Academics Fall Out Over Climate Change
Geraint Talfan Davies reports on another blast at climatologists delivered in Cardiff last night by economist Michael Beenstock
The current row over the alleged weaknesses in the some of the arguments advanced by the International Panel on Climate Change had an echo in Cardiff last night when Professor Michael Beenstock mounted a wholesale attack on climatologists while delivering the annual lecture of Cardiff University’s Julian Hodge Institute of Applied Macro-economics.
There is nothing like a row between different disciplines in the academic world, and there was certainly an edge to Beenstock’s lecture, entitled Global Warming: the Greenhouse Gas Illusion.
According to Beenstock climatologists are naïve data analysts and more volatile than the climate. “They don’t understand statistics,” he said. Global warming was “a fluke”. The panic about global warming was the result of a “doomwatch psychology” initiated by the Club of Rome 40 years ago. IPCC predictions are “unfounded” he declared, adding that there was “no need for carbon abatement”. The Stern report was “much ado about nothing”. It was “fortunate that Copenhagen had failed”. European carbon policy was a “white elephant”.
His argument was that data from the 20th Century does not support the greenhouse theory, but that when carbon emissions accelerate, global temperature increases temporarily, but not permanently. “Global warmers have made the simple error of confusing a temporary effect with a permanent one”.
He was asked why no-one else had spotted this fundamental statistical error. In response he referred to the “tendentious” nature of climatology, and claimed that he was “99.8 per cent” sure of his conclusions – always a dangerous contention. He said he had been attacked for his views “as a simple economist who had strayed out of his area”.
This was an altogether a more no-holds-barred, and political, performance, than Colin Robinson of Surrey University delivered at the same event in 2008, although even he spoke of the climate change lobby as a religious movement that regarded sceptics as heretics. Robinson even quoted the same 1975 Newsweek article that Beenstock cited, worrying about prevalent fears of a new ice age. Both espouse a benign view of the capacity of markets to deal with issues.
The Hodge lectures have often provided a valuable contrast to economic orthodoxy, especially valuable in social democratic Wales. But do I detect a trend in these lectures, and perhaps an orthodoxy of view within the Institute of Applied Macro-economics? Discuss.
· Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.
posted by Institute of Welsh Affairs at
10:13
1 Comments:
I'm not sure I'd want to leave the future of the biosphere in the hands of an economist. The great difficulty with climate science is the tendency to reduce a hugely complex area into smaller, simple arguments that do not consider the full scope of the available science. Not a single scientist disputes the validity of the data feeding the Keeling curve; the graph indicating the increase in Carbon Dioxide within the atmosphere over the last 50+ years. As to the totality of its cause and effects; that's rather less clear cut due to the immense complexity of climate science. However to enjoy the almost complete interdisciplinary consensus of earth scientists, physicists, biologists and climate scientists (not to mention poor communities in harsh environments, farmers, horticulturalists and other anecdotal sources), marks global climate change out as a rather unique phenomenon. All to often, it is the apocalyptic scenarios or dodgy data that grab the headlines - the unreliable information at the fringes of the huge volumes of available robust science. Where scientists fall down I feel, is too often being drawn into predicting outcomes and not being media savvy. They are simply not equipped to deal with the politicisation of the science.
Fiscal responses to climate change almost inevitably revolve around efforts to internalise negative external environmental costs. In other words; business picks up the tab for the consequences of business activity. Little wonder then, that a former treasury official and economist jumps on a sceptic bandwagon, fuelled by the inevitably of occasional scientific error. Science builds on mistakes and learns from them, an integral part of the scientific process in what has become the most scrutinised area of all scientific endeavour. There is little to suggest that Professor Beenstock is offering anything other than the 'business as usual' approach favoured by the traditional capitalist viewpoint and big business concerns.
Post a Comment
<< Home