The Island of Doubt

Canada's federal government, under the newly elected Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, seems to have adopted the dishonest propaganda techniques of the Bush administration as part of an attempt to wiggle out of past governments' commitments -- weak as they were -- to address climate change. What they're doing, of course, is slandering the good name of doubt.

This surprises no one who has been watching the Harper government cosy up to discredited climate change denialists. But the recent editing of the Department of Environment's explanatory web page on the greenhouse effect is still disappointing. (Hat tip to deSmogBlog for their diligence.)

The new Greenhouse Gas page starts off well enough, with a scientifically sound description of radiative forcing and the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide and other fossil fuel emissions. It also recognizes the dangers associated with the rise in temperatures predicted by general circulation computer models. The penultimate sentence is the suitably unsettling "For example, the average world temperature during the last Ice Age was only 5°C lower than it is now." So far so good, although for some reason the predicted temperature rise is offered as 0.3 C per decade, rather the more commonplace 3 C per century. Also, the observed historical temperature change is given as 0.5 C, when in fact it is better than 0.6 over the past 30 years and closer to 0.8 C over the last century (See NASA's discussion here.)

That would seem to cover the basics, if not perfectly at least adequately. But an extra paragraph has been was temporarily added (earlier today, after word of the editing spread, the offending paragraph was removed):

There is a great deal of uncertainty associated with climate predictions and, although temperature changes during this century are consistent with global warming predictions, they remain within the range of natural variability.

While there is nothing wrong with noting that climatology is bedeviled by uncertainties, this particular construction is misleading. The fact that the observed temperature change is within the range of natural variability is not the point. What's important about the observed changes is their temporal and spatial characteristics. In other words, it's how the world is warming (or as James Lovelock likes to say, "heating") that has convinced so many scientists that human factors are responsible for most of the warming, not simply how much it has warmed.

For example, the models predict that that Canadian Arctic should experience a warming rate approximately three times the global average. And that's just what's happening. Similarly, some regions should experience temperature declines. Sure enough, that's happening too.

One might argue that some Environment Canada technocrat was just being small-c conservative, trying to avoid saying anything that's not 100 per cent rock solid. After all, technically, the paragraph is correct. But contrast that paragraph with what the top folks in climatology have to say.

NASA's Jim Hansen's latest talk on the dangers of exceeding a "tipping point" notes that "Warming has the expected characteristic of GHG forced change." Which means humans, not nature, are at fault.

Going back to 2001, we have a National Research Council study, which states:

"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and sub-surface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability."

Note the subtle but significant difference between the way NRC deals with the notion of uncertainty and how Environment Canada casts it. Everyone agrees that natural variability is part of the equation, but Environment Canada elevates it far above what the science can support, from a minor part of the observed changes to something that exceeds the observed changes.

Also from five years ago, we have the IPCC's conclusion that "the warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current models. Reconstructions of climate data for the past 1,000 years also indicate that this warming was unusual and is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin."

Again, we're not talking about a hot-off-the-scientific-presses news here. Everything we've learned over the past five years has only confirmed what we suspected in 2001. And yet the official face of Environment Canada, a government agency that is filled with decent, honest, and intelligent scientists, is of an organization stuck in a time of greatly enhanced uncertainty, one that ended more than a decade ago.

Of course, it's more likely that the capital-C Conservatives of the Harper government, which is dominated by minds mired in the fossil-fuel-rich tar sands of Alberta, is simply unwilling to accept the facts, and is doing what it can to build support for an eventual withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. Not that that will make any difference, as Canada has never really had any intention of meeting its Kyoto obligations. Indeed, the previous, Liberal, government virtually guaranteed the country would miss its emissions-reductions targets by doing nothing for the better part of a decade before it was finally removed from office.

The important change here is that Environment Canada has been politicized just as its American counterparts have been by the Bush administration. It is worthy to add that the insertion of the suspect paragraph followed by just a few months the shutting down of the federal government's entire climate change information website, an action that would seem bizarre in the 21st century, but is made all the more understandable when you learn that it occured just a month after Harper met with Frank Luntz, who just happens to be the guy who developed Bush's climate change strategy. You know, the guy who advised using the term "climate change" instead of "global warming" and playing up uncertainties where they no longer existed or had diminished below the level of significance.

The common thread is casting uncertainty and doubt as bad things, when in fact they are unavoidable and necessary parts of the scientific process. By demanding that politicians not act until all doubt has been removed from the equation, people like Luntz and now Harper, through his environment minister, Rona Ambrose, are not only demanding perpetual inaction, they are also confusing the public about the very nature of science, and making it impossible for scientists to serve as effective policy advisers.

The only antidote to this pernicious trend is better science education. If Jim Hansen is right, however, we're long past the point where we have the luxury of choosing such a long-term strategy. Oh well. At least it's Thursday, which means there's another Battlestar Galactica webisode up on the SciFi Channel website.