Enter the Economists Part III

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Enter the Economists: Part I—Part II—Part III
Summary and Discussion at Bishop Hill
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An Amateur Appraisal

So far we have avoided an appraisal of the critique of Chapter 6 that was offered at the time by the Global Commons Institute and other outsiders. We have also avoided an appraisal of the treatment of this critique by the expert authors in the IPCC process. While something should be said of the latter, it is difficult to avoid in such a discussion an evaluation of the economic methodology in question. When faced with the ravings of a ‘crank‘, with (as one interviewee advised) ‘little understanding about economic systems,’ there is only so much polite listening that can be expected of the expert economists called in to do the Assessment. All the more so when political motivation is apparent. Can we dismiss the GCI critique as a silly campaign of misinformation and abuse? Or does it contain something solid that hits hard at the science behind the Assessment? Answers to these questions require economics expertise to which this blog can only aspire. What to do? With a view to reduce misinformed criticism (and notwithstanding many other concerns) this final post on the Price of Life Controversy restricts discussion of economic methodology to the key concerns raised in the controversy at the time, including many noted in the Assessment Report itself. And indeed, if this appraisal is cut down by an expert reader in the comments below, then this posting has not been in vain.

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Protagonists

David Pearce: Co-ordinating lead author of IPCC Working Group III Chapter 6, which assesses estimates of expected climate change damages. His findings support his view that moderate mitigation measures are required. He rejects changes to the Summary for Policy Makers made under pressure from government delegations. And he is especially angered when, in response to concerns about the reliability of the data, the Chapter’s percentage figures for damages at doubling of CO₂ (1.5 to 2%) are replaced with the vaguer ‘a few percent.’
Aubrey Meyer: Founding director of the Global Commons Institute (GCI) and instigator of the Price of Life Controversy. His criticism of the economic methodology and the uncertainty in the data behind the conclusions of Chapter 6 are taken up by poor country delegations at the Working Group Plenary and the climate treaty talks. He believes that damages will be much greater than given in Chapter 6, and his critique supports the GCI campaign for the wealthy developed countries (who are mostly doing the damage) to act immediately to stop the warming.

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Jim Bruce, the co-chair of Working Group III steered the assessment process to its eventual conclusion in Rome by successfully resisting pressure from government delegations to modify the underlying Report while yet achieving inter-governmental agreement on a Summary that did not overly contradict it.

The first thing to say about this controversy is that the integrity of the IPCC process was saved. Chapter 6 was not changed after its final drafting by the expert authors.

As for the Policymaker’s Summary (and the ‘Synthesis’), it does indeed present a critical perspective on the methodology and conclusions of the Chapter. Due to the intervention of the government delegates, the conclusions of the Chapter are couched within strong warnings. The section opens with:

The literature on the subject of this section is controversial and mainly based on research done on developed countries, often extrapolated to developing countries…

This is true and in accord with the Chapter, as are the proceeding warnings about the unreliability of the data. The emphasis these warnings are given only reflect the intergovernmental reception of the Chapter—which is entirely legitimate.

After this opening, the summary of Chapter 6 continues: ‘There is no consensus about how to value statistical lives or how to aggregate statistical lives across countries.’ This is partially misleading. Valuation tables do vary and one cited report (see: this summary) does value all lives at OECD levels. But as for the aggregation of these values across countries through conversion to US dollars, this is only disputed outside the reviewed literature.

Other changes reach beyond the Chapter content and into the plenary debate so as to introduce curious and distracting artifacts like:

…the value of life had meaning beyond monetary considerations

and

…the Rio declaration and Agenda 21 call for human beings to remain at the centre of sustainable development.
(p10)

Perhaps it does and perhaps they do. But it is unclear how these statements even add or change anything. If they are meant to contradict the damages findings then they fail.

Indeed, the Summary does present all the Chapter’s key findings. And, while sometimes, and sometime curiously, it does reach beyond these findings, in doing so it does not directly contradict them. Thus, overall, considering the extraordinary level of disagreement between the authors and a whole bloc of delegations, this is a remarkably successful outcome for the science-to-policy process that is the IPCC—a credit to those, including Jim Bruce, who managed to hold it all together.

The next thing to say is that the authors had good reason for their differential monetary valuation of life. Like it or not, it is in terms of a global currency that government and inter-governmental bodies need to assess damages in order to determine how best to invest their limited resources. The valuation is for assessing the damages of climate change. It does not itself prescribe policy for responding to it. It is descriptive and not prescriptive. But anyway, even if wrongly interpreted prescriptive, it is still not easy to come to Meyer’s dark interpretation—a rationale for the genocide of impoverished nations. Let me explain.

At least with the IPCC, if not before, it was never going to be an all-or-nothing equation about whether we were going to stop global warming immediately in its tracks. Early intervention with ‘no regrets’ and ‘easy wins’ emissions reductions are more precisely identified due to this economic analysis. Moreover, with the twin finding of so many more poor lives under threat and their salvation so cheap, the economics of the Chapter suggests that spending money to save the poor is much more cost-effective than trying to saving the few among the rich. In all, it is hard not to be persuaded by a view common to those on the IPCC side in support of the authors. This is that the Global Commons Institute grabbed the opportunity to expose these ‘sensitive’ calculations, to interpret then crudely, and so to scandalise both the authors and their methodology in order to drum up opposition to the Chapter’s moderate conclusions.

While these two points need to be made in support of the process and the authors, they should not be used to veil some deeper problems with the Chapter, for they lie as though a thin cementing over a pile of sticks and straw. Probe a little deeper and the Chapter’s surface of scientific plausibility collapses into a jumble of chaotically aggregated quantitative data.

Enter the Economists Part II

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Enter the Economists: Part I—Part II—Part III
Summary and Discussion at Bishop Hill
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Continuing our look at the Price of Life Controversy, we find how the global sustainability movement influences the IPCC and especially through the re-constituted Working Group III.

But first, here is a brief chronology to guide the reader:
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1987 Our Common Future published by the United Nations
1988 The Changing Atmosphere Conference in Toronto (also: Hansen’s Congressional Testimony; Margaret Thatcher gets involved; the IPCC formed)
1990 The IPCC First Assessment Report published
1992 Rio Earth Summit in June introduces the UN FCCC which defers to the IPCC for its scientific assessment. At its 8th meeting (11-13 Nov) the IPCC re-directs its Working Group III to the ‘Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change’ for the 2nd Assessment.
1993 The inaugural plenary of the re-constituted WG III (4-7 May) proposes a work plan orientated to the sustainable development goals of the Earth Summit. This is approved by the 9th IPCC meeting (29-30 June) and the selection of lead authors begin.
1994 Four WG III workshops (Jan-July) in Japan, Brazil, Italy and Kenya involving a broader community of experts. A first draft of the Report is circulated for expert review. A revised draft is prepared and circulated for governmental and NGO review and then a final draft is produced before the year is out.
1995 The Price of Life Controversy: with the final draft of the chapters in hand, a lead author’ meeting (Paris 22-24 Mar) prepares a draft of the Policymaker’s Summary for the intergovernmental Plenary and its line-by-line approval process. At the same time, and days before delegates depart for the first Conference of Parties to the FCCC (April, Berlin), India sends a letter [Kamal Nath, 24mar95] to other poor country delegates raising concerns about the damage assessment in Chapter 6. The campaign during CoP1 includes strong words in the India’s delegations official address [Kamal Nath, 6Apr95]. Three months later, the WG III Plenary in Geneva (25-28 July) fails to agree on the Summary nor ‘accept’ the underlying Report. The Plenary reconvenes in Montreal (11-13 Oct) where the Report is accepted and the Summary approved. However, this is only after the Chapter 6 authors have their dissent from a number of points recorded in the minutes. The Controversy continues in the science press with both sides now calling for the removal of the Chapter from the Report before its final submission to the 11th meeting of the IPCC (11-15 Dec). The controversy dies when this meeting accepts the Report and Summary with a minimum of fuss. The Chapter 6 authors never accept the Summary, claiming that its Part 7 contains distortions and interpolations of their findings.
(For the larger context see this Timeline.)

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Channeling Sustainability Enthusiasm

1972: UN Stockholm Conference: Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, links environmental protection with development goals.

The global environment movement bursts onto the world stage in 1972 with the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. It is here that the seeds of sustainable development enthusiasm are planted and the UN Environment Programme is born. 

But the great manifesto of sustainable development does not arrive until 1987 with the UN Report, Our Common Future.

The vision encapsulated in the ‘Brundtland Report’ is to bring together the apparent conflict between economic development and environmental protection as the twin goals in a new global project.  Across the world the successive public hearings of the Brundtland Commission attempt to give voice to those previously voiceless in the inter-governmental discourse. Aid workers and environmental activists are actively sought, as are the views of the poor and illiterate living close to nature. Indeed, such folk as Amazonian rubber tappers take to the microphone, and sound bites of their contributions remain preserved in the Report.  But ‘equity’ has two dimensions in sustainable development—not only across the globe but also forward through time: Our Common Future also invokes the voiceless voice of future generations so as to ensure that today’s prosperity does not spoil the natural and economic inheritance of those yet to be born.

1987: The Brundtland Report, the sustainable development manifesto

Riding a wave of enthusiasm generated by the Report, Gro Brundtland headlines a charismatic and prophetic billing for perhaps the most evangelical Climate Conference of all time. The International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere issues from Toronto into that baking North American summer of 1988 a concluding statement that famously begins:

Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.

The Conference Statement [pdf] is primarily concerned with the ‘implications for global security’ of atmospheric damage, and, most alarmingly, the damage caused by greenhouse gases. But the ensuing ‘Call for Action’ is much broader and includes a call for the reversal of the current net transfer of resources from developing countries.

Much to the consternation of the American political right, Climate Change Alarmism has always been much more than about fixing the climate. Even before Rio, the movement for action on global warming has already emerged the great hope and channel for all the aspirations of the global ‘sustainability’ movement—including the aspiration for global economic justice.

Enter the Economists: The Price of Life and how the IPCC only just survived the other chapter controversy

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Enter the Economists: Part I—Part II—Part III
Summary and Discussion at Bishop Hill
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What price Climate Change? Before Stern and Garnaut there was Pearce. Chapter 6 of the IPCC Working Group III 2^nd Assessment by David Pearce et al is now forgotten, yet it caused the first public controversy in the history of the IPCC. This chaotic assessment of scant and confused costings of expected damages was under attack before it was even drafted. The ensuing scandal over the price of life among the world’s poor dragged the IPCC into an embarrassing political controversy that broke at the very first Conference of Parties to the climate treaty. It was a taste of things to come, with authors simultaneously publishing what they assessed, leaking drafts, and pressure at the intergovernmental Plenary to change the chapter in conformity to a re-write of the Policymaker’s Summary. But there were important differences also. While later in Madrid Ben Santer was entirely complicit in the push to change his Working Group I Chapter 8, David Pearce and his crew held their ground against the onslaught in workshops, plenaries and finally through the press. Indeed, the authors won the battle for scientific independence, but at what price?

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Part 1: An Uncommon Activist

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees,
then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest.
Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.
—Chico Mendes—

Chico Mendes. That man is a good place to start. Or at least, his death. Gunned down in his home out in the wild west, almost as far west as you can go into Brazilian Amazonia.

Barefoot and illiterate, growing up into colonial serfdom, it was all Chico knew since before he was ten years old to be out in the rainforest tapping the rubber trees. But when news of Chico’s death reached a certain violinist in London, it would turn his life around and launched him on a collision course with IPCC Working Group III. The onslaught against the Working Group began in 1993 and continued through the next two years as the co-chairman, Jim Bruce, tried and tried again to get the Second Assessment Report over the line. He nearly didn’t make it.

Protests against the method of costing the damages of climate change in this Report’s Chapter 6—where the death of the world’s poor is valued much less than the death of the rich—turned a large grouping of poor nation delegates against the Report, against the authors, and against the rich nations from whence they came.  A wedge driven deep in the fault line already opening between rich and poor nations at the climate treaty talks, the Price of Life Controversy was orchestrated by one man, our violinist, Aubrey Meyer.

Aubrey Meyer illuminates climate change mitigation with music

This unlikely course of events began back in 1988 when Meyer was seeking a theme for a new musical. He could hardly have missed the reports of Chico’s bloody demise as they came through on the eve of Christmas. At the end of a year when global environmentalism broke into the mainstream as never before, the news was everywhere; for this humble rubber tapper, born a nobody, died famous, world famous.

What began with a determination to preserve the livelihood of the local tappers, by 1985 had converged with the global campaign to preserve the entire Amazon.  Advocating the sustainable development of the forest that sustained them, the united rubber tappers of Brazil formed under Chico’s leadership to become the cause célèbre of the global environmental campaign to preserve not only the Amazon but threatened rainforests everywhere. The rise and demise of Chico Mendes captured the imagination of the entire movement – a martyr to environmentalism immortalised in prose, film and song.

Indeed, this Amazonian tragedy held Aubrey Meyer captive that Christmas, but there never was a Chico Mendes musical. Instead, the tapper’s story sparked the musician’s epiphany, launching his life in an entirely new direction.  Anyone who has ever heard Meyer speak will tell you that the passion for music never left him. But soon Meyer began to discover new talents, acknowledged by friend and foe, as he threw himself into the services of Chico’s cause—a cause that is as much about defending the global environment as it is about defending the rights of the poor.

David Pearce, the co-coordinating lead author of Chapter 6, died in 2005 aged 63.

When Meyer’s own brand of activism arrived at the climate talks, it was seen to be threatening what others saw as the greater purpose—a general agreement for action on climate change. His aggravation of this rich-poor split seemed to delight parts of the business lobby as much as it frustrated the environmental establishment.  Most of all, Meyer’s intervention exasperated the expert economists drafting Chapter 6. As we shall see, the dispute was never really resolved. When the controversy was over and the Report published, David Pearce, the coordinating lead author, remained insulted and perplexed that their expert assessment could be called into question by the government delegations due to the confused and spurious reasoning of this enthusiastic outsider with his ‘silly campaign of misinformation and abuse.’  In fact, to his dying day, Pearce remained convinced not only that Meyer served the interests of the coal lobby, but that they were funding the whole absurd charade.

Madrid 1995: The Last Day of Climate Science (Part II)

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MADRID 1995: Tipping Point?—The Quest (Part II)—The Last Day (Part II)

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Continuing from the Last Day The Last Day (Part I)…

It is not over yet. We pick up the story again on the last day in Madrid. Yes, Al Sabban has lost the battle to base the D&A section of the Summary on the conclusions of Chapter 8. But now the approval process begins on the re-write of this section. Santer’s draft will now be debated line-by-line, word-by-word, and this debate continues through to the afternoon and into the night. Once again it is the new pattern studies giving the human ‘fingerprint’ that will be most resisted.

A shambolic Victory of the Virtuous

The Side Group’s redraft of the D&A section of the Executive Summary lists three key areas where recent results contributed to positive attribution.1 The first is the proxy data giving that the 20^th century is the warmest century in the last six. The second is the statistical significance of the warming trend in the global mean temperature suggesting that it is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin [see SAR Fig.8.3]. This evidence on global mean temperature is well-known to be weak, continues to be expressed in the negative, had already been challenged by Australia, and it had previously been considered by the IPCC (in the 18Apr95 drafts and in the First Assessment) unable to provide positive support to the human attribution claim [see here]. As if to emphasise this, the third and final area of research, the CO2+ Sulphate pattern correlation studies, is introduced with the words ‘More convincing evidence:’

More convincing evidence for the attribution of a human effect on climate is emerging from pattern-based studies…1

These studies showed ‘pattern correspondences increase with time,’ as would be expected with increasing emissions, and there is a very low probability that ‘these correspondences could occur by chance as a result of natural variability.’ As we noted previously, the exclusion of ‘chance’ or ‘accidental’ variability implicitly leaves open the possibility of the standard century-old candidates for natural external forcing.  Perhaps it was to allay concerns about natural forcing (previously expressed in the commentaries, and so they are likely to have re-emerged in the Side Group) that the next sentence makes a curious reference to the ‘vertical’ pattern studies—as per our ‘Mirror in the Sky’—as also ‘inconsistent with the possible effects of known solar and volcanic forcing.’2

For this claim to be proposed for such a peak summary is curious because exclusion of such natural external forcing is not a major claim of Santer’s studies, nor of the other pattern studies, and no such conclusion is drawn in the Chapter itself. On the contrary, the Chapter repeatedly makes reference to the problem that we really don’t know what the pattern of nature forcing looks like. The best it can say right at the end of the section titled ‘Progress since IPCC 1990′ is that ‘we have now started to see pattern-based studies’ (which are not the flagship ones by Santer) that ‘try to rule out various non-anthropogenic forcing mechanisms.’ Thus, once again we have a situation where a claim is introduced during the inter-governmental negotiations that is contrary to the underlying scientific report, and nor is it derived from the ‘new evidence’ introduced to those negotiations in Santer’s extraordinary presentation.

Madrid 1995: The Last Day of Climate Science

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MADRID 1995: Tipping Point?–The Quest (Part II)–The Last Day (Part II)

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We continue our quest for how human attribution was first established by the IPCC with a close look at the dramas on the final day in Madrid using the Australian Delegation Report as our guide. The first and second essays on the  Chapter  8 Controversy will help readers follow the story, but the main tip for new readers is to catch up on the importance of  Barnett et al 1996 in maintaining the scepticism of all but the published version of Chapter 8. Also helpful will be this key to drafts and meetings:

SAR 18Apr95 draft: the version of the Working Group 1 Second Assessment  Report sent out for review before the deadline for comments on chapters in early July 1995
Asheville Meeting of Lead Authors (25-8 Jul) convened primarily to redraft the Working Group 1 Report’s Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM) in the light of comments and in preparation for Madrid
SAR 9Oct95 draft: the  version of the Working Group 1 Report circulated to the governmental delegates prior to Madrid
Madrid Working Group 1 Plenary (27-29 Nov) convened primarily to give line-by-line approval to the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM) and to accept the underlying Report.
Rome IPCC Plenary (11-5 Dec)  to accept all the Working Group Reports and give line-by-line approval to the Synthesis Report.
SAR: The IPCC Second Assessment Report as published in June 1996, the Working Group 1 part of which is also referred to as the ‘Scientific Assessment’ [pdf].

The Working Group 1 delegates entered the Palacio de Congresos de Madrid under a ceramic banner created by Artigas following a design of Miró.

If we were to fashion a comic strip, or a cartoon for some fantastic narrative of Madrid, we might imagine our evil antagonist as the chief delegate from some fabulously wealthy kingdom in Arabia.

He would arrive in costume from the North African deserts of sand dunes, oil and Mohammad. He would be Mohammad yes, but Dr Mohammad, a scientist with the best education the West could offer, enunciating graciously the lingua franca of modern diplomacy. And he would have the most wonderful Big Oil title, like:

Economic Advisor to the Minister of Oil for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Arabian delegate:  Dr Mohammad Al-Sabban

And so it is Dr Mohammad Al-Sabban from Jeddah who raises his flag once again to speak. Ever polite, but never afraid to re-state his point if it were slightly misconstrued…and persistent…Is he persistent! He is legendary at the various climate conferences for his ability to keep going, tenaciously labouring a point, sometimes solo against the whole room, politely—And just one more matter if you please Mr Chair—miraculously all day and into the night if necessary, one time even until dawn, only stopping when the Chairman simply said Enough is enough! It is diplomacy by exhaustion. And then it becomes consensus by exhaustion as we shall see.

This is the sort of thing that Tim Barnett could not stand for a moment. Tom Wigley has gotten used to it, as much as a scientist could. But then there are the likes of John Zillman who seem to thrive on it. Zillman won’t tell you that. Instead, he will complain of the talks getting bogged down in some nuance, of stalling and blocking with dubious motivation, of marathons session for which no amount of coffee could prepare. But these types like Zillman still managed to stay calm and hang in through the day and into the night and then up again the next morning. They seem to be blessed with some super-human tolerances for what would do in the heads of any of us mortal folk. Mortal folk like Ben Santer for instance. He could only tolerate so much, and this time he snapped. For a moment he completely lost his cool, barking back at the Saudi: If YOU are so interested in this topic then why had YOU not joined the Side Group to discuss it!

Madrid 1995 and The Quest for the Mirror in the Sky (Part II)

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MADRID 1995: Tipping Point? — The Quest (Part II) — The Last Day (Part II)

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Continuing from The Quest (Part I)…

The conditions under which science was practiced in the D&A scene in and around the writing of the IPCC Second Assessment reminds me of a search for a mountain hut in a near whiteout. I remember how turning to approach a ridgeline on the horizon it was a snowdrift in the face, and how an obtruding boulder loomed like a 3-pitch crag. How many times did an apparition of that safe place appear in the swirling mist. There it is!  We were all determined to retain a sober judgement, nonetheless we were all intoxicated by the desire to believe it was there…

Imagination is funny,
Makes a cloudy day sunny.
It makes a bee think of honey
Just as I think of you.

The Mirror in the Sky Explained…

The mark of man is found by comparing model predictions of warming with changes in the real data (radiosonde 1963-1988). The resemblance of the combined CO₂+SO₄ image (from Tayler Penner 1994) with the observed pattern is mostly in the stratospheric cooling and the more pronounced warming in the southern hemisphere. [See SAR p428. Colour images adapted from Santer’s original paper referred to in SAR as Santer et al 1995b, and later published in Nature, 4Jul96.]

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The Human Signal Emerging from the Background Noise

Asheville, North Carolina, July 1995: this was Santer’s first real opportunity to present the new attribution findings that are our Mirror in the Sky. Not long after the deadline for reviewer comments on the chapters, this conference of 70-odd Working Group 1 chapter authors convened in Asheville to revise the Summary for Policymakers. As if a rehearsal for Madrid later in the year, the attribution question all but hijacked proceedings.

Madrid 1995 and The Quest for the Mirror in the Sky

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MADRID 1995: Tipping Point? — The Quest (Part II) — The Last Day (Part II)

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The detection of global warming and its attribution to the human cause had always been a task fraught with seemingly irreducible uncertainties. These had not subsided towards the end of 1995 when the pressure was mounting to deliver on political expectations introduced in the late 1980s. In a previous post we considered whether the Nov 1995 IPCC Working Group 1 meeting in Madrid was a tipping point in the corruption of climatology. Here we take a closer look at the science behind the ‘Chapter 8 Controversy’ in a longer essay broken into 2 posts (Part II here).

Mirror, Mirror hanging in the sky
Won’t you look down what’s hap’n here below

Could this really be it? The first faint image of man in the sky?

Ben Santer had just placed a transparency under the lens to project this colour pattern high upon the conference wall.  It is the first afternoon of the Working Group 1 Plenary in Madrid, and this great council of nations from across the entire globe is persuaded to study the significance of its strange contours before getting down to their principal task. And so they should study it, for this is a game-changer striking at the nub of what the IPCC is all about. Although obscure, here is an image of the impact of human industry on the atmosphere above. At least part of the recent warming has at last been attributed to industrial emissions. If not for this, then why these near one hundred delegations flown in from all corners of the globe? There they are carefully positioned at arched rows of labelled bureaus across this cavernous auditorium. As they listen to live translations of Santer’s explanation, not a few of them must be gazing up in wonder: Could this really be what man hath wrought?

Madrid 1995: Was this the Tipping Point in the Corruption of Climate Science?

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MADRID 1995: Tipping Point?—The Quest (Part II)—The Last Day (Part II)

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John Houghton writes of it under the heading:  Meetings that Changed the World. He may be right but not only in the way he thinks. Here we consider whether this meeting in Madrid was the moment when climate science gave way under the monumental pressure of politics.

In 2008 John Houghton reminisced on the tense meeting ‘without which there would be no Kyoto Protocol’, and he ‘recalls how science won the day’—at least that’s how Nature called it (vol455, 9Oct08)

When Ben Santer arrived in Madrid in the late autumn of 1995, did he know that this conference would change his life forever?

Undoubtedly ambitious, a rising star in the climate modelling scene, he was doing well at age 40 to be leading the writing of a key chapter in the IPCC Second Assessment Report.  In fact, the convener of this IPCC Working Group, John Houghton, had asked him to take it on quite late in the day, only after more established scientists had turned down the offer. Perhaps they had a hunch of what was about to unfold, for it would be Santer’s fate that great forces of history would bear down on the lead author of his chapter at this conference. When he was through with it, when Houghton had accepted the final draft a few days later, climate science would be changed forever. After a long struggle, the levees of science gave way to the overwhelming forces of politics welling up around it, and soon it would be totally and irrevocably engulfed.

The story of Ben Santer’s late changes to Chapter 8 of the Working Group 1 Report is familiar to most sceptical accounts of the climate change controversy (e.g. here & here and a non-sceptical account). However, it is often overshadowed by other landmark events, and so it is usually not put up there in the same league with Hansen‘s sweaty congressional testimony of 1988, with the establishment of the IPCC nor with the Hockey Stick Controversy. Yet, if one looks at the greater controversy in terms of its impact on science, then this conference in Madrid might just surpass them all.

This was the tipping point. This was climate science’s Battle of Hastings, when political exigencies—the enemies of science—broke through the lines and went on to overrun all its institutions. Before Hansen there had always been the rogue scientists hawking some kind of scary scenario to the press or politicians. Indeed, sometimes they listened, and sometime they got all het up about it. Yet the institutions of science held firm. Before the IPCC there had been other politicised scientific institutions—the USA EPA is the prime example (see discussion here). And as for the Hockey Stick, well, by then it was all over, with the Climategate emails confirming that a culture of science-as-advocacy was already endemic in the science informing the IPCC assessments. The travesties of the Third Assessment would be unimaginable without the transformation that had already occurred in the writing of the Second Assessment. Madrid was the tipping point, when everything began to change. Not that everyone noticed it at the time. That the general shift begun at Madrid is much easier to see now with so many years of hindsight.

The Corruption of the Royal Society in the Climate Emergency

Part 1: Never to give their opinion as a body

A review and discussion of Nullius in Verba: On the Word of No One. The Royal Society and Climate Change,  Andrew Montford, GWPF, 2012

The Advertisement in the Philosophical Transactions #47, 1753

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Before Cromwell Mortimer died in the winter of 1752, he had gathered together all the papers presented to the Royal Society during 1749-50 for what was mostly now a biennial publication.  Philosophical Transactions had been the private enterprise of the Society’s Secretary since the first Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, sent some of the earliest scientific papers to the presses in 1665. The Society had expanded in both membership and its ‘communications’ since those early days, and Mortimer’s last edition was a hefty tome of 751 pages—that is, if you don’t count the auxiliary text, which included the 32 pages listing the 167 papers it contained.

After Mortimer’s death, the Society stepped in and took over.  Instead of attempting to publish all the papers presented at its meetings, a committee was established to select those outstanding in the importance or singularity of the subjects, or ‘the advantageous manner of treating them.’  And thus so the Society, formed primarily to advance experimental method, took another step down the path towards the modern practice of establishing scientific authority by peer review. In taking this step it immediately created a competitive scarcity and so a status; a status that slowly developed in complex hierarchies until eventually a professionalised science two centuries later would use it to evaluate the standing of its scientists, which thereby served to determine their careers, their salaries, their academic power.

While the Society’s Council at the middle of the 18th century would have had no idea where this was heading, they did not take this step lightly. An ‘Advertisement’ to the next volume of the Transactions (#47) gives a careful explanation evoking a powerful caveat.

Their problem was not only in the enlargement of membership and communication. It was also that, despite disclaimers and retractions, ‘common opinion’ had given that the 46 previous volumes of the Transactions were published with the ‘authority’ and ‘direction’ of the Society itself, even to the extent that they were oft cited as the ‘Transactions of the Royal Society.’

What’s the big deal with that? you may ask. Indeed, we are now all blindly familiar with the common disclaimer of institutional journals to the effect that while all due care is taken in reviewing and selecting papers, nonetheless the views expressed are those of the author and not those of [the institution]. So familiar are we with these disclaimers—with this presumption—that we can be forgiven for overlooking the historical significance of the caveat that was to follow in the Advertisement. The Society makes no pretence ‘to answer for the certainty of the facts, or propriety of the reasoning, contained in the several papers so published, which must still rest on the credit or judgement of their respective authors.’

In fact, the Advertisement goes further and takes the opportunity to declare that the same goes for all presentations made to meetings of the Society, and that if thanks are proposed to a presenter from the chair—or the assembly does applaud, or the newspapers, or authors, do report that they did so—this should not be taken as the Society giving assent to the opinions there expressed, but should only be taken as ‘a matter of civility, in return for the respect shown to the Society by those communications.’

The Advertisement makes clear that any authority that the Society may garner should rest only upon its original and continuing purpose, which is to advance its method of inquiry (i.e., experimental/empirical). Its authority should never be associated with any particular opinion apparently established upon this method. And so on the occasion when it finally, formally institutes its journal – almost a century after its Charter – the Royal Society deems it necessary to declare:

…that it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a body, upon any subject, either of nature or art, that comes before them.

The reasons for taking such a strong stand on this issue are apparent elsewhere in the Society’s early declarations (see especially The History of the Royal Society and my discussion of it here). The Society was founded in the tenuous toleration of The Restoration, when the politics of ideas remained bloody, and it now continued to navigate through ongoing religious controversies and into the enlarged and degenerate political sphere so marvellously satirised by Hogarth. The Society could only survive and prosper in its purpose by daring to broadly tolerate opinion (upon the evidence), without, itself, being held accountable for it. But there is also a very obvious and timeless reason for a society promoting the advancement of science to remain neutral on all matters of opinion:  it serves its purpose of advancement to avoid re-enforcing, by the authority of anything other than the science, the prevailing orthodoxy on any subject of inquiry. The continuing importance to the Society of this discipline is suggested in that this same Advertisement was henceforth stamped at the head of every issue of the Transactions for the next 200 years.

Andrew Montford's study of the Royal Society's response to climate change emergency

In Andrew Montford’s recent GWPF report on the opinions attributed to the Royal Society concerning climate change, it is not the Nullius in Verba of the title that is the central theme. Rather, the demise of the Royal Society in violation of this rule never to give an opinion as a body—this is its core theme and its powerful message.

Apocalyptic Enthusiasm and the Royal Society

On the 350^th anniversary of the Royal Society we reflect on how it first successfully promoted science as a sober and reasonable force serving society by dampening the prevailing apocalyptic ‘enthusiasm’ at large in Restoration England, and how the Society’s relationship to fearful prognostications was recently reversed when it came to promote apocalyptic environmentalism. This reversal is indicated by the election of the Royal Society’s current president in 2005,  shortly after he had published one of the most extremely apocalyptic books ever written by a scientist.

Apocalyptic Science

In 2003, an eminent British astronomer published a book entitled Our Final Century with the subtitle:

A SCIENTISTS WARNING:
How terror, error, and environmental disaster
threaten humankind’s future in this century
– on earth and beyond.

It tells of how during the 20^th century, humanity was first presented with the real risk of its own self-destruction through nuclear catastrophe, and how now, with so many more dangers, it is down to an even chance that our species will extinguish itself before this new century is through. Thus, the title Our Final Century refers to the likelihood of the extinction of the human species before this century is out. The message is clear: The end is nigh.

Published in the USA as Our Final Hour, this book revives the idea of the Doomsday Clock, a symbol of the cold war arms race, where a clock ticking through its eleventh hour is poised at so many minutes to midnight. At first sight the clock as a metaphor for temporal finality seems wrong. The persistent and endless motion of the clock’s hands suggests more a Buddhist sansara than the Christian teleology or eschatology.  But that is the point. The hands are seen relentlessly moving towards midnight just as they have always done, as though they might be saying: However bad things might seem now, tomorrow is another day. But this tomorrow is not another day. We don’t know precisely when this will happen, but when it does happen the hands won’t pass over the top of the clock just as they have always done. The scientist’s warning is that the time-bomb is set, the end will surely come. The scope of this temporal quantification of the risk of imminent annihilation is expanded in Our Final Century (as elsewhere) beyond the cold war nuclear threat and towards a complete aggregation of all catastrophic risks to humanity. Our Final Century is a scientific summation of all these fears; and so, if the minutes-to-midnight metaphor was not already crowding out old anti-nuclear book titles, this book might well have been called Our Final Minutes.

The original apocalyptic tipping point (Van Eyk 1420-2)

Lurking behind the dial of this Doomsday Clock is of course the eschatology of the original Christian Doomsday – the prophesy of the Last Day revealed in the last pages of the Bible. And we should note right away that this is no casual invocation of a religious imperative. On the contrary, the Doomsday metaphor is entirely apt for the most extreme magnitude of the threat our scientist wishes to convey. Our Final Century is not speaking here of a degradation. This is not a browning out, where the living conditions get worse and worse in a degradation of the ecosystem. Nor are we to envisage a qualified disaster, where nuclear war might kill, if not ourselves, then most of the people we know or care about – as was widely experienced in the Black Death, the 30 Year War, the Potato Famine, or any number of other scourges of the last few centuries. This is not of the scale of killing and maim inflicted upon a tribe or races in the various failed attempts at genocide of the last few decades. Nor is it about our final century of civilisation; a return to the dark ages, to poverty and filth, to brutal chaos and primitive barbarity. The scientists warning is of much more than this. We are threatened with the idea of a global annihilation such that there will be no more ideas, no more knowledge, no memory, no history. Such absolute forgetting threatens the collective ego of society in the most absolute way. And, if this apocalypse does not always imply immediate extinction, then, like the nuclear winter scare, the threat is of one terrible dawn of doom, when the fate of humanity will be much like the dammed in those medieval paintings – beyond the tipping point into hell, a place of no return.

In Our Final Century these last days of humanity are painted into the even bigger picture and timescale of the modern astronomer:

If our solar system’s entire lifecycles…were to be viewed in fast forward in a single year, then all recorded history would be less than a minute in early June. The twentieth century would flash past in a third of a second. The next fraction of a second, in this depiction, will be ‘critical’: in the 21^st century, humanity is more at risk than ever before from the misapplication of science. And the environmental pressure induced by collective human actions could trigger catastrophes more threatening than any natural hazards.

On this astronomical scale we are now reduced to Our Final fraction-of-a-Second. And while it is clear why the obliteration of one species is ‘critical’ and significant to that species – and perhaps significant to the history of life in general if we trigger a mass extinction – it is not clear why the demise of humanity is significant or critical to this bigger story.  But this is not the apparent rhetorical purpose of this passage, which is instead to heighten the importance of our present moment. We are at this very moment poised upon a monumental cusp – the tipping point of a history writ almost inconceivably large.

The investment of a profound historical significance to the current place-time is another quintessential element of the genre of apocalyptic preaching invoked by this book, and we cannot deny what is altogether so apparent in this text, namely, that here we have yet another doomsayer in the tradition of Jewish Daniel, the Christian John and the Prophet of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola.  Only this time he is uninspired, sober, reasonable, and wearing the cloak of science. What are we to make of this?

If we begin to question not so much the likelihood of imminent finality, but to question more precisely whether modern science has the means to make such a prediction, then we might question whether this scientist has departed from the rigor of science only to abuse its name with terrific fancy. Whatever the case, we should not suppose that his shift from astronomy to millenarian jeopardised his scientific career. On the contrary, it seems to have advanced it.

Following publication in 2003, our scientist-doomsayer went about promoting his prediction of imminent species annihilation in guest lectures and public forums. This provoked only muted criticism, and much applause. In 2005 he was promoted to English peerage and to the leadership of Britain’s premier scientific institution, so that there are now few scientists with more institutional authority than this man. This scientist of whom we speak is a most unlikely figure of a leader, let alone prophet-of-doom; he is the unassuming and quietly spoken current president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees.