If you weren’t paying too much attention, the past few months might have convinced you that the sceptics are right and global warming is a myth. If so, congratulations – you have joined the illustrious company of Nigel Lawson, Jeremy Clarkson and Sarah Palin.
More worryingly, you have also joined an increasingly large minority of the British public that doubts the science – a group which, if we are to believe ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie, now includes most Tory MPs.
All of which is rather unfortunate, given that the deniers haven’t actually won the argument over anything of substance. What they have done rather more successfully is to frame the debate in a way which makes them look more reasonable than they are and which makes the scientists look less reliable than they are.
In the 1980s, anti-tax campaigners in the United States managed to redefine talk about inheritance tax so that the levy became known as “death tax”. In the 1990s, Labour succeeded in changing the language of debate on the public finances so that spending became “investment”. Today, the Conservatives are trying to create a narrative of a “broken Britain” out of individual cases of youth crime.
There’s nothing rare or even particularly sinister about this and it’s a standard debating technique. But it can create the impression that an argument has been won before any evidence is even aired. In the case of political campaigns, it’s part of the arsenal of techniques used to persuade people and, infuriating as it might sometimes be, it’s not going to go away.
In the case of climate science, it’s a bigger deal, as the discourse is being manipulated to imply that there is serious doubt about climate change – which there is not. The result is not just to undermine climate science and to fool intelligent people into supporting the sceptics: it also undermines public understanding of science more broadly. Whether through ignorance or malice, the sceptics are dishonest to the core, yet they have managed to redefine the terms of the debate to make their dishonesty mainstream.
Global warming, it hardly seems necessary to say, is not like inheritance tax. Its existence cannot be legislated in or out of existence because we happen to like or dislike the idea. What is being framed here is not a debate between supporting or opposing a political proposal, but a debate between accepting or denying the broadly accepted scientific consensus.
Deniers like to throw about claims of scientific incompetence, of dogmatism and of corruption each time they uncover the slightest flaw in the research. “Don’t listen to those charlatans”, they say, “they might claim to be good scientists, but they’re not.” In fact, it is the sceptics who completely misunderstand the nature of science
Over the years, identifying exactly what makes science tick has been a big question for the small band of people who are interested in the philosophy of science. (Yes, we do exist.) And while no one has ever quite managed to pin it down in all its complexity, the Hungarian-born philosopher Imre Lakatos came up with one of the more persuasive models of how science works.
In his view, a research programme in any given field has a “hard core” of basic theories and a diffuse set of secondary theories and supporting evidence which he called the “protective belt”. Science, he argued, progresses mainly by dealing with problems raised with the supporting material, which is discarded or modified along the way as necessary. But unless something quite radical is discovered, you do not tear everything up and start again: the hard core remains as the protective belt takes a beating and, in time, usually recovers, with new theories and better data to replace the duds.
The bread and butter of science is therefore to test, refine and modify our knowledge of supporting theories. Revolutionary geniuses such as Einstein or Newton are not typical of how science works – the overwhelmingly vast majority of research is to refine old theories, not to question our fundamental assumptions.
So what would Lakatos say about climate change? I am pretty sure he would see the sceptics for what they are: a ragtag army of conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, corporate patsies and Ayn Rand worshippers. More importantly, he would see that the few punches they have landed are no reason to question a scientific consensus which remains fundamentally sound: the hardcore deniers haven’t laid a finger on the hard core of science, no matter what they claim.
In other words, publicly chipping away at the edges of climate science as the sceptics are doing might help change the public narrative in their favour, but it does nothing at all to change the science. That, not “bad science”, not blinkered dogmatism and not corruption is why the avalanche of fury that has been unleashed since the University of East Anglia email server was hacked has not moved mainstream scientific opinion one jot.
Suggesting otherwise is not just a grave misunderstanding of the theories and data of climatology – but a misrepresentation of how science actually works.
