The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia has been in the news lately, after a hacker broke into the Unit’s computers, downloaded some files and posted them to a website. The files included email archives, which were immediately picked over by right-of-center blogs in search of ‘proof’ that the Unit’s scientists were engaged in a conspiracy to falsify evidence for global warming. Email fragments that appeared to confirm this were quickly posted and recirculated.
RealClimate has already covered this better than I can. My own impression is that this doesn’t actually amount to a hill of beans. Rather than a ‘smoking gun’, what it shows can at worst be described as ‘scientists behaving badly’ (but very humanly). There’s a certain amount of bitching and fuming about their antagonists, some talk about how to present the data most convincingly, and some discussion of how seemingly contradictory results can be reconciled with the theory. This is reasonable enough: contrary to what some non-scientists seem to believe, scientists don’t actually throw out entire theories at the first whiff of apparently contradictory data. They reexamine the model and see if the new data can be reconciled with it. If it can, they refine the model and move on. If diligent study leads them to conclude that the data poses an overwhelming objection to the theory, that’s when they throw out the theory and come up with something new.
The shriller blogs have also made much hay of the fact that some of the scientists appear to have ‘doubts’ about global warming. I should damn well hope so. If you can’t entertain doubts about something, what you’re doing isn’t science. It’s faith.
What I wanted to write about, however, isn’t the CRU hack itself but the whole question of the environment as a political issue. My own feeling is that discussion of the environment ought to be beyond politics, but that’s absolutely not the way it is. There are few topics that are so politically polarized. Some conservatives and liberals might be willing to break ranks on, say, homosexuality or abortion or a few other topics. On the environment, they solidly vote the party line.
The party line for the conservatives is that environmental issues are largely not worthy of consideration. Anthropogenic global warming is either a trivial problem that can be ignored or actually non-existent. There is no such thing as global warming, runs the extreme (but common) view. It’s all lies, invented by the liberals and perpetuated by a monstrous conspiracy bent on using it as the fulcrum for a socialist power-grab. (That kind of thinking is commonly termed ‘paranoid’, but let’s not get into that).
For the liberals, of course, it’s axiomatic that anthropogenic global warming exists and demands our immediate attention. ‘Immediate attention’ probably means some kind of state intervention, accompanied by a lot of ‘Thou shalt not’ and the imposition of some hair-shirted austerity measures.
Why these positions? Why are conservatives so opposed to the mere idea, and why are liberals so ready to accept it?
My own belief is that it comes down to this: in broad terms, there is no free market solution to environmental problems. If we really are destroying our environment, the free market is not going to fix it for us. By the time the market responds, the damage is done. Even if the damage isn’t irreparable, environmental problems take vastly longer to fix than they take to create.
The existence of a problem that ‘laissez-faire’ and the free market cannot solve is anathema to conservatives and libertarians. It’s axiomatic for them that the best solution for any problem can be found in the market and that the proper response is for government to keep its hands off and let the market take care of it. Faced with a problem that apparently can’t be handled in this way, their only recourse is to deny that the problem exists. (At this point, you may want to re-read what I wrote earlier about how scientists handle data that contradicts their theories). If the problem of global warming exists, it calls into question one of the fundamental axioms of conservatism. Naturally, conservatives react by denying its very existence.
But could there be a free market solution? The classic free market response would be that if demand exists for a healthier environment, the market will meet the demand. If people want a world without pollution, without global climate changes and sea level rises, without ecosystem collapses and desertification, they will ask for it and the market will provide.
It simply doesn’t work that way. People are short-sighted and self-interested. If they can choose between two products, one of which is made by a company that is environmentally sound and the other of which is made by a company that rapes baby whales and dumps mercury in the rivers, they will buy the one that costs $10 less. Every time. Moreover, they will continue to do so until all the baby whales have been raped and all the rivers are full of quicksilver, at which point demand will cause the market to swing belatedly into action and offer up companies selling water filters and whale rape protection kits. The few people who do make the decision to consume ethically and choose the environmentally sound option - thus letting the market do its work - are derided by conservatives as ‘hippies’ and ‘treehuggers’. So much for the market solution.
Even if consumers did take a long-term view and chose to vote with their wallets for the greater good, they’d need to know where to put their money. The fact is that we have no clear idea about the environmental impact of our buying decisions and corporations have a vested interest in making sure that we remain ignorant. If you want, by the way, a documented instance of powerful interests conspiring to influence people’s perceptions and scientific knowledge about global warming, it isn’t the proponents of the theory that you should be looking at. It’s the large corporations that have paid out millions to friendly think-tanks and selected scientists to help them publish papers questioning the existence of the problem. Conservative outrage at this abuse of power has, so far, been muted.
Conservatives deny the idea of global warming because they have to. Why do liberals embrace it so enthusiastically?
I think the answer is that they do so essentially for the same reason. I don’t actually believe - as some conservatives do - that most liberals wake up each morning and ask themselves “What aspect of human existence can I bring under state control today?” But it’s certainly true that liberals are much more comfortable with the idea that a problem demands a collective or state solution. The idea of a problem that can’t be fixed in the marketplace comforts rather than horrifies them. When a conservative or a libertarian hears someone say “We need the government to fix this”, he falls on the floor, frothing at the mouth. When a liberal hears the same words, he says “Sure. No problem.”
Environmental issues support the belief that there are some problems that must be solved collectively and that may even require the nanny state to tell people “No, you can’t have a pony.” They validate the axioms of liberalism, so liberals embrace them. Conversely, they bring into question the belief that all problems can be solved by the market and that only the individual matters, that there is no larger whole to whom we are bound or responsible. They challenge the axioms of conservatism, so conservatives respond by denying them.
It could be argued that seeing an issue that appears to validate their beliefs has made liberals too credulous. They accept global warming uncritically because it tells them the story they want to hear, just as conservatives reject it because its conclusions are unpalatable to them. But that really illustrates the point that I’m trying to make here. The environment should be above politics. Conservatives and liberals alike should be able to do the intellectually honest thing and say “Never mind what my philosophy tells me should be true. What are the facts?”
Because if anthropogenic climate change is real - as the overwhelming majority of climate scientists seem to believe - then if we don’t put aside our political differences and do something now, we are all screwed, conservative and liberal alike.
