Climate Resistance

I’m so bored… BORED… of climate change. Environmentalism is such a boring, boring, boring thing. It’s mundane. It’s banal. It obsesses about the minutiae of biological functioning only to the extent that it wants to limit the possibilities of human life, rather than extend them. And it is mean spirited — it nags you about whether children need those Christmas presents, if you need that holiday, if you really need to take the car. It’s a joyless, nihilistic chasm, which sucks the life out of life.

According to some definitions, ‘politics is the art of the possible’. I was reminded of this by two videos I came across recently.

The first is this misery-fest from the Post Carbon Institute (PCI).

Yeah. Merry Christmas.

What we have in that little animated skit from the greens is the art of the impossible. On the Post Carbon Institute’s view, “We have to live within nature’s budget of renewable resources at rates of natural replenishment.” These limits become the parameters of our existence: the complete regulation of our productive lives.

But there are other ideas in the world, which don’t seem to conform to this stifling orthodoxy.

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY from jason silva on Vimeo.

Taking his inspiration from physicist, David Deutsch, Jason Silva says, ‘If you look at the topogaphy of the island of Manhatten today, that topography is a topography in which the forces of economics and culture and human intent have trumped the forces of geology… extrapolating… that will be the fate of the whole universe.’

Trumping the forces of geology is, of course, anathema to the PCI.

I have no idea whether Jason Silva and David Deutsch would thank me for offering them as examples of thinking which sits at the opposite end of an axis to rank gutless miserablism. Perhaps the climate debate is one they would rather avoid — sensibly. It strikes me, however, that this should be the geometry of the debate about the future. To the PCI, history is a series of mistakes, which have taken us to the point of crisis. To the optimists, it is the foundation of ever greater leaps. The PCI speak of constraint, whereas the optimists speak about unleashing ever more creative potential. But there is an even more important difference.

Whereas the likes of the PCI have been able to turn their bleak vision into a system of ‘ethics’ and politics, the optimists’ ideas don’t seem to have any immediate moral consequences. There is no Intergovernmental Panel on Trumping Geology. On the contrary, there is only an intergovernmental panel on sobbing at our utter vulnerability in the face of geology. The impossibility of overcoming it — to any extent — is presupposed in the very foundations of the UNFCCC process: it discovers natural limits, and we are expected to codify them in international law. This is bizarre, not least because there are so many problems that can be faced by not taking seemingly ‘natural’ limits for granted. But also, because so much positive good cold be done in genuinely transforming the conditions of our existence by transcending such boundaries. Environmentalists seem to want them to remain in place. ‘Science’ in that arrangement is restrictive. On the optimists view, however, it liberates.

Environmental politics is about nothing more than regulation of eating, shitting, sleeping and f***ing: human life is reduced to these things, and each must be done ‘sustainably’, lest any opportunity for a more meaningful life opens up between them. So, the pessimists’ approach to the immediate problems facing the world is to regulate them out of existence. But poverty, war, famine and disease could not be abolished from the world by acts of international law intended to make the weather more ‘predictable’. Even if that did succeed, what would human life look like? A drab, miserable existence characterised by subsistence, in which each generation’s existence is identical to its parents’.

We see in the PCI’s animation, active hostility to progress — it is impossible. In the optimist’s video, there is dedication to the idea — the possibilities of human life expand indefinitely. We can argue forever about what ‘science says’ about the climate; the real debate is about its interpretation. The optimists need to recapture the moral and political ground from the miserablists.

I thought it might be worthwhile posting this presentation I gave in Edinburgh in Spring last year, following the first Climategate. It seems to me that the same is true of Climategate 2 as was true of the first: if there had been a more transparent debate, Climategate would not have have had the impact is has had. Some are calling for transparency in science, which I agree with, but I think it is a mistake to believe that even completely transparent science would answer the debate. It would make it harder to hide environmentalism’s political and ethical claims, perhaps, but it would be no guarantee, either of that or a bit more reflection on certain claims and why they exist, not just in the climate debate, but more widely also. For instance, the precautionary principle, and the deference to science, and the prostitution of its authority aren’t at all exclusive to the climate debate, but are almost ubiquitous in contemporary politics.

We often get comments on Climate Resistance that ask us what qualifications to speak about climate change I and my colleague, Stuart Blackman, have.

Neither of us are climate scientists.

To take issue with the moral and political arguments that emerge from the climate debate, is seen as equivalent to taking issue – to denying – climate science.

What I think this speaks most loudly about is the weight of expectations that climate science has to bear.

What makes climate science’s relationship with the social political sphere special and unusual, compared to other forms of science is that there is so much moral and political capital invested in the idea of a climate catastrophe.

It seems to me that that something like Climategate was bound to happen, and will continue to happen in the form of things like as Glaciergates and Africagates for instance as people start to see what climate science is and isn’t capable of producing for their moral and political arguments.

George Monbiot is one of my favourite writers, because you can always find something to say about what he says. And the thing I’ve chosen today is that George Monbiot believes that gay people are more moral than straight people, because they won’t produce any carbon-emitting babies.

I’m not pointing it out to say that gay people are immoral, but because I don’t see how they can be any more or less ‘moral’ than people who happen to be born straight.  This is just a bizarre moral framework.

We also hear from the likes of the New economics foundation and the green party that there are just ten years left to save the planet. If you go to the NEF website, you can even hear the clock ticking, down from 100 months.

According to Susan Watts, the science… Science!… Editor of BBC Newsnight, ‘scientists have calculated that Obama has four years in which to save the planet

So these are the kind of arguments people are trying to support with climate science.

But it is not just journos and activists. This is academics from many different disciplines,

Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tells us that fat people contribute more to climate change than thin people do. Because as they get fatter, they enter a positive feedback system, in which they increasingly use labour-saving devices to cart their increasingly fat bodies around, as they become less and less physically able. So they use escalators, lifts, cars, etc, pumping out CO2 all the while.

Using carbon is the equivalent of slavery, according to Jean-Francois Mouhot, a historian at the University of Birmingham.  If we compare our current attitude to fossil fuels and climate change with the behaviour of the slave owners, there are more similarities than one might immediately perceive.

There are now special climate change ‘ethics’, that occupy the minds of philosophers. The scientific certainty that we are destroying the planet has made black and white the moral questions that have haunted moral thinkers since ancient times.

This cheap moral realism gives purpose to special climate change psychologists, who are employed to find out why the moral message isn’t getting through to the public.

They set about working out how to communicate climate change to people who don’t believe it, and try to locate the processes that may be going on in the heads of those who refuse to believe it… The deniers.

There doesn’t appear to be an area of public life that has not been framed in the terms of climate change. The idea of climate catastrophe has become the prism through which we see ourselves, the world, and our relationship to it.  Everything is captured in this one idea that the world is about to be destroyed.

This is a political and ideological phenomenon, not something which has just emerged from climate science, to which conventional politics has simply responded after considering it carefully.

And yet, if you look at how the arguments within this system are constructed, they nonetheless all begin with the claim that “climate change is happening”. I think this is mistaken view. Not that climate change isn’t happening, but that it is a mistake to [allow] ‘climate change is happening’ [to be] the beginning of all these moral calculations.

What happens at UEA, then, appears to be the keystone of all the arguments that ensue.

And so it is no surprise that this is where people have been focussing their hacking efforts. And it is of no surprise that what has been found reveals that the source of all these moral and political arguments is not so clear cut.

I think sceptics have made a mistake here. And that a peak behind the firewall didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know.

Rather than a process of the science informing the political or otherwise social, the dynamic is the other way round. That is to say that the politics is prior.

Monbiot puts it best: It [the campaign against climate change] is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Monbiot has had to make his apology, because he has invested his entire perspective on the world, in “The Science”.

David Attenborough is even less reflective. He says.

“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time to control the population to allow the survival of the environment”.

The President of the Royal Society – the organisation that promotes the scientific view of the world, Martin Rees, writes in “our Final Century” that our odds of surviving the next 100 years are just 50/50.

I mention Rees because he was on the Today program this morning, talking about the IPCC review — a review of the review by the reviewers — and it struck me more than ever that Rees’ role was once occupied by people who were proud to speak truth to power. Now, he, the Royal Society, and so many institutions that have attached themselves to the climate issue, instead speak Official Truth FOR official power. And I think that is a dangerous thing.

The sense of overwhelming crisis is being used to give authority to the kind of political ideas I think we ought to reject. These political ideas, since they make a virtue of being anti human, depend instead of our consent, on empirical substance for their moral authority. That substance comes from organisations like of the CRU.

So there are two sense in which the politics is prior to the science.

First, there are the ideological presuppositions that we are powerless to address the things produced by our sense of alarm and imminent doom. We passively accept our fate, and the fate of others.

For instance, the Global humanitarian Forum released a study last year which claimed that 300,000 people a year die from the effects of climate change. This doubles the WHO’s estimate from 2002. They project that half a million people will die, in 2030, they say, from the same malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea, caused by climate change. This, they say makes climate change the biggest issue facing mankind.

Never mind the 10 million people who died according to the WHO in the very same report, from first order effects of poverty.

We feel so unable to understand the social world, that the only way we can conceive of its problems is by naturalising them through ideas about the environment and climate change.

Second, there are the searches for authority in the statistics and projections such as those produced at the CRU.

The academy, government, and the media each seem to have rooted themselves in this crisis, and define themselves by it.

The crisis gives orientation to journalists who are disoriented by a world that no longer divides into left and right, and East and West.

It breathes new life into dusty old academic departments who have had relevance and targets foisted upon them from above.

And it gives the government legitimacy in a time when no one can be ‘bovvered’.

Finally, then, in order to make productive sense of what the science ‘says’, we need to be sure that we know what science has been asked, and what it has been told, and what it is really studying.

The climate crisis — and all of its little debates and fights like Climategate– are a projection of much deeper problems and crises in society.

So… Part two of the Climategate series is out. Popcorn is flowing.

It’s too early to say anything that isn’t already being said about what the new emails revealed. But, as per usual, what’s being said about what the emails do or don’t reveal is interesting.

Leo Hickman is the first to the scene…

The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.

The BBC’s Richard Black was not far behind, quoting the a University of East Anglia (home to many of the climate researchers)…

The university says it has “no evidence of a recent breach in our systems”, and suggests that the cache – posted on a Russian server – has “the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks”.

The central argument from those invested in the climate debate seems to be that the release of these emails is a ‘deliberate attempt to derail the climate talks in Durban’.

It would seem so. But when is the best time to publish information pertaining to the climate debate? The proximity of the COP17 meeting didn’t stop the International Energy Agency announcing just two weeks ago that,

Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system [...] The agency’s flagship publication, released today in London, said there is still time to act, but the window of opportunity is closing.

And the looming meeting in Durban didn’t stop the publication of the IPCC report into extreme weather:

Regarding the future, the assessment concludes that it is virtually certain that on a global scale hot days become even hotter and occur more often. “For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world”, said Thomas Stocker the other Co-chair of Working Group I. “Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease”.

Why weren’t the journalists at the Guardian as suspicious of the timing of these documents as they are now about the release of these emails? The two reports above, are consistent with the raised tone with which the Guardian has been reporting on climate matters recently. Fiona Harvey, for instance, covered the IEA’s report with the dramatic words:

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change
The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.

And Harvey was equally credulous about the IPCC report.

Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns
Heavier rainfall, storms and droughts could wipe billions off economies and destroy lives, says report by 220 scientists
Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

There are double standards in play: it’s okay to step up the alarm on the eve of climate talks, but to throw any questions about the provenance of climate change alarmism into the mix is to ‘deliberately derail’.

I’ve made the point about timing myself, before. It seems that each autumn, the alarmist narrative goes into overdrive. Back in 2008, for instance, the ink on the UK’s new Climate Change Act was barely dry by the time the COP meeting was underway. As I said at the time,

The point of all this is that the UK Government’s need to have successfully created a a strong climate law, in place by now, December the 1st 2008, is owed, not to the Government’s commitment to ‘saving the planet’, nor even the UK population, but to the designs its members have on being ‘world leaders’.

Timing is everything, after all.

I have no idea about the truth of a story in the Telegraph today. As usual, however, I find that the way the facts — whatever they are — are treated is more interesting than the reality.

BBC drops Frozen Planet’s climate change episode to sell show better abroad
The BBC has dropped a climate change episode from its wildlife series Frozen Planet to help the show sell better abroad.

Hmmm. Okay, I am wondering if it is true now. You have to wonder…

British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man. However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes. The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore.

So I’m wondering, now, did the BBC put out a press release saying ‘you don’t have to buy the seventh episode — it’s an optional extra, for non-climate sceptics’? I find it hard to imagine. So where did the story come from?

Campaigners said the decision not to incorporate the episode on global warming as part of the main package was “unhelpful”. They added that it would allow those countries which are sceptical of climate change to “censor” the issue.

Others suggested that the Corporation should have offered “On Thin Ice”, the global warming episode, for free due to the importance of the issue.

Ahhh. Campaigners. You see, it probably wasn’t an issue…

However, the BBC said it was standard practice to offer international clients only the parts they wished to purchase.

… until the campaigners turned it into one. And, moreover, until the Telegraph indulged them.

A spokeswoman for the BBC said it was not be feasible to force networks to buy the climate change episode as it features Sir David talking extensively to the camera and there are many countries where he is not famous. Many environmentalists are ardent fans of the show for highlighting the fragile beauty of the natural world.

Fragile beauty? This is the myth of ‘fragile beauty’. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, after all. And in much the same way, so is fragility. It’s not until you believe that the world is ‘fragile’ that change and ‘destruction’ become equivalents. Environmentalists presuppose ‘balance’ in the world. Thus, any change can only be explained in terms of a destructive agent — humanity. It’s this idea of fragility and balance that leads to ideas about ‘tipping points’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘gaia’. That’s not to say that the changes seen in the Arctic are neither problematic, nor our fault, but that the idea of ‘fragility’ precedes a treatment of the facts, and precludes a sensible debate about them. Hence, there are some angry voices about the fact that broadcasters are free to buy the episodes they desire. The Telegraph quotes a number of such angry voices,

Harry Huyton, the head of climate change for the RSPB, said: “Selling Frozen Planet in two parts seems rather unhelpful because it suggests that it would be perfectly reasonable not to show the bit with the climate message.

“We would encourage the networks that haven’t bought the whole thing to think again and not to censor the issue.”

Tony Juniper, an environmental adviser and former head of Friends of the Earth, said: “It raises questions about the BBC’s overall environmental coverage, which is patchy and inconsistent.”

He added that the BBC’s attitude allowed other countries to opt out of the climate change episodes for “political reasons” or because they had already covered the issue with previous programmes.
A spokesman for Greenpeace, the environmental group, said: “It’s a bit like pressing the stop button on Titanic just as the iceberg appears.

“Climate change is the most important part of the polar story, the warming in the Arctic can’t be denied, it’s changing the environment there in ways that are making experts fearful for the future.”

It’s not clear how Toby Juniper has determined that the BBC’s coverage of the environment is ‘patchy and inconsistent’. The ‘science and nature’ pages of BBC’s iplayer site reveal that the BBC is pretty keen on reporting from the natural world. Moreover, as recent controversies over the Jones report, and Richard Black’s instructions to his juniors reveals, the BBC takes a pretty dim view of climate scepticism. As I’ve argued before, greens’ lack of sense of proportion is made up for by their sense of persecution. Huyton’s allusion to ‘censorship’ is picked up by Business Green’s James Murray, who is ‘none too impressed with the BBC’s decision to censor its nature documentary for foreign audiences‘

Unsurprisingly, (and this is more the fault of the scientific and political community than the BBC), 10 of the 30 networks to buy the show have opted for the censored version. There is no prize for guessing the US is among those markets where TV execs have decided they do not like scientific reality to impinge upon their inspiring nature footage.

Censorship? Censorship? Really? I bought a Sunday paper this weekend, but decided to leave the supplements at the newsagents, as I wasn’t interested in them, and I had a fairly long walk up a hill home. Was I censored? I freely made a decision not to take the parts of the paper I didn’t want with me. The shopkeeper agreed to keep them, and dispose of them himself. In much the same way, the BBC, as seems to be normal practice, offers its series in parts, to broadcasters, so that they can freely chose to screen what they wish.

Where is the censorship?

‘Censorship’, in its day-to-day usage, means an official intervention, to prevent the broadcast of material. But we see now that, in the strange moral universe created by environmentalists, ‘censorship’ has been somewhat transformed. Censorship is now the failure to broadcast the official account of something. That is to say that if you don’t broadcast something which environmentalists tell you that you should broadcast, you are censoring. In other words, environmentalists have precisely inverted the meaning of ‘censorship’. This is amazing, not least because ‘censorship’ is something we typically equate to the ‘Orwellian’ use of language, and now we see the word ‘censorship’ itself being subject to revision along the lines of ‘newspeak’. But perhaps this dystopia is a better account of what environmentalists have in mind…

Perhaps this is a bit of an over-reaction. Nobody is forcing our eyes open, and holding our head to the screen. Yet. But the point remains, environmentalists seem to believe that exposure to their narrative, over images of change will provoke a change in the audience’s moral conscience. Moreover, we shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy the stunning photography, or images of the cryosphere in general,
without being told the story of climate change.

Natural history, then, becomes a morality tale. Or perhaps worse, a secular creation myth. Rather than ‘censorship’, the word James Murray and Harry Huyton were searching for was ‘blasphemy’. To show images of the Arctic without the sermon would be to puritans what the godless celebration of Christmas and Easter is, without the story of Christ: mere hedonism.

To the main point: what’s wrong with enjoying the BBC’s epic photography, for it’s own sake, eschewing the moral message? It would be hard to deny that the BBC’s natural History unit has a unique sense of spectacle, and some extremely talented staff. There is nothing wrong with it, of course, except for the fact that enjoying such images, divorced from the environmentalists’ narrative is ultimately to enjoy distance from nature. What you see, when you watch these programmes is not intrinsic beauty, but the culmination of thousands of man-hours, and £ millions of technical processes: skilled camera operators and production crews, and expensive and time consuming post-production, recolouring, re-timing, and editing the footage.

If you were actually sat at the Arctic, you would, after some moments of awe, likely become quite bored quite quickly, and yearn for home, even if it is, like mine, a flat in a fairly brutal 1970s block of cubic modernity. You would also get quite cold. And hungry. ‘Beauty’ — aesthetics in general — would become less and less of concern, and thoughts about what you’d prefer to eat would give way to actual hunger, which would force you to eat regardless of taste. You would be less concerned with the ‘fragility’ of nature than with your own imminent demise.

It’s only with such distance that natural history as a morality tale makes any sense. It’s only when were not subject of nature’s whims that nature seems to be ‘fragile’. It’s only when we’re warm and snug that we can be forced to consider what life would be like without warmth and snugness. And that’s why various greens have got their knickers in such a twist about the BBC not forcing overseas broadcasters to buy its miserable, moralising follow-up.

Something of a brouhaha is developing in the debate about the extent of subsidies for renewable energy in the UK. Green energy campaigners are complaining about a proposed cut in the Feed-In Tariff (FIT) scheme which promises owners of domestic solar PV up around £0.433 per kilowatt hour, but which will ‘only’ give them £0.21 per kWh. James Murray, editor of Business Green said in the wake of the leaked proposal that,

The government is about to deal a crippling blow to a fast expanding green industry that is serving to cut carbon emissions and create jobs.

In the same article, Murray also claims that the solar industry employs more people than the UK’s nuclear energy sector. According to many of the government’s new critics in the green energy sector, there are 25,000 jobs in solar energy in the UK.

That seems like an extraordinary claim to me. According to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics, nuclear power provided 69,098 gigawatt hours (18% of total) of electricity to consumers in 2009, whereas there were only 50 megawatts of installed solar PV capacity on the grid in the same year. That makes a comparison in equivalent terms of output difficult. DUKES doesn’t even bother, the sums are so small, so it lumps production from solar PV in with wind. But if we assumed that solar panels were 100% efficient (had a 100% load factor), and the sun shone 24 hours a day, the UK’s fleet of solar panels would have produced just 438 gigawatt hours — a 160th of what the UK’s fewer nuclear energy employees produced. But the sun doesn’t shine every day, and solar PV struggles to produce a load factor of more than 20%. Let’s call it 15%. It now looks like solar PV in the UK produced just 66 GWh of electricity in 2009 — less than a thousandth of what the nuclear energy sector did, with fewer people.

But there’s an even better way to show that the figure is bogus. Even if the UK’s solar PV fleet increased by 50MW (50,000 KW) of capacity each year, that would mean that each job in the sector only produced 2KW of capacity. That is less than one domestic solar PV installation per year, per sector employee.

Then let’s imagine that each of those jobs costs £25,000 a year. That would mean a total of £625 million. So in order to compete with nuclear in labour terms, the solar sector needs to become 1,000 times more efficient. Anyone who wants to defend subsidies to solar energy on the basis that it ‘creates jobs’ needs to take a reality check. There are much better things that could be done with that money. It’s hard to think of a more futile and costly gesture. It would be better to simply give 25,000 people £25,000 each, every year, because then there would be no need to pay for the solar PV panels and no need to subsidise their pitiful output.

I had a look to see the source of the 25,000 jobs claim. The closest thing I could find was this article, which claimed that

According to the latest REAL Assurance data an estimated 25,000 UK jobs have been created as a direct result of the feed-in tariff (FiT). Despite already exceeding all expectations, the Renewable Energy Association (REA) believes even this huge figure is likely to be underestimated as the REAL team only deals with companies working on small-scale installations.

It looks like James Murray was confused about the statistics…

In the solar industry alone there are currently 4,000 companies registered with REAL in the UK with approximately 100 new members signing up each month. Each one of these companies has from 1-2,500 employees, showing the sheer dominance the solar sector has in the UK. At this growth rate the REA estimates that solar jobs will exceed 7,000 by April 2012, with more jobs created providing the industry remains supported.

But the more accurate figure hardly puts the solar PV sector in a better light, if you’ll pardon the pun. It means that the average solar PV job produces just 7KW of installed capacity per year (assuming that capacity is increased by 50MW per year, which is more than optimistic).

Stuff the subsidies for solar PV. They make no sense. At all. Just as the statistics produced in defence of the UK’s energy and climate policies make no sense. I’m struggling to not to use expletives and other words that are no stronger than ‘innumerate’ to describe the nonsense that we’ve seen over the last few weeks (see previous posts). Forget hockey sticks. Forget ‘hiding the decline’. The real statistics-abuse happens closer to home — in the policies and politics of the climate and energy debate. With such liberties taken with arithmetic, it makes no difference what graphs depicting global temperature change say.