‘To know and not to act, is not to know.’ *
‘To know and not to act, is not to know.’ *
Today we are releasing our report: A New Agenda on Climate Change: Facing up to Stealth Denial and Winding down on Fossil Fuels.
The piece was covered in The Times earlier today and I have a piece distilling the report in the Guardian. We also experimented with conveying the report's message through Buzzfeed, which will appear soon, and was a lot of fun to create.
The human response to climate change is unfolding as a political tragedy because scientific knowledge and economic power are pointing in different directions.
The website preamble is copied below, but the main thing I want to convey now is that researching and writing this report really opened my eyes. At the start of the process I thought of climate change as a problem of emissions, and that the purpose of behaviour change was about using behavioural insights to reducing personal carbon footprints. However, the more I looked into it, the more I felt the issue is unavoidably political, and that 'behaviour change', to be worth its salt, had to connect with the core issue of gradually substituting our energy supply. We can still play nicely, but if you care about climate change, you have to talk about the price of fossil fuels, and think hard about what it would take to keep them in the ground.
Facing Up to Stealth Denial and Winding Down on Fossil Fuels
The human response to climate change is unfolding as a political tragedy because scientific knowledge and economic power are pointing in different directions. The knowledge of the reality, causes and implications of anthropogenic climate change creates a moral imperative to act, but this imperative is diluted at every level by collective action problems that appear to be beyond our existing ability to resolve. This challenge is compounded by collectively mischaracterising the climate problem as an exclusively environmental issue, rather than a broader systemic threat to the global financial system, public health and national security.
This report makes a case for how Britain can take a leading role in addressing the global climate problem, based on a new agenda that faces up to pervasive ‘stealth denial’ and the need to focus on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Our data indicates that about two thirds of the population intellectually accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change, but ‘deny’ some or all of the commensurate feelings, responsibility and agency that are necessary to deal with it. It is argued that this stealth denial may be what perpetuates the doublethink of trying to minimise carbon emissions while maximising fossil fuel production, and also what makes us expect far too much of energy efficiency gains in the face of a range of rebound effects that lead energy to be used elsewhere.
This report argues that we should focus less on those who question the scientific consensus as if they were the principle barrier to meaningful action. Those who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change are not at all helpful, but at least they are consistent. One corollary of facing up to stealth denial is that we should turn more of our attention instead to mobilising those who, like the author of this report, fully accept the moral imperative to act, but continue to live as though it were not there.
*- Wang Yang-ming (Neo-Confucian philosopher 1472–1529)
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The science of climate change is far from "settled". Anyone with some background in statistics, physics and computer modelling can read the original papers with no difficulty. (I have a research degree in engineering and a career involving mathematical modelling, so no problem for me.) Anybody who cares to look can see the assumptions that are made by climate scientists, which so far have not been verified. Just one such assumption, as yet unverified, is that atmospheric water vapour strongly amplifies the effect of other greenhouse gases.
All predictions of global warming are based on the output of computer models. The Met Office has confirmed this: "Computer models are the only reliable way to predict changes in climate. Their reliability is tested by seeing if they are able to reproduce the past climate, which gives scientists confidence that they can also predict the future.".
The Met Office's last sentence involves the fallacy known as "testing on the training data", since records of past climate were used to "parameterise" the models*. Hindsight does not verify that a model is a correct representation of the physical reality.
The only real test of a model is whether it can predict future observations. By this measure, the General Climate Models referred to by the IPCC have failed. Fifteen years ago, steady and rapid warming of global temperature was confidently predicted. This has failed to materialise; global temperature has remained essentially constant for that time.
In any other branch of science, such a failure would have resulted in reapraisal of all results. Note that the failure of General Climate Models to predict the lack of global warming over the past fifteen or so years is not open to dispute - the predictions are on record and the temperature records are readily accessible.
Anyone who disputes this central failure of climate science is the one in denial. People such as me who ask for concrete evidence do not merit such a title and we find it offensive.
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*"Parameterise" means replacing aspects of the physical system that are not well understood to model precisely by simple mathematical formulas whose coefficients are chosen to reproduce previous observations.
"the more I looked into it, the more I felt the issue is unavoidably political, and that ‘behaviour change’, to be worth its salt, had to connect with the core issue of gradually substituting our energy supply."
Agreed, but I think the core issue goes deeper than the energy supply. Catastrophic climate breakdown is being driven by the necessity for perpetual economic growth. This structural flaw within the global economic system must also be talked about in our conversations about climate breakdown.
These conversations need to consider how we move beyond an industrial civilisation built on competition, domination, exploitation and short-termism towards an ecological civilisation built on co-operation, partnership, care and concern for future generations.
Are we ready for such mature conversations? I don't think enough of us are, and from where I stand the prognosis does not look good.
"... we should turn more of our attention instead to mobilising those who, like the author of this report, fully accept the moral imperative to act..."
I agree. And while you're in the process of finding and mobilizing all three of them, the deniers will be turning everyone else into climate skeptics and kicking your socialist butt.
Good luck and keep up the great work. Lol!
cheers