More heat than light in climate change debate
The 2 day sceptic schedule boasts serious scientists from the universities of Adelaide, Stockholm and Western Australia Photo: GETTY
Hey ho!. The great slanging match which passes for the climate change debate has just got even louder, and nastier.
Ian Wolter, a third year fine art student at Anglia Ruskin University has won its annual ‘sustainable art’ prize with a tasteless plywood tombstone, bathed in a stream of oil, with the names of six climate sceptics etched beneath the words ‘Lest We Forget Those who Denied’. It has run into a storm of protest (and abuse) and one of those named – Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has complained to the police, calling it – somewhat hyperbolically - a “death threat”.
Ian Wolter's stone
Ian Wolter's stone
And now the row has been eclipsed by one over the ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction) author David Thorpe, telling the Hay Festival that he liked “writing for children because their minds are still forming” adding; “You can try to be seriously subversive and try to infect their minds with these viral ideas that they can explore on their on to make it exciting”.
An unwise choice of words, say his friends (those that aren’t busy trying to imply that he never said it, despite it being reported in the Telegraph). It seems more sinister than that to me, but no worse that some of the abuse he has been getting in return, including being accused of “child molestation”.
But then this increasingly par for the course. I once chaired a meeting where a particularly unpleasant environmentalist spat in the face of a distinguished and courageous – but moderate – advocate for action on climate change who disagreed with him. And only last year, pressure groups pressed for the sceptical Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, to be fired when he was off sick following an alarming eye operation.
And sceptics are equally good at dishing it out. Vociferously objecting to being called “deniers”, on the slightly tenous grounds that this equates them with Holocaust deniers, some don’t hesitate - sometimes in virtually the next breath – to compare their opponents to “Nazis” or “Hitler youth” .
For what its worth I have received more explicit “death threats” than Mr Wolter’s obnoxious sculpture being told, among other things, that I was “not long for this world”. But then so have other writers both among those who both accept and those who are sceptical of man-made climate change.
The ridiculous thing is that the practical distance between the two positions is remarkably slight. Almost all climate change sceptics will agree that the world has warmed over the last century, that it is almost certain to go on doing so, and that emissions of greenhouse gases by humanity are at least partially responsible. (They could hardly do otherwise, given the laws of physics).The differences are over how great the warming is likely to be, and what should be done to counter it.
That should provide grounds for serious, constructive debate. Instead we have this abusive argument – though, curiously, it is a largely an Anglo Saxon phenomenon, confined almost entirely to England, Australia, Canada and the United States. The reason is that it has become more a matter of values - sometimes assuming almost religious intensity on either side - than-of science.
Too many greens believe that global warming ought to be a serious threat because it casts doubt on unregulated capitalism, therefore it must be one. Too many sceptics believe, for the same reason, that it must not be a danger, therefore it can’t be one.
None of this, of course, makes any difference to the science which goes on accumulating evidence that global warming is both real, and a serious threat. Nor does it affect the economics, which show technological innovation in a global market provides much the best way of addressing it, while simultaneously achieving bringing growth. There’s huge scope for discussing these two realities and working out how to meet them, if only we could all get away from the unproductive, unpleasant slanging match.
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