February 14, 2010

“It sounds silly when you say it out loud,” said Ram Myers, “but they seemed to have a notion that you could sit in Ottawa and make up reality. If you could enforce a scientific consensus, that would be reality.”

That’s Dr. Ransom A. Myers, Dalhousie University’s late, great, and sorely-missed marine biologist, talking about the federal bureaucrats who “gruesomely mangled and corrupted” the research of their own scientists, to quote an internal DFO report, and thus allowed three imperilled groundfish stocks to be fished almost to extinction.

Ram Myers’ comment has echoed in my mind since the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change began imploding in the blizzard of compromising emails that escaped from the University of East Anglia in December. That episode was followed by the disclosure that several findings in the IPCC’s report of 2007 were based on faulty evidence.

These were not trivial findings. One was the widely-reported prediction that, based on current trends, the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. Since Asia’s nine largest rivers arise in those glaciers, the result would have been a nightmare sequence of catastrophic flooding and lethal droughts for the one billion people who live downstream.

But the prediction was based on anecdotes, not on peer-reviewed science — and it was “so wrong that it’s not worth discussing,” says Georg Kaser, a leading Austrian glaciologist who flagged the error before the report was issued, and was dumbfounded to find it in the text. Maybe part of the reason is that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also heads a New Delhi research group that has scooped up millions of dollars in grants to study the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

The IPCC’s scientists now stand accused of shabby science, selective reporting, naked self-interest and the intimidation of skeptics. And of course the climate change skeptics are all over the issue: See? These guys are liars and cheaters and thieves — and therefore, climate change is all humbug.

Not so fast, bub. To begin with, the IPCC report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries, and only a few have been impugned. Georg Kaser himself was a lead author of the section of the report dealing with the physical science of climate change. Despite the furor, Kaser says the report’s central contention that climate change is an established reality and a major threat is absolutely sound.

What reminds me of Ram Myers is the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual. I’d love to believe it, but it’s nonsense. Somewhere out there, beyond all the noise and clamour, the real world is evolving according to its own nature, no matter what we may hope, wish or believe.

I listen to Gwynne Dyer, who travels the world investigating the military implications of climate change. “When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike,” Dyer writes, “there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations. We are not going to get through this without taking a lot of casualties.”

I listen to Jim Lovelock, a towering figure in earth science, who concedes the possibility that the skeptics are right and that global warming is an illusion — but whose observations suggest that global heating is happening much faster than expected. For example, he says, the great global heat sink is the sea. When the sea gets warm, it expands, and sea level rises. Well, sea level is rising faster than predicted, so the sea is absorbing a lot of heat. That’s an observation, not an opinion.

How do we deal with all these uncertainties? In 2007, a young Oregon science teacher named Greg Craven reviewed the options in a little YouTube presentation called “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See.” His conclusion? Acting to counter the risks of climate change will certainly cost a lot of money, perhaps needlessly. But failing to act could very well cost a lot of lives. How hard a decision is that?

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