Can humanism survive in the 21st Century?

by Barry Jones AO, FAA, FAHA, FTSE, FASSA.

Presented atthe Manning Clark House seminar Imagining The Real: Life on a Greenhouse Earth, Wednesday 11 June 2008

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Abstract:

The impact of climate change poses unprecedented challenges not only to the environment but also to democratic practice and the pluralist values associated with western humanism. Political and psychological factors are paralysing the will to act to slow down the process of global warming, leading to denial, prevarication, crude appeals by vested interest, and a growing, but unspoken realisation that the climate system may have passed a “tipping point” and moved into an irreversible crisis.

A report to the European Union by Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner (March 2008) identifies seven threats to Europe (and most may have a direct or indirect impact on Australia): mass migration by climate refugees; political destabilisation of regions most affected by climate change; radicalisation of politics and populations; intensified north-south conflict because of the perceived injustice of the causes and effects of global warming; famines and escalation in food prices; wars over natural resources, especially reduction of arable land; reduction of up to 30 per cent in potable water. They view climate change as a “threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends…”
In addition to resource competition over water, oil, wilderness and forests, there will be deep divisions between the pursuit of short term individual resource security, and a longer term approach based on co-operation for the longer term. The complexity of tackling climate change, the lack of appropriate global instruments, apart from the failure of political will, may encourage the rise of over-simple solutions, including fundamentalism, tribalism, communal violence and a revolt against reason.

Existing ethnic and/or religious conflicts are likely to be exacerbated in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent, posing threats to democracy even greater than those that arose in the 20th Century.
Australia is capable of taking a strong moral lead, and must work closely with the EU and the UN to achieve it. The intellectual strength of this Conference demonstrates that we can take this lead – but time is already running out and State Governments must be seized with a sense of urgency.

As Talleyrand said: "Not to choose is to choose".

Introduction:

I am delighted, surprised and touched to have been invited to make the first speech at this important conference, “Imagining the Real: Life on a Greenhouse Earth”, organised by Manning Clark House and driven by the convenor, Dr Andrew Glikson. It was kind of you to include my name as a sub-heading in the title and I am glad that it is not a memorial tribute.

My theme comes from Tim Wirth, former US Congressman and Senator from Colorado, now President of the United Nations Foundation:

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and not the other way round”.

The environment is the totality of all there is in our world – the planet itself, soil, air, water, biota and minerals. Environmental concerns cannot be regarded as mere discretionary matters to be addressed after the economy has had its whack. One of the greatest moral and intellectual challenges is to persuade political leaders, both here and overseas, that the environment and the economy are inextricably linked. If the environment collapses, all is lost. The political response to the Greenhouse challenge and the measured evaluation of risk has been rather feeble. In Australia, the community is, I suspect, more deeply committed to change than political professionals recognise.

My first major speech on climate change was delivered in November 1984 when I spoke in support of Tony Lamb in Croydon, Victoria, during the election campaign in which he won the new House of Representatives seat of Streeton.

I can safely make the claim to have been the first Australian politician to have raised the issue of climate change/ global warming. This is actually less audacious than it sounds. I was, for some years, the only competitor in the race.

I gained nothing from having been there first – indeed, for me, talking about climate change was an isolating factor. In politics, timing is (almost) everything.

For years I had been deeply concerned about the impact of rapid clearing of the Amazonian rainforests (although I did not see it for myself until November 1989) and knew that by the late 1950s there was mounting evidence that the oceans and seas were becoming less effective as CO² sinks.

I became Minister for Science in March 1983 and among my responsibilities were the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO (including the Division of Atmospheric Physics) and the Antarctic Division.

I was soon made aware of scientific differences within and between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Physics over rising CO² levels in the atmosphere, how serious the implications were and whether the changes were anthropogenic or not. The Bureau took a more conservative view (although there were striking internal differences), Atmospheric Physics more radical (although there was dissent there too).

The Antarctic Division was working on atmospheric composition of ice cores and glaciologists were deeply concerned at the possibility, however remote, of the Antarctic ice sheet, up to 2.5 kilometres deep, breaking up. I made my first and only visit to Antarctica in December 1983, travelling with a high-powered team from the US Congress. Scientists working at McMurdo keep raising the issues of increased CO² levels.

It was an old story.

In 1824, the French mathematician Joseph Fourier anticipated the Greenhouse effect by proposing that the atmosphere maintained surface heat on Earth – otherwise the Earth’s orbit was too remote from the Sun for a temperature which could support life.

In 1859 the Irish physicist John Tyndall identified the role of water vapour, CO² and methane as the key factors in maintaining atmospheric temperature.

The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius named the “Greenhouse effect” in 1896 and calculated the relationship between CO² levels and atmospheric temperature with astonishing accuracy.
The prodigious American statistician Alfred James Lotka coined the term “anthropogenic climate change” in 1924, just a century after Fourier’s work.

When I succeeded in establishing the Commission for the Future in June 1985, discussion of the Greenhouse effect and the implications of climate change was very high on its agenda.

The Commission published extensively and won some international awards. However, the response from my political colleagues in Canberra was distinctly underwhelming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Interestingly, it proved to be far easier to attract Australian Government support on the issue of the expanding hole in the ozone layer, particularly so over Antarctica and southern latitudes due largely to the impact of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants. Locally, there was concern that rising levels of ultra-violet penetration would increase Australia’s already high incidence of melanoma dramatically.

In the United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a late, unexpected but welcome conversion on the importance of ozone depletion and convened a “Saving the Ozone Layer” Conference, held in London in March 1989. She was persuaded by the impressively named Sir Crispin Tickell, a senior diplomat and amateur climatologist, who ran the Conference behind the scenes.

There were to be two keynote addresses, one by Senator Al Gore, the other by me. I applied to the Prime Minister’s office for approval to make a Ministerial visit and received a speedy response: No. I notified the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner in Canberra, Sir John Coles, and regretfully declined the invitation. He said, “Mrs Thatcher has made up her mind on this, and it can be very ugly when she is thwarted. Would your Government be embarrassed if we invited you to be our guest?” I passed on the offer to Bob Hawke’s office which agreed, rather grumpily, that I could attend at Mrs Thatcher’s expense.

It became clear at the London Conference that it was easy to secure international agreement to take action against CFCs because there were no vested interests in opposition to the change from CFCs to HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), or even challenging the science. After 15 years of denial and prevarication about the science (which Rowlands, Molina and Crutzen published in 1976), DuPont developed a non-depleting product and began campaigning for its mandatory adoption. This is a far remove from the position of the coal, oil, motor and aviation industries in the global warming controversy.

In March 1992 I delivered a World Meteorological Day Address in Melbourne on “Climate Change, Resource Use and Population Growth: the Challenge for Sustainable Development”. In it I first set out my adaptation of the celebrated "wager" about the existence of God proposed by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal and applied it to Greenhouse issues. I modified it slightly in my autobiography A Thinking Reed (2006):

If we take action on climate change and disaster is avoided, there will be a massive reduction in human suffering and physical destruction

If we take action and the problem corrects itself, little is lost and we benefit from a cleaner environment.

If we do not act, and there is a global disaster then massive suffering will have been aggravated by stupidity.

If we take no action and no disaster results, the outcome will be due to luck alone, like an idiot winning the lottery.

Regrettably, at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, Australia took a very low keyed approach on climate change.

The IPCC has produced now four reports (1990; 1995, 2001, 2007), each with a growing confidence about its predictions about the human contribution to climate change. The IPCC’s assumptions have been conservative, not radical. IPCC’s work was an underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Framework Convention on Climate Change which has been ratified by all major economies except the biggest one, the United States. The Convention came into operation in February 2005.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 was jointly awarded to the IPCC and to Al Gore for his book and Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

On global warming/ climate change there has been an unprecedented convergence of observation and theorising in a variety of disciplines, including zoology, botany, physics, chemistry, oceanography, glaciology, polar science, geology, epidemiology, population health, ecology.

There is broad consensus on many issues involved in climate change/ global warming but there are significant areas of denial or skepticism, including such eminent scientists as Richard Lindzen and Freeman Dyson.  A distinction can be made between sceptics who are open to persuasion, contrarians who object on some points of detail, and denialists, who act on ideological conviction, and are not open to proof.

The Royal Society’s Climate Change Controversies: a simple guide (2007) provoked irritation in some quarters, but it seems sensible to me. I commend to you the 2007 Lowy Lecture on Australia and the World, “Relations between Nations on a Finite Planet” by Lord May of Oxford, Sydney born, and former President of the Royal Society, for a persuasive and elegantly written over-view.

Robert May does not examine climate change in isolation but in the context of other, inter-related issues: population growth, humanity’s ecological footprint, water, species loss.

Accelerating during the twentieth century, levels [of CO²] in the atmosphere reached 330 ppm by the mid-1970s, 360 ppm by the 1990s, 380 ppm today. This change of magnitude by 20 ppm over only a decade has not been seen since the most recent ice-age ended. And if current trends continue, by about 2050 atmospheric CO² levels will have reached at least 500 ppm, roughly double preindustrial levels. (p. 7)

Guy Pearse in his High & Dry (Viking, 2007), subtitled “John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australia’s future”, gave a powerful, even sinister, account of the effectiveness of the fossil fuel lobby and its allies and its decisive influence on government policy on Greenhouse issues until November 2007.
At the recent Australia 2020 Summit, managed as it was to the nth degree, the response of the Climate Change stream was disappointingly bland due to effective blocking by sections of industry.

I don’t always agree with Australian Financial Review editorials but they got it right this time: “The lameness of the recommendations from the climate stream was striking. If this is the best we can manage on ‘the gravest moral challenge’ of the 21st century, we are in trouble”.

Climate change is a striking illustration of the problems involved in complex systems and the challenge for political and economic leaders of having to make decisions before all the evidence is in.

As I understand it, there are six major factors that have contributed to climate change in the life of Homo sapiens sapiens.

1.       Milanković* cycles (1942).  Long term variability – because of changes in the axial tilt of Earth’s orbit around sun: 26,000 year cycle.  Major impact on temperature. Predictable. There are several  Milanković cycles, including a 100,000 year cycle on eccentricity in orbit. Beyond human influence (BHI).

2.       Sunspots. Eleven year cycles (at a low point in 2007). BHI.†

3.       Volcanic eruptions. Unpredictable. The eruption of Mt Pintatubo (1991) had a major impact on temperature throughout 1992. BHI.

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* Milutin Milanković (1879-1958) was a Yugoslavian (Serbian) geophysicist.

†While the direct influence of the 11-year cycle seems to be small, long-term variations
in the strength of the cycle have been linked to the multi-century cooling of the Little  Ice Age.

4.       El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This is a major influence on drought in our region, with 2 > 7 year cycles in the Pacific Ocean.   Unpredictable. It is now thought possible that human influence may have some impact with a risk that ENSO could become permanent.

5.       Anthropogenic (human) emissions of particulate matter, which remains in the atmosphere as aerosols, increases the albedo (reflective) effect of the atmosphere and may reduce impact of the sun’s rays and cool the atmosphere. Short dispersal cycle of 5-7 years. This probably caused the (very slight) cooling in the Northern Hemisphere between 1940 and 1970, after which temperatures began rising more sharply*. It was a major factor in the (sulphuric) acid-rain phenomenon

6.       Anthropogenic (human) emissions of greenhouse gases, compounded by population increase, higher rates of resource use, aviation, motor , changing land use, forest clearing, grazing, waste dumping in oceans. Greenhouse gases have a relatively long absorption/ dispersal cycle. The length of the CO² cycle is deeply controversial.† Carbon dioxide is far more abundant in the atmosphere than methane or nitrous oxide but, at the molecular level, both have a far higher global warming potential. Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that “we are now entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which began around 1780”.

Synergy develops from adding 5 or 6 to any one of the earlier numbers.

Geoengineering, also known as "ecohacking", has been seriously proposed by some scientists as a means of heading off global warming, mimicking the effect of volcanic activity, for example, by putting some tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere. (The impact on rain does not seem to have been taken into account.) Re-icing the Arctic has been proposed in order to help the Gulf Stream and the ocean could be seeded with iron particles to encourage the growth of phytoplankton, which could capture carbon and plunge it into the ocean.

Paradoxically, global warming might be slowed down, even reversed, if Factor 5, increasing particulate matter, was accelerated, if we flew and drove even more, and doubled coal use without any attempt to capture and store * greenhouse gas emissions. But there might be a downside – we might choke on a toxic atmosphere, with a sharp increase in respiratory diseases and higher incidence of depression if we no longer saw a blue sky.

It is striking that some major oil companies, notably BP and Shell, both European owned, are now working to support Greenhouse mitigation policies, while ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute are fighting against any concessions. In Australia, the confusingly named Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN) has been fighting a delaying action on Greenhouse responses.

_______________

* Exceptionally, Australia’s temperature continued to rise 1940-70.

† Robert May emphasises the century-scale response of the natural processes that remove CO² from the atmosphere, while Freeman Dyson describes a 12 year time-scale that would apply for removal by using large-scale geo-engineering of vegetation.

George Monbiot has identified four stages of denial about climate change:

1. “There is no evidence of climate change”.
2. “That if climate change is occurring, it is not caused by human activity”.
3.  “Climate change will bring benefits (more CO² = more crop yields).”
4. “It’s too late to act: unilateral action won’t help.” and pointed to a fallback to a technological fix:  “Science will find a way – it always has…”

Climatology and atmospheric activity are complex systems and the political process finds it hard to respond to complexity. In addition, the problem is complicated by a “two cultures” approach, with scientists (apparently) on one side and economists on the other, without a common language or understanding.
I draw your attention to the work of a Welsh philosopher (and ex-Jesuit), David Snowden, and his diagram, set out below, about contextual complexity. He distinguishes four categories – the Known, the Knowable, the Complex and the Chaotic.
Weather systems fall between the Complex and the Chaotic.

 

Lord May writes: “What we are seeing is not [Samuel] Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, but rather a revival of an older clash between dogmatic, faith-based belief systems and the open-minded, experimental questioning of the Enlightenment”.

The impact of climate change poses unprecedented challenges not only to the environment but to democratic practice and the pluralist values associated with western humanism. Political and psychological factors are paralysing the will to act to slow down the process of global warming, leading to denial, prevarication, crude appeals by vested interest, and a growing, but unspoken realisation that the climate system may have passed a “tipping point” and moved into an irreversible crisis.

A report to the European Union by Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner (March 2008) identifies seven threats to Europe (and most may have a direct or indirect impact on Australia): mass migration by climate refugees; political destabilisation of regions most affected by climate change; radicalisation of politics and populations; intensified north-south conflict because of the perceived injustice of the causes and effects of global warming; famines and escalation in food prices; wars over natural resources, especially reduction of arable land; reduction of up to 30 per cent in potable water. They view climate change as a “threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends…”

In addition to resource competition over water, oil, wilderness and forests, there will be deep divisions between the pursuit of short term individual resource security, and a longer term approach based on co-operation for the longer term. The complexity of tackling climate change, the lack of appropriate global instruments, apart from the failure of political will, may encourage the rise of over-simple solutions, including fundamentalism, tribalism, communal violence and a revolt against reason.

Existing ethnic and/or religious conflicts are likely to be exacerbated in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent, posing threats to democracy even greater than those that arose in the 20th Century.

Australia is capable of taking a strong moral lead, and must work closely with the EU and the UN to achieve it. The intellectual strength of this conference demonstrates that we can take this lead – but time is already running out and State Governments must be seized with a sense of urgency.

Robert May concluded: “Probably the Easter Islanders did not fully understand the impacts they were having on their island universe. We have no such excuse”.

I adopt the words of Talleyrand: “Not to choose is to choose”.