In the first week of April, amid reports of more job losses and government spending, came news that might have gained more traction were we not in the middle of a recession. The thin bridge of ice that links the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Antarctica shattered, leading many scientists to expect the shelf itself may soon collapse.
A report about the breakup of the ice bridge made the nightly news where only a few years ago, it might not have been considered worthy of comment. Two years ago Canada experienced a freakishly warm winter, and suddenly the environment was on everyone’s minds.
Climatologists became our knights in shining armour. Off they trod to international conferences to do battle with fossil-guzzling fossils such as the then-president of the United States and former Canadian Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, while valiantly asserting what may be one of the more redundant phrases in the English language: the science is real.
The battle is won. Sort of. How climate science is practiced is coming under attack again, and from an unlikely source.
Gwynne Dyer is among the most internationally successful Canadian non-fiction writers. A well-known commentator on military issues, when he spoke at U of T in December about his most recent book, he joked that he owes David Suzuki an apology for treading on his turf. Which isn’t to say that in Climate Wars Dyer doesn’t talk about military strategy—he does; it’s just that the world’s militaries are very interested in imagining models for how global climate change will also affect the world’s power structures.
In Dyer’s telling, it isn’t that the science isn’t real, it’s that it isn’t being realistic. Specifically addressing the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said in December, “They [the IPCC] are often had for being too extreme in their models, but quite the contrary, they’re almost not adequately describing our reality in terms of the speed of change.”
Looking at the rate at which arctic sea ice has melted since 2005, for example, it appears that climate change is happening faster than predicted by even the most extreme model put forward in the 2007 IPCC report. “Here’s the problem,” Dyer knowingly intoned from on stage. “The actual observed changes in the last three or four years are so radical that they’re putting us above the top prediction: above 6.4 [degrees Celsius hotter than present] by the end of the century.”
A jump of 6.4 degreed Celsius in average global temperature is significant. To put it into perspective, Dyer says that he can imagine the world adapting to an increase of two degrees by the end of the century. But in the opening to each chapter in his book, Dyer imagines scenarios based on expert opinions about how global geopolitics will change with as little as a 2.8 degree increase in global temperature. It’s pretty scary stuff, not only for the polar bears: nuclear war between India and Pakistan, unrest in the United States due to the closure of the U.S-Mexico border, civil war in China, mass starvation in formerly well-fed countries such as Italy, the breakup of the European Union. This future world order is not an environment that will nourish healthy democracies or, for that matter, stable government in general, Dyer contends. We need to create appropriate agreements between governments now.
Dyer notes that from the 80 or so interviews he conducted for Climate Wars, “The conversations I had with the scientists generally had an undercurrent of panic running beneath them, because their perception is that the changes are happening faster than their [the scientists’] models predicted.” To crib the title of a source that he draws from frequently, right now is the age of consequences. Dyer states bluntly “the IPCC is getting it wrong,” with the effect that “we have much less time than we thought.”
An example: one of the more positive climate change scenarios presented by the 2007 IPCC report predicts that the Arctic Ocean will not be ice-free until 2060. Of the many reasons why arctic sea ice is significant, not least of these is that it acts as a reflector for the sun’s rays, effectively reducing the amount of energy and heat absorbed by the planet. Ocean water, on the other hand, absorbs heat. A less lucky scenario outlined in the 2007 IPCC report would see an ice-free arctic by 2040. Some scientists are now predicting that we will see an ice-free arctic by 2013.
Dyer suggests a number of reasons for why changes are happening much faster than the IPCC predicted. Among the reasons he gives are many unknowns—the effect that feedbacks will play in the climatic system, the growth rate of developing economies. But he also criticizes the panel itself on a number of fronts: everything from working by consensus and, he alleges, governments vetting the most worrisome findings out of the final report.
Dyer is not without his critics. Professor Bob Jeffries, an internationally recognized scholar on the arctic and a participant on the panel, says that while he appreciates Dyer’s concern for global climate change, Dyer also ascribes a different role to the IPCC than the scientists who partake in it. Jeffries contends that Dyer has gone over the top in his representation of the development of how the international scientific consensus takes shape.
Says the scholar: “I think what’s very important to say right at the outset is that the IPCC does not ever engage in policy issues—that is not our job. […] Why the IPCC is so successful internationally is that everybody recognizes it comes in on a level playing field and there’s no attempt to usurp authority, no attempt to lay down the law. It’s an attempt to give the best available blueprint from a scientific standpoint that can be available, which governments can use to make up their own mind, or the public at large can use.”
Jeffries notes that the sea ice example Dyer uses is a very good one for illustrating an unexpectedly fast rate of change, but that this increase is not true across the board when scientists look at other indicators.
“The IPCC, because it has such an international reputation for fairness and really attempting to on the one hand draw attention to what the data show you. On the other hand, there’s an attempt all the time to portray an accurate, fair presentation, with limitations,” he notes. Those drawbacks include not having all the data necessary to draw certain conclusions.
He maintains of Dyer’s criticisms regarding unkowns, “I think that’s a fair point, but it’s true of any review. It’s true of any science. There are big unknowns. […] We worked with the best information we had at the time we put this together.” Jeffries flatly denies that all the research in the 2007 report is over five years old, as Dyer said in December. There are references in the report from up to 2005 and early 2006.
The IPCC is aware of the criticisms, and has considered coming out with mini-IPCC reports on special topics such as that it published most recently on water. But the panel is also an immense process involving between 3,000 to 5,000 scientists over the five-year span it takes to write each edition of the report. Jeffries says that as far as Big Science goes, he has never been on a review committee so intensive as the IPCC: “It was simply totally physically and mentally exhausting.”
If the contention between Dyer and researchers such as Jefferies is what constitutes real climate science, Jefferies is unequivocal.
“I think we have to work with the best we’ve got, knowing jolly well that there are unknowns all the time,” Jefferies says, “and that is how scientific progress is made: you move forward bit by bit changing the conclusions as more data become available.”
Apart from the work of the IPCC, the two men may actually have fewer differences than those highlighted. The real issue is not of how science is conducted but about consciousness—ours—our own future, and who is going to make decisions for us. Both Jefferies and Dyer agree, we have less time than we thought.
