Climate Change Doubts in Britain

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25climate.html

LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

I wager that it has to do with the misinformation being spread by the denialists who can easily convince a public that doesn't understand the science.

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.

“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”

Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.

And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.

Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”

The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.

Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.)

Asked about his views on global warming on a recent evening, Brian George, a 30-year-old builder from southeast London, mused, “It was extremely cold in January, wasn’t it?”

A response like that demonstrates the misconceptions and ignorance some people have towards what climate change is.

In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend.

“I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid.

Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. An editorial in the prestigious journal Nature said climate deniers were using “every means at their disposal to undermine science and scientists” and urged scientists to counterattack. Scientists in France, the Netherlands and the United States have signed open letters affirming their trust in climate change evidence, including one published on May 7 in the journal Science.

In March, Simon L. Lewis, an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter.

“I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites.

It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.

In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.

Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added.

The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.

Defending the Science

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/49672-scientists-defend-climate-change-research-in-open-letter

Scientists are fighting back against the recent wave of climate scepticism:

"More than 250 US scientists, including 11 Nobel laureates, have published an open letter defending climate change research.

The letter, which appears in Science, follows increasing hostility to climate change science in the wake of the release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia and errors made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scientists, all members of the US National Academy of Sciences, accuse their opponents of "McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."

Much of the controversy stems from a lack of scientific understanding on the part of the general public, they say.

"There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything," says the letter.

"When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action."

Well-established theories which have not been successfully challenged can be spoken of as facts, they say - and climate change falls into this category. Heat-trapping gases are indeed warming the planet, and most of this increase is due to human activity."

A Greener Capitalism

http://trueslant.com/jeffmcmahon/2010/04/29/capitalism-climate-change/

Does capitalism need to adapt to the demands of the Earth? Jeff McMahon thinks so:

“Flocks of environmentalists and economists will alight in Vancouver this evening for a weekend of striving toward a more sensible capitalism.

The De-Growth conference hopes to achieve a “viable economic, social and ecological system” that’s kinder to both workers and to the earth, but these are no Molotov-hurling Bolsheviks. They’re just looking for sustainable capitalism.

That means shrinking the economies of the developed world. Which will be hard to do. In a political campaign, that’s not a platform to stand on, it’s a plank to walk.
And I wonder whether we have the power to engineer the economy quite that radically. It may only have the power to engineer us.

A favorite bloody example is that messiness in 18th Century Europe, when aristocrats were losing their heads. It might have seemed as if people were ecstatic with notions of liberté, egalité, fraternité, but those also just happened to be values the economy needed to expel the last vestiges of feudalism and get the capitalist orgy underway.

You can’t have the fishmonger’s son growing up believing he’s destined to become a fishmonger, not when there are jobs opening in new factories, in whole new industries. Whose destiny would it be to operate the steam engine? The nuclear power plant? The silicon chipmaker?

And so democracy became all the rage, along with its values–the liberty to work in a factory instead of a fishmarket, the equality to be replaced by another worker the day you depart, the fraternity to take your lumps until 5 and show up again at 8.
The economic system fueled the ideas, according to this venerable argument, not the other way around.

You see what I’m getting at, don’t you–just as feudalism proved too inflexible for industrialization, capitalism appears too inflexible for sustainability. And sustainability increasingly appears necessary for survival. Democracy and capitalism get along famously well, as America has demonstrated, and nothing can stop them.
Except the planet.

It’s the developed democracies of the New World, those built from scratch on capitalism, that are having the most difficulty adapting to climate change.
You know what’s been happening in the United States: we’re going nowhere. Canada has said it’ll do whatever the U.S. does, perhaps confident that the U.S. will never do anything. Yesterday, Australia reneged on its promise to reduce emissions a measly 5 percent, putting off any action until at least 2012.

Totalitarian China and socialist Europe have been making more significant strides, but China in particular is careful not to make any sudden moves that might disrupt its young romance with capitalism.

The United States has only seriously considered a capitalist solution to climate change–a carbon market–and even that monied enterprise appears impossible without huge payoffs to coal, oil, agriculture–all the dirty practices that got us into this mess.

But we can best see America’s stalemate by examining our capitalists:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute produced a documentary on climate change last year, “The Truth About Global Warming,” which argued that there’s no need to worry about climate change because people adapt to higher temperatures.

Their evidence? Temperatures have risen in U.S. cities in the last 35 years, but heat-related deaths have declined. The video quotes Patrick J. Michaels of the capitalist CATO Institute saying, “The more frequent heat waves are, the fewer people die. That’s because they adapt.”

They sure do. They adapt by turning on their air conditioners. Heat-related deaths have declined in U.S. cities since the early 1970s largely because more people have air conditioners, and secondarily because cities do a better job of rescuing people who don’t.

How do we know that? From a study conducted in 2003 at the University of Virginia by none other than Patrick J. Michaels of the CATO Institute.

Offered a dark cloud, capitalists can’t help but mine the silver from the lining.
As it gets warmer, people will buy more air conditioners! As they turn on more air conditioners, they will use more power, consume more fossil fuels, emit more greenhouse gases. As they emit more greenhouse gases, it will get warmer. As it gets warmer, people will buy more air conditioners!

It’s a win, win, win for industry…. Until the ice caps melt, the sea levels rise, the rivers dry up, farms and cities wither. But even those dark clouds have silver linings. Markets will flourish for imported water, fresh food, higher ground, as the demand for each increases.

This is just how capitalism works. It capitalizes. But we may be verging upon the moment of history when we see that it’s a finite system: not a loop but a long, dusty road to a dead end. You can make a lot of money extracting carbon from the ground and putting it into the air… until atmospheric carbon begins to threaten our survival.
The people who are trying to solve this problem are not just trying to save polar bears, they’re trying to save human beings, and by embracing carbon markets they’re trying to save capitalism. (For this they’re called socialists.) From the UN to the White House to Vancouver, people are trying to shift the forces of capitalism away from finite fossil fuels, before its too late, and unleash them on renewable energy.
I think they might fail. But I also think it’s worth a try. It’s might be our only shot.

I have more faith that the sold-out politicians in Congress can do it than the idealistic activists and academic economists presently gathering in Vancouver, precisely because those politicians are invested in capitalism. If anyone can make progress profitable, it’s the big whigs who lunch with the fat cats.

But it might be the case that no one can do it, that the economic system steers us and we only think we steer it. If so, neither can we get rid of it.

The protestors at the Copenhagen Climate Talks found themselves in an awkward position: they wanted to solve climate change, but they were bodily assaulting the only global effort to accomplish that. Their message was incoherent, their behavior reinforced the incoherence, but one prevalent theme I could discern was anti-capitalist.

In the beginning, there was Naomi Klein: “Finally we’re seeing the movement and it’s focused on these false solutions, these market based solutions–the insanity, after what we’ve just witnessed, of handing over the most pressing, challenging, horrifying crisis to the very same people that created that crisis, that gambled away people’s jobs and homes and pensions.”

At the rally, with 40,000 demonstrators gathered in the city center, there was Vandama Shiva: “The time is past for big capital to make more money. The earth must make the change. The earth must make the rules.”

Klein was in the clouds, I thought at the time, but Shiva was on to something. We might have a moment to use capitalism, the very engine of our social organization, to forestall more undesirable consequences. But if capitalism fails to adapt–and it’s failing so far–change will come whether we like it or not via the earth.

When change comes, it will bring corresponding political ideas, and we’ll embrace the emerging ideology. We’ll believe we thought of it ourselves. We’ll do its dirty work by lopping the heads off of air conditioner salesmen (in all their various forms).
But we will no more control the future in that moment than Robespierre’s Reign of Terror controlled industrialization. We’ll be the steered, not the steering.

In Vancouver this weekend, ecological economist Dave Batker will ask the question, “What’s the economy for, anyway?” And like many smart people who pose questions, he’ll have an answer:

“Using Gifford Pinchot’s idea that the economy’s purpose is ‘the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run,’ Batker compares the performance of the U.S. economy with that of other industrial countries in terms of providing a high quality of life, fairness and ecological sustainability, concluding that when you do the numbers, we come out near the bottom in nearly every category.”

Tell us something we don’t know. Like, how do we turn this supertanker around?
Treehuggers and eggheads aren’t going to shrink the world economy from the Vancouver Library. Likewise, no raggle taggle mass of protesters is going to overthrow capitalism by rallying in Copenhagen, especially when they identify themselves largely through commodity preferences–hemp clothes, folk music, natural toothpaste. No army will do it either, if the massive red armies of the Soviet Union and China failed.

But the earth can do it. The earth can do it by creating conditions warm enough to disrupt markets. And look: she’s on the march.”

The key is moving towards a green capitalism that values the use of renewable resources and punishes those who deplete the Earth’s resources for gain.

Weather vs. Climate

http://www.mauiweekly.com/page/content.detail/id/501390/Global-Warming-Baloney.html?nav=9

Debra Lordan addresses the weather vs. climate confusion that some people have:

““It’s April and it’s freezing Upcountry today. So what’s with this global warming baloney?”

I have overheard much confusion about local weather and global climate change.
According to the experts at NASA, the difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather consists of the short-term minute- to month-long changes in the atmosphere. Climate is how the atmosphere behaves over relatively long periods of time—the average weather over time and space. Some scientists define climate as the average pattern of weather in a region over 30 years.

For example, after looking at rain gauge data, you can tell if an area was drier than average during the summer. If it continues to be drier than normal over the course of many summers, then it would likely indicate a change in the climate.

To add to the confusion, there are shorter-term climate variations related to El Niño, La Niña, volcanic eruptions and other changes in Earth’s complicated systems.
An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect—like a warm summer—and weather is what you can get—like a hot, muggy day with thunderstorms.
Research and the memories of old folks seem to indicate that the climate is changing.
When you kids hear stories from your grandparents about trudging to school through waist-deep snow, they may not just be berating you for needing to be driven everywhere. You may have never experienced the extreme conditions your grandparents suffered, because changes in recent winter snows indicate that the climate has changed since those ancient folks were your age.

OK, so it never snows here in Kīhei, but if summers seem hotter and drier lately, then the recent climate may have changed.

Although global warming refers to an average planetary temperature increase of a degree or so, that doesn’t mean the thermometer in our back yard is going to read a degree higher. That’s why “climate change” rather than “global warming” may be an easier concept for us on a daily basis.

I know it’s a challenge. We don’t like change, because then we have to change. And we especially don’t like climate change, because our economy, our homes and our wardrobes are already set up for the status quo.

So, just as one day of cold does not an ice age make, neither does it relegate the term “global warming” to the status of processed luncheon meat.
Misunderstandings don’t change a thing. Only action will.”

German Climate Sceptics

http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Germans-sceptical-of-climate-20100427

Climate chance scepticism is on the rise in Germany:

Climate change is showing no signs of slowing despite a severe winter in Germany that helped reduce public concerns about the threat of global warming, Germany's leading meteorologist said on Tuesday.

Wolfgang Kusch, president of the German Meteorological Service (DWD), said it was a mistake to interpret the harsh winter of 2009/10 as a sign climate change is abating. A German opinion poll recently found fears of climate change falling sharply.

"Despite fluctuations, temperatures are still moving in one direction - higher," he said. "Climate researchers have to look at least 30-year periods when talking about trends... At the same time the last decade was the warmest in Germany in 130 years."

Scepticism about climate change has been growing in Germany, one of the world's four largest industrial countries, after an unusually long and cold winter in northern Europe.

An opinion poll by the Infratest institute in Der Spiegel magazine found 42% of Germans are concerned about climate change, down from 62% in 2006. A third do not think the climate change research is reliable and a quarter believe Germany will actually profit from climate change.

Profiteers

Scientists say global warming could upset weather patterns, bringing flooding to low-lying areas throughout the world and disrupting agriculture in many regions, not least in the poorer, developing world.

DWD officials said on Tuesday rising temperatures in Germany could indeed turn out to be a boon for local farmers. They said the average annual temperature in Germany has risen by 1.1C over the past 130 years.

By the end of the century, the DWD expects temperatures in Germany to increase by 2C to 4C. The findings have particular ramifications for farmers, said Paul Becker, a DWD board member in charge of the climate and environment unit.

"The northern European agriculture sector will be one of the profiteers of climate change," Becker said. "The temperature rise will expand their growing possibilities considerably."

Becker said rising temperature will lead German farmers to plant various types of corn that mature at warmer temperatures. As winters grow milder, farmers could also plant various types of cereals. That will lead to a higher income for farmers.

"The decisive factor will be whether there will be enough water available," Becker said.”

There is an unfortunate confusion between weather and long-term climate.