Nevertheless, the history of environmental politics in the twentieth century is littered with failed predictions of global disaster and catastrophic societal collapse, so it makes sense for social scientists to work with the best available scientific research, which is currently the ongoing IPCC programme. It is also correct that computer modelling can conflict with real-world evidence, but the IPCC climate models are complex and built on evidence gathered from many sources around the world. The Fourth Assessment Report noted that, since 1990, IPCC forecast values have averaged 0.15 to 0.3°C increase per decade, which compares favourably with the observed increase between 1990 and 2005 of 0.2°C per decade. Such evidence suggests that the IPCC modelling is, in fact, the most accurate we have.
The ‘ClimateGate’ affair, discussed in ‘Using your sociological imagination’ 5.2, has been a salutary experience, not just for climate scientists, but for the academic community as a whole. In an increasingly global academic environment, which operates within societies where easy access to the internet and ideals of freedom of information combine to create expectations of open access to information and data, scientific practice often seems to be catching up. It is certainly not unusual for groups of scientists to guard jealously their raw data in order to protect their own knowledge claims, and, although it is common to speak of a ‘scientific community’, it is important to remember that scientific work, like all other spheres of social life, is highly competitive. For the foreseeable future at least, it is likely that an uneasy tension between established scientific practice and the emerging culture of open access to information will continue.
USING YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
5.2 ClimateGate: a cautionary tale
Climate change science was called into question in 2009, when the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK had its email system hacked and around 1,000 emails, including exchanges between members of the unit and colleagues around the world, were published on the worldwide web – an affair now known as ‘ClimateGate’.
In some of these emails, the director, Professor Phil Jones, referred to performing ‘a trick’ with climate data and talked of ‘hiding the decline’ in temperature for one data series. He also admitted refusing repeated requests to share data with critics and asking a colleague to delete all emails relating to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment. Jones later argued that the email comments were taken out of context; the ‘trick’ was simply finding a creative way of joining two datasets, while ‘hiding the decline’ meant correcting a false impression in one dataset by making a composite set that also included instrumental data (BBC 2010).
Sceptics see this episode as supportive of their case that many climate scientists, whose careers and reputations have become intertwined with proving anthropogenic global warming, are prepared to sacrifice key scientific principles of openness and peer review in order to protect themselves and their ‘unproven’ thesis. Then, in 2010, after criticism from glaciologists, the vicechair of the IPCC admitted that a claim in the 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers ‘could disappear by 2035’ was wrong. Mistakes such as this, say sceptics, raise the issue of how many other IPCC predictions are incorrect, calling the existence of global warming into question.
‘ClimateGate’ was the subject of three independent inquiries: a parliamentary inquiry, a university inquiry into eleven key scientific papers, and a university-commissioned inquiry led by a senior civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, into the hacked and leaked email exchanges. All three found no evidence of scientific malpractice, falsification of data or attempts to subvert the peer review process. However, the Russell Review (Russell 2010: 10–11) did criticize the unit for being unhelpful and defensive when requests for data were made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. It also criticized the university and the unit for failing to appreciate the statutory requirements of the FoI Act and the potential damage that could be caused to climate science research and the university itself by withholding data. A separate review of the IPCC’s main forecasts, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2010, found no errors that might call into question the finding that anthropogenic climate change was occurring.
THINKING CRITICALLY
If the evidence of global warming is compelling, why should this unit be wary of giving out information and withhold some of its data? What impact might hacking of this kind have on the practice of climate science?
Responding to global warming
The industrial countries currently produce far more greenhouse gases than the developing world, and China has overtaken the USA and emits more carbon dioxide than any other single country. However, emissions from the developing world are increasing, particularly in countries undergoing rapid industrialization, and are expected to be roughly equal to those of industrialized countries sometime around 2035. Taking population size into account, and looking at emissions per capita, China and India currently produce lower levels than the USA, Europe, the Russian Federation and Japan, which shows why some developing countries see their own ‘survival’ emissions as far less damaging than the ‘luxury’ emissions of the already rich countries.
There is also a disjunction between the widespread acceptance of global warming and people being prepared to change their routines to help tackle it. Giddens (2011: 2) calls this (unsurprisingly) ‘the Giddens Paradox’. This states that, as people experience no clearly tangible effects of the dangers of unchecked global warming in their everyday lives, they will not change their environmentally damaging actions. Car dependency is a clear example of this. Yet, if they wait until global warming does impact on their lives, it will be too late to do anything about it. Before that happens, ways have to be found to ‘[embed] it in our institutions and in the everyday concerns of citizens’ (ibid.: 3).
Without the positive involvement of the critical mass of individual citizens, it seems unlikely that government policies alone will succeed. But a coordinated global approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is made more difficult in the context of uneven economic development at the national level, which produces as much disagreement as agreement on how to coordinate reductions and adaptive measures.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was created in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, where agreement was reached to cut emissions significantly by 2012 in order to stabilize and eventually reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Targets ranged from an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia. The USA originally committed itself to a 7 per cent cut but has never ratified the protocol. The Kyoto Protocol took 1990 greenhouse emission levels as its starting point. However, this was seen in the Global South as favouring the industrialized countries, both failing to take into account the latter’s ‘historical responsibility’ for creating global warming and, hence, avoiding attributing blame. It is also unclear exactly when developing countries will be asked to reduce their emissions or by how much. Will it allow for the inevitably higher emissions levels as their economic development catches up with that of the industrialized world? If it does not, then it may be seen as unfair and unworkable (Najam et al. 2003).
Following acrimonious disagreements and failure to secure a binding agreement at the Copenhagen talks in 2009, the Cancun meeting in 2010 was widely seen as marking progress: 190 countries agreed to bring the voluntary targets set out in Copenhagen into the process, to accept the goal of limiting the global temperature rise to less than 2°C, but to strive for 1.5°C. They also agreed to set up a green climate fund as part of a US$100 billion commitment to help developing countries move forward in non-polluting ways. The overall agreement is legally binding, but specific aspects such as pledges by individual nation-states to reduce emissions are not (Goldenberg et al. 2015).
In 2015, a new Paris Agreement (COP24 – the 24th ‘conference of parties’), involving