The Filtnib’s Progress

“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”

So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.

The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006.  Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?

Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:

“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”

Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam.  The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher.“

Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed, and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.

Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.

I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. He told me he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:

I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…

This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.

If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say, tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.

“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.

Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we’re forced to make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:

* why would this person or organisation lie to me? One of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.

* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.

* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.

Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the coming century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists have begun to predict. Which would be great. Bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face global catastrophe. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ‘sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, could yet retain the upper hand.