The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (9 page)

Be careful what you wish for.

Even while I was at school, a revolutionary new idea was already emerging, but its power remained hidden. It was a scientific insight that was eventually to reveal itself as even more
radical and challenging than Darwin's. The science of climate change had its foundations in the mid-19th century with the discovery of ice ages, and it had a breakthrough moment in the year of the publication of
On the Origin of Species
, 1859, when Darwin's friend, John Tyndall, discovered the influence of greenhouse gases on the temperature of the planet. A century later, in the late 1950s, Charles Keeling began to measure a steady, relentless upward trend in atmospheric CO
₂
, and by the final decades of the 20th century, ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica delivered a sense of urgency and crisis about global warming. The ice core data revealed the historical delicacy and instability of Earth's climate and confirmed that CO
₂
levels, which have risen rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, are the highest for at least three million years and therefore new in human history. Scientific alarm began to influence public debate and in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established to distil complex, emerging scientific information for government and business.

The theories of evolution and of anthropogenic climate change both had a long, slow gestation followed by a sudden crystallisation, rapid scientific acceptance and some trenchant public resistance. In the early 19th century, the link between animals and humans became a subject of dangerous fascination, for it raised questions about ‘the mode of creation', about organic origins and spiritual destiny, and therefore about the relationship between science and religion. The beak of a finch thus seemed connected to the salvation of a human. In popular discourse, Darwin's idea became condensed into a contest between apes and angels.

Charles Darwin delayed publication of his insight into the transformation of species because he feared its effect on the religious beliefs of his society, and those of his devout wife, Emma. We have a compelling picture of Darwin as a tortured soul,
bunkered down with his barnacles in Kent, and meticulously gathering a fortress of detail with which to defend his idea when the time came to reveal his secret. It was, he wrote, ‘like confessing a murder'. He applied scientific scepticism to his theory with the double force of his critical faculties and his emotional fears. In his wife's religious faith he had the loving embodiment of all that he wished not to upset. If you visit the museum that was once Darwin's home, you can open a hall cupboard and see a replica of the securely wrapped parcel labelled by Darwin: ‘Only to be opened in the event of my death'. It was the first account of his great idea, a 200-page manuscript completed in 1844, a ticking time-bomb at the centre of the elegant Georgian home.

The publication of
On the Origin of Species
15 years later did indeed unleash a storm – but it was ultimately not quite as bad as Darwin had feared. By the time Darwin died, 23 years after the publication of
Origin
, he was celebrated enough to be buried in Westminster Abbey and he was hailed as a hero and icon. As Iain McCalman's compelling collective biography,
Darwin's Armada
, reminds us, the key battles within Victorian Britain for acceptance of Darwin's theory and its associated scientific culture ‘were over in a surprisingly short time'. By 1868, Joseph Hooker could address the British Association, as president, and conclude that few scientists now openly rejected the theory.

Of course, the idea of natural selection continued to be refined by scientists and, in the 20th century, was challenged and ultimately strengthened by the discovery of the gene. And religious resistance to evolutionary theory continued; indeed, at times it has even grown. In the United States today, polls keep telling us that up to 40 per cent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and believe that the Earth was created less than 10 000 years ago. Since the 1960s, ‘creation science' has become active and politically powerful, challenging not only Darwin but also
the scientific method, and seeking ‘equal time' in the US school curriculum.

During a
Q&A
discussion on ABC TV in 2011, an audience member disparaged climate change science as ‘just a theory – like gravity'. Inadvertently, he was making a good parallel. Our understanding of anthropogenic climate change is indeed a theory – like gravity, electricity, germs, the heliocentric solar system, evolution, relativity and plate tectonics. But in science, ‘theory' is a very strong word. It does not mean an untested hypothesis; it does not mean a vague, esoteric concept. Rather, it describes a consistent form of scientific knowledge not yet disproved by experiment. Resilient scientific theories describe complex phenomena extremely well, continue to be refined and improved by experimentation and observation, and have impressive explanatory and predictive power.

Good scientists subject their own work, and that of others, to rigorous scepticism: it is the scientific method. Darwin's methodical analysis of the possible weaknesses of his theory gave him the structure of his book. ‘I have felt these difficulties far too heavily during many years to doubt their weight,' he wrote near the end of
Origin
. And at the beginning of the book he explained: ‘No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he make due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of the many beings which live around us.' A good theory is fertile and identifies uncertainty; it can remain true at the same time as it generates new and exciting research into areas of weakness. ‘The theory of evolution is not just getting older, it is getting better,' declared the palaeontologist Steven Stanley in 1981. And the theory of climate change is also getting older and better – and more forbidding. It has accurately predicted many observed manifestations of global warming – from sea-level rises to increased temperatures to acidification of the
oceans – although sometimes these changes have come about a little more quickly than had been estimated. Caution – of which Darwin at Down is the exemplar – is another hallmark of good science.

The theory of evolution opened up a new worldview, chiefly of the past but also with implications for the future. Family history – across deep time – became natural history. Natural selection was radical in its vision of a totally contingent natural world, one ruled by chance and improbability rather than by a steady and progressive purpose or a predetermined set of stages. People who resisted or rejected the theory of evolution argued about origins, creation, history and natural history. But they also felt the future was at stake – the prospect of a godless world and their personal destinies in heaven. At the end of
Origin
, Darwin argued eloquently that there is ‘grandeur in this view of life', that ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved'. And he also finished the book with words of confident hope about the earthly future of humanity: ‘Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length', he wrote, because humanity under the influence of natural selection ‘will tend to progress towards perfection'. Here the scientist begins to look for a way of selling his idea to Victorian industrial society, and allows the chaos at the heart of his theory to be conceived as ‘progress'. Thus Darwin succumbed to the progressive culture that his own theory undermined.

Today, climate scientists are like Darwin: the implications of their science frighten them, and the politics of their society can intimidate them. The theory of anthropogenic climate change met with swift scientific acceptance but has been followed by a sustained and strengthening public counterattack. The backlash has been deep and powerful because this new idea does not have the reassuring ethic of progress on its side; instead it requires a
critical reassessment of the implications of the Industrial Revolution. And the balance of the problem it poses lies more in the future than in the past. It does not promise ‘a secure future of great length'; it threatens it. It demands political action, which the theory of evolution did not. And for that action to have significant effect, it must be global. Competition will need to be moderated by co-evolution. Further refinement of Darwin's theory awaits humanity's decisions this century about its own evolutionary fate.

* * * * *

You are sitting at the dinner table with old friends you haven't seen for a while. The atmosphere is warm, friendly and celebratory. Then, suddenly, climate change slips into the conversation. The mention of global warming immediately precipitates a light frost. There is some wariness and a sounding-out of positions. Then one old friend leans forward, slightly conspiratorially but also with the conviction that he is delivering some welcome information, and tells you that a friend of his uncle's is an absolute whiz with computers and has crunched the numbers of the climate scientists and found that they have made a basic error that changes everything. What do you say? This kind of conversation is happening – or dying – at dinner tables, barbecues and pub bars around the country.

Climate change has become dangerous social territory. It now surpasses religion, politics and sex as a taboo subject. It threatens to disturb polite conversation with anger, resentment and anxiety, and can hijack any serious attempt to discuss the worrying predicament of our grandchildren. It is only human to find ways to doubt or reject what is so difficult and frightening to confront.

I will return to this common and disabling reflex of denial. But first let us acknowledge that there is a different kind of
denialism – and it deserves the name – that is a strategic and knowing political act in the face of established facts. It is consciously fraudulent, motivated by malice aforethought, driven by cynical opportunism and greed, and frequently funded by the carbon-polluting industries. Sadly, there is nothing surprising about this cunning exertion of naked power for short-term self-interest. ‘Doubt is our product' was the message of an infamous tobacco company memo in 1969, and the confection of doubt continues to be a successful corporate tactic. (Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Not every year is hotter than the last.) In their book
Merchants of Doubt
, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway document how, from the 1950s, the tobacco industry poured money into manufacturing a phony ‘debate' about the rapidly emerging scientific theory that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and other diseases. Having created an apparent debate, the industry then convinced the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present ‘both sides' of it. Research funded by tobacco companies cherry-picked scientific data, focused on unexplained or anomalous details, and exploited ‘normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt'. The same tactics were used decades later by the carbon polluters, and
Merchants of Doubt
makes shockingly clear that sometimes it was even the same people orchestrating them.
The Australian
newspaper is an unashamed exponent of disinformation on this issue, and it is appropriate that its middle-back page is entitled ‘Weather and mind games'.

In the 1960s and '70s, people who knowingly conspired with the tobacco industry to delay popular understanding of the links between smoking and lung cancer seemed self-seeking and highly irresponsible. Looking back now, we judge them even more harshly. In 2004, in a landmark federal case in the United States, the tobacco industry was found guilty of fraud and corruption. But that was half a century after the verdict of scientists
began to emerge clearly. Those were decades of profits for a cynical few, pocketed through the merchandise of doubt. How, in 2050, will we judge those who, for personal gain, intentionally propagated misinformation about climate change science? How do we judge them today?

The political denial of climate science gathered momentum in the late 1980s when NASA scientist James Hansen testified about global warming to a US Congressional hearing, the IPCC was formed, the Berlin Wall fell, and American conservatives began to look for a new enemy of the free market economy. But political denialism has strengthened, especially in the past few years, and it has succeeded in presenting science as ideology and in replacing evidence with opinion. Critics of climate change science often invoke the word ‘belief ' as if the issue is one for personal decision. Former prime minister John Howard calls himself an ‘agnostic' on climate change. And those who articulate the science and its implications are branded as ‘high priests' of an ‘evangelical' movement or ‘cult'. ‘Environmentalism', which is a political stance, is depicted as ‘religious', and climate science is portrayed as its core belief. In an article in the
Monthly
in August 2012, Robert Manne declared the dark victory of the denialists and tracked how funding of their activities has shifted from mainly fossil fuel interests to include an increasing number of conservative foundations advocating a libertarian, antiregulatory ideology. In the US, the issue has polarised dramatically between Democrats and Republicans just in the past decade, and a similar party-political divide has solidified in Australia.

In such an adversarial culture, I think that use of the word ‘consensus' to describe the scientific position can be seriously misleading. The word was generated by the IPCC process which, although founded on the best science, relies on intergovernmental negotiations to produce agreed statements. ‘Consensus' sounds like politics, not science; it evokes compromise
and negotiation. It suggests that majorities are instrumental and sometimes temporary. It seems to allow for contrary or dissenting opinions, without the need to offer new evidence. It possibly undermines public understanding of the status of an accepted scientific theory.