Sunday, November 15, 2009
"Climate Change is not our fault", say voters
So, only 2 out of 5 people in the UK think human activity is to blame for global warming, according to a poll for the Times. And only 28% of those polled agreed that it is happening and is “far and away the most serious problem we face as a country and internationally”.
As somebody who gets to hang out with a lot of scientists, one of the perks of my job, I can already hear them tutting, muttering about denial, how people have been hoodwinked by the propaganda of oil companies and are too selfish and shortsighted to accept the truth, as handed to them by scientists, governments, and green campaigners.
But let’s try to draw a line here. A very small number of respondents – less than one in ten - thought climate change was a natural phenomenon, and environmentalist propaganda falsely blames human activity. Only 15% think it’s not happening at all (and, if you pick your timescale, they’re right. The warmest year on record was 1998, since when global temperatures have not risen. So if you’re an undergraduate now, things really have got no warmer since you started secondary school).
That means most people think the climate is changing and that human activity could, or definitely does, have a role in causing it. But that is not the same thing as accepting culpability. “Climate change is not our fault, say most voters”, as the Times headline puts it. And indeed, in what sense could you say that the concentration of greenhouse gases in today’s atmosphere is the “fault” of today’s British voters?
There’s little we, as individuals, can do to change the emissions profile of civilisation, even if we were to embrace the austerity agenda and give up the things like cars, planes, central heating and a varied diet that our parents and grandparents struggled to win for us. Denmark is the poster child of renewable energy, but its CO2 emissions per capita were close to Germany’s 10 tons in 2004. Sweden was closer to France’s 6 tons, thanks to its heavy reliance on nuclear power alongside its renewable sources. Does that mean that the Danes and Germans are nearly twice as guilty as the French and Swedish? If the UK government built new nuclear power stations and a Severn barrage they’d do more to change our emissions profile than any amount of wearing sweaters indoors.
When newspaper articles use the terms “cause”, “blame” and “fault” interchangeably, no wonder the interviewees aren’t sure whether they’re being asked for a scientific or a moral judgement. But asking whether a warming planet is “the most significant problem we face” is clearly a political, not a scientific question. And in the face of a global recession, rising unemployment, an intractable war, and persistent world issues like underdevelopment, disease and conflict, the answer is not a foregone conclusion.
Even within the UK, you might well think that your child having a good education and growing up in a democracy, with the chance to do a worthwhile job, live in a decent home and be free to travel, for example, would make more difference to their life than whether the world is 2 degrees warmer or the sea a foot higher.
In the developing world it is surely nonsense to suggest that a changing climate will have more effect on the next generation’s life than having access to the things that we take for granted – sanitation, transportation, industrial production of food and other goods, higher education, convenient and safe energy on tap. If minimising emissions is prioritised over economic development, will the citizens of a still-impoverished Bangladesh really be thanking us in 2050 for keeping their world just as it was?
All this, of course, presupposes that the science is robust, and that human industrial activity is the main and controllable cause of global warming. The problem is that, thanks to this kind of elision of scientific, moral and political categories, it is becoming harder, not easier, to point to objective and reliable scientific opinion on the issue. The more scientists line up to tell us that their research shows we ought to fly less often or eat fewer steaks, the less objectivity they can claim.
On page 3 of Saturday’s Times is another science story. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition reports that previous guidelines on how many calories the average man and woman needs to consume were a bit small. Unless you are simply spending your time in one room doing nothing, you’re burning off more calories than they thought, and should be able to consume 2,900 calories a day (men) or 2,350 (women) without getting any fatter. That’s an extra 2 pints of lager, 2 large glasses of red wine, or a Tesco chicken salad sandwich.
Underneath the main story, page 3 stunna and qualified nutritionist Amanda Ursell warns how irresponsible it is to tell us fatties what the scientists have found. ‘My main worry with these figures from the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition is not the figures but how they will be interpreted… One response will be “scientists got it wrong, we can’t trust them.” Another will be: “we can eat more”.’
Ms. Ursell seems to think that we will stop listening to scientists altogether because they tell us the truth about what they’ve found. Either that, or be confused enough to believe that our bodies have somehow been recalibrated overnight (like a cable TV box) to take on 400 more calories than the day before without gaining weight.
We are not idiots. Most of us have simply spotted that life is too short to count calories, or carbon.
As somebody who gets to hang out with a lot of scientists, one of the perks of my job, I can already hear them tutting, muttering about denial, how people have been hoodwinked by the propaganda of oil companies and are too selfish and shortsighted to accept the truth, as handed to them by scientists, governments, and green campaigners.
But let’s try to draw a line here. A very small number of respondents – less than one in ten - thought climate change was a natural phenomenon, and environmentalist propaganda falsely blames human activity. Only 15% think it’s not happening at all (and, if you pick your timescale, they’re right. The warmest year on record was 1998, since when global temperatures have not risen. So if you’re an undergraduate now, things really have got no warmer since you started secondary school).
That means most people think the climate is changing and that human activity could, or definitely does, have a role in causing it. But that is not the same thing as accepting culpability. “Climate change is not our fault, say most voters”, as the Times headline puts it. And indeed, in what sense could you say that the concentration of greenhouse gases in today’s atmosphere is the “fault” of today’s British voters?
There’s little we, as individuals, can do to change the emissions profile of civilisation, even if we were to embrace the austerity agenda and give up the things like cars, planes, central heating and a varied diet that our parents and grandparents struggled to win for us. Denmark is the poster child of renewable energy, but its CO2 emissions per capita were close to Germany’s 10 tons in 2004. Sweden was closer to France’s 6 tons, thanks to its heavy reliance on nuclear power alongside its renewable sources. Does that mean that the Danes and Germans are nearly twice as guilty as the French and Swedish? If the UK government built new nuclear power stations and a Severn barrage they’d do more to change our emissions profile than any amount of wearing sweaters indoors.
When newspaper articles use the terms “cause”, “blame” and “fault” interchangeably, no wonder the interviewees aren’t sure whether they’re being asked for a scientific or a moral judgement. But asking whether a warming planet is “the most significant problem we face” is clearly a political, not a scientific question. And in the face of a global recession, rising unemployment, an intractable war, and persistent world issues like underdevelopment, disease and conflict, the answer is not a foregone conclusion.
Even within the UK, you might well think that your child having a good education and growing up in a democracy, with the chance to do a worthwhile job, live in a decent home and be free to travel, for example, would make more difference to their life than whether the world is 2 degrees warmer or the sea a foot higher.
In the developing world it is surely nonsense to suggest that a changing climate will have more effect on the next generation’s life than having access to the things that we take for granted – sanitation, transportation, industrial production of food and other goods, higher education, convenient and safe energy on tap. If minimising emissions is prioritised over economic development, will the citizens of a still-impoverished Bangladesh really be thanking us in 2050 for keeping their world just as it was?
All this, of course, presupposes that the science is robust, and that human industrial activity is the main and controllable cause of global warming. The problem is that, thanks to this kind of elision of scientific, moral and political categories, it is becoming harder, not easier, to point to objective and reliable scientific opinion on the issue. The more scientists line up to tell us that their research shows we ought to fly less often or eat fewer steaks, the less objectivity they can claim.
On page 3 of Saturday’s Times is another science story. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition reports that previous guidelines on how many calories the average man and woman needs to consume were a bit small. Unless you are simply spending your time in one room doing nothing, you’re burning off more calories than they thought, and should be able to consume 2,900 calories a day (men) or 2,350 (women) without getting any fatter. That’s an extra 2 pints of lager, 2 large glasses of red wine, or a Tesco chicken salad sandwich.
Underneath the main story, page 3 stunna and qualified nutritionist Amanda Ursell warns how irresponsible it is to tell us fatties what the scientists have found. ‘My main worry with these figures from the Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition is not the figures but how they will be interpreted… One response will be “scientists got it wrong, we can’t trust them.” Another will be: “we can eat more”.’
Ms. Ursell seems to think that we will stop listening to scientists altogether because they tell us the truth about what they’ve found. Either that, or be confused enough to believe that our bodies have somehow been recalibrated overnight (like a cable TV box) to take on 400 more calories than the day before without gaining weight.
We are not idiots. Most of us have simply spotted that life is too short to count calories, or carbon.
