Channel 4 Teaches the Controversy
March 13th, 2007
Views: 283
I’m back. Don’t all cheer at once.
That particular hiatus was occasioned by the need to a) finish co-writing a book (on the shelves in Autumn, folks! more details soon), b) finish assisting in making a written case against National Grid’s planning appeal and c) get everything transferred from our old PC over to a new one, and to get the £15 wireless router I got from Ebay working (which actually probably took the longest of the lot).
For a bit of relaxation last night, Rochenkette and I sat down to watch the repeat of The Great Climate Change Swindle on More 4, and somehow neither of us put a foot through the screen for a whole hour, as we were treated to what can only be described as a ‘polemical and thought-provoking documentary’ (© Channel 4), because it doesn’t really deserve any more than that level of verbal inanity.
Still, I’ll give it a couple more hopefully non-inane paragraphs, because the rhetoric, if mostly empty, was good enough to build an internally-coherent, superficially convincing case.
OK, let’s get the ad hominems out of the way first (and note: playing the man rather than the ball is not always a dishonest strategy). The director Martin Durkin is a longstanding acolyte of the Spiked Online crowd (see here for a quick rundown) with a history of distortion and ignoring evidence, and the subtext of the programme (unrestricted growth is good, environmentalists are all moralising fascists) was pure Spiked boilerplate. Given Durkin’s affiliations, it was interesting that one of the more absurd sections of the programme concerned how climate change apparently gave the Global Left something to nail its colours to after 1989, perhaps projecting his sympathy for Frank, Mick, Brendan and the other ex-RCPers who are confronted with a gaping hole where their ideology used to be when they get up every morning. But my dislike of the Spiked agenda aside, Durkin’s credibility relies on the credibility of his witnesses as well the arguments in the programme, mainly because he chose very deliberately to present them as ’senior’ authorities on climate science (all of whom, presumably, are always stopped speaking out by the global environmental conspiracy and yet somehow managed to gain their senior status - and get grant funding, despite all the money, as Durkin claimed, going to the members of said conspiracy).
OK, here’s some food for thought on that. Particularly amusing that he dragged Piers Corbyn on as a reputable authority. And there is, of course, the charges of misrepresentation that are now being slung around by some of the people Durkin apparently conned into appearing on a programme whose basic thesis they fundamentally disagree with.
As for the arguments, they’re mostly effectively debunked (PDF) by John Houghton - for more detail, see Ill Considered. But the most glaring flaw in the whole thing was Durkin’s presentation of the causal story concerning climate change. According to the programme, there cannot be a causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and temperature rise because we have evidence from ancient ice core samples that shows a lag between the start of periods where temperature rises happened, and increases in CO2 levels. Given that, temporally speaking, the temperature rise comes first, how can CO2 cause it? Similarly, given that average temperatures actually fell during the first half of the 20th century (when CO2 production really took off), how can emissions of CO2 make any difference?
Here, the misunderstanding of causality at work is so basic that it looks like deliberate omission. Climate change is not about one variable intervening to ‘force’ an overall change in a linear fashion; it concerns a mutually reinforcing relationship between variables. Certainly (as the programme pointed out triumphantly - forgetting that everyone accepts this anyway) the global climate is subject to all kinds of fluctuations. The preponderant influences in each case may be different, but solar activity is probably a significant one - as Durkin also suggested. But the current models of climate change tend to treat historical concentrations of CO2 as an amplifier of effects which may derive from other sources, feeding back into the overall tendency of temperature to rise. Therefore if heating of the atmosphere liberates more CO2, then this CO2 subsequently increases the temperature further - and so on. Similarly, once other systemic variables are taken into account in relation to the early 20th century fall in average temperatures, then other multifactorial causal relationships can be established: here, we see that, as man-made sulfate emissions fall and GHG emissions rise, the global average temperature rises - dramatically after 1975, which was when Durkin’s data conveniently seemed to stop. The key relationship is therefore not a linear correlation between two variables, one of which has temporal priority over the other, but a non-linear one between several variables. To seek to make one variable (whether it’s CO2 or solar activity) the efficient cause of changes in all the others is just to misunderstand the basis of complex systems modelling.
[…] The ‘Logic of Essence’ in the Science of Logic attempts to carry this forward by mounting a full-on critique of the separation between essence and ‘mere’ reflection, essence and appearance, ground and grounded, and substance and accidents. Through this movement, the concept of relation - Kant’s third causal category of reciprocity - receives a full articulation as the primary means of thinking identity dynamically. As Sinthome writes, there is no inner core to things that provides their effectivity, their capacity to produce an effect autonomously. There are only the relationships between things that govern the ongoing expression of their potential: Hegel writes (I don’t have the exact reference to hand) of the idea of existence, not as the achievement of a finished, settled accretion of individual being, but as a process of coming-to-be through which the interrelated conditions of a thing’s existence complete or augment [ergänzt] themselves in another thing. This is to foreshadow the conceptual universe of complexity theory, in which co-constitutive, dynamic, non-linear relations are shown to subvert putatively unidirectional causal series. Sinthome notes that the predilection for a fixed relationship between a veiled to-be-known and a pure knower are reflected, in slightly differing configurations, across a ‘wide variety of skepticisms common to thought today’. The habit of mind that refers causality and determination to the equivalent of the efficient cause - just one out of Aristotle’s four modes of aition - is one to which we return just as often. For example, I noted recently how trying to force empirical evidence into this mode of explanation was at the heart of Martin Durkin’s recent ‘documentary’ on climate change. […]