Legal Eagle (LE) published this post at SkepticLawyer: Climate change, scepticism and elitism, wherein she says that she is “agnostic” on the science of climate change as it pertains Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and catastrophic scenarios, that she is offended by climate change activists belittling climate change denialists. LE finishes by stating that she is particularly concerned that various policies proposed to mitigate/reverse AGW are likely to disproportionately impact people on the poverty line and developing nations barred from certain technologies, and that she wants more scrutiny of such policies and more attention paid to egalitarian outcomes, and that this is her primary reason for being agnostic on climate change..
Rob Merkel criticised LE’s post strongly in this post at Larvatus Prodeo: The intellectual laziness of climate skepticism. He concentrated on her statements of doubt about AGW and climate catastrophe, and he was harsh, as were most of the subsequent comments. Too many of the commentors confused LE with her co-blogger SkepticLawyer (SL) and conflated the separate views of LE and SL on this and other matters, which didn’t help at all.
However, the reason that critics at LP and on her own blog were so harsh about LE’s stance on climate change science, while virtually ignoring her points on inequitable outcomes of climate change mitigation policies? Because of how she wrote her article – LE tied together two separate things as if one was dependent on the other, and the one she waxed passionate about first got the lion’s share of the attention, because what one puts first is generally considered to be what one considers most important.
It didn’t need to be that way. Being skeptical about many climate change mitigation proposals because they are likely to inequitable social outcomes is a viewpoint that doesn’t depend upon one’s position on climate science and AGW/Catastrophism. I’m utterly convinced by the science behind AGW and while I have hopes that the less catastrophic models are what will happen, I fear for the worst and believe that we need to prepare for it. That doesn’t mean that I think that developing nations and the poor in our own country should be the ones to pay the bulk of the economic burden for what needs to be done to enhance the world’s food security and remaining biodiversity.
Climate change science and climate change policies should be closely entwined, but in the real world they tend not to be so closely aligned as an idealist would wish. Where do I go to vote for some luxury taxes on delicacies and fripperies whose production and transport pushes carbon emissions out into the world for no reason other than consumerist display? Currently nowhere, because economic “rationalism” models say that doing so would be A Bad Thing for The Economy. You know, those “rational” models which do not account for such non-essentials as breathable air or drinkable water or edible seafood because there’s no profit in Clean Atmosphere or Clean Rivers or Living Oceans.
We do need to be having a better conversation about how we balance the needs of the poorer people and nations to use affordable technology to improve their economic security and the need to preserve the ecosystems that keep us all alive. The West cannot ethically tell poorer people and nations that we could use fossil fuels to build our economies but that they cannot, at least not without giving them a viably affordable alternative. Framing that conversation within doubts one has about climate change science per se merely confuses the issue.
Categories: culture wars, environment, ethics & philosophy, language, Science, social justice
Hoyden About Town 
The idea that there must be sceptics bewilders me. Must there be sceptics of all science? There should be rigorous evaluation of the scientific method, but isn’t the idea that there must be sceptic run contrary to scientific thinking? Aren’t you then just disagreeing for the sake of it – and contrary to the scientific evaluation of the data? How is that of value to scientific thinking?
Science, it is true, cannot prove anything beyond all doubt. It’s always about the balance of the probabilities. You cannot scientifically prove (at least on a statistical level) that the sun is going to come up tomorrow because we don’t know how many days there will be, but only a fool would be a sceptic of the fact. Or a contrarian. I don’t make sweeping generalisations of people, but the martyr call from “sceptics” could probably be alleviated if they stopped and looked at the science itself rather than rely on the commentary surrounding it. If someone who is sceptical were to argue with someone who accepts the science by attacking the science itself, no worries. But too often we see people graduating from the Andrew Bolt School of Statistical Clusterfuckery. That isn’t science. It isn’t evaluation of scientific method. It’s polemic. It’s disingenuous and it adds nothing to the debate.
Also, the idea that disagreeing with the application of measures to combat Climate Change means that you should disagree with Climate Change modelling also bewilders me. The data and how you interpret it shouldn’t change because you don’t like the way the outcome might look. That’s a corruption of the scientific process. You’re coming at it, to borrow a phrase, arse-about-backwards.
Personally, I do not like the idea of Carbon Tax in isolation. I personally believe that the best idea would be to use Carbon Tax in addition to massive tax cuts and the like for fostering the renewable energies industries. There’s no point whacking someone for producing carbon without there being anywhere to head on to. We need to develop the renewable industries so there’s a smoother transition. But that opinion does not change the science, and doesn’t change the way I look at it. It can’t, if the science is to stay, you know, science.
*standing ovation*
Yes, this is what more people (on both sides of the debate) need to realise.
I’m not a climate change skeptic, but I must admit after this blow-up I now do not wish people who are either skeptics or believers pulling policy levers. I think they might break both the levers and the government.
I’ve gone into far more detail on this point over at our place, but very simply: if one cannot fight freedom’s cause in freedom’s way (or the environment’s cause, or whatever), then there are serious problems, not only with the rhetoric and those spouting it, but also with the underlying policy proposals (not, note, the science).
And confusing a hard right libertarian with a soft left progressive repeatedly is close to unforgivable. As is the overblown mansplaining. I normally like having interesting things I don’t know about explained to me (you are among the best at this on the interwebs Tigtog, but then you know that already). But not that post. It was patronising and missed the point. Robert is a DPhil student. He can read, even if some of his commenters can’t.
Keri, I think actually there must be skeptics, because science is about being skeptical. If the evidence changes, you examine it closely and test it again, and if it stays changed, then you change your conclusion.
Science has no dogma, only testable hypotheses that give rise to ever-more-detailed theories. Excitable, fallible humans sometimes conflate well-proven (i.e. well-tested) hypotheses and theories with dogma, of course, but they are not the same thing at all.
It’s people who confuse these things, and act as if theories are dogma, and then call themselves skeptics, who have it arse about. If a doubter actually demonstrated that there was a great big hole in the chain of evidence for AGW, climatologists would be fascinated by the opportunity to understand something new about climate variations. The doubter who overturned the AGW climate change model would undoubtedly end up with a Nobel Prize, and the people applauding the loudest would be the climatologists.
But what the loudest doubters do instead is point out facts that the climatologists have been considering for decades as if it’s brand new information, or sue a study group for original data that belongs to somebody else (who would be perfectly willing to supply it to the doubters directly if they paid the requisite licence fee, but for some reason obtaining the data in the standard way simply is not good enough for them), and then turn that into a conspiracy theory scandal.
That’s not skepticism, that’s propaganda.
SL, as for human freedom vs environmental conservation, I want the classic libertarian adage (“your freedom to swing your fist ends where it comes into contact with my nose”) to be applied to pollutants: other people’s freedom to pollute ends where it contaminates anything on land, sea or air that I and others depend upon, which includes the atmospheric effects on climate from carbon combustion certainly, but that’s not the half of it. I know of no Libertarian or market mechanism which can prevent the Tragedy of the Commons being repeated, this time with environmental stability and sustainability, without regulation of these common resources enforced by the power of the State. Have you got anything else up your sleeve?
As I said in the post, the conflation of your and LE’s identities was definitely unhelpful, and largely done by drive-by posters, I noticed. They’ve mostly buggered off now.
I’d recommend the work of Elinor Ostrom (most recent Nobel economics laureate) on the private management of common resources. She also discusses the tragedy of the commons and the conditions when both state and private ownership can lead to the tragedy of the commons, and when it can be averted. State ownership does not prevent the tragedy of the commons; indeed, it sometimes exacerbates it: ‘the government owns it’ can be as empty as ‘no-one owns it’.
Elinor Ostrom aside, my concern is the one I raised above: people who carry on like that should be kept as far away from government as possible, and should not be allowed to hijack broader political movements (be they right or left). DEM pointed out this morning that the Greens in Europe are far more benign politically, in part because proportional representation drags them to the centre and in part (and for the same reason) because their support is accurately reflected in the Diet/Assemblée nationale/etc. This means they act in their own right, without undermining the political coherence of the social democratic parties.
Thank you, Tigtog, for discussing the matter politely and sensibly, and with respect.
The post wasn’t focussed, and it was a little confused, because I was not only trying to explain my own concerns, but also to explain the concerns I saw in the audience. I think I personally am a lot less skeptical than some of them, but I can understand where they are coming from, and I was trying to explain that.
tigtog – I should have been clearer. Science is about testing theory, yes. We must be sceptical of all untested theory, and there must be rigorous analysis of the scientific process. But sceptical for the sake of sceptical? Sceptical when the data disagrees? When the model has been tested, and tested and tested?
My point, not very elegantly made, was that people who are sceptical without actually addressing the science itself are not sceptical for the sake of factual correctness. That isn’t science, it isn’t helpful. It’s barely scepticism. It’s the equivalent of the Church arguing that the world was really flat and the Earth is the centre of the universe. It was not based on Science, it was not based on fact. It was based on “we have too much to lose” and because it was easier to attack the science – and the people behind it- than accommodate the truth into Dogma. The Dogma here is a society that praises insane profit and eschews market-control and behavior-modifying taxes.
Keri, I think we are agreeing furiously – most of the points I made about skepticism in my previous comment were more in the nature of general thoughts rather than responding directly to you. I should have been clearer about that!
SL, I’ll have to look into the Ostrom, although I spoke about strong State regulation of common resources rather than State ownership e.g. laws about what a farmer cannot allow to run off into a river on hir land that people downstream also rely upon don’t involve any State ownership of the water in question. I want more laws like that about more types of pollutants.
LE, all of us have published the occasional Post of Imperfect Clarity. I figured this was one of those.
SL, just addressing this point in particular:
I don’t grok this attitude towards the commons at all: it was never “nobody owns it” it was always “we all own it”. What has always brought about the tragedy of the commons in the past is “nobody polices it” except against outsiders, when the problem at heart is insiders taking more than their fair share/more than is sustainable.
Air quality, soil quality and water quality cannot be enclosed and given legal title. That’s why traditional economic models have treated them as irrelevant, that’s why the legal system took so long to catch up with the flagant disregard for the common good shown by the biggest polluters. In my opinion, the law still has a long way to go in its policing of polluters, and I’m cheering them every slow step of the way forward on this.
“Must there be sceptics of all science? ”
Bags being a gravity skeptic.
And a nitpick: “It’s the equivalent of the Church arguing that the world was really flat and the Earth is the centre of the universe.”
I don’t believe the Church ever argued that the world was flat, although they certainly argued the earth is the centre of the universe.
” What has always brought about the tragedy of the commons in the past is “nobody polices it” except against outsiders, when the problem at heart is insiders taking more than their fair share/more than is sustainable. ”
This is interesting because I’d never thought of it that way before. When I studied it (and I can’t remember if it was a philosophy subject or an environmental history subject, but it was back in the murky days of my undergraduacy (made up word)) the way it was presented was that the short-term rewards of using more than your share were greater than the long-term rewards of everybody using a fair share and the resource not being destroyed. It was presented as rational behaviour, because if you used only your fair share, your neighbours would still use more and the resource still be destroyed, so the rational course of action was to get maximum benefit out of it now, rather than less and none.
Of course policing it resolves the problem but strangely it never occured to me.
In terms of policing pollution, I think it needs to be much broader than just a carbon tax (although that would be a good start) – all the externalised costs of production need to be paid by the producers (and so then by the consumers), instead of by society as a whole.
”I don’t believe the Church ever argued that the world was flat, although they certainly argued the earth is the centre of the universe.”
They did, but gave up the fight far earlier and easier than they did with the model of the universe. Lactantius, for example, was a proponent of the Flat Earth theory, particularly in The Divine Institutes, Severian was another. I don’t think there was an official position of denialism that the world was spherical(ish), but there were certainly prominent churchies afraid they were going to fall off the edge of the world.
”Bags being a gravity skeptic.”
Love it, love it, love it
“tragedy of the commons” is actually a bit of a misnomer. Tigtog got it right when she said that everyone owns it. Commons were/are owned by a small group of people who protect it from outsiders e.g. town commons were for the use of the townspeople not anyone coming in from outside and so the collective policed the use of the commons by townspeople because if someone thought you were taking more than your share then you’d be outed by the town, but everyone would come together to keep an outsider out. So commons were generally well kept because everyone’s wellbeing relied on them and as your wellbeing relied on your social standing you generally had to toe the line. I can’t remember what my geography lecturer called the ‘non-commons’ but he said that this is what was meant instead of commons – land that no one was responsible for so everyone used it up without care or recourse.
Ah yes, but individual members of the church is not the same thing as The Church 🙂
Just to clarify my own personal position further – I just posted this over at my own place:
A tribalism of having a bit of a vent and a snark aimed at some of the nangnangs you come across in your working life. As you say, just like your own workplace.
Do you know that the BBC had to apologise to the university of East Anglia for the “climategate” beatup?
I acknowledge that it’s (very) possible to read things differently, but all I saw in the “Climategate” emails was the tribalism of people who were being unjustly assailed finding a small comfort in mocking their assailants.
The datasets that the Climategate aggressors wanted were transparently available from the sources who had a proprietary interest in them. It was repeatedly explained to the aggressors that the East Anglia scientists did not have the intellectual property rights over those datasets. They chose to harass the East Anglia scientists regardless.
I’d get fucking tribal over that.
P.S. Also, since the proper and straightforward procedure for the harassers was to go and get the non-public datasets from the organisations who owned them as explained above, and they nonetheless kept on harassing East Anglia, the emails talking about how the harassers still weren’t going to get what they wanted on their umpteenth application were not even actively obstructive, let alone conspiratorial. The harassers had been told directly and clearly what they needed to do. It’s not the scientists’ fault that they wouldn’t do it, so those email conversations were more along the lines of “have you seen what those nangnangs are trying to pull now?” rather than “how can we stop the righteous investigators getting our secrets this time?”. The East Anglia position was consistent – anybody who wanted the non-public datasets had to apply to the people who owned them, as East Anglia was using them under license.