Environmentalism versus climate change advocacy

From Are Conservationists Worrying Too Much About Climate Change? by Michelle Nijhuis.

At last, a possible signal towards a reasonable sign that the long nightmarish fever of Anthropogenic Global Warming might be about to break.

In January of this year, James Watson, an Australian scientist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, noticed an image that had been tweeted by a friend of his, a physician in Sydney. With a chain of progressively larger circles, it illustrated the relative frequency of causes of death among Australians, from the vanishingly rare (war, pregnancy and birth, murder) to the extremely common (respiratory disorders, cancer, heart disease). It was a simple but striking depiction of comparative risk. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done something like this for the rest of nature?’ ” Watson recalled.

The answer was that, until recently, nobody had the data. While many scientists have studied the vulnerability of individual species or groups of organisms (corals, say, or birds) to extinction, only in 2010 did ecologists, conservationists, taxonomists, and naturalists begin to more comprehensively assess the threats posed to species of all kinds—an effort to assemble what the biologist E. O. Wilson has called a “barometer of life.”

Over four months this spring, Watson and Sean Maxwell, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland, used the new data to identify and rank the existential threats to nearly nine thousand species, ranging from otters to lilies. In a commentary published today in the journal Nature, they report that almost three-quarters of the species they studied are threatened by overexploitation—human activities such as logging, fishing, and hunting. More than sixty per cent are threatened by the conversion of habitat to farmland and timber plantations. (Many species face multiple threats.) Less than twenty per cent, however, are currently endangered by the many effects of climate change—drought, extreme temperatures, severe storms, and flooding.

Like other conservationists, Watson and Maxwell were already well aware that poaching and agriculture posed serious threats to many species. But even they were surprised by how dramatically the effects outstripped those of climate change. Much like the causes of human death, the current causes of species loss appear to be inversely proportional to the media attention—and, to some extent, the research and funding attention—they receive.

This is the point that Bjorn Lomborg was making way back in 2001 with The Skeptical Environmentalist. Focus on the science and you get different answers than if you focus on the politics.

AGW has always been a political issue. Born out of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its first report in 1990, AGW has been the fulcrum to transfer resources from rich countries to poorer countries. The science was always much more tentative and subjective than allowed. It has, in the intervening years become a global football kicked all around the pitch with no goals ever being scored.

AGW had many bad consequences, few of them to do with the climate. AGW became the fire that sucked all the oxygen out of the environmental room. Many real environmentalists signed up as AGW foot soldiers, never realizing they were being manipulated. Science was another victim of AGW. Politicians being politicians, the AGW controversy became mired in lies and deceptions. Duly hedged forecasts by well intentioned scientists became statements of certainty in the mouths of social justice politicians.

Lomborg, a genuine environmentalists, was one of the first to see the bad outcomes of hijacking science for hubristic ideology. He argued that all environmental decisions needed to be evidence-based and that there were simply too many unknowns about climate forecasting to make the kind of decisions required.

Nobody argues that climate change is not happening. What is debated is how much change, in what direction, by what mechanisms, and to what degree human activities may be causing change or could prevent it. We really do not understand the great complexity of climate to any sufficient degree to make reliable forecasts as evidenced by the failure of the early forecasts to match the reality of actual temperatures.

Lomborg argued (or at least my paraphrase of him) that we live in a world of limits, including budgets. If we are going to spend $1,000 dollars on the environment, then the overwhelming majority ought to be spent on activities with a real world impact such as improved farming practices, better water management, environment and species conservation, etc. Yes, we should spend some few dollars on research and some part of that should be on understanding the climate, but until some point in the future, we simply do not understood enough about climate effects to even know whether a given action will be net positive or detrimental in consequence.

Nijhuis's is the first mainstream reporter I have seen in a long time to not automatically genuflect to the alter of AGW and actually report on real scientific efforts. Kudos.

Less than twenty per cent, however, are currently endangered by the many effects of climate change—drought, extreme temperatures, severe storms, and flooding.

Even that is likely an overstatement. Without humans, the climate is always changing with consequent deleterious effects on species and environments. It is not enough to know what percentage of species are threatened by drought, temperatures, severe storms and flooding. We have to know what percentage of those would not have happened anyway. In the human scale of things, probably virtually none, i.e. most of climate change is driven by existing phenomenon such as solar activity and other such independent variables not controlled by humans.

What is easy to lose is the real consequence of focusing for twenty years on climate change instead of more practical environmental concerns. Environmental advocacy has certainly continued but I am convinced that much energy and effectiveness has been lost owing to the diversion of attention to AGW.

I hope Nijhuis's report is the first of many to bring attention back to the environment and saving ecologies and species.