One of the clearest ways in which, for some, a belief in anthropogenic global warming has taken on the characteristics of a religion is in the way it has provided them with an organizing principle that helps ‘explain’ so much that would otherwise be random (a terrifying thought, apparently) or, in any event, beyond mankind’s control. To the ancients, the idea that terrible storms, say, or famine, was the work of the gods was not only an explanation for the previously inexplicable, but also, paradoxically, a source of hope and, for their priests, control. Could divine wrath be appeased by a sacrifice or two or, for that matter, better behavior? If it could, man was no longer powerless in the face of natural disaster. What a relief.
Time has moved on and many religions, excluding perhaps the curious faith apparently professed by Pat Robertson, are now a little more sophisticated, but the certainty with which some in the AGW crowd link catastrophe to climate change has been striking and more than a little reminiscent of more primitive belief systems.
Under the circumstances, this latest inconvenient revelation about the way in which the IPCC, the UN’s climate change body, has both been operating and been used is striking:
The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.
Ed Miliband, the [British] energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”
I haven’t been reading your blog for long, so maybe you’ve made this analogy before, but I think it is VERY interesting. I haven’t ever heard it, and I think it’s great and makes perfect sense. In fact, that GW is used to explain EVERYTHING is one of the main reasons I find myself skeptical (that and because I find their statistics suspect). It’s the hottest summer of all? Global warming. Bigger storms? Global warming. Snowing in March in the South? Well, that’s GW, too! Cooler summer? Global Warming! The way it is used to explain everything sends my bullshit radar into overdrive. It’s difficult because asking questions about it gets you the same response as if you asked a question about Creationism: attacked. It frustrates me. 🙁
Laura,
Look up “Environmentalism as Religion” on the web, an essay by the late Michael Crichton.
Oh, for goodness’ sake. At least make a pretence of actually verifying media claims before going off the rails!
1. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers (you know, the bit written for people like Milliband) has a handy little table about attribution for things like heavy precipitation events, tropical cyclones, etc etc. This table says it is likely (probability greater than 66%, confidence 90%) that such phenomena have seen a worsening trend in recent decades. However, it has a separate column for likelihood of human contributions to that observed trend – and this never assigns a value of greater than more likely than not, with an added footnote explicitly stating that ‘Attribution for these phenomena [has been] based on expert judgement rather than formal attribution studies.’ It’s always a good idea to look at what a report actually says rather than relying on the spin by politicians and journalists trying to exploit it for political capital or to secure newspaper sales.
2. Even if you look only at the claims cherry-picked for the Times article you seem to be citing (and your link is broken, by the way), you can see that the assertion that catastrophe costs have been rising due to climate change is not actually made by the IPCC at all. The IPCC claim is that the costs of weather-related catastrophes have been rising, followed by an observation that one single report claimed to detect a limited signal that goes beyond land use etc (a tentative conclusion at best). And even this must be viewed in the light of the report’s caution about attributing present trends in extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change in the first place!
3. The debated paper by Muir-Wood was not (as insinuated by the Times) the source for attribution of worsening weather events to climate change – there have been many, many studies exploring that issue, with a lot of caveats in their conclusions (hence the IPCC’s caution). That report was the only source focusing on attributing increased costs of disasters to climate change – a very different thing. The IPCC’s claim is NOT NOT NOT as it is presented in that scurrilous Times article.
4. It is not wholly true to claim (as Pielke apparently does) that ‘People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part [in rising costs] but can’t find it.’ It may be trivially true in a sense (in that no one who has explicitly studied cost impacts has been able to make such an attribution; I’m not sure, since it’s not an area I’m familiar with at all, though iirc the Stern Report found differently – maybe Pielke means ‘no one I personally believe claims to have found such a link’?) but that’s really a bit of a red herring. There are many studies that have (with varying confidence) found a global warming contribution to certain kinds of disasters; but this attribution is difficult to make with any confidence in specific cases due to the signal-to-noise ratio in weather, harder still to quantify, and so effectively impossible to cost as yet. Even if physical scientists were interested in making formal economic attributions, which they tend not to be.
I appreciate that you like this ‘AGW-as-religion’ meme, and there is certainly a degree of that going on among the people who latch onto the ideas without actually making any attempt at serious understanding (though the same can be said for many other branches of science, and for many other human endeavours; it’s the human constant). And I do note the rigorous insertion of ‘some’ people every time you bring this up. But there’s a bit of dodginess in taking the claims of the genuinely nutty (some environmentalist types) or cynically manipulative (some politicians) or simply ignorant, prejudiced, and lazy (some journalists, say) and using their claims to discredit the IPCC without ever actually looking at what the IPCC actually claims.
Is there any other branch of science you would judge by media reporting and political posturing alone? Stem cells, say? Cancer research?
Yeah – newspapers get science so badly wrong it’s not even funny. Even some of the better papers for science reporting, such as the NYT, often have howlers.
It kind of bugs me that people point to popular reporting on global warming – which often confuses weather and climate. Yes it is part of what gets in the popular mind. But to informed people who think global warming is reasonably established science this carelessness about warming is bad even when it happens to be promoting warming. (And let’s be honest – the media is often going the other direction)