Obligated to Politicize
March 19th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
James Hansen is once again in the news for his advocacy efforts. This time he is in the UK to help lead a political protest against coal. The Guardian quotes Hansen as saying that:
The democratic process isn’t working
What he means by this is unclear. It could mean that he thinks that the process needs to be fixed, or that democracy itself is flawed. He further states:
Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: “The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
“The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I’m not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we’re running out of time.”
Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. “I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society’s attention to the issue are not inappropriate,” Hansen said.
I wonder what the second and third actions are? We’ll have to wait and see I guess.
In the Times, Hansen is quoted as well as a number of other scientists discussing their turn to political advocacy, but explicit and implicit. Here is a long excerpt from this very interesting article:
Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he believed scientists, the people who knew most about climate change, now had a moral obligation to become politically active. He has chosen Coventry to stage Thursday’s protest because it is home to E.ON, the power company that is planning a giant new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent.
He will lead the demonstrators to a final protest on its doorstep. The protest, being organised by Christian Aid, will involve a New Orleans-style funeral march by “mourners” for future lost generations.
“We can no longer allow politicians and business to twist and ignore science,” said Hansen.
“The scientists can connect the dots and define the implications of different policy choices and we should make clear those implications.”
Hansen also launched a direct attack on the Labour government, criticising its decision to approve a new runway at Heathrow and calling the Kingsnorth proposal a “terrible idea”.
“One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions,” he said.
Hansen is just one of a number of leading researchers who believe that scientists must get out of their laboratories and campaign on climate change.
They say researchers have spent nearly two decades producing high-quality research demonstrating that the world risks dangerous warming – yet political inaction means CO2 emissions are rising faster than ever. Many also believe the United Nations talks aimed at a global treaty on cutting emissions are likely to fail.
They compare the anger and concern among climate researchers to that felt by physicists as they watched the massive growth in nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s.
Back then, such concerns prompted many leading scientists to become politically active in movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The leaders of that movement even included Professor Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist now best known for describing the Higgs Boson particle, which is thought to give matter its mass.
His modern counterparts include scientists such as Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow, at the Earth and Biosphere Institute at Leeds University, whose recent research on the impact of climate change on tropical forests has been published in leading journals such as Nature and Science.
Lewis believes his understanding of climate change means he is morally obliged to become a climate activist. He took part in the recent Climate Camp protests at both Kingsnorth and Heathrow.
He has also joined with other protesters to buy land outside Sipson, the village near Heathrow that would be destroyed by construction of the runway.
“If the government permits the building of new infrastruc-ture which locks us into a future of high CO2 emissions, there is a moral obligation to try to stop them,” he said.
Even the Met Office, which traditionally has been one of the government’s most conservative research institutions, has become quietly radical over climate.
It sent a team of its top climate scientists to the Copenhagen meeting – backing them with a team of publicists who lobbied journalists intensively to maximise coverage of their research.
Others have used scientific publications to make overtly political points. Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre, the government’s leading global warming research centre, recently used the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, one of the world’s most respected academic journals, to call for a “planned global recession” to cut carbon emissions.
“Emissions are rising so fast that we are heading for a world that will be 4C-5C warmer than now by 2100. That would be catastrophic,” he wrote.
“Unless economic growth can be reconciled with unprecedented rates of decarbonisa-tion, it is difficult to foresee anything other than a planned economic recession being compatible with stabilising the climate.”
Even other climate researchers were shocked by such overtly political comments in a pure research paper but Anderson is unrepentant.
Speaking in Copenhagen last week, a meeting he attended by train and ferry to maintain his personal boycott of flights, he said: “Scientists have lost patience with carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. We must stand up for what we know.”
Others believe many more scientists will feel obliged to take a similar stand.
Marcus du Sautoy, professor for the public understanding of science and professor of mathematics at Oxford University, said climate change was “galvanising” the scientific community.
“The evidence and data is all there but politicians don’t seem to understand what the science is telling them, so the scientists feel they have to respond,” he said.
John Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, said scientists had become more willing to get politically active after mounting successful campaigns against proposals to put legal restrictions on embryo and stem cell research.
“Scientists are increasingly aware of their public responsibilities and realise there is not much point in doing science unless your findings will be uti-lised. They now realise that if they make themselves heard on climate change then policy makers will react,” he said.
Kathy Sykes, professor of sciences and society at Bristol University, said scientists were increasingly aware that they had a duty to convey their knowledge more effectively – and that meant becoming political.
“Every now and again, when things become absolutely desperate, as it has with climate change, scientists have to become advocates,” she said.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Even a “planned global recession” would not be nearly enough; they’re being far too humanitarian. It’s time for them to come out and say that the entire human population needs to be exterminated, save for perhaps a few dozen breeding pairs of exceptional specimens, such as leading climatologists. They might as well, since there’s no longer any credibility left for such an absurd demand to damage.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:05 am
LOL. THat article is so biased that it is pathetic. If all scientists were to become vocal advocates of their position, I think it’s pretty clear that the MAJORITY would be saying that there is no reason for panic! These AGW-extremists keep saying they represent some kind of consensus, knowing very well that they are not. So they are liars, from the very start.
““We can no longer allow politicians and business to twist and ignore science,” said Hansen.”
Many people think it is Hansen who is twisting and ignoring science.
March 19th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Hansen needs to go home and stop obsessing about Kingsnorth. He can find 20 or 30 coal fired plants in the US to try to get closed. Do that, then come back and tell us about it. Till then, just go home.
March 19th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
“Hansen needs to go home and stop obsessing about Kingsnorth. He can find 20 or 30 coal fired plants in the US to try to get closed.”
In the time it takes one to read these two sentences, the Chinese have started to build another coal-fired power plant.
Seriously though, his efforts to stop the Kingsnorth power plant from being built while the Chinese are building so many seems rather futile (if reducing CO2 emissions from power plants really is his concern).
For example, here is a December 2004 report that indicated that the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency had received environmental impact reports for the construction of 200 coal-fired power plant in the *first 11 months* of 2004.
The total capacity was 180,000 megawatts. That’s more than HALF of the entire U.S. coal-fired power plant capacity. In less than one year!(!!!)
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200412/10/eng20041210_166808.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat2p2.html
March 19th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
The article seems rather well-written and objective to me; it’s just that it’s reporting on what could be a troubling trend.
It seems to me scientists should of course be guaranteed the right to be politically active, but if they are, they should be ready for others to take the scientists’ political activity and political statements within papers into account when judging their science.
Still, it makes me uncomfortable that the person in charge of assembling data for and processing/constructing it into the the US’s most-respected land-based temperature record (Hansen, GISS) is overtly stating that pure science and democracy are not enough when it comes to this issue. This, in addition to the already troubling situation where a person constructing an official scientific record is also in the business of predicting its future values, and politically and personally vested in those future values turning out a certain way. And while this may be unfair, it’s also very troubling to me that that record (GISS) has been diverging from satellite records in recent years, in the direction of the above-mentioned personally desired values.
Perhaps, in the interest of GISS maintaining (or recapturing, depending on one’s opinion) its credibility, it’s time for Dr. Hansen to step down, most likely to become a full-time activist. It seems to me, however, that his apparent, growing megalomania makes this unlikely to happen any time soon, at least by his own choice.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
re: Kmye March 19th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
“it’s also very troubling to me that that record (GISS) has been diverging from satellite records in recent years, in the direction of the above-mentioned personally desired values.”
While it may be true that GISS is “the US’s most-respected land-based temperature record” it is a record that is becoming ever more apparently flawed. Science is based on empiricism, the careful observation of phenomena. If your method of observation is flawed, so, too, is your data. Real scientists pay close attention to the validity of their instruments (are we measuring what we think we are measuring?). The meteorologist Anthony Watts has started a project to review the stations that are collecting GISS data. The results are very discouraging. Take a look at
http://www.surfacestations.org/
Anyone who grew up in the fifties and sixties can tell you the world has warmed (at least it has in Southern New England). How much has it warmed? Has it ever been warmer? What are the trends? The data is, in fact, unreliable and the US GISS data is the gold standard. If it is as badly flawed as it appears, then the rest of the world’s records cannot be any better. Rather than spending trillions on cap-and-trade and green technology, maybe we should spending a few millon (ok, maybe a billion or so) on a valid and reliable system of measurement.
From a demographic point of view, cap and trade and the restrictions on development will result in the deaths of millions, primarily third world people. Politically, it will strengthen authoritarian regimes. Ordinary people CAN understand the science if they are given the time. Hansen wants to tell us there is no time and we should trust him. There is evidence that the world is in fact growing cooler… cold kills faster than heat. Isn’t in our interests to know the facts?
March 19th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
“Scientists have lost patience with carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. We must stand up for what we know.”
So do all scientists from all disciplines get to “stand up for what we know”? And if we all did, would that look surprisingly like the variety of political viewpoints about “what is the best thing to do?”
Perhaps we need a mechanism where all scientists get an equal vote by some gigantic survey.. one scientist, one vote, and then we would know what “scientists think”. Otherwise it’s purely rhetoric and not a bit “scientific” at all. IMHO.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:53 am
[...] "…..faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." – 1 Cor 13:13 added an interesting post on Obligated to PoliticizeHere’s a small excerptNations talks aimed at a global treaty on cutting emissions are likely to fail. They compare the anger and concern among climate researchers to… [...]
March 20th, 2009 at 9:20 am
“Hansen also launched a direct attack on the Labour government, criticising its decision to approve a new runway at Heathrow …”
How did he get to the UK? By rowboat? Seriously, we do not have an alternative to long-haul flights for intercontinental travel at the moment. The protest might make more sense if it concerned expansion of infrastructure for shorter commuter flights, where fast rail could be a lower-emissions alternative. (I just returned to Australia from the climate conference in Copenhagen and I sure as hell didn’t travel by donkey – so I’m in no position to preach!)
I have a lot of respect for Jim Hansen as a scientist, and I agree in general on the need overall to shift to low-(or lower) carbon emissions. But the notion that “science” has some special authority which overrules democracy (which is what I am reading – perhaps mistakenly – in his comments) frankly scares me. It has the ring of totalitarianism to me.
As scientists we are, perhaps, in a better position than the populace in general to identify the processes affected by carbon emissions and to anticipate some of the risks. We can, and should, report those to the best of our current understanding. But the question of what, if anything, to DO about it, is not a scientific one and science has no special authority there. Even if we had a perfectly clear view of the future under our current emissions path, there is a possibility that policymakers (and the voters they answer to) decide the best policy is to adapt, compensate, mitigate, later, rather than cut emissions. This would be a perfectly valid policy option – even if I personally think it would be misguided. And I do think it would be misguided – there’s much we can do to reduce the risks presented by the buildup of CO2 and other GHGs. I can say so, as a citizen, and advocate my position (vote, write to my representatives, write letters to editors, give money to advocacy organisations). Then I have to step back and let democracy work. Sometimes I agree with the result and sometimes I don’t.
For those climate scientists who claim democracy doesn’t “work,” what just happened in the USA, and the previous year in Australia? Governments opposed to Kyoto-style emissions-limitation agreements were voted out, and governments in favor (at least in their rhetoric) were voted in. Climate policy was not the only issue on which those elections turned, but it was a prominent element of the successful campaigns. To complain about democracy in this context sounds like an inability to take “yes” for an answer.
Have the Rudd (Australia) and Obama administrations lived up their rhetoric? Well no, not quite, at least not yet. The Rudd gov’t has scaled back its early stated ambitions for deep emissions cuts, citing economic trade-offs.
And I couldn’t help but notice that one of the earliest big spending initiatives announced by President Obama under his economic stimulus package was for roads. After seeing this announcement by Pres. Obama at the Transportation Dept. ($28 billion for road construction), and another announcement of spending for airport infrastructure, I heard several comments at the conference about how great it was that Obama was going to use the economic stimulus for “green” energy initiatives. Perhaps he will – and that would be great and I will applaud it. And whatever the merits of spending on road and airport infrastructure, “green” it is not. Are climate scientists protesting this? To be true to the positions enunciated above by Jim Hansen and others, they would be obligated to.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Hansen is saying that the voters agree with him and that the politicians are refusing to do the will of the voters because they are being bought by money from business. I think he’s nuts. The voters have no desire to impose higher taxes, fees, and regulatory burdens on themselves for the purpose of saving the world from AGW.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
For who is interested, the presentation and speech of Jim Hansen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands (27 november 2008) is available online.
http://www.kennisvoorklimaat.nl/templates/dispatcher.asp?page_id=25222883
Summary: The usual scaremongering of ‘tipping points’ and ‘warming in the pipeline’.