The Climate Summit in Copenhagen is providing interesting reading for folks. Apparently, Sarah Palin has weighed in via the always friendly op-ed pages of the Washington Post. Last night, California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher took to the House floor to denounce "globalists" who have a secret agenda that only he, apparently is aware of, although what it is, he can't say, because then he'd have to kill everyone listening.
Then there's the alleged "Climategate" scandal, in which hacked emails from a British climate research institute reveal . . . that scientists debate stuff, including the political implications of their research. Ooo!
When politics and science collide, it is usually a messy business. Politics is about power; science is about explaining how stuff happens, a "best guess" based on publicly-accessible methods, providing answers that even the most dedicated practitioner would admit are nothing but provisional. After all, even Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Darwin were "wrong" in the sense that their theories have either been superseded or, at the very least, are known to be incomplete. Precisely for this reason, however, the introduction of scientific data in to political debate creates problems. Since there are actually politicians who are unscrupulous enough to point out that scientific data can be erroneous, we have the odd combination of a political conference, meeting to discuss the policy implications of scientific data, based in a theory, all of which, as some rightly point out, could be wrong.
"Could be" is not "is", however. Falsifying a scientific theory is difficult. A theory that is able to take in to account all sorts of disparate data, and predict the potential outcomes of future research is a pretty robust theory. Then there are the facts that the theory attempts to connect - the belching of all sorts of gases known to create the greenhouse effect by two hundred years of industrial activity in the west; rising global temperatures and sea levels; the disappearance of glaciers; the upward trend in global temperatures; the increasing instability of regional meteorological phenomenon; even species extinction rates and migration patterns of birds and sea mammals. These are phenomena that, taken separately, make no sense. Drawn together through a theory that states that they are related, or at the very least highly correlated, makes sense of this data.
No scientist, of whom I am aware, would make a policy recommendation based on any particular bit of research, or even an entire theory. At their best, as handmaids of politicians, they merely report their findings, based on current research models, and allow the politicians to figure out what to do, if anything.
Since it is devilishly difficult at the moment to get some folks in the United States Congress to understand the reality that we face, imagine getting delegates from nation-states as disparate as Uzbekistan, the Central African Republic, the Maldives, and Bolivia to come to anything like agreement on a kind of global policy regarding climate change. Yet, the UN is cowboying up, getting roughly representatives from over 200 nations together to discuss "what do we do about it." In principle, this is a good thing; global warming effects us all. No single country can possibly address this issue on its own. Yet, at the same time, there are all sorts of complications that make such a meeting not quite a farce, but certainly an exercise in futility, especially for those who are dedicated to the idea that global warming is the most pressing problem facing the planet at the moment. Energy-producing countries certainly have no interest in curbing the use of fossil fuels; some of those countries, like Venezuela and Nigeria, need that oil money for development purposes. Emerging economies like India, China, Brazil, and Argentina might balk at being told by those in western Europe and North America that they are required to take steps to make further industrial expansion more expensive. African nations that are potentially rich in mineral wealth and other natural resources might not be best pleased to be told that extracting that wealth would be a danger to the climate. It is difficult enough to find investors willing to risk putting their money toward mining ventures in unstable places in the world; now, it seems, it might be possible that such would be cost-prohibitive.
These are only some examples of the political realities the meeting will face. Then, of course, there are on-going international rivalries and even conflicts that make these economic questions pale in comparison. There is the developed world faced by an increasingly recalcitrant undeveloped world. Many of these latter states, only recently released from over a century of imperial domination, still de facto colonies of the interests and industries of the imperial power, might be a tad reluctant to be told by these same former colonial powers how to run their countries.
Finally, there are the activists. A fun bunch, they are convinced that the threat of global warming is such that we must simply disregard the social, economic, and political realities of the world and do somethingright now!!!!! What "that" might be . . . well, beyond "curbing greenhouse gas emissions" and "ending our reliance on fossil fuels" some might offer some ideas, to be sure. For the most part, though, the nitty-gritty details of policy - like cap-and-trade, say, in the United States, or investment incentives via the World Bank for developing nations to adopt "clean" industries - are up to other folks. Too many activists, in my experience, really can't be bothered with this kind of stuff. "Raise awareness" is their mantra and motto.
The clean lines and elegance of science meeting the dirty, sometimes nasty, occasionally delusional, world of politics can be fun to watch. Yet, when the issue facing us is as full of roadblocks and pitfalls, crazy folk screaming at the clouds and earnest do-gooders insisting that the entire planet is going to die unless we all shut up and listen to them, we have the makings not so much for a road map for future policy as an exercise in global futility. It may be that Rep. Rohrbacher's delusion of "global governance" is what is necessary to address the threat posed by global warming; sadly, the reality is that such does not exist, and even if it did, it would face these same problems, only slightly more organized.
