Thanks to greedy environmentalists and corrupt scientists, the world is in the grip of a dangerous mass delusion that driving cars and using electricity is causing global warming. Unless these mendacious “experts” are stopped, the leaders of some of the globe’s biggest economies will pour trillions of dollars into useless schemes that exist merely to feed the enviro-industrial complex. Only a few (American) voices speaking out against a dangerous (European) orthodoxy can save us from global chaos.
If this sounds like the plot of a thriller, it’s because it is: in Michael Crichton’s latest bestseller, State of Fear, environmental groups grow so fat on middle-class guilt over pollution and the destruction of small furry things that they fasten on the alarmist theory of global warming, or climate change, as a means of screwing even more money from gullible donors.
But unlike Crichton’s previous tales - of dinosaurs stalking schoolchildren (Jurassic Park) or invisibly small machines taking over people’s brains (Prey) - the author doesn’t want this novel to be regarded as total fiction. He really does think the dangers of global warming have been seriously exaggerated.
At one point in an exchange of e-mails with me that took place over the past couple of weeks, he asked: “Is climate change happening? Of course. Always is. Always has. Is there data for changing climate? Of course. Does it vary in different parts of the world? Duh. Is climate change primarily caused by human action? Different issue entirely. You needn’t take my answer on this. See what the climate scientists say in private.” But in fact it is what scientists are saying in public that makes the views of Crichton, and other influential climate-change “deniers”, increasingly difficult to understand.
The debate over whether humans really are making the Earth grow dangerously warm has been going on since the 1980s. But in recent years, the evidence has grown increasingly difficult to ignore. In 2001, after 13 years of considering all the available research on global warming, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that the Earth had definitely grown warmer during the past half century - and it was our fault.
In the past nine months alone, three new reports have given considerable backing to the IPCC’s position. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a four-year study involving more than 160 scientists from eight countries, found that Arctic sea-ice now covers an area up to 20 per cent smaller than in the 1960s, while snow cover in the region has shrunk by 10 per cent in the past 30 years. A geological survey of the Antarctic Peninsula found that 87 per cent of glaciers studied in the region had been retreating at an increasing rate over the past 50 years; and a study led by the California-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography found the warming of the world’s oceans could only be explained by anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. As one of its authors said when news of the report broke: “The debate over whether there is a global-warming signal is over now, at least for rational people.”
The scientific evidence appears to be having a political effect. In December last year, as the UK prepared to take over the presidency of the Group of Eight, Tony Blair stated publicly that he intended to put climate change (along with the needs of Africa) at the top of the G8 agenda. And last month, the leading national science academies from all the G8 nations - plus Brazil, China and India - took the unprecedented step of writing an open letter to the group’s leaders, urging them to take concerted international action on climate change at next week’s summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
Whether the G8 will do this is unclear: the Bush administration, home of climate-change scepticism, has a history of blocking international agreements on the subject. And a recently leaked draft of the G8 communique on climate change failed to take a clear position on the science of global warming.
Yet given the mounting evidence that global warming does exist, how can the sceptics remain so firmly convinced otherwise?
The theory of global warming has been around for decades. Once an arcane area understood by only a few specialists, it has now become part of mainstream scientific thought. The theory runs thus: carbon dioxide, along with a few other “greenhouse” gases such as methane, can affect the Earth’s climate because they absorb infrared radiation, thus trapping on Earth heat that would otherwise dissipate into space. This is known as the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse gas that causes most concern - because it makes up an ever-larger part of the atmosphere - is carbon dioxide: a colourless, odourless byproduct of burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.
In the pre-industrial mid-18th century, carbon dioxide made up 280 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. Today, it comprises 375 parts per million and rising, higher than at any time in the past 420,000 years, which is as far back as we can measure reliably. And the temperature of the Earth’s surface rose by about 0.6 deg C during the course of the 20th century.
Few scientists quibble with these basic facts. According to the mainstream view of global warming, when the Earth heats up under the influence of greenhouse gases, the effect on the climate is dramatic. It leads to droughts, heatwaves, storms and floods. Because excess carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for at least a century after it is produced, the cumulative effects of the gases that have already been emitted would continue to exert a malign influence on the climate even if we stopped burning fossil fuels immediately.
But to do that would require an unthinkable disruption to the world economy. Therefore the only reasonable solution to global warming is to try to cut our emissions of greenhouse gases gradually, while attempting to find new, low-carbon, energy sources, such as wind, solar and nuclear power. That idea underpins the UN-brokered Kyoto protocol on climate change, which requires developed nations to bring down their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012 to an average of 5 per cent below 1990 levels.
Yet sceptics continue to argue that either the world isn’t heating up or if it is, the problem is not necessarily caused by humans. Either way, it isn’t anything to worry about.
In his e-mails to me, Michael Crichton compared climate change to the Y2K bug that was supposed to cause worldwide computer crashes on January 1 2000.
He e-mailed: “(Sigh) Remember Y2K? Went on for years. One news report, one group after another weighing in on the coming perils. With what result? The ultimate human cost was not trivial: people sold houses, pulled out of the financial markets, moved to higher ground. And all for... nothing at all. Now, when nothing occurred in 2000, the explanation was that thanks to the foresight and extended effort of all the organisations behind the panic in the first place, the desperate situation was averted. And so it will be with GW [global warming].”
Some sceptics go further than Crichton. Myron Ebell is a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think- tank in Washington DC that has received funding from the oil giant ExxonMobil. Ebell, who is friendly with a lot of policy-makers in the upper echelons of the Bush administration, stands out among the dark suits and ties of Washington. He likes to describe himself as a farm boy from Oregon and wears elaborately tooled cowboy boots. He once called the UK government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King “an alarmist” who knew “nothing about climate change” and “has no expertise in climate science”.
When we meet over a drink near Capitol Hill, he says that, unlike some climate-change sceptics, he doesn’t believe that there is a European Union “conspiracy” to destroy US competitiveness and create a market for Europe’s otherwise pointless renewable energy companies by making oil more expensive. “No, it’s far too public for that. Call it a ‘plan’,” he says.
Like most of his fellow sceptics, Ebell attacks climate change on a variety of fronts. Reasonably, he argues that some of the computer models used to make predictions about climate change have contained mistakes, and some produce contradictory results. Less reasonably, he says the experts who support the arguments for climate change are “second-XI scientists”.
”Warming can be a good thing,” he says. “Why do you think most Canadians live close to the US border? Lots of places used to be much warmer - did you know Yorkshire used to export wine in Roman times? People can adapt: when they stopped making wine, Yorkshire didn’t just collapse - they made something else.”
Ebell’s generalisations can be persuasive. But pinning him down on specifics can be trickier. When the environmental writer George Monbiot offered Ebell a wager, during a BBC Today programme interview, on whether the global temperature would rise in the next 10 years, Ebell refused. “I couldn’t afford it,” he said later. “Unlike environmentalists with their big salaries and trust funds, I can’t risk my family’s money in that way.”
We could regard sceptics as responsible people playing devil’s advocate, or at worst as mere cranks, if some of them didn’t hold influential positions in Washington. In public, the Bush administration says action is needed on climate change. Although the US is the only developed nation besides Australia that refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol, the White House couches its opposition in terms of economic justice, not science. Kyoto is unfair, it is argued, because it imposes less stringent terms on developing countries.
But in private, some top administration advisers and officials freely admit to sceptical views. It is hard not to conclude that many of them arrive at their positions by considering politics first, science second. During recent visits to Washington, several Republicans have told me that limiting big cars and air conditioning is “communist” or “anti-American”. They pick holes in the research that says Kyoto-type emissions limits will be necessary, and rely on rival arguments provided by a small band of scientists who cast doubt on the work of the majority of climatologists.
One of the most prominent and distinguished of these is Professor S. Fred Singer, an affable 80-year-old atmospheric physicist. Singer’s position is interesting because he was in on the start of climate science. He was the first to predict - in the early 1970s, when few other scientists were working in the area - that the growth in the world’s population would lead to an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases (though at the time he was making calculations about methane, rather than carbon dioxide).
Talking above the cries of children splashing in an outdoor swimming pool in the courtyard of his Washington DC apartment building, Singer explains to me why he is so sceptical about global warming.
He says satellite data show that even though the Earth has recently become warmer, the atmosphere has not, and this suggests that global warming is not actually happening. Why? Because clouds are not trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, but are reflecting it into space instead. (Needless to say, the reliability of atmospheric temperature measurements is constantly argued over by climate change’s opposing camps.)
Moreover, he says that if you look at temperatures as far back as the 1940s, you see a trend line indicating the Earth has been cooling, not warming. The loss of ice in the Arctic, according to Singer, can be explained by the “memory” that ice exhibits: “The ice takes a long time to melt, and is now melting under the influence of previous warming.” As for the rise in temperature of the oceans, Singer dismisses the Scripps study and says another report has found that any warming in the oceans would be brief.
In their letter to the G8 leaders, the national science academies acknowledged the problems in reaching a consensus on global warming: “There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate.”
But they went on to note: “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures and from phenomena such as increases in average global sea levels, retreating glaciers and changes to many physical and biological systems. It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.”
The sceptics argue that there has always been climate change, so how can we tell that the current shift is not simply a natural variation? (The answer, according to climatologists, is that the degree of change we are now experiencing looks entirely different to the “signature” of any natural climate change we have evidence for.)
Sceptics also point out that the observations from some parts of the world contradict those of another. In the Antarctic, for example, some areas are growing colder even as glaciers in other parts of the region are retreating.
The sceptics also claim - sometimes justifiably - that there are inaccuracies in some of the computer models. But when these inaccuracies are corrected, or overtaken by another study, the sceptics keep talking about the old model. And if that doesn’t work, there is always a conspiracy theory to fall back on. Like Crichton, Singer claims that the world’s most respected peer-review journals have refused to publish certain studies that purport to show flaws in global-warming research.
Crucial to the sceptics’ argument is the idea that, as Singer tells me, “there is no consensus on the science”. He quotes an online survey undertaken in 2003 of more than 500 climate-change scientists. Of these, 29 per cent said they disagreed with the proposition that climate change was mostly the result of human activity. Of the rest, 14 per cent were neutral; however, 56 per cent agreed with the proposition. Two things are worth bearing in mind here: the survey was undertaken before some of the most compelling recent evidence came out, and, for reasons that remain unclear, the journal Science would not publish the results.
Each side in this debate routinely accuses the other of having perverted science in the name of politics, while themselves remaining pure. Crichton tells me: “Be clear: in truth, when it comes to climate, everybody on all sides is intensely political. And it has been thus for several years. Except me, of course. I’m just an interested observer with a summa cum laude degree and a doctorate from Harvard who happened to look into somebody else’s little private fiefdom [and] reported what he saw. And who says this is a scientific matter that should not be allowed to be political?”
Yet if there is to be effective international action on climate change, the argument - scientific and political - must be won in the US, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas. Given the credence accorded to sceptics, from the Oval Office down, this will be a struggle. There are always uncertainties to be exploited in science. Scientists, indeed, are professional sceptics, taught to question all hypotheses and received wisdom. There is no doubt, for instance, that Singer has based his utterly sincere conclusions on painstaking examination of some of the climate-change data. But the motives of some of his fellow travellers seem less pure. And the recent history of maverick scientists challenging the mainstream has not been glorious: think of the denial that the HIV virus caused Aids, and the study linking the MMR vaccine to autism.
The science in this case is probably not going to get any clearer until some form of catastrophe has occurred. Yet in order to believe that the sceptics are correct, one must disbelieve the national science academies and the foremost climatologists of the developed world. One must believe that the most respected scientific journals are joined in a conspiracy to hide evidence proving the sceptics right. And one must believe Michael Crichton’s science-fiction is actually closer to fact.
Fiona Harvey is the FT’s environment correspondent.
