Climate change agnosticism, John Howard and some inconvenient truths

John Howard, who argued for an emissions trading scheme if the Coalition won the 2007 election, says he is 'agnostic' about climate change. That being so one must wonder why he intended to put a price on carbon all those years ago, when Australia appeared to be falling behind the rest of the western world in seeking to reduce polluting emissions. It was, he implied in London last week in a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, only political, a reaction to the fashion of the time. Clearly he didn't really believe in it. But in the speech he said some more worrying things as well.

Despite its name the Foundation (like its guest) is sceptical about climate change. Howard made several interesting comments, and according to the Sydney Morning Herald (6 November) he claimed before his speech that he has read only one book about climate change. That was written not by a scientist but by a commentator who is a sceptic.

In the speech itself he referred to many people who think climate change is potentially disastrous as having a "sanctimonious tone" in their utterances, said that the advice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included "nakedly political agendas", suggested that politicians are faced with attempts to "intimidate" them by insisting they accept the science of climate change, and cautioned that they should not be "browbeaten" into surrendering their job of developing economic policy. There are "plenty of people around", he was quoted as saying, "who want access to public money in the name of saving the planet."

That is quite a list of concerns. Some of what Howard said was contemptuous of science and scientists. Saving the planet, if could credibly be in trouble, is no bad objective. But we can certainly tell where Howard sits on the issue of potential future climate change. He is much more sceptical than agnostic.

Howard also noted that there was a big bush fire in Victoria 163 years ago, before there was any concern about global warming: this comment was in response to claims that climate change is linked to bush fire occurrence. And he told his audience that he feels "instinctively" that claims about the potential future impacts of warming are exaggerated.

There is much here that needs response. Firstly, nobody denies that there have been big bush fires in Australia in the distant past. What Howard says on this is simply a furphy. No link between individual bush fire events and climate change can be made, and scientists routinely caution that it is unwise to consider particular fires to have been the 'result' of warming. But it is entirely logical to suggest that increasing temperatures encourage vegetation to dry out which in turn could make it more likely, once ignition has occurred, for fire to spread more aggressively. Higher temperatures might well be leading to fires that are both more severe and more frequent.

So far, the link has not been made from the bush fire record in Australia. But these are early days, and it is entirely possible that in future the links between climate change and bush fire characteristics will become clearer.

Here it must be said that there is no doubt that global average temperatures have risen, by 0.8 degrees Celsius, since the 1880s. As it happens this represents a very rapid rate of increase over a small number of decades by comparison with earlier known temperature rises established by scientists. These are attested to by a variety of kinds of indirect evidence well back in time.

Moreover the rise has occurred despite 'pauses' or muted increases of the kind that occurred for 30 years from the mid-1940s and from the second half of the 1990s. The first of these pauses was followed by very rapid increases in temperatures. If the established long-term trend is continued into the future ─ and this is the key to the question of whether global warming will be seriously problematic ─ the link between warming and bush fire frequency and intensity is likely to become clearer.

One problem here is that we may not know for decades whether temperature increases have been sufficient to have dangerous consequences. If they have, dealing with the problem will be more difficult than it currently is, especially if the rises become self-sustaining and 'runaway' temperature increases occur as some scientists fear.

For people of Howard's generation this scenario will not have to be faced, but if it occurs it may have severe impacts during the lifetimes of some people who are now with us. They should be given some consideration here, as should the planet.

Given that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have increased rapidly in a proportional sense since the Industrial Revolution, and with good theoretical reasons to believe that there will be a lag between this build-up and a rise in temperature, it is probable that we have already created the conditions for further temperature increases over coming decades. The momentum may already exist for a continuation of what we have seen to date.

The fact that temperature rises appear trivial on the span of a human lifetime (though not over a couple of hundred years or over geological time) is itself a problem. It encourages us to ignore the issue and to focus only on the immediate future. The short term inevitably dominates our discourse, our policy and our planning, rather than the possibility of serious environmental problems occurring decades hence. And as individuals we are more likely to worry about our job security or our children's performances at school right now than about something that appears distant from our day-to-day lives and impossible for us individually to influence.

All this makes the economy and education policy seem more important than the future of the world. And politicians have difficulty in dealing with concerns that are not immediate or that they cannot address readily.

We already know that some low-lying parts of the world are in trouble from another irrefutable trend - the rise in sea levels, averaging 0.2 metres since the late 19th century - which is presumably related to the observed melting of ice sheets and glaciers resulting from rising temperatures. These things too are incontrovertible, though some glaciers have actually grown larger. The fact that sea levels are not rising everywhere or at the same rate does not deny the overall tendency any more than a pause in the trend towards higher temperatures denies the longer-term reality experienced so far.

Other elements of Howard's thinking need to be questioned as well. He said that his "instinct" tells him that predictions of climate catastrophe are exaggerated. That is a truly stunning statement. If we are to rebut science, we should be using the tools of science. Evidence-free alternatives based on nothing more than gut feel are of no value. If a doctor tells us we have cancer, do we dismiss his diagnosis, without evidence, because we 'believe' him to be wrong? That would be a triumph of hope over sense.

Beliefs, faiths and preferences are legitimate in many areas of life: we may 'believe in' a god, have a particular philosophical orientation or prefer rugby union to rugby league. But 'beliefs' are not helpful in diagnosing environmental trends or forecasting the future. Howard is "situating the appreciation": he believes without rational justification that no catastrophe is on the cards. So the trends already seen must not be thought of as having momentum in case they portend that very catastrophe. This is arguing backwards from a preference and it must be exposed.

His mode of thinking is common amongst climate change sceptics and deniers. It is seen, for example, in the insistence of some that the 'pause' in temperature rises over the last few years (for which there are several potential explanations, including a decline in solar output) means that warming is no longer occurring. This is akin to Howard's point that, because there have been big bush fires in our past, as there are now, climate change has no bearing on trends in fire behaviour past, present or future. All that matters is variability.

Howard also argues that politicians should not be intimidated or browbeaten. Quite so. But they should listen to evidence, query the methods used in providing it and weigh it up - without prejudice, preconception or bias. Politicians are practised in dealing with lobbying. Howard's government provided subsidies to car manufacturers who periodically threaten to abandon Australia if their efforts are not subsidised. Is this 'intimidation'? Of course it is! It is also part of the industry's normal modus operandi, and dealing with such things is integral to the operation of government.

A sensible society considers where it might be going. It plans for its future, both the short term and the long, by soberly evaluating its strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities it might exploit and the threats it faces. It does not work from the basis of weak logic, the selective plucking of evidence or the unreasoning denial and denigration of expert opinion.

John Howard does not perceive the bigger picture. He is not serving us well here.