Gory science or Gory politics?

• This column was first published on 8 October 2007 in Maverick, a South African business magazine. The rest of the magazine is much better, so if you’d like to subscribe, simply contact them via e-mail.

Why does Al Gore bang the climate change drum? Because he’s a scientist, certain that his theory is true? Or because he’s a politician, and scary predictions have always persuaded people to put their faith in the ability of the prophets to save them from doom?

You don’t bet on uncertainty if you’re a politician. So if climate change and its causes are uncertain, what exactly is it that Al Gore betting on?

When Paul Ehrlich warned about the coming population explosion in 1968, he said it would lead to mass starvation by the mid-1970s. “Nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he wrote. But death rates had already been in decline in both the rich and poor world, for 100 years, and have continued declining since.

Moreover, fertility rates had long been going down in the rich world, and a similar decline had already begun in the developing world too. It is now estimated that global population, far from rising uncontrollably as Ehrlich predicted, will never exceed 10 billion. He warned about a crisis that was already being addressed, naturally.

In 1998, the UN compared the Y2K problem to the impact of an earth-asteroid collision, which “demands worldwide strategic mobilisation…similar to the effort required by World War II.”

So Y2K required food rationing, confiscatory taxes, central planning and martial law? It’s unsurprising that this is what an organisation of governments would promote. When the new millennium arrived, the UN said: “The governments…can congratulate themselves for passing the Y2K challenge.”

The only problem is that the governments did nothing. Well, not much. Of the total US spend on Y2K, the US government’s contribution amounted to about five percent. The problem was already in hand when the dire warnings of a “meltdown of civilisation” (I kid you not) were rife. People aren’t stupid.

Every day, we hear the doomsday predictions that never come true. As I’m writing this, the BBC reports as news that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by the middle of the century. Of course, this cannot be disproven before 2050. A few years ago, the same BBC reported that a quarter of all mammals would go extinct by 2032. Polar bears clearly aren’t among them.

Turns out a quarter of just about everything is about to go extinct in the next 25 or 50 years, if you believe National Geographic, Scientific American, CNN and a host of other supposedly reputable news organisations.

Here’s a partial list culled from headlines in the last five years: fish, conifers, birds, bamboo species, medicinal plants, sharks, all species, 95 percent of species, sea turtles, owls, cycads, kangaroos, rhinos, niger giraffes, sea otters, lynx, koalas, salmon, zooplankton, marine mammals, deep sea species, arctic fauna, peacocks, kiwi birds, tuna, Australian butterflies, British butterflies, bees, African elephants, Indian elephants, wild horses, zebras, South African species, West African species, Madagascar’s species, Persian Gulf wildlife, Australian species, New Zealand species, the earth, hippos, leopards, tigers, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, wild magnolias, frankincense trees, palm trees, Borneo’s jungle, Brazil’s rainforest, Mexico’s jungle, New Guinea’s rainforest, Himalayan forests, Congo rainforest, insects, wading birds, parrots, wildflowers, lemurs, gibbons, lions, cheetahs, orca, whales, penguins, albatross, dolphins, porpoise, bats, rabbits.

Rabbits!? Look, fellas, if you can’t even get rabbits to breed, then why are we giving you money?

How much faith can we put in these dire predictions? We can’t disprove them, because 25 or 50 years haven’t yet passed. But we can look back, at a report entitled Global 2000, which was commissioned by Jimmy Carter, and published in 1980. In it, biologist Thomas Lovejoy of the World Wildlife Fund (now known as the World Wide Fund for Nature) predicted that 15 to 20 percent of all species would be lost by the year 2000. It didn’t happen. Not even close.

Al Gore repeated a figure of 40 000 a year in his 1993 book, Earth in the Balance. The actual observed data is in the single digits. Even the most generous extrapolations, which assume huge numbers of undiscovered species, show Al Gore overestimates the extinction rate by a factor of 20.

And we’re expected to evaluate the cost-benefit of investing resources on the basis of such alarmist twaddle?

But wait. Doesn’t the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change understand climate change? Isn’t the science settled? Isn’t there a consensus? Aren’t the few remaining skeptics like flat-earthers, beholden to the oil majors?

Let’s quote the IPCC’s own Third Assessment Report:

“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Not possible? Really? That’s not what I hear Al Gore say.

The irony is this observation makes any measures we do take just as risky as not taking them. In a complex, chaotic system, the outputs don’t vary linearly with the inputs. They’re unpredictable. So we may find that our well-intended laws and regulations result in unintended consequences that are even worse than a change of a degree or two in average climate.

No matter what the discount rate, the uncertainties are such that the cost-benefit of spending money on climate change is worse than just about any other investment of our resources.
Besides, we’re already reducing carbon in our energy profile. Not only do rich industrialised societies no longer tolerate the sort of pollution that poor countries are willing to accept for the sake of development, but for the last few hundred years, society has been moving towards a low-carbon energy profile, as it replaced wood with coal, coal with oil, and oil with natural gas.

This didn’t happen because Queen Vic signed some pie-in-the-sky agreement in Kyoto, just like population growth didn’t slow because Paul Ehrlich terrified us all.

Yet it will continue as technology improves. Does anyone really believe that we’ll run out of oil, and just sit there wondering what to do now? Simple economics is already prompting people to buy energy-efficient vehicles and light fittings, or invest in solar heating for their hot water needs.

On the day this was written, solar thermal energy producer Ausra announced that it received funding from venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company expects to produce power that is economically competitive with fossil fuel-based electricity in the next few years. Venture capital funds aimed at clean energy investments have more money than they know what to do with.

All without Al Gore.

Sea levels rose by about 20cm in the last hundred years, and we expect another foot or so in the next hundred years. (Unless you’re Al Gore, in which case you make it 20 times bigger so it fits on a protest banner.) Do you know any old people who tell scary tales of how the rise in sea levels was the biggest crisis of the 20th century?

My guess is that Al Gore is betting his political future on a problem he knows will solve itself, and can claim credit for when it doesn’t materialise. Mean time, he has a perfect excuse for high taxes for governments and new powers for politicians. He wouldn’t be the first to get away with it.