Today Anthony Watts and his correspondent, Barry Woods, have caught a bad case of it (archived here). Most of Anthony's WUWT readers haven't. Anthony and Barry think that Mike Hulme is disputing the fact that 97% plus of scientists who do research relating in any way to climate agree that humans are causing global warming. But Mike Hulme is not disputing that at all.
**Update**
Barry Woods has stated in the comments that what he meant was "Mike Hulme doesn't appear to like Cook et al's paper".
I doubt I'll ever know what Anthony Watts thinks Barry Woods meant. Obviously most of the WUWT-ers read it the same way as I did (see WUWT comments below).
It's interesting that Barry jumped in so quickly and went to a lot of effort to explain himself here at HotWhopper, but he didn't bother correcting the same interpretation as me, which everyone at WUWT made. I wonder why that would be...
Anthony Watts picked out three paragraphs written by Mike Hulme and published them out of order, in contravention of the agreement with The Conversation. (The Conversation gives permission to republish with provisos, including: Unless you have express permission from the author, you can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. To make material edits contact us.)
I'll publish the full article below, then make some observations.
Science can't settle what should be done about climate change
By Mike Hulme, King's College London
The sight of speakers known to dispute the scientific evidence supporting climate change being called to speak at a parliamentary select committee on the latest IPCC report last week has raised certain commentators' blood pressure.
Some have gone so far as to claim that the climate change debate in Britain has become “as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States”.
I disagree. The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific. Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics.
The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.
What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does). As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.
In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it? Scientific consensus is not much help here. Even if one takes the Cook study at face value, then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% about a fact make policy-making any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr has often remarked in the context of US climate politics, it’s not for a lack of public consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change that climate policy implementation is difficult in the US.
So politics, not science, must take centre stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her recent book, asking climate scientists to forge a consensus around facts with the expectation that decisive political action will naturally follow misunderstands science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.
Because the questions about climate change that really matter will not be settled by scientific facts. They entail debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable. This requires a more vigorous politics that cannot be short-circuited by appeals to science.
Mike Hulme does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
The sight of speakers known to dispute the scientific evidence supporting climate change being called to speak at a parliamentary select committee on the latest IPCC report last week has raised certain commentators' blood pressure.
Some have gone so far as to claim that the climate change debate in Britain has become “as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States”.
I disagree. The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific. Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics.
The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.
What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does). As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.
In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it? Scientific consensus is not much help here. Even if one takes the Cook study at face value, then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% about a fact make policy-making any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr has often remarked in the context of US climate politics, it’s not for a lack of public consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change that climate policy implementation is difficult in the US.
So politics, not science, must take centre stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her recent book, asking climate scientists to forge a consensus around facts with the expectation that decisive political action will naturally follow misunderstands science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.
- How do we value the future, or in economic terms, at what rate should we discount the future? Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how much less we value future public goods and natural assets relative to their value today. This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.
- In the governance of climate change what role do we allocate to markets? Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around whether commodifying nature, by pricing environmental “goods” and “services”, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
- How do we wish new technologies to be governed, from experimentation and development to deployment? This question might revolve around new or improved low-carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel), the use of genetically modified crops as a means to adapt to changing climate, or proposed climate engineering technologies. Again, these are not questions upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate.
- What is the role of national governments as opposed to those played by multilateral treaties or international governing bodies? This requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation. They are no less important in relation to climate change than they are in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.
Because the questions about climate change that really matter will not be settled by scientific facts. They entail debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable. This requires a more vigorous politics that cannot be short-circuited by appeals to science.
Mike Hulme does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
From his bio at The Conversation: Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse....From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change.
Politicians and the public should be debating policy not the science
I agree with Mike Hulme that it's way past time politicians and the public accepted the science and moved on to discuss policy. I don't agree with him if he was suggesting that there was any value whatsoever in UK politicians giving a platform to fake sceptics like Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.
Most politicians of any standing do accept climate science. Some might be reluctant in this regard, but it's getting harder and harder to deny it. In the USA the Republican Party as a whole seems to punish members who do accept the science but this will change. Looking around the world, though, governments (as opposed to individual politicians) have accepted the science for more than two decades now. Governments have made some progress in doing something about global warming - just not nearly enough progress. Some time over the next couple of decades no-one (except the bedraggled mob at places like WUWT) will have a choice about whether or not to accept the science. The climate will be doing it's thing. It's happening already with hotter heatwaves and flashier floods. More and more people are noticing.
Barry Woods and Anthony Watts engage in wishful thinking
Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are engaging in wishful thinking. They grabbed onto one word written by Mike Hulme: "infamous". Mike used that word to describe the 97% consensus paper by John Cook et al, published last year. Anthony Watts and Barry Woods decided that Mike Hulme thinks there is not an overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are causing global warming. That's despite the fact that Mike Hulme clearly wrote that humans are causing global warming - and Anthony even published that particular paragraph. Anthony quoted from an email he got from Barry Woods:
Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but if Mike Hulme thinks Cook 97% is nonsense AND pointless, this will be noticed.
Except that Mike Hulme doesn't think that the 97% is nonsense. What he's arguing is that it's time to move beyond the science of climate and explore some big questions relating to what we are going to do about climate change. I'll paraphrase his questions as:
- What value do we place on the future?
- What role do we want markets to play in mitigating global warming or adapting to it?
- Do we want to regulate new technologies and if so how?
- What is the role of national governments vs multi-lateral agreements vs international governing bodies?
These aren't new questions. Nor are they single answer questions. In fact, the article by Mike Hulme is probably quite a good illustration of the point he is making. Scientists are good at science but can't be expected to excel at policy.
My reaction to the Mike Hulme article is - um yes. Oversimplifying the obvious. I reckon the people who are involved in high level discussions about climate action and associated policy development, have delved much deeper into these and other related issues.
It's science deniers who want to avoid discussing policy, not the general public. By continuing to rage against the science, deniers reckon they can avoid or put off the inevitable - deciding what to do about climate change. Thing is, getting to policy solutions might be moving too slowly but it has been moving along. Without the input of science deniers. They have decided to forego the opportunity to help shape policy. But policy is taking shape without them. It's their choice to not participate.
From the WUWT comments
Quite a number of people pointed out to Anthony that Mike Hulme accepts the 97% consensus and is saying we have to move beyond debating science and into debating and developing policy. (Archived here.)
John F. Hultquist says:
February 4, 2014 at 9:52 am
My take-away of M.H.’s remarks is that he thinks “prominent critics” of the IPCC agree with the climate change projections, climate change is bad, governments can alter the future, and should, so let’s get on with it. Business as usual in the CAGW camp.
kenw says:
February 4, 2014 at 9:58 am
This is most telling: “What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); …”
His mind is made up and the politicians have to tell us what to do about it. If they tell us to do nothing, well, it’s all their fault and we shall all cook like the frog in the slow boil.
as with most, he incorrectly believes that Mankind is in control of the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’. If you have such a mindset, it is obviously a political solution since the underlying science is settled and all that remains is to decide what (yes, if anything) to do about it. It’s just more of a throwing up of the hands, fatalistic, we’re doomed point of view.
Ken Hall agrees Mike Hulme doesn't doubt the 97% consensus, then accuses him of being a "human hating zealot" - and says:
February 4, 2014 at 10:09 am
He is not putting doubt on the 97% figure, only the importance of it in furthering the alarmist’s aims. He is suggesting that it is so obviously self evidently true, that it must no longer be questioned, and even if questioned, policy should now urgently be taken upon the assumption of it being true.
The telling quote for me is the following:
“By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point [.…] In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it?”
So it matters not if it is true or not? The alarmist scientists are done with trying to prove it, we must accept it on nothing more than blind faith before the earth cools anymore and further falsifies their CAGW hypothesis, and get on with implementing the alarmist’s cure.
In other words, sod the science, start the de-industrialisation and the destruction of industrial economies now. Truly, the argument of a human hating zealot.
Jammy Dodger says:
February 4, 2014 at 10:13 am
Yes, you are reading too much into it. He does not say Cook’s 97% is nonsense. Or pointless. A bit of confirmation fantasy there.
DirkH says:
February 4, 2014 at 10:14 am
Hulme doesn’t criticize Cook’s “methodology”. He’s perfectly fine with it. He essentially just says, this propaganda approach is not relevant for The Cause right now; how can we enforce the policies we planned? And he has no answer, that’s the good thing. Another failed NATO strategy.
There are many more in that vein. WUWT-ers aren't buying what Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are selling. Not this time.
There is of course the normal (for WUWT) science denying response. It's Just Weather says:
February 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Hulme seems to believe that human beings are the primary cause of climate change. And that the change is significant enough to cause “risk.” I hate to break it to him. 97% of all people do not agree with that.
The human species has proven to be amazingly adaptive and lives and thrives in a wide variety of climates already. Almost all human beings (97+%) are continuing on with their lives as if they believe they will be able to adapt to the climate change headed our way whatever it might be.
