Memorandum submitted by John Gorman (GEO
04)
1. Obviously geoenginering must be regulated
at a global level by the one global organisation that exists for
something this important, the United Nations.
2. It might seem obvious that geoenginering
should be included in the remit of the body already set up by
the UN to coordinate the world's response to climate change, the
Intergovernmental Panel For Climate Change, the IPCC.
3. It is very important that the climate
academic community is not given control of geoengineering. It
is very important that this does not happen for the following
reasons.
4. Unfortunately the IPCC has shown itself
to be remarkably inaccurate or complacent in predicting the seriousness
of climate change. The 2007 prediction for sea level rise
was 40 centimetres by 2100. It is now universally accepted
that the figure will be one to two metres. This was fairly obvious
to anyone with scientific commonsense at the time as demonstrated
by the coverage in the new scientist in March 2007.
"How and why did explicit warnings disappear
from the latest IPCC report?
The final edit also removed references to
growing fears that global warming is accelerating the discharge
of ice from major ice sheets such as the Greenland sheet."(Leader
and article 10 march 2007)
5. At the same time the IPCC has been naive
in their demands and estimates for immediate emissions reductions.
"Delusional" is the word used in a recent publication
from the UK energy industry. It seems likely that the challenging
but realistic agreement that will come from the climate talks
in Copenhagen this week will confirm a doubling of worldwide emissions
by 2020.
6. This leaves a massive and obvious gap
between what is needed and what can be done. However the only
action that can possibly fill that gap, geoenginering, was dismissed
in the IPCC 2007 report with 18 words in some 20,000 pages.
7. Even if one were to take seriously the
rate of emissions reduction proposed by the IPCC, this still assumes
that the world can live with ("adaptation" is the word
used) a global temperature rise of 2 degrees C. I don't think
the world at large would agree if it were given the facts. The
current global average temperature rise is about 0.7° C.
Because of the 9:1 ratio from equator to pole the present
rise is about five times greater in the Arctic and Antarctic at
3 to 4° C.(British Antarctic Survey Position Statement)
8. With the well-publicised effect that
this is having in Greenland, the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula
it is very difficult to see how anyone can look upon three times
this rise (10 to 12° C.) as something that the world
can adapt to.
9. At present the world climate academic
community (which is what the IPCC is) has shown a lack of practicality
and a very strong anti-geoenginering prejudice.
10. Oliver Morton, who is now the environment
editor of the Economist, was previously a general science editor
for Naturenot specifically on climate. In 2006-07 he
studied geoenginering to write a six-page feature and quickly
understood the politics of the situation and wrote "Much
of the climate community still views the idea (of geoengineering)
with deep suspicion or outright hostility".
11. This hostility extends to suppression
of geoenginering ideas. Even the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen had
difficulty in getting his seminal paper on stratospheric aerosols
published in 2006 and only did so eventually with the help
of Ralph Cicerone, the president of the American Academy of Sciences
who wrote "many in the climate academic community have opposed
the publication of Crutzen's paper for reasons that are not wholly
scientific".
12. Oliver Morton also wrote "In the
past year, climate scientists have shown new willingness to study
(geoengineering) although many will do sosimply to showthat
all such paths are dead-end streets".
13. At the most local level there is evidence
of this happening. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council has recently allocated £3 million to research
into geoenginering. This is possibly as a result of the hearings
last year by this committee and the comments by the chairman on
the government's negative attitude:
The select committee's chair, the liberal
democrat MP Phil Willis, said he was disappointed with the government's
position of adopting only a "watching brief" over the
emerging field. "That seems to me a very very negative way
of actually facing up to the challenge of the future," he
said. "It's a very pessimistic view of emerging science and
Britain's place within that emerging science community."
He said government should support many different avenues to tackling
climate change. "There have to be plethora of solutions.
Some of which we do not know whether they will work, but that
is the whole purpose of science." (quote from Guardian report)
14. To allocate this money there was a "workshop"
in November in London. Among the attendees were three people with
simple practical research proposals. (There may have been others.)
After the workshop none of the three believed that they were likely
to succeed. Their comments were:
(1) It was dominated by geophysicysts wanting
to study the problem more than solving the problem.
(2) The workshop was of little importance, The
problem, I fear is not realised.
(2) The main problem is that no official wants
to be associated with anything that can sink, catch fire, explode
or just not work. Careers are much safer with paper as the only
deliverable.
15. In raising these concerns about the
scientific objectivity of the IPCC, the recent controversy about
the content of e-mail communications from the University of East
Anglia is obviously relevant. The situation cannot be expressed
better than the leader in this week's "The Week" by
Jeremy O'Grady.
Just as the appalling behaviour of the Catholic
Archbishops in Ireland has no direct bearing on the truth of Catholic
doctrine, so the skulduggery of scientists of climate change in
East Anglia does not constitute refutation of the theory of man
made global warming. What it does do, however, is to shake the
laity's faith in the integrity of their scientific high priests.
And should that lead to those priests to question their immaculate
view themselves, it will probably be no bad thing.
The view of themselves as prelapsarian truth
seekers unaffected by the psychological frailties which afflict
the rest of us finds its clearest expression, you will recall,
in Karl Popper's classic, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery".
To Popper, the method of framing testable theories and then discarding
them if the facts fail to fit was the distinctive way scientists
not only should, but do, proceed. But in real life argued Thomas
Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", scientists
engage in "group think". You have been taught in a certain
"school" of theory; the imminent scientists who oversee
your career have built reputations in the school: why let mere
facts get you in psychological and career difficulties? If Kuhn
is right, this suggests that the scientists' boast that their
work has been peer-reviewed often means little more than that
it has been exposed to group think. "If the facts change,
I change my mind. What do you do?" asked Keynes with studied
naivet
. The answer, at least where the East Anglian
scientists are concerned, is that you massage the facts.
16. In conclusion: the The climate academic
community/IPCC "group think" has three parts:
(A) Failure to recognise the seriousness of the
situationmaybe because scientists require "proof".
("But we don't know that those things are going to happen"
Met office head of climate change in group discussion after geoenginering
hearing at this committee.)
(B) Grossly unrealistic "ivory tower"
mentality on how quickly an idea (eg for clean energy generation)
can be developed into a mature fully implemented technology.
(C) Grossly unrealistic "ivory tower"
mentality on how the world can adapt to change such as one to
two metres of sea level rise.
17. It is vital that the decisions on how
the world reacts to the major worldwide problem of climate change
are made by those in government who can apply common sense and
not get lost in the detail. As EF Schumacher said 40 years
ago in "Small Is Beautiful."
"Maybe it was useful to employ a computer
for obtaining results which any intelligent person can reach with
the help of a few calculations on the back of an envelope because
the modern world believes in computers and masses of facts and
it abhors simplicity" and "the endless multiplication
of mechanical aids in fields that require judgement more than
anything else is one of the chief dynamic forces behind Parkinson's
Law".
December 2009
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