Gale-force hype or not, nature needs protection

Some of the heat involved in 2014 being called the hottest year on record is from debate about anthropogenic climate change, writes Sholto Byrnes.

Fossil fuels are being linked to the changing climate. Photo: Frank Gunn / AP

We have just lived through what has been officially declared the hottest year on record. Sea levels are rising at a faster rate than had previously been thought. Some estimates say significant amounts of coal, gas and oil reserves – 82 per cent, 49 per cent and 33 per cent respectively – must remain underground if we are to prevent global temperatures rising more than two per cent.

There is great pressure on those who argue that the science on climate change is not, in fact, settled. A US senator, Bernie Sanders, for instance, wants to smoke out the deniers among his colleagues by means of an amendment to a new bill. It will require them to state whether they agree with “the opinion of virtually the entire worldwide scientific community” that climate change is proven and that it is causing “devastating problems in the United States and around the world”.

Whatever the US senators say, the headlines often suggest a certainty that the data does not. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for instance, which made the claim about 2014 being the hottest year, later admitted that it was only 38 per cent certain that this was true. Meanwhile, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has just issued a paper that concludes the Antarctic ice is growing, rather than shrinking.

The likes of senator Sanders and former US vice president Al Gore may claim that most experts are in agreement about climate change – that it is man-made and a threat to our continued existence. But Mr Sanders and Mr Gore would also know that there are enough academics and researchers who argue the opposite, for doubts to linger. And then there those who don’t believe scientists because they think they’re always changing their minds. They point to the public health advice handed down for decades, like butter being a health hazard. It forced millions to glumly spread their toast with tasteless margarine instead but then it turned out that natural products were better for you than artificial ones.

For further proof of the fallibility of science, why not ask a scientist? The Stanford health professor John Ioannidis once wrote a paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings are False, admitting with admirable honesty that the claim should not be surprising. “It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false,” he wrote.

But whatever the rights or wrongs of climate change data, there is one thing we can surely agree on and it’s particularly appropriate to raise it during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. It is to do with collective responsibility. We all have a clear responsibility to take greater care of the environment. Those inclined to “green” politics, as it’s called, will agree with this anyway. But even those who don’t think fossil fuel emissions make a jot of difference to global temperatures, to the glaciers in the Himalayas or to the continued survival of the North American bull trout or the lesser spotted woodpecker, will agree that it is important to preserve nature. The despoliation of the landscape that has accompanied unfettered growth is clearly a bad thing in itself. Not just because it’s dangerous, although it can be that too, as was recently suggested by Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak after the floods that displaced 250,000 people. He said that part of the reason for the flooding may have been “rampant opening of land, especially by logging”, that it was important not to look at trees as “mere profits” and we must not “ betray our mother nature”.

In a sense, the climate change naysayers, who might be called conservatives, should be natural environmentalists and believe in conserving our heritage. This includes the forests, seas and reefs. It is important to be good custodians for future generations. Religion enjoins this too. Islam holds that humans are “khalifa”, or guardians, of creation. Pope Francis dwelt on the same theme recently, in the Philippines, when he said that God “created the world as a beautiful garden and asked us to care for it. But through sin, man has disfigured that natural beauty.”

Environmentalism makes sense from a non-theological perspective too, as theorist Roger Scruton, a climate change sceptic, put it in his recent book How To Be a Conservative. He wrote: “The goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point [is] home, the place where we are and that we share, the place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil.” This, he argued, is what true conservatives should believe. And so they did, he pointed out, until the conservative cause was “polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians”. Scruton concludes that all of these factors have led conservatives to enter into an “alliance with people who regard the effort to conserve things as both futile and quaint”.

They do so at the risk of seeming selfish, as Canadian-born philosopher Ted Honderich once said, because their beliefs appear to have no “legitimation, of any recognisably moral principle”.

But environmental protection is a legitimate concern – as well as a deeply moral cause and conservatives could prove that climate change evangelism is not the only reason to be concerned about environmental degradation. If they do so only because they accept the need to preserve the beauty of nature, that’s a perfectly good enough reason. Their children and grandchildren will thank them all the same.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia