Climate change: do we care?

Do we care about climate change? We know that some do, passionately, and most of us, if asked, will say we do. But the evidence is clear that our collective, honest, answer to the question Do we care about the threat of climate change? is a resounding no, not really. Despite innumerable high-level conferences, apocalyptic rhetoric, doom-laden prognostications and worthy-sounding declarations, what have we actually achieved?

David Wallace-Wells tells it like it is:

The Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before.

Recent headlines confirm this:

·        Faking it on climate change;

·        UK is failing to meet almost all of its climate action targets;

·        Accept people don’t, and may never, give a toss about climate change.

Why, if climate change is likely to be as catastrophic as the scientific consensus paints it, are we so reluctant to do anything about it?

One answer is that the issue is so politicised that changing your mind on the issue is seen as a sign of weakness.

The other answer, though, is a bit more subtle. Science appears to tell us that it’s our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are causing changes in the climate, and accompanying changes like rising sea levels. Accordingly, these emissions have been the focus of our climate change policy, to minimal effect.

It’s not working, because:

1.   the science is not convincing,

2.   our goal is not really to stop the climate changing, so we have very little buy-in, and

3.   focusing on the alleged root cause might not be the best way of achieving what we actually want to achieve.

Not convincing

When I say the science isn’t convincing, that’s not my personal opinion. I mean that the science is literally unconvincing. It’s not convincing most of us to allocate our scarce resources into solving a problem that could well be catastrophic but, the way it’s formulated, requires big upfront costs for uncertain gains that that will probably be nugatory, slow to materialise, and whose provenance will never be able to be confidently attributed to past sacrifices.

No buy-in

The way it’s formulated. To solve this potentially calamitous problem, requiring spending huge sums now, we need buy-in. Saying that the problem is to do with the composition of the atmosphere might be accurate, but neither the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, nor the average rise in our planet’s temperature have meaning for ordinary people; you know, the vast majority of the human population who have more pressing concerns, but whose backing for the huge task ahead is critical. Limiting the Earth’s rise in temperature to two degrees Celsius, or reducing the level of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million: these are not goals with which ordinary people can identify. They are abstractions. They are means to ends, and we’d do better to decide exactly what ends we want to achieve and aim to achieve them.

Our problem is not the composition of the atmosphere nor the planetary temperature: it’s adverse climatic events, however they are caused, and their impact on human, animal and plant life. That is how the problem should be formulated to generate popular support for policies addressing climate change. There's no good scientific or moral reason for a policy that prioritises the adverse impacts possibly attributable to man over those caused by nature. It doesn’t matter whether the floods, hurricanes or rising sea levels that kill people or make them homeless are caused by man-made contributions to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere or anything else. We should aim to reduce the impacts of adverse climatic events on ourselves and our environment rather than what current - or rather, 1990s - science tells us is its most likely cause.

Tackle the symptoms as well as the cause

We waste a lot of energy trying to identify the root causes of social and environmental problems when it might be more efficient to address the symptoms. Even when we do know the root cause of a problem, getting rid of it isn’t always the best way to go. Take a weather-related example: people with vitamin D deficiency in northern latitudes. The root cause is readily identifiable: lack of exposure to the sun’s rays. But the solution isn’t to shoot laser beams upwards on overcast days to vaporise the cloud layer. In this instance, at least, we do the sensible thing and dispense vitamin D tablets. Often it’s best to tackle symptoms and causes simultaneously, which is how we approach most serious health problems. With climate change we think we know that greenhouse gas emissions are the culprit. It is scientifically plausible, but not certain. It is even less certain that we have correctly identified all the greenhouse gases, and correctly weighted the ones we can directly control according to their long-term impact on the climate. And it's not at all certain that reducing these emissions will stop the climate changing. We’ve staked so much on trying to identify and deal with greenhouse gas emissions that we have lost sight of what should be our priority, which is to look after our environment, rather than try to stop the climate changing. It’s a serious distraction. Our almost obsessional focus on greenhouse gases led the UK to cut the duty on diesel fuel, which emits less CO₂ than petrol but more nitrogen oxides and particulates. This switch contributed to 12 000 premature deaths in the UK attributable to nitrogen dioxide emissions. We seem now to be considering a similarly indirect and demented approach – this time on a global scale – by taking geoengineering seriously.

Outcomes versus root causes

In summary: trying to identify and eradicate the root causes of adverse environmental impacts might not be the best way of preventing them. With climate change, it's (currently) impossible to persuade enough people that cutting back greenhouse gas emissions is going to make an appreciable difference to their quality of life or that of the environment. Focusing on the supposed root causes serves, at best, as an excuse for inaction; at worst, as a distraction from, or cause of, serious environmental problems. And we need to be clear that even if we can show that greenhouse gases are the root cause of adverse climatic events, cutting emissions might not be the best way of solving that problem. Scientists, politicians and bureaucrats talk endlessly about degrees Celsius, parts per million, climate models and scenarios. They should be talking instead about the actual, current impacts of adverse climatic events on human, animal and plant life.