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Environmental Ethics

Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 2: Objectivity

As promised at the end of part 1 (here ), I shall now run over the evidence for the failings of epistemic character among climate scientists. I shall be breaking this up into loosely related groups: objectivity, the conduct of enquiry, what is owed to other enquirers and virtue in testimony.  

impartiality

The emails show that these particular climate scientists are neither objective nor impartial. One even harbours violent urges towards a critic: ‘Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.’[1]

 

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Copenhagen

The Copenhagen climate change summit begins today, and will run for two weeks: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/copenhagen . The aim of this UN meeting is to establish agreements to succeed the Kyoto protocol, in the hope ultimately of limiting global warming to a maximum of 2˚C. After the disappointing results of the negotiations in Barcelona in September, it is looking unlikely that such agreements will emerge from Copenhagen. But it can be hoped that Copenhagen will play an important role in establishing a basis for further negotiations over the next few years. If those negotations fail, then there is a non-trivial risk that the overall quality of human life on the planet will plummet, or even that the earth will no longer be able to sustain human life at all.

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Climate scientists behaving badly? (Part 1)

Global warming hawks claim the moral high-ground, claim to speak for what is right against grubby self-interest. It behooves those who take the high ground to behave well themselves. Do they?

 

Data and email exchanges between climate scientists have been stolen from the servers at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published online. Whether the data or content of these emails tell us anything about global warming is not an issue I am concerned with. Nor, for that matter, am I concerned with bad behaviour in the sense of global warming hawks being rude about global warming skeptics. The bad behaviour of interest is epistemic bad behaviour, and on this matter I think the emails tell us quite a lot. Furthermore, the Climatic Research Unit is one of the world’s leading players and so the behaviour of its members tells us something about the epistemic state of climate science.

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Why pander to the pandas?

Chris Packham has recently (and not for the first time) suggested that we should stop trying to save the panda — an expensive exercise — and instead put our efforts and resources to ‘better use.’ This suggestion is worth some unpacking.

His argument is a familiar one about cost-effectiveness and resource allocation: we should use our resources so as to maximise their beneficial effects. This kind of argument relies, of course, on an estimation of the value of pandas (and so the disvalue of their extinction) with the cost-effectiveness of saving them being this value divided by the cost of doing so. This is then compared to the value and cost-effectiveness of other environmental concerns like protecting “biodiversity hotspots”.

Importantly there is a range of ways of valuing pandas and biodiversity that each may give different answers to the question of what we should do. It is instructive to consider a number of combinations of these to see how they might pan out and affect Packham’s claims.

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Wealth versus Happiness

Economists have long used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita as a proxy measure for the average level of wellbeing within a country. GDP is a measure of the goods and services produced in a country and is a fairly good proxy for material wealth. However, it fails to capture many other factors that are clearly important for wellbeing: for example, amount of leisure time, health, quality of one's environment, wealth distribution, employment rates, and changes in wealth over a lifetime. Some negative influences on wellbeing – such as crime – may even contribute positively to GDP since the costly government responses to them are included in a country's GDP. The gap between GDP and wellbeing obviously has important practical implications since policies correlated with higher (lower) GDP are likely to be adopted (rejected) for that reason.

On 14 September an expert group commissioned by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and and including no less than five Nobel prize laureates released a report recommending that official statisticians should move to a wider measure of wellbeing that takes into account some of the factors that GDP leaves out. This move away from 'GDP fetishism' has long been championed by the commission's chair, Joseph Stiglitz.

Everyone seems to acknowledge the problems with GDP, but the commission's report gets a cool response from some of the business press, with the adjective 'Orwellian' cropping up here and there. The Economist admits that 'broadening official statistics is a good idea in its own right', but emphasises that 'these are early days' and remains sceptical about the practicalities of moving away from GDP. The primary concern is about potential abuse of a less well defined measure by governments or interest groups and a resulting lack of public trust. The message seems to be that it's fine to research broader measures and to start collecting figures, but until something robust is found, GDP per capita should remain the gold standard. Policymakers shouldn't put any credence in the broader measures yet.

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Should we forget about organic food?

A recent
report by the Food Standards Agency argues that organic food doesn’t bring any
substantial nutritional benefits compared to conventionally produced food.
This contradicts the conclusions of previous studies suggesting organic food to
be nutritionally superior. As one might have expected, supporters of organic
farming have been critical of the report, yet it is unfortunate that the media
coverage on this issue often gives the impression that organic food has been
shown to be a sham (some consumer groups thus expect shoppers to now “think
twice before buying organic”)
and that its advocates are now reduced to using any bad argument they can think
of to prove the contrary. This impression is understandable but misleading.

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Educating children on matters of food

As evidenced by recent declarations by the Children’s Secretary (see here and here),
the British government is determined to fight childhood obesity and to initiate
nothing less than a “lifestyle revolution”, resulting in more children leading
a healthy and active life. With this aim in view, a free cookbook was recently distributed to 11
year-olds by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. In
addition to that, from 2011
cookery lessons will be compulsory in England's secondary schools for children
aged 11 to 14, and £3.3 million will be invested in order to
recruit and train people capable of teaching cooking skills to children.
Parents are also urged to teach their children how to prepare meals from
scratch.

These are certainly sensible steps to take. With nine out of 10 British adults
and two-thirds of children expected to be overweight or obese by the year 2050
unless action is taken (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/30/obesity),
we are clearly dealing with an important public health issue. And given the
significance of the link between excess weight and an unhealthy diet (lack of
exercise being another major contributing factor), it seems clear that we should
teach children what a healthy diet consists in and equip them not to be dependent on
the local fast-food chain when the time of the next meal comes. We can hope
that the government’s scheme will help to achieve this, and that parents will
follow the lead – though it is also necessary that the meals provided in school
canteens be in keeping with those aims. However, I would like to suggest that
these steps should form part of a wider project meant to educate children on
matters of food. We want our children to be healthy, but we should also want
them to become autonomous and ethically responsible eaters (and, more
generally, consumers).

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Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit

The current issue of the Royal Society’s journal (Philosophical Transactions) is devoted to geo-engineering. That is, very large scale engineering projects aimed at combatting global warming. For example, one proposal is to release sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere in order to increase the reflectivity of the earth and thus lower the earth’s temperature enough to offset global warming. Another proposal is to increase the reflectivity by producing more cloud over the ocean. This could be achieved with a large fleet of wind powered yachts, blowing a fine mist of salt spray into the air and thus seeding cloud formation. Such proposals offer a serious hope for avoiding most of the damage from significant climate change, and yet they are often rejected by environmentalists (for example see yesterday’s article in the Guardian by Greenpeace’s chief scientist). However, there is a strong case that these environmentalists are mistaken and should be encouraging this research.

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The truth about saving water

The last few years have seen some very bad droughts. In the UK, the drought of 2004-2006 was severe enough to nearly require the shutting down of domestic water in London and the fetching of water from public wells (called standpipes). Australia has been suffering from its own decade long drought with devastating consequences. As a result, water-awareness in both countries has been rising. People are at least dimly aware of ideas for saving water, such as turning off the tap while brushing one’s teeth. In Australia there was even a government sponsored advertisement recommending taking showers with someone else. However, as a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund shows, even if we stop showering altogether, we will still be using an unsustainable amount of fresh water.

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