The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 Page 7
Climate change has become dangerous social territory. It now surpasses religion, politics and sex as a taboo subject. It threatens to disturb polite conversation with anger, resentment and anxiety, and can hijack any serious attempt to discuss the worrying predicament of our grandchildren. It is only human to find ways to doubt or reject what is so difficult and frightening to confront.
I will return to this common and disabling reflex of denial. But first let us acknowledge that there is a different kind of denialism – and it deserves the name – that is a strategic and knowing political act in the face of established facts. It is consciously fraudulent, motivated by malice aforethought, driven by cynical opportunism and greed, and frequently funded by the carbon-polluting industries. Sadly, there is nothing surprising about this cunning exertion of naked power for short-term self-interest. ‘Doubt is our product’ was the message of an infamous tobacco company memo in 1969, and the confection of doubt continues to be a successful corporate tactic. (Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Not every year is hotter than the last.) In their book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway document how, from the 1950s, the tobacco industry poured money into manufacturing a phony ‘debate’ about the rapidly emerging scientific theory that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and other diseases. Having created an apparent debate, the industry then convinced the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present ‘both sides’ of it. Research funded by tobacco companies cherry-picked scientific data, focused on unexplained or anomalous details, and exploited ‘normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt’. The same tactics were used decades later by the carbon polluters, and Merchants of Doubt makes shockingly clear that sometimes it was even the same people orchestrating them. The Australian newspaper is an unashamed exponent of disinformation on this issue, and it is appropriate that its middle-back page is entitled ‘Weather and mind games’.
In the 1960s and ’70s, people who knowingly conspired with the tobacco industry to delay popular understanding of the links between smoking and lung cancer seemed self-seeking and highly irresponsible. Looking back now, we judge them even more harshly. In 2004, in a landmark federal case in the United States, the tobacco industry was found guilty of fraud and corruption. But that was half a century after the verdict of scientists began to emerge clearly. Those were decades of profits for a cynical few, pocketed through the merchandise of doubt. How, in 2050, will we judge those who, for personal gain, intentionally propagated misinformation about climate change science? How do we judge them today?
The political denial of climate science gathered momentum in the late 1980s when NASA scientist James Hansen testified about global warming to a US Congressional hearing, the IPCC was formed, the Berlin Wall fell, and American conservatives began to look for a new enemy of the free market economy. But political denialism has strengthened, especially in the past few years, and it has succeeded in presenting science as ideology and in replacing evidence with opinion. Critics of climate change science often invoke the word ‘belief ’ as if the issue is one for personal decision. Former prime minister John Howard calls himself an ‘agnostic’ on climate change. And those who articulate the science and its implications are branded as ‘high priests’ of an ‘evangelical’ movement or ‘cult’. ‘Environmentalism’, which is a political stance, is depicted as ‘religious’, and climate science is portrayed as its core belief. In an article in the Monthly in August 2012, Robert Manne declared the dark victory of the denialists and tracked how funding of their activities has shifted from mainly fossil fuel interests to include an increasing number of conservative foundations advocating a libertarian, antiregulatory ideology. In the US, the issue has polarised dramatically between Democrats and Republicans just in the past decade, and a similar party-political divide has solidified in Australia.
In such an adversarial culture, I think that use of the word ‘consensus’ to describe the scientific position can be seriously misleading. The word was generated by the IPCC process which, although founded on the best science, relies on intergovernmental negotiations to produce agreed statements. ‘Consensus’ sounds like politics, not science; it evokes compromise and negotiation. It suggests that majorities are instrumental and sometimes temporary. It seems to allow for contrary or dissenting opinions, without the need to offer new evidence. It possibly undermines public understanding of the status of an accepted scientific theory.
Australia has its own band of paid or cynical denialists and, although they are mischievous and dangerously influential, their motivations are so clear and selfish that they are essentially boring. I am more interested in the everyday dinner-table reflex. Doubt is not only the ‘product’ of industries protecting their livelihoods; it is also the natural refuge of humans confronting an unwanted reality. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.
Clive Hamilton is an Australian political analyst who has been steeped in the climate literature and policy debates for years and quickly recognised the political urgency of the issue. Yet for a long time he could not emotionally accept what it really meant for the future of the world. It was only in September 2008 that he finally allowed himself to concede that it is now too late to prevent far-reaching changes in the Earth’s climate and ‘to admit that we simply are not going to act with anything like the urgency required’. That emotional shift induced some relief – relief at admitting what his rational brain had been telling him, relief at saving energy on false hope, and relief at being able to let go of some anger – but it also initiated turmoil. To resolve that grief and disturbance, he wrote a grim book entitled Requiem for a Species. It is driven by a historical quest ‘to explain why humanity failed to respond to the existential threat posed by global warming’. Hamilton’s insight into his own protective, unconscious instinct enables him to find some compassion for his fellow humans as they expertly deploy strategies of denial and dissociation.
Emotional denialism can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin to understand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. In a book entitled Living in Denial, an American sociologist of Norwegian descent, Kari Marie Norgaard, studied an educated and environmentally conscious Norwegian community of about 14 000 residents (to which she gave the fictional name Bygdaby) during the unusually warm winter of 2000–01. Norway is a country where there has been a relatively high acceptance of the science of global warming, and Norgaard chose a place where climate change will swiftly bring economic challenges. It is also a community where people are ‘sincere in their concerns for the wider world and engaged in so much political activity on its behalf ’. Yet the people she studied ‘lived in denial’.
Norgaard found that climate change was a conversation stopper. What she observed was a culture of habitual avoidance where people accepted the science but failed to integrate that knowledge into everyday life or to transform it into social action. The well-educated, open-minded, environmentally conscious global citizens of Bygdaby recognise what global warming means, are disturbed by it, and yet are able to live in a parallel emotional universe where it is rarely mentioned or acted upon. In the words of Kjersti, a teacher in the town: ‘We live in one way, and we think in another. We learn to think in parallel. It’s a skill, an art of living.’ Climate change is both deeply disturbing and almost completely submerged; it is simultaneously common knowledge and unimaginable.
What about the climate scientists themselves? How do they deal with the frightening revelations of their daily work? How do they sleep nights? What do they tell their children? These are the questions that shape Feeling the Heat, a fine book by the Walkley Award-winning Australian journalist Jo Chandler. She follows climate scientists to Antarctica, the tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef, ‘traversing the frontiers of the climate story’. Early in her writing, Chandler is sipping a Christmas drink with friends in an Austra
lian backyard and finds herself confessing in public her worries about ‘drought and sea levels, monsoons, methane and the mysterious mechanics of the deep ocean’. ‘People drift away’, she writes, ‘as if I let slip a fart or a faux pas’.
Chandler is trying to find a way to write about the revolution we are living in without people drifting away and without conducting trench warfare. Her solution is to communicate the passion and dedication of the scientists, these ‘explorers of extremity’. We see their excitement as they follow their curiosity and pursue puzzling questions; we see their resilience and optimism in the face of bleak findings; we see the dawning of sickening sense as scientific scepticism meets hard evidence; we also see the withering of hope as they experience the resistance and paralysis of social and political systems that should be activating change. Chandler’s book reveals the scientific method in rich detail, as fine minds struggle with complex systems, depressing outlooks and their responsibilities as citizens.
I think she is right to take her readers into the hearts and minds of the scientists, for they are engaged in surely one of the most exciting and vertiginous intellectual endeavours in the history of humanity: to get a firm understanding, quickly if possible, of how climate change is playing out, and will continue to play out, in the ecosystems of the globe. It is the colossal story of our time and perhaps if we would allow ourselves to be more caught up in the exhilaration of it, we might also find the political will to do more about it.
This is a quest that has secured my own urgent sense of wonder. In January 2012, I was fortunate to join Australia’s centenary voyage to Mawson’s huts in East Antarctica, which was also the major marine science expedition of the summer. On board Aurora Australis was an impressive team of oceanographers, biologists, glaciologists and climate scientists. Every day I benefited from conversations with passionate and dedicated researchers who were both intrigued and disturbed by what they were discovering. Among other things, they were researching the consequences of a collision between a giant iceberg and the tongue of the Mertz Glacier, a fascinating natural experiment in ocean circulation and sea-ice production – and just how ‘natural’ was such an event now? One evening, as we sailed near the Mertz Glacier, a distinguished oceanographer confided to me that in 20 years’ time he thinks that climate scientists will regret that they did not speak out more forthrightly about the grim implications of their findings. He is a brilliant communicator himself, and his passion and sincerity are luminous. But a good scientist, he explained, is objective and therefore wary of politics. Where his science intersects with a highly political issue, he might be inclined to protect its objectivity by being extra conservative and a touch restrained. That is why the future of the planet is probably a little more frightening than we know.
* * * * *
How can intelligent, learned, civic-minded people feel that they can reasonably reject, doubt or be ‘agnostic’ about the theory of anthropogenic climate change? And how can some of them also feel that they must prosecute their case in public? In Feeling the Heat, Jo Chandler shares my dismay and considers their motivations:
Sometimes it is blatant – it’s about greed. Sometimes it is more obscure – it is about reputation, about relevance, about fear, perhaps, of facing the poisoned legacy our life choices have bequeathed, however unwittingly, to those who come after us. Sometimes it is about horror of the unknown, and that I can understand. Sometimes it is entirely baffling, and I have to wonder what kind of madness or delusion or anxiety drives it.
We have considered healthy scientific scepticism and fraudulent political denialism, and somewhere between those two poles are to be found the contrarians. As Clive Hamilton puts it: ‘The contrarian is a loner, perhaps cranky, but also genuinely independent of mind.’ I want to consider three Australian contrarians on climate change, three retired professors – of history, political science and geology: Geoffrey Blainey, AC, Don Aitkin, AO, and Ian Plimer. They perfectly fit the profile of climate change sceptics – older, educated, once-powerful men. They are seeking our attention on this issue. Should we give it to them? This is a good question, and one that climate activist Anna Rose considered when she was asked to enter a dialogue on ABC TV with the climate sceptic and former senator, Nick Minchin. Minchin was the powerbroker responsible for Tony Abbott’s rise to the leadership of the federal Liberal Party in 2009, and the decisive issue was climate. Nick Minchin ‘remains unconvinced’ by climate science. As Rose wrote in her book, Madlands, ‘the whole idea of the [ABC] show played into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed’. But Rose decided to go ahead anyway because the documentary would reach a diverse audience and might possibly change some minds. We have to believe in the creative potential of dialogue with our fellow citizens.
Geoffrey Blainey is our pioneering climate historian. He has an abiding interest in the historical physics and geography of the globe – one of the early fruits of that curiosity was his famous book, The Tyranny of Distance. In 1971 he wrote an article called ‘Climate and Australia’s history’ and in 1981 he argued in A Land Half Won that ‘delusions of climate’ should be added to the list of vital causes of the British settlement of Australia. Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had chanced to visit Botany Bay in a wet autumn and imagined they were seeing it at its worst, but 18 years later Governor Phillip landed his fleet in a dry summer and found a very different landscape. Blainey’s quizzical intellect, quirky, original insights and literary flair make him a brilliant historian.
He has always relished a bit of social and academic mischief. In 1984 he drew trenchant criticism for comments he made about the social dangers of large-scale Asian immigration. In 2003, he favourably reviewed The Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Keith Windschuttle, a controversial book that was strongly condemned by most experts in the field.
Blainey is a genuine contrarian. His teachers and colleagues labelled him an individualist, a maverick. In academic debates, he has been the generalist and populist who enjoyed unsettling the authority of the specialist. Although a university professor, he began and ended his professional career outside academia, as a freelance historian. At a time of rapidly increasing professionalism and specialisation in the discipline of history, Blainey never despised the public; as a writer he has often taken on the mantle of speaking for them, and as an academic he has always been a loner.
Blainey is sceptical of intellectual fashion and has made its swings a subject of historical analysis in a book called The Great Seesaw: A new view of the Western world, 1750–2000. In the late 1960s and 1970s, green politics overtook him in a way that clearly irritated him, just as multicultural politics did a little later. He sees environmentalism as akin to a religion and as having benefited from the decline of Christianity. The green movement is not only a cult; it is a professional one. It is an evangelical crusade and, in Blainey’s narratives, has worshippers, an altar, a halo, a sense of the sacred, and a Garden of Eden. It also fosters guilt. Reasonable people are thereby made ‘unconscious captives’.
Blainey has decided that climate science is an intellectual fashion, and that it has gone too far – eventually the pendulum will swing back, and the great seesaw of optimism or pessimism in the Western world will go to the other extreme. ‘There is a brittle quality in these extreme moods’, he believes, and ‘whatever is fashionable can suddenly become unfashionable’. He criticises climate scientists for saying ‘this is simply a question for scientists, keep out’. Blainey cautiously endorsed Ian Plimer’s book, Heaven + Earth: Global warming – the missing science with the words: ‘Those who say that the latest “climate change” is unique are really making a profound appeal to history. Professor Ian Plimer is a leading historian of climate change, and takes his evidence from the layers of rocks. He strongly challenges the prevailing theory of human-induced global warming.’ It is not a ringing endorsement, but Blainey is happy to set the cat among the pigeons.
He resents the exclusive authority of the climate scientist
s, and positions himself – as he did in the immigration debate in 1984 – as the champion of the everyday perceptions of ordinary people. He resists doomsayers and is an advocate of the positive ledger of national life. He feels that most historians wear black armbands and drink from half-empty glasses. His long career as a historian of mining, mining companies and mining towns (Queenstown, Broken Hill and Mount Isa) schooled him in the economic importance of mining and inclines him to defend it from attack. He is critical of the interference of international bodies in his country’s sovereignty. And he still probably carries a deep emotional wound from the attacks on him by his professional colleagues about his views on Asian immigration in the 1980s. Marginality was suddenly no longer self-imposed, and he developed sympathies for the underdog or whistleblower in intellectual battles. A prominent ‘consensus’ of ‘experts’ represented in an ‘international body’ championed by ‘greens’ was sure to attract his attention. But he is unable or unwilling to separate environmentalism and climate science. Contrarianism has been an immensely creative scholarly style for Blainey, and a successful professional strategy. But there is a studied naivety and innocence about him, and a carelessness for the consequences of the game he is playing.
* * * * *
Professor Don Aitkin is another persistent contrarian whose intellectual habit has led him to question climate science. He calls himself a ‘dissenter’ and, like Blainey, styles himself as a champion of the ordinary punter. Aitkin is a distinguished scholar of political science, an academic leader, and a conscientious and civic-minded member of his community. He was vice-chancellor and president of the University of Canberra from 1991 to 2002, vice-president of the Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee 1994–95, foundation chair of the Australian Research Grants Committee and a member of the Australian Science and Technology Council. His community service includes his time as chair of the National Capital Authority, chair of the NRMA/ACT Road Safety Trust, and many formal roles in support of music and the arts. He admires the environmental histories of Eric Rolls and George Seddon and thinks we should learn to live more lightly on the planet. When a person with such a strong commitment to environment, research and public education declares climate science to be a ‘fashionable bugbear’, it is a matter of deep concern and interest.