticise polar bear science. New Scientist.
Pile, B. and S. Blackman (15.5.2007). The Royal Society’s “Motto-Morphosis’’. Spiked Online.
Pile, B. and S. Blackman (1.9.2007). May, the “facts” be with you. Climate Resistance.
Royal Society (2005). A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change. Royal Society.
Ward, B. (4.9.2006). Open letter to Esso. Royal Society.

Nullius in Verba, the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as ‘on the word of no one’. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the personal authority of the scholars. ‘On the word of no one’ highlighted the independent authority that empirical evidence bestowed on science; knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority.

Lately, however, the Royal Society has dropped any mention of ‘on the word of no one’ from its website. Instead, it talks of the need to ‘verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment’. Lord May of Oxford, erstwhile president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, offers us a whole new translation: ‘respect the facts.’ This provides the title of his recent review in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), in which he gave the scientific nod of approval to seven recent publications on climate change, including books by George Monbiot, Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern (1).

The Royal Society’s ‘motto-morphosis’ – where it has gone from saying ‘on the word of no one’ to demanding that we ‘respect the facts’ – points to an important shift in the way that scientific authority is used to close down debate these days.

Science has earned its stripes over the past four centuries. It has proved the best method we have for understanding the material universe and has transformed our lives for the better. We now have chief scientific advisers to the UK government and scientists in the House of Lords. But science has correspondingly become more entwined with the political process, and custodians of the scientific facts need to be especially careful how they wield them.

In his TLS review, May exemplifies some of the problems of dealing in a currency of facts. He quotes Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change to demonstrate that global warming will devastate species diversity: ‘Ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable to climate change, with around 15–40 per cent of species potentially facing extinction after only 2°C of warming.’ That’s not a fact. It’s not even an accurate quote. Stern actually wrote: ‘Ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable to climate change, with one study estimating that around 15–40% of species face extinction with 2°C of warming.’ (Our italics.) Stern’s claim was a worst-case scenario based on a single study, not a fact.

Unrepresentative evidence has morphed into scientific fact by a process that owes more to Chinese whispers than scientific rigour. Moreover, a scientist should be scrutinising the facts of the Stern report, not deferring to them. May’s assertion that ‘CO2 is, of course, the principal “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere’ is just as questionable, given that water vapour has far more influence on the global greenhouse, and other gases such as methane are more potent, measure for measure.

In spite of his own errors, May is deeply suspicious of any attempt to subject claims about the future of the world’s climate to scientific scrutiny, and he steps further outside the realm of material fact to speculate that those guilty of not respecting the facts belong to an ‘active and well-funded “denial lobby”’ that is ‘misinforming the public about the science of climate change’.

The Royal Society also makes much of the motivations of so-called ‘deniers’. In an open letter to ExxonMobil written last year by Bob Ward (then head of communications at the Royal Society), it complained that the company was paying scientists to misinform the public. And yet, as the New Labour government knows only too well, one must be whiter than white oneself for accusations of political sleaze not to come back to haunt you. In his current role as director at Risk Management Solutions (’the world’s leading provider of products and services for the quantification and management of catastrophe risks’ for the insurance industry), Bob Ward still writes letters to ‘deniers’ on behalf of scientists – most recently to Martin Durkin, producer of The Great Global Warming Swindle (2). Anyone wishing to counter Ward’s accusations of embarrassing conflicts of interests need only point out that fear is to risk insurance what oil is to Exxon.

More embarrassing for the Royal Society, however, is that, given its need to offer political opinions, the political vision it has to offer is so bleak. Its current president, Sir Martin Rees, in his book Our Final Century, gives odds of just 50/50 that the human race will survive the twenty-first century. That is not based on any computer model. We can’t predict the climate, let alone the course of human history, yet. This is not science, but Hollywood-esque fantasy politics, written by someone whose anxieties about the future and best guesses are no better informed than our own. What are the facts that the Royal Society requests that we respect exactly?

While Rees and May lend flimsy scientific credence to the urgency of alarmist politics, what the Royal Society should be doing is injecting debates about the state of the planet with some scientific clarity and caution. Like any political body, the Royal Society would no doubt prefer that policymakers and the public take the word of no one but itself. But if it really wants our trust, it will take more than a new motto. It could start by refraining from making political statements while selling itself as the custodian of scientific fact.

And let’s face it; it would be handy to be able to trust the Royal Society on matters of experimental evidence. Because the alternative is that we all have to go out and do all the experiments ourselves.

(1) Respect the facts by Robert May, Times Literary Supplement, 6 April 2007

(2) See What next, a Committee on Un-Scientific Activities? by Brendan O’Neill

Little is certain in the field of global climate prediction. But one thing is for sure: if all those worst-case scenarios made so much of by environmentalists come true, we really are screwed.

So you might expect those same environmentalists to be rather excited by a project that claims to be able to stabilise global temperatures at the push of a button, and keep them stable while the world makes the transition to energy sources of the future. Except that they’re not. In fact, if their reaction to the project is anything to go by, either they don’t believe their own press releases, or trying out new things in order to save the planet is not one of their top priorities.

There has been no shortage of suggestions over recent decades for large-scale ‘engineering fixes’ for global warming, some more outlandish than others. They have ranged from seeding the oceans with iron filings to draw down atmospheric CO2, to the launching of billions of aluminised balloons to reflect the sun’s rays away from the Earth, to the installation of giant mirrors in space that intercept those rays before they reach us. Atmospheric physicist John Latham’s idea is perhaps more down-to-Earth than most, although whether it can provide a ‘solution’ to climate change remains very much up for debate. In the 1980s, Latham, professor emeritus at Manchester University, and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, realised that the Earth already had the hardware in place for reflecting sunlight back into space.

While some types of cloud have an insulating effect on the planet, others, such as the low-altitude stratocumulus variety that covers much of the world’s oceans, reflect incoming sunlight. Latham’s idea, which he first published in the science journalNaturein 1990, is to make the silver linings of those stratocumulus clouds a little bit more silvery, by injecting salt crystals into the atmosphere to seed the formation of the water droplets that comprise them. In this way, he claims, ‘one can produce a degree of cooling in a controlled way, to try and balance the warming produced by the burning of fossil fuels’. He calculates that to achieve the desired effect on cloud reflectivity would require treating them with ‘a cupful’ of salt per km2 per hour.

‘It’s a very interesting idea, and one that is based on sound cloud physics’, says Alan Gadian, climate scientist at the University of Leeds. He is impressed that, because the technique would be augmenting a natural process (breaking waves are constantly throwing vast quantities of salt up into the atmosphere), it carries relatively little risk. And should things go awry, he says, ‘you could just stop producing these salt crystals and the system would return to its normal state’. John Shepherd, director of the University of Southampton’s Earth System Modelling Initiative, agrees. ‘In principle, the idea is sound’, he says. ‘The big question is whether they can get enough sea salt nuclei into the atmosphere.’

And that’s down to Stephen Salter, professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, who is best known for his invention of ‘Salter’s duck,’ a device for harnessing energy from waves. For the current project, he has designed a fleet of specialised ocean-going yachts. ‘They’ll look like steam ships with big funnels’, he says. But these are no ordinary funnels. They will be spinning rapidly on their vertical axis, a feature that serves two important functions.

The first is propulsion. When wind hits a spinning cylinder, it generates a sideways thrust. As well as allowing the boats to be positioned optimally, this force would propel them fast enough to drive a water turbine that powers the conversion of seawater into a very fine mist. As the mist rises, the water evaporates from the droplets to leave the airborne salt crystals. To do their job, the crystals must be within a narrow size range, which means producing droplets that are consistently about one millionth of a metre in diameter. This will involve vibrating the surface of a seawater reservoir to create a network of fine ripples. ‘If you make these ripples big enough, drops are thrown off’, says Salter. The size of those drops is determined by the frequency of the vibrations.

And there lies another technical challenge. To produce the ripples, the surface of the seawater reservoir must be smooth – not easy to achieve on a pitching, rolling boat. This is where the spinning funnels really come into their own. They will be filled with seawater, which gets thrown against the walls by centrifugal force, producing a smooth, vertical surface on which the ripples can be generated. Fans inside the funnels will then blow the resulting mist up into the sky like smoke rising from a chimney.

The yachts will carry no crew, but will be controlled via satellite. Salter estimates that a fleet of up to 40,000 of these hi-tech Mary Celestes would be required to offset the temperature rise predicted to result from a doubling in atmospheric CO2. Even if CO2 concentrations were to increase according to worst-case scenarios, this, he estimates, would provide several decades’ respite – which might provide time to develop non-carbon energy sources; research the intricate workings of climate systems; and plan long-term strategies to cope with a changing climate.

It would also be relatively cheap. ‘I can’t see these things being more than a million quid a go’, says Salter. That still adds up to £40billion. However, the investment would be spread over the time it takes for CO2 to double. ‘You’d only need to spend perhaps three per cent of that every year to stabilise things’, says Salter. ‘That would be an incredible bargain.’ Indeed, it is a tiny fraction of the expense of the Kyoto Protocol, for example, which is expected to shave off just a few tenths of a degree of temperature rise over the next hundred years.

Stabilisation of global temperatures? Little risk? At a fraction of the cost of Kyoto? It sounds like it at least worth trying, and it sounds like an environmentalist’s wet dream. So why are green organisations so unimpressed with the idea? ‘It’s one of those crazy engineering solutions to climate change that we ignore really’, says Friends of the Earth (FoE) climate campaigner Bryony Worthington. ‘It’s not something we think we should be spending money and time on.’ Worthington denies she’s being dismissive. ‘It’s not a question of being dismissive; it’s a question of whether this is worth any time and effort even thinking about.’

Over at Greenpeace, Mark Strutt, who was until recently senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK (he’s now Greenpeace International’s agriculture spokesperson), takes a similar stance. ‘Greenpeace wouldn’t be interested in this sort of thing. We’re looking for reductions in the use of fossil fuels rather than these technologies that in all likelihood would come to nothing.’

Of course, the project might indeed come to nothing. There are good reasons to think that we cannot control the climate – a chaotic system influenced by a host of inputs – by tweaking a single variable. And yet tweaking a single variable – CO2 emissions – is precisely what environmentalists are themselves urging us to do. However, the environmentalist case against engineering fixes for global warming does not rest on the underlying science. It has more to do with a view of science as thecauseof the world’s problems, and not something that might provide a solution. ‘We don’t take these ideas very seriously because the idea that we’ll somehow come up with a man-made fix is fanciful’, says Worthington. This sentiment is echoed by Charlie Kronick, Greenpeace UK’s climate change coordinator. ‘The idea of interfering with another natural system to compensate for the nearly catastrophic interference we’ve already done is not an enticing prospect’, he says.

Despite these seemingly Luddite sentiments, Worthington claims to have science on her side. ‘The models are showing that reducing the concentrations of greenhouse gases is the only sensible response to climate change.’ Really? Latham has been collaborating with the UK Meteorological Office to test the theory behind his project using their powerful computer model of global climate. This suggested that treating clouds covering just three per cent of the Earth’s surface would cool the planet sufficiently to compensate for a doubling of CO2. Alan Gadian is sufficiently impressed that he is now embarking on a project to replicate that study.

It is at this point that Worthington is forced to express her discomfort with the very models on which the environmental case depends. ‘But he can’t be certain’, she says, ‘they’re only models.’ Yes, and green activists’ predictions of climate change disaster are also based on models.

There may be other reasons for FoE and Greenpeace’s discomfort with such projects. After all, a successful engineering fix would deprive the green movement of its most valuable political currency – urgency. If the world were to have a few decades of stable temperatures, the urgency of green politics would have to give way to a genuine, rational political debate. Their discomfort also points to a lack of faith in man-made solutions; we are seen as giving rise to climate chaos and thus must apparently take a hands-off approach from nature.

Engineering the climate might yet prove impossible, for scientific or practical reasons. Latham’s team is now planning a small-scale pilot experiment further to explore the project’s viability. ‘We don’t know yet what fraction of the drops we make will actually get up to where the clouds are’, says Salter. But there is surely something noble about the aspiration to control the climate. We don’t need climate models to tell us that Mother Nature has plenty to throw at us, whether or not the planet warms as predicted. And in that respect, projects such as Latham’s could be seen as valuable developments, regardless of whether the elements have even more nasty surprises in store for us.

No doubt environmentalist groups would abhor the prospect of controlling the Earth’s climate on the basis that, in the words of Kronick, we’d be interfering in a ‘natural system’. Environmentalists’ aspirations are very different: through rain or shine, they seem determined to stick to the mantra that we should be reducing CO2 emissions and, in doing so, leave us even more vulnerable to the whim of Mother Nature. Worthington and Strutt both claim that the search for engineering fixes for global warming only serves as a distraction, making people and governments less inclined to reduce CO2 emissions. And yet Worthington herself doesn’t seem to have much faith that reducing emissions will be particularly effective: ‘If we can see global CO2 emissions peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ve still got a slim chance of holding [temperature increases] down to two degrees’, she says.

A slim chance of avoiding climate catastrophe? Environmentalists, it seems, don’t need any help when it comes to disinclining the world to reduce carbon emissions.

Read on:

J Latham (1990), ‘Control of global warming’,Nature, vol 347, pp330-340; J Latham (2002), ‘Amelioration of global warming by controlled enhancement of the albedo and longevity of low-level maritime clouds’,Atmospheric Science Letters, vol 3, pp52-58.

‘Art was made to disturb, science reassures.’

Like all the best quotes, this one from cubist painter Georges Braque makes you think, but it doesn’t quite ring true.

Both science and art have the capacity to disturb and reassure. Scientific breakthroughs – like the discovery that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection – can upset the same social orthodoxies that some art, produced for the purposes of religious and political propaganda, seeks to uphold.

But Braque had a point. In general, science tries to explain the world, and the better something is understood, the less frightening it becomes. Art, by contrast, seeks new, unconventional ways of looking at anything and everything – asking more questions than it answers.

How times have changed. While art seems to be increasingly concerned with the trivial and the mundane, scientific knowledge has become a major source of disturbance in the Western world – nuclear power, genetic modification and embryo transfer technologies spring to mind, as does the science of climate change.

So perhaps I was fooling myself when I visited London’s Science Museum – the UK’s flagship institution for the communication of science – with high hopes for its new climate change exhibition (1). I thought it would give a clear, accessible and balanced account of the science behind the headlines, distinguishing the harder facts from the flimsier fictions. I thought it would be, well, reassuring.

The introductory display panel promised all of that. ‘You’ve heard the hype’, it said. ‘Now find out the facts.’ If I hadn’t been so full of mindless optimism, I might have taken more heed of the four words that followed – ‘…and then take action’. These were a far better clue as to what was really in store.

Burning Issue: Climate Change opened on 19 March 2002. Despite its high-profile space in the museum’s new Wellcome Wing, the exhibition is rather modest, both in size and content. You can get round it all in 30 minutes – or 90 if, like me, you want to write everything down.

The most prominent feature is one inviting visitors to contribute their own thoughts on climate change. The comments then ‘flow’ along a vast network of criss-crossing pipes (symbolising the interconnectedness of global ecology or something), which soars upwards into the stratosphere of the roof space.

Back at ground level, information is provided on display boards, and is pretty much duplicated – but with added theme-park effect, in interactive installations.

Most of the ‘facts’ are presented in the form of statements from scientists (complete with smiling photos to remind us that scientists are humans too), environmental activists and spokespeople from non-governmental organisations. Most are simply worst-case scenarios backed up by little or no evidence.

Take extreme weather events, which feature heavily in the exhibition. A display board tell us that, ‘The weather is going wild. Scientists now agree that the climate just isn’t following the rules any more’. But the link between such events and climate change is almost entirely anecdotal. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the observed variation in storm activity and drought shows ‘no significant trends evident over the last century’ (2). Yet still Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (3) is quoted as saying: ‘The world’s already seeing heavier rainstorms and more severe flooding which could be the result of the industrial revolution.’

Here are some more ‘facts’ from the exhibition: ‘Disaster – millions suffering in Africa with widespread droughts.’ ‘Destruction – whole ecosystems under threat as the Amazon overheats.’ ‘Deluge – 20million people at risk from floods as sea levels rise.’ All lack further elaboration.

Though the exhibition presents some evidence that the world is warming up, there is no evidence to show that this is linked to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. And it doesn’t tell us much about the possible positive consequences of climate change (unless you count expansion in the ranges of turtle doves and nuthatches). There is no mention of longer growing seasons, or the expansion of agricultural land. The possibility of a shift towards a Mediterranean climate in the UK is mentioned only in the context that it will create increased traffic jams as tourists head for the south coast.

The question of whether the best strategy is to ameliorate climate change or adapt to it also receives scant attention. We are assured, however, that ‘Kyoto is a step in the right direction’. But as the spiked/NERC debate on the Kyoto Treaty showed, there is still a lot of controversy about the science in all these areas (4). The Science Museum has missed an opportunity to bring these debates to a wider audience.

Instead, the political agenda is pushed further with the advice: ‘If you want to lobby for strong action, you can contact your MP. And you can also make your international views known.’

The message seems to be that we have to decide between good and evil rather than between alternative strategies for progress. ‘We have a choice’, says David Vincent of the Carbon Trust (5). ‘Stop abusing our environment and leave a decent planet for our children. Or carry on as we are, destroy the planet and become evolutionary history.’

As you work your way around the exhibition, the worst-case scenarios just keep on coming. Apparently, by 2050, malaria and Colorado beetles will be rife in southern England; the UK will experience increases in the incidence of algal blooms, food poisoning, gales and flooding; we will lose the mountain ringlet butterfly, the capercallie and the dwarf willow; and in the Antarctic, tens of thousands of baby penguins will face starvation, as environmental change affects their food supply and habitat. You soon start wondering whether the ‘euthanasia machine’ on show nearby – used to assist in the suicides of four people in Australia – is not just for display purposes.

And the conclusion to all this ‘science’? Climate change is ‘a global problem and we’ve all got a part to play in sorting it out’.

Cue the lifestyle advice: ‘In Britain, we all add to carbon dioxide emissions by the choices we make – how we travel, power our homes and choose the food we eat. Are you willing to change your lifestyle?’

The advice on ‘changing your lifestyle’ ranges from installing low-energy light bulbs to putting lids on pans when cooking, from turning your thermostat down to not leaving your TV in standby mode. There is a lot of advice, but nothing we haven’t heard many times before.

‘[Fifteen] per cent of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from cars, and a quarter of our car journeys are less than two miles long’, states Brenda Boardman of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (6). ‘Public transport emits less than half as much carbon dioxide per passenger. Taking a walk is better still.’

The irony here is that the consequences of walking or bussing it for a few extra miles will pale into insignificance against the changes brought about by new, cleaner, more efficient technologies such as hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars. According to the UK Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, such cars will likely be available at mass-market cost by 2015 (7). Indeed, the exhibition has a Ford Focus FC5 fuel cell vehicle on show.

In fact, in its next breath, the exhibition seems to concede the fruitlessness of all these lifestyle changes: ‘We can’t stop climate change. We’d better get ready for whatever the weather throws at us – rain or shine.’

So there you have it: the planet is on a trajectory to ecological annihilation (but don’t expect to see any evidence), and you are urged to adapt your lifestyles accordingly (but this is unlikely to actually help matters). I could have spent my train fare on a few pints and heard all this propped up in a bar, talking to the regulars.

There is worse to come. The exhibition has an interactive computer game called ‘Battle for the Planet’, which seems say, we may heading for a global ecological catastrophe, but hey kids, global warming can still be fun! ‘In 2100 life is far from pleasant’, reads the introduction. ‘Climate change has brought the Earth to its knees. Life… has changed for the worse. Back in 2002, people ignored the warnings and kept up their fuel-thirsty lifestyles, belching out more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide. Now it’s payback time. You have been chosen to set things right. Your mission is to travel back in time to see if the choices you make about the way we live will affect the environment of the future. Good luck.’

Oh well, I might as well enjoy myself, and have a go at Battle for the Planet.only my chosen wayward lifestyle results in environmental ‘meltdown’. The virtual townscape becomes choked with black smoke, dumper-trucks work overtime carrying waste to the landfill site, fires rage. Strangely, one of the cartoon townsfolk is being held at gunpoint by another (a mugger? Or a well-intentioned eco-activist trying to convince his neighbour to change his wicked ways?) – and, even more strangely, a cigarette advert appears from nowhere on the roof of a skyscraper. This really is hell. Something must be done!

I play the game again. But this time I do everything that is expected of me. I wash in the sink instead of taking baths and showers (‘by far the most climate friendly option…as long as you remember to put the plug in and fill the basin’); I go on a coach holiday rather than fly to the tropics (‘Bus tours aren’t just for grannies. It’s great to be chauffeured around in style!’); I recycle my beer cans; I forego my crispy, oven-baked potato, and settle for a soggy microwaved one; and I walk or cycle everywhere (‘transport makes up 25 percent of the UK’s emissions of greenhouse gases…And you can get road rage stuck in all that traffic’).

With a warm glow of self-righteousness, I hit the return button. There are no muggings or cigarette adverts this time – but, hang on, the thick black smoke is still there, and what’s this? ‘The climate has changed for the worse’, I’m told, ‘but there’s still hope. You’re trying to be climate-friendly but there’s still room for improvement’. What do you have to do to save the planet around here?

What you have to do is make such severe sacrifices to your quality of life that even the computer can’t bring itself to recommend them. Only by not washing (the computer kindly reminds us to wash sometimes, otherwise ‘you’ll pong before long’) and never going on holiday (‘Even eco-warriors need to get away sometimes! Relax a little’, says the computer) can the destruction really be stopped. But it’s all worth it in the end. At last, lambs frolic in the fields as white fluffy clouds bob overhead. ‘Thanks to your sensible choices, the Earth is in good shape.’ Hurrah for me!

Reassuring? Far from it. Disturbing? Yes. But not because it presents scientific information that challenges any prevailing orthodoxy – it is the prevailing orthodoxy. It is disturbing because this is the Science Museum, and yet there’s a good chance you’ll find more science at the Tate Modern.

(1) Climate Change: The burning issue, 19 March to September 2002

(2) Climate change 2001: the scientific basis, IPCC 2001

(3) Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

(4) See the spiked-science debate: Global warming

(5) The Carbon Trust

(6) Environmental Change Institute

(7) Powering Future Vehicles: Draft Government Strategy, Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, 2001