How the Climate Agenda Weaponises Science to Erode Democracy

BEN PILE

A petition started last year on Parliament’s website calls on MPs to “Repeal the Climate Change Act 2008 and Net Zero targets”. Now exceeding 10,000 signatures, the petition has had a response from the Government. The text of the petition is identical to an earlier version that was submitted in the previous Parliamentary term but closed because of the General Election. That petition also received a response from the then Government, as we reported here. However, there are some revealing differences in the replies given by the respective administrations.

If there is a shortcoming in the petition, it is that it allows the Government to hide its ideological agenda behind scientific authority. This is an ongoing problem with criticisms of the green agenda broadly, because arguments that rest on scientific authority are often alienating, and seemingly mirror the excesses of the green agenda’s apparent deference to technocrats. The petition states, not inaccurately, that “many hundreds of scientists up to the highest Nobel Laureate level have jointly declared ‘There is no climate emergency’”. This is a reference to Clintel’s petition of 1,900 experts. (Listen to my podcast with Clintel’s co-founder, Marcel Crock here.) But this is then undermined.

The petition continues, arguing that climate policy is “in effect based on just one side of a two-sided scientific debate as we do not consider there to be a scientific consensus on the hypothesis of human emissions causing climate change”.

As I argued at Climate Debate UK, confronting the excesses of green ideology requires care to make distinctions between categories of argument that comprise the case for climate policies. These categories are, roughly speaking, ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’, ‘climate impacts’, ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate policy’. These concepts, though related, are not equivalent, and comprise a chain of reasoning, the stages of which are joined much more by ideological presupposition than by fact, allowing greens to claim they are equivalent. The green case conflates the putative fact of climate change with the Nth-order consequence of ‘climate crisis’. And the petition reproduces this category error by switching from the criticism of “climate emergency” (climate crisis) to the “scientific consensus on the hypothesis of human emissions causing climate change”. In other words, the petition does the greens’ argument for them.

You may well believe that there is no “scientific consensus on the hypothesis of human emissions causing climate change”. But to conflate the substance of this claim with the climate crisis is to miss opportunities to examine how ideology influences seemingly scientific judgements. It is far easier to prove that there is no “climate crisis” than it is to prove that there is no climate change – and it may well be wrong. And the disproof of this “climate crisis” requires no deference to scientific authority. My attempt to show this in my film Why There is no Climate Crisis (and why people believe that there is) also shows how ideology conceals the gap between climate science and climate policy.

It may well seem easier to look at the green chain of reasoning, and therefore to focus criticism on the upstream claims about the functioning of atmospheric CO₂. But that has the further consequences of alienating an audience and pitching oneself against gigantic scientific institutions. If error has been introduced to the chain of reasoning by ideological or political influence, then the best point of entry into that debate is the location in that chain where ideological influence is most obvious.

The petition’s mis-emphasis therefore allows the Government reply that “The IPCC is the authoritative source of information on climate science”, and that “The IPCC has established that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented”. Whether you agree or not with these claims is immaterial. Others will see that the petition itself asked for deference to scientific authority, and on that same basis those observers will take the side of the greater scientific authority, rather than get into scientific claims and counter-claims about the physics of CO₂ and the mechanics of the IPCC process. And this allows the Government to advance the claim, seemingly on the IPCC’s authority, that, “if the CO₂ concentration continues to rise unchecked the world could face a global surface temperature rise of about 3°C or more above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century”.

“The Net Zero transition” is therefore necessary, according to the Government’s reply, “because of the economic costs of unmitigated climate change”. Citing the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), it adds that, “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to Net Zero”. The OBR’s analysis claims to show “debt spiralling up to around 290% of GDP thanks to the cost of adapting to an ever hotter climate and of more frequent and more costly economic shocks”.

But the problem with this claim is that it is based on assumptions of “the most pessimistic Met Office projection to have severe consequences for the public finances”, and, “that the cost of adaptation to each degree of warming raises spending by 0.3% of GDP a year”. Furthermore, this extremely shallow analysis of cost, little more than back-of-a-fag-packet guesswork, borrows from the Bank of England’s (BoE) equally dire methodology.

The worst-case assumptions, implemented by the IPCC, but used by the Met Office, the BoE and OBR in their own ways, are based on ‘scenarios’, known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and latterly “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs). But these scenarios are not ‘science’. In the past, debates about future warming were loosely based on estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ – the temperature rise that would be produced by a doubling of atmospheric CO₂. But science was unable to overcome the uncertainties produced by climate simulations to sustain this conceptual framework to meet political demands for prognostications.

So, the uncertainties of climate science were wrapped in other assumptions about demographics, economic growth and the use of energy resources. As Roger Pielke explains, the “most commonly used RCP scenario and the one said to best represent what the world would look like if no climate policies were enacted – represents not just an implausible future in 2100, but a present that already deviates significantly from reality. … RCP8.5 projects to 2100 a six-fold growth in global coal consumption per capita”, and “foresees carbon dioxide emissions growing rapidly to at least the year 2300 when Earth reaches more than 2,000 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations”, he points out. “Making up a phoney fiscal horror show out of an extreme and implausible climate scenario can hardly be described as fiscal responsibility,” argues Rupert Darwall, in an equally important analysis of UK government agencies’ climate interventions.

The Government switched its appeal to authority from the IPCC to agencies under its own control: the MO, the BoE and the OBR. Though the design of the UK’s political order seemingly grants these parts of the state ‘independence’, the very clear fact of the matter to anyone who cares to look at the composition of quangos in the post-Blair era is that state agencies recruit in their own image. The idea that any of these agencies would appoint climate change sceptics to even junior roles, never mind senior management, is implausible. Moreover, climate ideology is embedded in such agencies’ standing orders. Groupthink is consequently a genetic condition. And the more that the Government has leant into ‘global climate leadership’, the more that state agencies have been required to squeeze ever more political capital out of an extremely weak scientific claim.

Though the IPCC may have started the problem with its emphasis on what even notable climate alarmists openly call “implausible” and “misleading” “worst-case scenarios”, UK state agencies have amplified the problem to the point of lying. The claim that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to Net Zero” is sheer fantasy. We can know this because the response admits, “many people are struggling with their bills and we want to do everything we can to help them”. And indeed, vastly more people and businesses are struggling with their bills than are struggling with anything that resembles ‘climate change’. But that very obvious fact gives the Government no pause for thought before its even more grotesque lie: the claim that this ‘transition’ is going to produce benefits.

It is true, as the Government claims, that “There is no ‘two-sided’ debate on anthropogenic climate change”, if, and only if, the claim that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas is equivalent to the claim that increasing the cost of energy will make people better off. We can see that there is no such equivalence – that a great deal of presupposition is required to make such a leap. And ideology dwells in such leaps. The Government claims that its “ambitious action on climate change reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus”, but between the putative scientific consensus that anthropogenic CO₂ increases global temperature and its policy agenda is a very long chain of reasoning, comprising many steps that are not the object of any scientific consensus whatsoever.

The science that seemingly comprises the steps in that chain of reasoning, but which are in fact ideological leaps made by wonks and hacks whose salaries and careers are wholly dependent on obedience to groupthink, is, frankly for the birds. And none of that is to argue that CO₂ is not a greenhouse gas, or that the world is not warmer, or that the warming does not produce climate change. It is to argue that no matter what the ‘science says’, a democratic government is answerable to the public, not to panels that governments have themselves convened with instructions to make the case for policy action.

The fact of 21st century politics is that Western governments in particular have decided that democracy is not the preferred basis for control of policymaking and governance.

Continue reading: The Daily Sceptic

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