Untangling fake news from climate science

THE Singapore government's recent decision to form a Select Committee to examine the problem of online falsehoods was an acknowledgement that when "fake news" spreads at Internet-speed via the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the threat to public order cannot be viewed with complacency. Governments in the US, the UK, France, Germany and elsewhere are convulsed with protracted hearings about the role of Russian-supported news sites in the social media designed to sow political dissension and mistrust of public institutions in their countries.

Fake news, however, is not a new phenomenon. Media reporting of the climate change issue - among the most important international policy concerns for most governments in the past two decades or longer - has been plagued by charges of intentionally-biased and misleading reporting from both sides, advocates and sceptics.

On reading climate change news - both mainstream and that purveyed in the social media - the typical non-specialist news consumer is immediately faced with the stark choice between enlightened affirmation of "settled science" or "anti-science" denial. Climate change news is presented as a package deal: it is real, man-made and dangerous (as in President Barack Obama's famous tweet), or that it is not happening. But this is a false dichotomy.

To break free from this binary straight-jacket, here is a practical guide to intelligently navigating journalistic views of a difficult and complex problem in the era of pervasive fake news.

THE '97% CONSENSUS'

This is easily among the most misleading assertions made by climate change alarmists. We are constantly told that there is a "consensus" of scientific opinion that human-caused climate changes are occurring and that radical changes in policy and behaviour are required.

What exactly do scientists agree on? The answer is that climate science experts have a variety of opinions, ranging from "the climate always changes" to "humans have contributed to climate change". While most scientists would agree with these broad statements, there would be far less unanimity when posed with more detailed questions such as "How much has climate naturally varied since pre-historic times?" and "By how much have recent human-caused emissions contributed to increasing global temperatures?".

The often-implicit assertion that "we are going to have catastrophe if we don't go all out to replace fossil fuels" in the 97 per cent consensus claim is spurious and hence, fake. The original peer-reviewed paper that was cited by the mainstream news media in support of the 97 per cent consensus claim did not ask the surveyed scientists what they thought were the appropriate policy responses (if any). Attempting to define a single number to represent a range of opinions with many nuances and which have nothing at all to say about what policies to adopt to counter global warming is not just unhelpful, but misleading.

The best counter to the "97 per cent consensus" reference, with all its implied baggage, would be to first express agreement to the obvious (the climate always changes, and mankind is likely to be contributing to such changes) and then face up to the question as to what is to be done.

COSTS AND BENEFITS

Appropriate policy responses need to consider all economic costs and benefits and their distribution across people and places now and across generations over time. Too often, the apocalyptic visions of climate policy advocates make for muddled thinking and undermine their case. The single-minded emphasis on fossil fuel use as the source of a potential global catastrophe often over-rides all common sense regarding the benefits of fossil fuels to human civilisation. The truth is far less convenient, to borrow Al Gore's phrase.

Modern economic growth and humanity's long grind to emerge from widespread poverty is also a story of the development of fossil fuels. Humans benefited mightily by going up the energy value chain, from using wood, straw and cow-dung since the dawn of time to the rapid growth in coal mining that accompanied the 19th century Industrial Revolution and to the widespread use of oil and natural gas in the 20th and 21st centuries. Fossil fuels have saved forests and alleviated backbreaking human effort, and represent the best chance for many developing countries to quickly emerge as middle-income economies that can devote more resources to fighting environmental problems facing them both now and in the future.

The chief economic advisor to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, recently put across the point more bluntly: "The narrative of 'carbon imperialism' should not be allowed to block realistic energy planning." The latter would include adopting the best technology in the use of cheap coal for power generation, increasing the use of cleaner fossil fuels such as natural gas, and recognising the hidden costs of intermittency of newer technologies such as wind and solar power.

What India cannot afford is Germany's Energiewende debacle. After the vast investments by the government on renewable energy technologies in its rush to phase out nuclear power, its leading magazine Der Spiegel ran a report about the country's energy poverty subtitled "How Electricity Became a Luxury Good".

The best academic models that link climate change and economic impacts come up with costs of 10 per cent or less of the global gross domestic product by the year 2100 and beyond. As economists David Henderson and John Cochrane put it: "That's a lot of money but that's a lot of years too."

Between now and then, it may well be smarter to ensure high economic growth and healthy R&D budgets for new technologies to build resilience to risks of climate change. It is indeed rational to wait strategically before responding to uncertain risks far off into the future with fast-changing technology options.

For the world's bottom two billion people mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, with little or no access to electricity and modern cooking fuels, global warming policy must compete for scarce resources with policies to mitigate other threats to human welfare, including the scourges of malaria, dirty water and child malnutrition afflicting people now.

Hardly a day passes by without news of extreme weather events allegedly caused by global warming. Linking the immediacy of weather events and their impacts on unfortunate victims to a larger and often implicit message of climate change sells well in a saturated media competing for eyeballs and advertising revenue.

Yet there is little or no evidence linking specific weather events to climate change. The weather and climate change are two different phenomena, one short-term and highly variable, the other very long run and cumulative. The links between the two are tenuous and causality is difficult to prove under the current state of knowledge.

LITTLE SYSTEMATIC EVIDENCE

This is the position held not only by many reputable scientists but several lead authors involved in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is little systematic evidence to indicate that tropical cyclones, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the US or globally. The fundamental problem about linking the transitory events of weather with long-term trends in climate relates to the philosopher Karl Popper's famous test of empirical science: the ability to falsify hypothesis. He distinguishes the scientific from the unscientific such that what is unfalsifiable is classed as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience.

When very hot summers and very cold winters or extreme floods and drought are all assumed to be caused by an overarching global warming hypothesis, one is hard put to find any weather that is not "caused" by the hypothesis. In Popper's terms, this is not science, and hence, in our terms, it is fake news.

Facing up to the question of what is to be done brings one back to a sober discussion of costs, benefits, risks and uncertainty of climate policy. This is precisely the type of discussion that is lacking in this era of fake news.