During the last decade, climate experts and government officials from more than 100 countries have unanimously agreed the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s analysis, its review of scientific literature and its predictions have been carefully scrutinised by governments and generally accepted. The unanimous political support the IPCC has obtained from the international community represents a comprehensive consensus on the science and economics of climate change.
Despite this globally sanctioned agreement, there have been serious reservations about the way the IPCC works and how it produces its conclusions. Two years ago, the Economic Affairs Committee of Britain’s House of Lords concluded that there are concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, and the influence of political considerations in its findings.
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For the last 10 years, one IPCC report after another has been responsible for a relentless outpouring of disaster predictions that have been published and promulgated with little hesitation and rising alarm. Any lingering reservation about looming catastrophe that can be found in the small print of the latest IPCC report are routinely ignored, while uncertainties are conveniently disregarded and highly unlikely worst case scenarios exaggerated.
There can be little doubt that the IPCC’s disaster scenarios have been converted into a general consensus among the world’s political and academic elites. Ironically, the apocalyptic predictions of the future are politically sanctioned at the same time as a growing number of scientists are recognising that environmental and economic computer modelling of an inherently unpredictable future is illogical and futile. As the eminent mathematician David Orrell has pointed out:
“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate. Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of CO2 When models about the future climate are in agreement, it says more about the selfregulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy.” (David Orrell, The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction, New York 2007)
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More than 30 years ago, Anthony Downs demonstrated persuasively that public attitudes towards environmental problems always go through what he called an ecological “issue-attention cycle”. According to his model, the typical issue-attention cycle is started off with alarmed discovery and euphoric attempts to solve “the problem” – until the realisation of insupportable costs eventually brings about a gradual decline of intense public interest (Anthony Downs, “Up and down with the ecology: the “Issue-Attention Cycle”, The Public Interest 28:1972, 38-50).
It is far too early to consider whether or not the current climate change anxiety will fit Downs’ predictive model. Nonetheless, it is more than likely that any significant IPCC reforms will ultimately depend on the economic and political cost its workings will burden national economies. If governments were to concede that the cure promoted by the IPCC turns out to be worse than the ailment, only if the price of climate hysteria eclipses the value of political and economic stability, can we realistically hope for a comprehensive reorganization of international climate science and policy-making.
Completo y magnífico el artículo de Benny Peiser en Die Achse des Guten.
