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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Overheated rhetoric on climate change

The Meteorological Office has helpfully produced figures which show that this April has been the warmest “ever” (in other words, it has been the warmest for at least three hundred years in the Midlands, which are where the oldest actual records we have were taken). On the back of this they have averred that it is “almost certain” that this is a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. Mr John Hammond, representing the Met Office on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme on Friday, could hardly contain his enthusiasm, and sounded rather pained when the interviewer reminded him that there would surely be cooler Aprils in the future. One swallow does not make a summer, and one unseasonably warm April does not make a global ecological catastrophe. Of course it’s not that simple – and nobody seriously contests that climate change is a reality. The point at issue is the cause of the climate change.

This is where the Met Office has done a serious disservice. While the issue of whether or not climate change is occurring is uncontroversial (indeed trivial, since climate is naturally dynamic and changes all the time), the issue of whether or not current climate changes are due to human activity or not is of vital importance, principally because a whole raft of policy decisions across the world depend on the answer. The lazy thinking behind so much comment on the issue is extremely unhelpful in this regard. A prime example of just such sloppiness is provided by Michael McCarthy in Saturday’s Independent:

The temperatures recorded during [the French heatwave of 2003] were so far above the statistical record that it is accepted by meteorological scientists as having been caused by climate change - and is regarded as one of its first manifestations in Europe.

The suggestion that the French heatwave may have been caused by climate change is so absurd as to be practically meaningless. It is rather like saying that traffic jams are caused by cars. What the writer really intends is to convey that meteorological scientists consider the French heatwave to have been caused by human beings. However, McCarthy has to resort to ludicrous comments like the above in order to sustain the following charge:

A side effect might well be to make it extremely hard for people who do not accept that climate change is happening to deny the reality of a warming world.

As stated above, very few people deny that there has been a period of global warming over the past thirty years or so. But nevertheless there is an overriding political imperative from certain quarters to convince the world (a) that climate change is of human origin; and (b) that those who doubt (a) are denying reality. In a free society we can’t stop journalists or politicians from indulging in this sort of thing. It is a great pity, however, that we have to put up with it from institutions such as the Met Office.

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Overheated rhetoric on climate change