From Climate Scepticism

by John Ridgway

A common accusation levelled at so-called climate change ‘deniers’ is that their position is profoundly anti-science. It is therefore more than germane to point out that an anti-science sentiment lies behind the belief that climate change poses an existential risk to mankind. Ironically, activists such as Greta Thunberg, who say we must ‘listen to the scientists’ and prepare for Hot House Earth, are promoting a belief that is advocated by experts who will tell you that you should not listen to the scientists. They say this because they believe that the scientific method has led to a consensus that underplays the climate change risks. The scientific method, it is claimed, is inherently overcautious. Furthermore, there is said to be a tendency for important fringe ideas to be marginalised by a dominant orthodoxy. Yes, the same dominance that may have driven out scientists who were climate change sceptics is also driving out those who believe in climate Armageddon. The former was a good thing, we are told, but the latter is a very bad thing.

You either respect the scientific method and accept the scientific consensus, or you don’t. It isn’t good enough that climate change ‘deniers’ be castigated for being anti-science when an anti-science position is also taken by activists espousing extreme alarm.

The ‘expert’ case for ignoring the scientists

To illustrate how belief in the existential nature of climate change risk presupposes a rejection of mainstream climate science, I bring to your attention a 2018 document that is typical of the climate alarm canon. It is titled ‘What Lies Beneath’ and carries the subtitle, ‘The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk’. It is written by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop of Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, a high-profile think tank based in Melbourne, Australia. To add to the report’s intended gravitas, a foreword has been supplied by the much-acclaimed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber – the gentleman responsible for persuading the World’s governments to arbitrarily accept 1.5 deg C as the dangerous limit for global warming. So whilst the thinking outlined in What Lies Beneath may be overtly anti-scientific, it has to be appreciated that its logic is shared by Schellnhuber, and hence is one that lies at the heart of the policies that are emerging annually from the various COPs.

Without having to delve into the body of the document, it is revealing enough to note the message conveyed by Schellnhuber’s foreword. He starts with a firm endorsement of the Breakthrough report:

What Lies Beneath is an important report. It does not deliver new facts and figures, but instead provides a new perspective on the existential risks associated with anthropogenic global warming.

And is that because it was written by climate scientists who are best qualified to comment on climate change risk? No, on the contrary:

It is the critical overview of well-informed intellectuals who sit outside the climate science community which has developed over the last fifty years.

Schellnhuber thinks the fact that neither of the authors is a qualified climate science expert is a good thing because:

[Climate] Experts tend to establish a peer world-view which becomes ever more rigid and focussed. Yet the critical insights regarding the issue in question may lurk at the fringes, as this report suggests.

Having called for more attention to be paid to the those who are not domain experts (because they are presumed better at rooting out what lurks in the fringes) he goes on to take a swipe at the IPCC itself:

After delivering five fully-fledged assessment reports, it is hardly surprising that a trend towards “erring on the side of least drama” has emerged.

It seems odd that anyone could claim that a drift to “least drama” would be an unsurprising result of gaining more knowledge, but Schellnhuber has a couple of reasons why he thinks this should be so. The first is a supposed preoccupation with determining likelihoods. Or, as he puts it, the IPCC has a ‘Probability Obsession’. He goes on to explain that the discipline of statistics cannot apply to the climate change problem because we are dealing with a complex, non-linear system and there is no precedent for the situation we currently find ourselves in. This, combined with the fact that we cannot perform repeated, planetary-scale experiments, obviates a statistical approach — at least in Schellnhuber’s fringe opinion. As he puts it:

Of course, climate scientists are not trying to treat the Earth like a roulette wheel, yet the statistical approach keeps on creeping into the assessments. How many times did the thermohaline circulation collapse under comparable conditions in the planetary past? How often did the Pacific enter a permanent El Niño state in the Holocene? And so on.

Schellnhuber says that, instead of bothering with probabilities and statistics, it is sufficient to address the possibilities and base one’s risk assessment on that:

So calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances…Rather we should identify possibilities, that is, potential developments in the planetary makeup that are consistent with the initial and boundary conditions, the processes and the drivers we know.

Of course, a climate scientist would tell you that consistency with initial and boundary conditions is a necessary but far from sufficient restriction upon which the reality of a risk can be established. But then Schellnhuber would say that’s just them being too ‘rigid and focussed’; focused, that is, upon what can be expected rather than what cannot be ruled out.

I’ll not say too much about this other than to point out that risk is a function of likelihood and impact, and so if one is to turn one’s back on the calculation of likelihood, one is no longer doing risk assessment; one is simply putting all your eggs in the precautionary principle basket. It’s undiluted uncertainty aversion and, as such, it represents a retreat from the rationality that comes with the scientific desire to quantify.

Schellnhuber then moves on to what he calls the ‘Devil’s Advocate Reward’. This is a strange one, because he seems to be criticising the scientific method itself for its insistence that all claims be well-evidenced:

In the magnificent tradition of the Enlightenment, which shattered so many myths of the ancient regimes, scientists are trained to be sceptical about every proposition which cannot be directly verified by empirical evidence or derived from first principles (such as the invariability of the speed of light). So, if a researcher comes up with an entirely new thought, experts tend to reflexively dismiss it as “speculative”, which is effectively a death warrant in the academic world. Whereas those who criticize the idea will be applauded, rewarded and promoted!

Of course, it is absolutely essential that new ideas be robustly challenged, particularly if acceptance of them leads one down the road towards something like Net Zero. That’s the beauty of the scientific method; speculations are important but they are only the starting point. But this is not where Schellnhuber’s sympathies lie:

…out-of-the-box thinking is vital given the unprecedented climate risks which now confront human civilisation.

On the contrary, a preference for well-evidenced thinking is vital when confronted with decision-making under uncertainty. Undeterred, however, Schellnhuber finishes with an unqualified call for more alarmism from the fringes:

Therefore it is all the more important to listen to non-mainstream voices who do understand the issues and are less hesitant to cry wolf.

Reading this reminds me of what Roger Hallam, the slightly unhinged co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, said recently, just before he was thrown into jail for his particular version of wolf-crying:

The rapid heating and extreme events of the last year demonstrate that overall predictions of institutionalised climate science were less accurate than the conclusions of generalist scholars and leading climate activists, who better saw the frightening signals through the noise produced from siloes, hierarchies, and privilege.

Their methods may be very different, but Hallam and Schellnhuber are very much on the same page in believing that the scientists are getting it wrong and that the people who truly understand the risk are the ‘generalist scholars and leading climate activists’.

Enough said

I could go through the body of the report and demonstrate how it does indeed say what Schellnhuber says it does. But I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that any report that receives the endorsement of someone holding Schellnhuber’s views is bound to read more like a manifesto for Extinction Rebellion than it does a sober, scientific appraisal of climate change risks. Besides which, the very first ‘well-informed intellectual’ that the report chooses to cite is none other than Naomi Oreskes:

A 2013 study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes and fellow researchers examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists. They found that scientists have been “conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change” and that “at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science”.

This is a surprising claim, to say the least, given the catalogue of failed predictions of disappeared glaciers, ice caps, coastal cities and polar bears that have floodlit the path taken by the climate righteous. Besides which, Oreskes, you may recall, has made a big thing of scientists being too averse to making Type I errors. To her mind, they are setting the bar for statistical significance far too high. This from someone who, in the process, demonstrated that she didn’t even understand what statistical significance meant. To be precise, she seems to believe that the probability of observing data, given the null hypothesis, is equivalent to the probability of the hypothesis being true, having observed the data – a gaffe known as the fallacy of the transposed conditional. So much for the well-informed intellectual.

For these reasons, I am content to leave it here, allowing my readers (if they are so inclined) to pick through the report for themselves. But if you get to the end thinking, “I’ll never get that time back again”, then don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. All you are likely to discover is that what lies beneath isn’t the scientifically sound revelation you might have been hoping for.