Does Climategate Trump Copenhagen?

In the minds of many Albertans, including our Open Range columnist George Koch (who opines on it in the upcoming January issue), the leaked emails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. discredit the entire scientific consensus on global warming and therefore the very need for Copenhagen, a meeting that could have significant consequences for Alberta’s economy.

This is one of those issues where there’s quite a distance between George’s thinking and mine, but I agree with his assertions that:

- The revelations from Hadley are very damaging to the cause of fighting climate change, in the way that people who shoot abortion doctors undermine the pro-life cause.

- Any policy around climate change must be based on the best and latest available facts;

- The burden of proof rests on those who would change the status quo, since change involves significant costs.

That said, I feel the deniers are barking after the wrong (hybrid) car. The popular consensus that brought Copenhagen into being did not come from somebody’s tainted “hockey stick” graph. (Who can tell you what that graph means, anyway?) It comes instead from the fact taxpaying, voting adults have noticed a change in the climate over the course of their lives. The winters we have today are not nearly as cold or prolonged as the ones they experienced in their formative years in the 1960s and ’70s. They remember when the water in the lake came up to here. It’s something they just know. That is what the deniers are really up against.

Second, getting back to those facts, what’s always bothered me is not what’s happening to the climate specifically – that’s as predictable as, well, the weather and, as our geology here in Alberta can tell you, it has never been stable – but rather the fact that there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time since the plants that today make up our hydrocarbon resources proliferated in the first place. (Unlike today’s plant material, they went undigested by respiring organisms – animals, bacteria – because the latter lagged behind in evolution. In other words, that isn’t going to happen again. We can never again “sink” more than a fraction of that carbon now released into the atmosphere again after hundreds of millions of years.) And we know the CO2 spike is caused primarily by human activity. That’s a fact.

Climate change is just one of the potentially negative outcomes of that reversion to a high-carbon atmosphere. Equally scary, in my mind, is the acidification of the oceans that many scientists predict (like with climate change, there is some but not yet conclusive evidence of that happening). That could have a devastating effect on shellfish, coral and the entire oceanic ecosystem which is very much larger and heavier in biomass than the terrestrial one we inhabit.

It’s reasonable to expect there will be a great many as-yet-undiscovered unintended consequences of the atmospheric carbon spike. We don’t begin to know them all. In my pragmatic and moral worldview, that means we have to err on the side of caution.

Finally, there is the question of motive. When a suspect of a crime is tried in court, a great deal rests on whether he or she had sufficient motive to commit the crime. Inherent in the deniers’ rhetoric is the assumption that all these crooked scientists and activists are trying to push an agenda upon the world. But to what end? What could they possibly gain from it? (Certainly not as much as Exxon Mobil can gain from funding research aimed at debunking global warming.) I just see an absence of motive, which tends to afflict all conspiracy theory.

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