The Naked Green Emperors Must Stand in Line
by Walter Russell Mead
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/04/06/the-naked-green-emperors-must-stand-in-line/

Sometimes, you don’t have to be an emperor to have no clothes.  Just being the Prince of Wales can be enough.  After all, in May of 2008 Prince Charles warned the world that we had only eighteen months left to save the planet from spiraling climate disasters.  Twenty-three months later we are struggling to cope with the resulting chaos and devastation; fortunately the Prince has given us an extension.  On March 7 of 2009 he announced that we have 100 months to save the world.  There are 87 months still left — at least by the current count.  And who but an evil or foolish climate denier can disagree?  After all, the Prince speaks with the Authority of Science — and his tailors are the best and his garments are always very grand.

As the dust settles from the climate upheavals of the last few months — the email scandal, the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, the revelations about the flaws in the IPCC methods and reports — the overall pattern looks more and more clear.

First, there’s significant evidence that something unusual is happening to the world’s climate, and a very strong case exists that it is related to human activity.

Second, some important questions remain.  Climate science is a young discipline, and the earth’s climate system is extremely complex.  Gathering data, interpreting data, developing and testing models, and making predictions all present non-trivial problems.  It is likely that as time goes by and our knowledge and methods improve, many of today’s views on climate will be modified, some significantly.  It is impossible to predict from our current knowledge base whether the likely revisions will point to increased risks, decreased risks, or a complex mix of increased and decreased risks. It is possible but by no means certain that the changes in our understanding of climate dynamics will lead to improved ideas about how to reduce the impact of human activity on the world’s climate.

This far, much to the annoyance of some readers, my views are more or less compatible with those of mainstream climate scientists and on these underlying facts of the case I’m pretty close (perhaps a bit more cautious) than the article published in a recent issue of the Economist.

Third, the climate change movement is losing ground; in the English speaking world, in China and India, even in Germany, the political climate is turning more hostile.

As someone who has always been less skeptical about the science of climate change than about the politics of the issue, I’m not surprised.  I’m not even unhappy; the headline policy proposals that the ‘climate change community’ has generated are by and large unrealistic and ill-advised.  Concern about the impact of human activity on the environment makes sense; the political program of the climate lobby does not. It is too global and too grandiose ever to be implemented, and the kind of treaties that the movement has sought cannot be delivered by the international system that now exists.

At the national level, the climate lobby is reeling from a series of setbacks.  French President Sarkozy has dropped his support for what would have been Europe’s first carbon tax after concluding that the program was contributing to his steep decline in the polls.  Australia’s government was handed an embarrassing defeat over a climate change bill; an opposition leader who sided with the government lost his job when his party revolted.  In the United States, even the most optimistic proponents of climate change action have drastically scaled back their dreams; the current Senate bill on cap and trade looks more like a subsidy program for energy companies than like a serious effort to reduce America’s carbon use.  Polls in the United States are even less encouraging. As China and India sense that the global balance of power is changing in their favor and also that the climate lobby has lost political momentum in the West, they are looking less likely to take serious action.  And generally, the ongoing financial and economic problems in the world have driven climate change far down the list of global priorities — and made it harder for the climate lobby to raise money from private foundations and guilty rich people.

A poll by the German magazine Der Spiegel found that the percentage of Germans “worried” about the effects of climate change has fallen from 58 percent to 42 percent; German government officials are described as “horrified” by the lack of professionalism at the IPCC and German scientists are demanding the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri.

Characteristically the climate lobby is blaming its troubles on the moral imperfections of other people: short-sighted ordinary people too stupid to comprehend the danger, evil climate “deniers” confusing the peasants with misleading charts, energy producers ready to wreck Planet Earth if that will increase the value of their stock options, and cowardly politicians who won’t walk the plank for the most important issue in the history of mankind.  Another, less arrogant and obnoxious way to say the same thing is to say that the climate lobby has been unable to develop a strategy that could work in the world we happen to inhabit.

The current New Yorker offers a classic example of clueless hand wringing: “Why, with global warming, is it always one step forward, two, maybe three steps back?” asks Elizabeth Kolbert, citing a number of the cascading political disasters that have overtaken the movement.

Until the climate change movement understands the flaws in its own strategy, it will continue to experience political setbacks even as it repairs its scientific foundations.

There is nothing surprising about the green crack-up.  The changes the climate change movement sought were so dramatic, so complex and so expensive, and required so much coordination in so many different countries, that the climate lobby could only hope to prevail by creating an aura of mass panic about global warming.  In my first post about ‘climategate’, I wrote that climate scientists, like Dean Acheson at the start of the Cold War, felt they needed to be ‘clearer than truth’ to sell the public on the dangers they saw.  It was this that led the movement and its most visible leaders to stress high profile predictions (like the infamous glacier story) that very publicly blew up in their faces.

This was devastating to the movement; its narrative had been that “We are the scientists, the voices of reason; our critics are ignorant cranks.” Thus the ineffable Rajendra Pachauri, utterly incompetent to manage a high profile global scientific institution in its hour of crisis but serenely convinced of his superior wisdom and virtue, tore himself away from his erotic novel writing to dismiss people who dared question his beloved glacier prediction as “voodoo scientists”.

The critics’ narrative was simpler: “The emperor has no clothes.”  Climategate and the IPCC meltdown powerfully reinforced the critical narrative.  The pompous, wiser-than-thou establishment had been caught with its pants down.  The fact that the mainstream media were slow to appreciate the significance of these developments and were slow to grasp how much things had changed only served to strengthen the impression that the critics were right.  The mainstream media looked like the courtiers admiring the emperor’s fine new garments while everyone else could plainly see the skinny imperial knees and the saggy royal rear end.  It was a big political win for Matt Drudge, Fox News and all the other kids in the crowd shouting “But he’s not wearing anything at all!”

The underlying problem is strategic, not merely one of PR.  It turns out that the actual science, as strong as it is, won’t scare enough of the people enough of the time to enact the sweeping changes the climate lobby wants.  That may change over time as evidence accumulates, but the climate movement’s plan for a Big Global Fix probably can’t be adopted no matter what the science says.  In the meantime the effort to stampede the herd into the corral by hyping the evidence has not only collapsed; it has given skeptics a strategic boost.  Future pronouncements by future green poo-bahs will be met with more skepticism and more cynicism than ever before.  To the extent that the green lobby is fighting an entrenched conspiracy of rich oil companies, it has just handed its enemies a powerful set of weapons.

But there’s another little point to consider.  I hate to bring this up, but when it comes to the possibly disastrous problems that humanity has so far failed to solve, climate change is neither the most immediate or the most deadly.  We live with many unsolved problems.  Some are even scarier than global warming — like nuclear proliferation, the development of biological weapons of mass destruction, and the rising volatility of the international financial system.  It has been crystal clear for more than a century that modern technology makes war so overwhelmingly destructive that it should no longer be allowed; yet the world is no closer to the elimination of war than it was in 1910.  Any or all of these may well do us in before Antarctic ice melt drives tsunamis up the Hudson or climate change creates super-cyclones that empty Florida of everything except walking catfish and Burmese pythons.

Given the many dangers humanity faces, and the limited economic and political resources available to counter them, it’s not as clear as Prince Charles thinks that climate change needs to be the number one issue we address in the next 18 or 87 or however many months he thinks we have left.  The United States, for example, has only a limited amount of political capital with China and India.  Should we put all of our diplomatic chips on the table to stop global warming, or should we prioritize getting their help in strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, arms control, or local issues — like getting India to be more forthcoming in its negotiations with Pakistan, lessening the dangers of both proliferation and nuclear war?  Can an American administration survive if the country believes that it has chosen to ignore China’s trade surplus with the United States in order to prioritize global warming?  If President Obama is succeeded by a Republican, it’s unlikely that the US commitment to fighting climate change would grow.  How much of his political capital should the President spend on global warming now — as opposing to conserving his popularity and his political majority for worries like re-election and support for his disarmament policies?

“Science” provides no answer to questions like these; the climate change movement has not really thought them through.

I suspect that over time the list of issues that are at least as grave as climate change and quite possibly more urgent will grow.  The global economy appears headed into a turbulent era; how much of our political capital should be spent on working with China to avoid devastating world depressions that could get us into big trouble (like war) long before climate change can really hit us?  The weaponization of biology as our ability to create organisms and make new diseases explodes is likely to generate a host of arms control issues — and the proliferation of biological WMDs is far easier to arrange and harder to stop than the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  Terrorists in particular are likely to find ‘loose germs’ much easier to get hold of or even create than ‘loose nukes’.

In some ways, the greens are like a doctor telling a 95 year old man with heart trouble that he has a slow growing form of prostate cancer that is likely to kill him in 15 years.  He doesn’t have to be a ‘cancer denier’ to think that this isn’t the issue he needs to focus on right now.

Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and all the other naked green emperors need to get in line.  The human condition in the twenty-first century is far graver and more complex than they seem to understand.  They are not the only people with an urgent agenda; climate change is neither the only nor the most imminent threat to civilized life.  Humanity needs leaders who can face its problems whole, think about how to address them in context, and above all who can act calmly and deliberately — neither being swept away by every passing panic (remember swine flu) nor taking refuge in denial.

Striking that balance will be hard, but as I’ve written before on this blog, the twenty first century is likely to prove the most challenging era humanity has ever known.  To play its not inconsiderable part in the the complicated business of getting humanity through this century in reasonably good shape, the environmental movement needs stronger leadership than, so far, has come to the fore.  Not even Prince Charles, Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore seem to be up to the job.

But you’ve got to admire the threads.


Doing What Comes Naturally
by Walter Russell Mead
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/04/07/doing-what-comes-naturally/

Yesterday’s post on climate change was pretty gloomy.  A combination of scientific uncertainty, green ineptitude and the volume of other insistent global problems competing with the green agenda for resources and attention add up to near-certain for greens who think the only way to Save the Planet is to cut carbon use by international decree yesterday.

Worse, one of the reasons the climate change movement won’t get what it wants is that the constipated global political system is already in critical overload.  We are too busy failing to solve problems like poverty, war, economic instability, the culture clashes between the worlds various civilizations and religions and, oh yes, the proliferation of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction to have the time or resources to deal with the climate issue as its backers would like. In other words, civilization may not live long enough to worry about the consequences of climate change, and even if we do, our solutions and strategies are likely to be as partial, corrupt and incompetent as most of the other things our somewhat dysfunctional species attempts.

With an outlook this glum, why am I not investing in Canadian real estate and fallout shelters?  It’s not that I’m a skeptic about the science of climate change.  It’s that I’m a skeptic about Thomas Malthus (right).  In the many, many years that have passed since I was a promising young sprout in pundit school the world has suffered through one Malthusian panic attack after another.  The population bomb was going to create mass famines and untold disasters as those senseless third worlders bred themselves and us into a terminal food crisis.  (Overpopulation was the specter that caused the Reverend Thomas Malthus to make the original Malthusian disaster prediction back in 1798.)  The glaciers were going to sweep down from the north as the anomalously warm and benign climate of the latest interglacial period moved inexorably to its predestinated end.  Huge plagues sweeping out of central Africa (or, more recently, the duck and pig farms of southern China) were going to scythe through our overpopulated petri dish of a planet — an inevitable consequence of the combination of a rising population and greater international travel.  As water supplies dried up (overpopulation again, more recently mixed with climate change), a new era of destructive water wars was upon us (or soon will be: Malthusian tenses shift from decade to decade). Oil shortages were going to cause uncontrollable energy wars and/or drive prices up to unsustainable levels.

At this point, an old and crusty pundit like me has too many joint pains to jump up from the front porch and join the procession every time Chicken Little runs past my house on her way to warn the king about the latest horror.  I barely look up from the bridge column in the daily paper to watch the crowd run past, cackling in that senile, cynical way that idealistically Malthusian young people so deeply loathe.  I have become so hardened that I might even reflect that most of the chicken’s earnest followers out there in the road are simultaneously running two Malthusian horror movies in their heads that have incompatible plots.  One is the Peak Oil horror film, predicting havoc as our doomed and destructive dependence on hydrocarbons exhausts the natural supply, despoiling the environment and driving the prices to ruinous levels.  The other is the Mass Burning horror movie, in which non-renewable hydrocarbons remain so cheap and abundant that we burn them in such accelerating, vast quantities that the CO2 they release dooms the planet.  A graceless old reptile like me can’t help reflecting that one of these two ideas might be right, but that they can’t possibly both be.  If we run out of fossil fuels, we will stop emitting so much CO2.  If we keep emitting ghastly quantities of CO2, then fossil fuel must be pretty damn abundant, given the projected increase in developing world industrial activity.

The projection of statistical trends into disaster scenarios is as old as the modern science of statistics.  People once worried that England’s nascent industrial economy would come to a sputtering halt because forests were disappearing at increasing rates, driven by the need for charcoal.  The Peak Charcoal scenario yielded in time to Peak Coal worries before morphing into today’s Peak Oil and Peak Gas scenarios.  My favorite Malthusian crisis scenario is the horse manure problem.  Nineteenth century statisticians calculated how much cargo a horse could carry, and then looked at the daily needs of London’s population for food and other material goods.  From there it was a short step to calculate the amount of manure produced by each cart horse, the number of horses required to operate the manure removal carts, and basically to calculate a choke point: the point where cart horse manure would pile up so high in London’s streets that urban life would come to a crashing halt.

Malthusians always have science on their side, and the science is usually pretty good.  The processes involved are scientifically verifiable: the population is increasing at a certain rate; a single horse can haul so much freight so many miles in an eight hour day and, demonstrably, produces a certain amount of manure during that time.  Do the math: the sums add up.  And so, the Malthusians invariably say at this point, “What is wrong with you that you don’t panic?  Are you a science denier, a dung skeptic?  Can you not see that every day there is more manure on the streets?  Do you realize that the dung isn’t just piling up in your neighborhood, but that dung removal totals are increasing all over the city?  Are you a pawn of the cart horse industry, objecting to necessary regulations and taxes that are the only way to control the mounting road apple crisis before we all perish in a great stinking heap of horse hockey?”

The climate change panic (as opposed to the climate change concern) is a classic Malthusian panic.  The facts of the case are somewhat complicated because the data is difficult to assemble and the climate system is fiendishly complicated, but overall the methodology is classically Malthusian.  Do the math!  Check the science!!  We are all going to die!!!

For the student of comparative Malthusianism, the real question isn’t whether this particular panic has some scientific basis.  They almost always do.  The real question is why do these disaster scenarios, which over time tend to become more elaborate and more rigorous, not pan out?  Why are there both trees and blacksmiths in England after so many centuries?  Why have wages defied Thomas Malthus and kept rising for two hundred years despite the impeccable logic and math of his pamphlet?  Why did the coal not run out?  Why didn’t London perish ingloriously in the excrement of ten million carthorses?  Why do the predictions of oil and water catastrophes keep getting deferred?  Why haven’t we all died in a horrible plague?  Why are these people so persistently scientifically and mathematically right but historically wrong?

It’s odd, when you stop to think about it, just how frequently things work out better than we had any right to expect.  Who would have thought the brains of the descendants of savannah plains apes happened to be constituted in such a way that they could comprehend and even discover mathematical ideas that had nothing to do with the necessities for which their brains evolved, but apparently matched up at a profound level with the inner workings of the universe?  Who would have thought that an animal evolved to live in small groups could learn to live in complex, multicultural societies?  Or that ears evolved to detect danger should have the capacity to experience everything we hear and feel from music?  Who would have thought that there was so much electric bandwidth, a spectrum invisible all these years that just happened to be beautifully suited to human communication?  Theologians can dispute with atheists where this unearned benefit comes from or what it means, but you would have to be blind not to see the unexpected ways in which humanity fits into the universe we inhabit.

It’s not that a deus ex machina mysteriously steps into history from time to time, waves a magic wand, and gets us off the hook.  It’s rather that human beings are really much more creative and adaptable than we sometimes realize.  We are very good at solving problems, exploiting opportunities, and in general using what we’ve got to get what we need — but we are significantly better at doing this than we are at understanding how it’s done.

Perhaps one way to think of humanity is to think of a vast parallel processing computer network.  Our species is constantly receiving vast quantities of data and constantly changing our behavior in response to it.  When a big problem emerges, affecting us all over a country or the world, millions and billions of us start making changes in our behavior, trying new strategies and dealing with it in various ways.  We are constantly monitoring one another as well; when somebody’s coping strategy is working, other people pick it up.  When something is failing, we let it go.  From moment to moment, all over the world, human beings are processing information, shifting behavior, collecting feedback and rethinking their behavior.  A lot of this isn’t conscious; just as baseball pitchers can throw a curve ball without necessarily being able to understand the math that could describe the ball’s flight, so people who have no education or training in formal logic are able to process real world information and make good decisions.

Big problems like overpopulation or even carthorse overcrowding communicate themselves to many people, and they begin to shift their behavior.  As, for example, people in developing countries take note that advances in public health are reducing infant mortality, both sexes adjust their behavior and reduce the number of pregnancies for each woman.  As the changing balance of supply and demand alters the economics of family life and reduces the advantage of having additional children, people change their ideas about how many children they want — and the rate of population growth slows and, in some places, fertility rates fall below the replacement rate and the population starts to decline.

In London, the rising costs of supplying a growing city on the horse and buggy principle set people to thinking about different ways of managing the flow — and created a market for those horseless carriages that are now causing so much trouble.

The core point is that the fallacy of composition is overrated, as is its logical cousin, the problem of the commons.  More often than we suppose, individual behavior responds to large forces.  If oil is becoming scarce and the price of gas rises, people drive less and/or buy more efficient cars.  If water is becoming more scarce, they conserve, they recycle, they start to think about more efficient ways to desalinate sea water or use less in agriculture and so forth.  The bigger the problem, the harder we work on it — the more strategies we try, the quicker we are to adopt the ones that work, and the bigger rewards we pay to innovators who come up with new approaches.

My guess is that Malthusian panics are part of humanity’s coping mechanism.  The problems to which Malthusians point are almost always real problems, but the solutions they advocate are usually not the way out.  Malthusians classically go for big interventionist fixes, when humanity’s most efficient method of solving problems is to nibble them to death rather than swallow them whole.  Billions of people change their behavior; innovators perceive the economic rewards of addressing a growing problem and little by little, bite by bite, we nibble the problem down to size.

In its lunge for the grand global solution, the climate change movement was making the classic Malthusian mistake.  It was relying on a single dramatic solution to a vast problem, rather than working to prepare the way for a multitude of tiny fixes.  The growing environmental footprint of human activity on the natural environment is a real problem; the industrialization of the developing world is going to greatly increase the potential for serious damage to the environment.  Of all that I have no doubt.

But it is precisely because the problem is important that I believe that we need problem solving tools that are sharper, more flexible and more serious than the crude and blunt instruments now under discussion.  Climate change is only one of a series of major environmental issues that will confront us in the coming decades.  The unsustainable overfishing of the seas, the toxic waste being generated and almost certainly carelessly disposed of in rapidly industrializing countries, the loss of habit for key species and the considerable problems of atmospheric cleanliness unrelated or only tangentially related to greenhouse gasses: these and many more will have to be dealt with.

Putting so much of the world’s environmental energy and talent behind a quixotic solution is a bad idea.  That energy, creativity and commitment needs to work more efficiently and strategically if the world is to make enough progress on enough of its environmental issues.  Malthusian panics are part of the process by which humanity comes to grips with big problems, but they are rarely the source of the fix.  The climate change movement needs to move past Malthusian panic into broad engagement with social development.  There are lots of people in the environmental movement who already think this way; we need more.