Climate Change – a new religion? (Mar 10)

Robin Roy

I’m going to very briefly look at the question whether belief in Climate change is a new religion. I haven’t had time to delve as deeply as I would like into an enormous topic. So I’ll briefly introduce the subject and then open things up for discussion.

What does climate change – a new religion mean?

To me it means that a growing number of people are arguing that the view that climate change is largely the result of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions from relatively recent human economic activity is not based on reliable scientific evidence but instead has become an unquestioned article of faith like religious belief. The people who say climate change is like religion point out that it has become a new orthodoxy held by most scientists, governments and environmentalists, i.e. is. like a religion, they say the belief in human-induced climate change no longer allows criticism or question.

This religion rather than science argument has been emerging since the late 1950s when an American scientist Charles Keeling started measuring rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over Hawaii over past 50 years until now the reality of climate change and global warming linked to rising human generated CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions like methane from belching cattle was acknowledged by almost every govt in the world at the UN Copenhagen Climate summit in Dec last year.

Up until recently the climate change is like religion was argued by a weird coalition of critics. These ranged from a few sceptical scientists, various mainly right wing, newspapers, TV and radio stations, a variety of non-scientist commentators like Nigel Lawson and journalists and TV producers out to create a controversial story to politicians and industrialists aligned with the oil industry.

Perhaps the purest example is the BNP which on its website has a poster headed ‘Church of Climatology: how to deal with global warming heretics’ showing climate change sceptics being burned like medieval sinners.

Below the burning climate change sceptics is comment’ be sure to use smokeless fuel’ (the supposedly humorous but revealing ignorance of the link between fuel burning and climate change, smoke actually can cause atmospheric cooling rather than warming). More seriously, the BNP issued a 40 page briefing arguing the case against human-inducted climate change for the UN Copenhagen conference last December.

And of course there has always been a proportion (in some countries a majority) of the general public who either don’t know who the believe given the publicity given to the sceptics or think climate change is a plot to deprive them of their right to drive their cars, consume as much as possible and fly on holiday whenever they can afford it.

Up until now governments, scientist and environmentalists have been able to dismiss the sceptics as misinformed, mischievous or ignorant. But recently the sceptics’ views have gained much new impetus as a result of some perceived scandals in the work of climate scientists, These scandals have played right into the sceptics’ hands and have been fuelled by world-wide media coverage, much journalistic hype and outright misleading campaigning. E.g. Simon Hoggart (who says he is a climate change agnostic) wrote an article in Guardian on 6 Feb 2010 headlined ‘Is climate change the new faith?

In it he argued that Humans have always wanted to attribute natural disasters to their sinful behaviour and instead of god bringing earthquakes or famines or epidemics on us we now have climate change to blame for our profligate lifestyles.

The first scandal was so-called ‘emailgate’ in which scientists at the Climatic Change Unit at UEA had sent emails to a climate change sceptic among other things refusing to release the original global weather station data on which the famous ‘hockey stick’ chart of the relation between average global temp and Keeling’s rising CO2 concentrations is based. When the sceptics tried to force UEA to release the data, they then said the data had been discarded. There were also some other emails that someone had managed to hack into that seemed to suggest that the data had been manipulated to disguise some contradictory evidence.

The controversy got so great that the scientist at the centre of the row Prof Phil Jones had to step down from his position as head of the CRU and was quizzed by House of Commons Select Committee on Science & Technology on 2 March. Under questioning he admitted some emails he sent were ‘pretty awful’ but that the person asking for the data under Freedom of Info was only doing so in order to discredit the data and the conclusions and that releasing raw scientific data + the codes to analyse it to the public was not usual scientific practice.

I can very much sympathise with Prof Jones. It’s extremely difficult to supply huge amounts of raw scientific data collected from all over the world over many years. Just imagine the vast amount of paperwork, computer files etc. you’d have to assemble and given them to someone who only wants to pock holes in it.

But in another sense the UEA scientists are mistaken. Science is not like religion, it should always be open to criticism and contradictory evidence. Science must not ignore contradictory evidence from reputable sources or even from rebel scientists. That’s how it evolves and changes. Occasionally the conventional wisdom is overthrown when a new theory gains evidence e.g. when it was accepted that the earth revolves round the sun rather than vice versa. (Thomas Kuhn’s scientific revolutions). As the ‘sceptical science’ website aimed at climate scientists says:

‘Scepticism is healthy, scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge and improve their understanding’.

Scientists also have to admit when their ideas are merely hypotheses without firm evidence yet or when there are many assumptions behind results or conclusions e.g. as is the case with climatic modelling which is a very complex and uncertain business.

Indeed despite some sceptics view that the scientists are like religious believers and are absolutely certain about their conclusions, in fact climate science doesn’t claim recent climate change is definitely mainly due to human activity, it gives probabilities. E.g. The last 2007 IPCC report, gave the probability that changing climate is human induced was about 90% which was an increase in certainty on previous IPCC reports. Just recently a March 2010 Met Office study of all the evidence in the peer reviewed journals says the probability is now up to 95%, i.e. that the changing climate is mainly due to something else (sunspots, volcanoes, water vapour, you name it as the sceptics claim) is not impossible but only 5% probable.

So science isn’t trying to be definite like religion – believers don’t generally say the existence of God is 50% or 90% or 95% likely, it’s a matter of 100% faith.

Scientists also are of course human, no data is perfect and it is not unknown to for them do a bit a data massaging or simplification to come to a neat conclusion, to get the next research grant, to be able to write good paper. [I can’t claim to have been totally guilt free myself when analysing research data, it’s often very awkward to explain some findings if you want to come to a clear conclusion, so you might play them down.]

But it doesn’t mean scientists have to spend ages dealing with or take into account every criticism from cranks, those that are trying to create mischief, making a name for themselves, those funded by commercial organisations with political or economic axes to grind. While some of the climate critics may be genuinely concerned about evidence, others are making their criticisms from highly dubious personal, commercial or even political motives.

There have of course been some scandalous examples of deliberate scientific fraud, distortion and manipulation. A good example is the storm over the MMR vaccine, which a doctor Dr Andrew Wakefield claimed could cause autism. This caused enormous worry among parents, the usual (largely ignorant) media storm, a drop in vaccination rates from 92-80% with an increase in childhood measles. He has since been found to have manipulated the data and is subject to charges of serious misconduct by General Medical Council. And maybe the some UEA scientists are partly guilty of some of this, which is inexcusable. But in general science proceeds on the basis of objective evidence with the process of peer review pointing up flaws, even if results are not always perfect.

The second controversy that erupted has been called Glaciergate’. It arose from a mistake that appeared in the 4^th IPPC report that Himalayan glaciers would be 80% melted by 2035. This turned out was based on a non-scientific source and was a mistake by one of the authors in one section of a huge report. But you’d think from the vast row that it led to, the crowing of the sceptics, and the reports in the media dying for a good story, that the whole 4 volume IPCC report was flawed. The estimated glacier melting dates were given correctly elsewhere in the report - it could even have been a typo mistake quoting 2035 instead of 2350 that the Himalayan glaciers would have melted by.

It seems likely that both the email and glacier rows were deliberately fuelled by climate sceptics wanting to derail the Copenhagen climate change conference. There’s even some evidence that hacking into the UEA emails was so professional that it could only have been done by a hostile government agency or major corporation of some sort.

These controversies have of course done nothing to increase the public’s confidence in the science of climate change.

A Feb 2010 BBC poll found that 25% public felt climate change was not even happening (many mix up the weather and the climate), 48% doubted it was human caused and only 26% agreed it was due to human activity. All these results have changed since the climate scandals.

In any case it’s much more convenient for people to believe it’s not happening or not caused by our profligate lifestyles so we can keep in flying, driving and shopping with a free conscience. Developing countries likewise can feel free to develop along the same path as industrial countries. 

So, I would argue that despite flaws, scientific methods and scientists are not perfect, it is nothing like religion. It is open to being challenged and it evolves in response to new evidence. [Since when have atheists, humanists and agnostics been able to criticise religion in the way that climate change sceptics have and produced much media fuelled mischief and misleading information.]

I would argue it’s the sceptics that are being non-scientific and are the religious believers. They seize on every small bit of evidence or error in the conventional wisdom that human activity is at least mainly responsible for recent changes as proof that something else is responsible or its not happening, but blindly accept other explanations.

My view is that climate change is not a new religion; it’s just very convenient for those who don’t want to accept the implications for our economy, lifestyles and values to say it is.