FOUR SIDES TO EVERY STORY
by Stewart Brand
San Francisco -- CLIMATE talks have been going on in Copenhagen for a week
now, and it appears to be a two-sided debate between alarmists and skeptics.
But there are actually four different views of global warming. A taxonomy of
the four:
DENIALISTS - They are loud, sure and political. Their view is that
climatologists and their fellow travelers are engaged in a vast conspiracy
to panic the public into following an agenda that is political and
pernicious. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and the columnist George Will
wave the banner for the hoax-callers.
“The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply
untrue and not based on sound science,” Mr. Inhofe declared in a 2003 speech
to the Senate about the Kyoto accord that remains emblematic of his
position. “CO2 does not cause catastrophic disasters — actually it would be
beneficial to our environment and our economy .... The motives for Kyoto are
economic, not environmental — that is, proponents favor handicapping the
American economy through carbon taxes and more regulations.”
SKEPTICS - This group is most interested in the limitations of climate science
so far: they like to examine in detail the contradictions and shortcomings
in climate data and models, and they are wary about any “consensus” in
science. To the skeptics’ discomfort, their arguments are frequently quoted
by the denialists.
In this mode, Roger Pielke, a climate scientist at the University of
Colorado, argues that the scenarios presented by the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are overstated and
underpredictive. Another prominent skeptic is the physicist Freeman Dyson,
who wrote in 2007: “I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model
experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted
by the computer models .... I have studied the climate models and I know
what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they
do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the
oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the
chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.”
WARNERS - These are the climatologists who see the trends in climate headed
toward planetary disaster, and they blame human production of greenhouse
gases as the primary culprit. Leaders in this category are the scientists
James Hansen, Stephen Schneider and James Lovelock. (This is the group that
most persuades me and whose views I promote.)
“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which
civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted,” Mr. Hansen
wrote as the lead author of an influential 2008 paper, then the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have to be reduced
from 395 parts per million to “at most 350 p.p.m.”
CALAMATISTS - There are many environmentalists who believe that industrial
civilization has committed crimes against nature, and retribution is coming.
They quote the warners in apocalyptic terms, and they view denialists as
deeply evil. The technology critic Jeremy Rifkin speaks in this manner, and
the writer-turned-activist Bill McKibben is a (fairly gentle) leader in this
category.
In his 2006 introduction for The End of Nature, his famed 1989 book, Mr.
McKibben wrote of climate change in religious terms: “We are no longer able
to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces — now we
are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become
not acts of God but acts of man. That was what I meant by the ‘end of
nature.’”
The calamatists and denialists are primarily political figures, with firm
ideological loyalties, whereas the warners and skeptics are primarily
scientists, guided by ever-changing evidence. That distinction between
ideology and science not only helps clarify the strengths and weaknesses of
the four stances, it can also be used to predict how they might respond to
future climate developments.
If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet
undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is that
the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical this
time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and the
calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim.
If climate change keeps getting worse then I would expect denialists to
grasp at stranger straws, many skeptics to become warners, the warners to
start pushing geoengineering schemes like sulfur dust in the stratosphere,
and the calamatists to push liberal political agendas — just as the
denialists said they would.