And in this corner ...

Climate change debate

A new website launched from within the University of Canterbury is challenging those who believe there is no longer any argument about climate change. PHILIP MATTHEWS meets the sceptic and the anti-sceptic.

The corridors and offices of Canterbury University's philosophy department are dead quiet in January, but you can imagine that they are normally ringing with informed debate, lively disagreement and polite point-scoring.

I think, therefore I argue? To disagree up here is to take part in both a gentlemanly sport and an honourable tradition.

"It's very rare for two philosophers to agree on anything," says Douglas Campbell, who teaches in the department.

Case in point: Campbell noticed last year that Denis Dutton, associate professor of philosophy and one of the university's most high-profile academics, had a graph on the door of his office that explained why he is a climate-change sceptic. Why he doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming -- the idea that human activity has caused temperatures to rise.

Such intellectual heresy. Campbell was astonished and collared Dutton in the tearoom. The friendly argument started there and they haven't got to the bottom of it yet, says Campbell.

On New Year's Day, the argument went to another level with the launch of climatedebatedaily. com, a website that acts as a clearing house for articles and essays supporting both Campbell's position and Dutton's -- the case for climate change and the case against. The sceptic and the ... what?

It's a curious fact of this debate that while the denier gets to be called a climate-change sceptic or the authoritative-sounding "climate rationalist", no-one has come up with an attractive term for the other side. Campbell has been using "anti-sceptic" to define himself, but he agrees it isn't satisfactory. Climate-change "believer" carries all the baggage and stigma of religion -- and such sceptics as United States left-wing columnist Alexander Cockburn claim that climate change has indeed become a secular faith.

Campbell has also used "pro-IPCC" -- named for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- but it's hardly catchy.

Both men are listed as co-editors of the site and they take the work in turns -- each finds arguments for the other side as well as their own. "It's not Denis's corner and my corner," Campbell says. "We're there to keep each other honest."

For both, the site is also a distraction from work that they should really be getting on with: Campbell is finishing a PhD in philosophy with the University of Arizona and Dutton is near the end of a major new book on evolutionary psychology and art, to be titled The Art Instinct.

The site is modelled on Dutton's successful Arts and Letters Daily, a clearing house for cultural journalism. That site gets 44 million hits a year. Dutton expects that the appeal of the new project will be narrower: a few weeks after the launch, the site was getting around 2000 hits a day.

The motto here is "let the best argument win". Which implies that there is still an argument to be had. Increasingly, the mainstream media has decided that the issue is settled -- that climate change is fact, not theory, and there's no longer any need to include sceptics within global-warming coverage. National Radio's Chris Laidlaw made that very point recently.

And that's what rankles Dutton. "We're not talking about whether fundamentally we're an evolved species," he says. "We're not talking about whether homeopathy produces clinical results. I think that climate change is still an open question.

"I'm perfectly willing to be proved wrong, but I'm not willing to be shut up on the authority of people who think they know better. I'm not willing to be intimidated into adopting an opinion because it's the majority opinion. There is a well-qualified, knowledgeable, intelligent minority view."

Take solar astronomers, for example. Based on a recent drop in sunspot activity, some are predicting that another mini-Ice Age will be upon us in the middle of this century -- the last was the so-called "Maunder Minimum" which delivered unusually cold weather between 1645 and 1715.

If the astronomers are right, and we are freezing in the year 2050 and ice caps spread rather than retreat, will believers like Campbell look stupid in hindsight?

"He won't look stupid," Dutton says, "because he's one of the people who said, `look, there's two sides'. I hope I won't look stupid for having thought there's two sides. But I think Al Gore might look stupid."

"The major scientific academies would look stupid," Campbell says, "because nearly all of them have thrown their weight behind global warming."

But neither Campbell nor Dutton is a geologist or a climatologist. How are philosophers qualified to pass judgment on this issue? What they can do, they say, is weigh up the merits of an argument. They're qualified in logic, and that has general application.

The most famous philosopher to ever start an argument at Canterbury was Karl Popper, the Austrian thinker who sat out World War 2 in Christchurch. Dutton likes to cite Popper's line that one must put forward hypotheses that are open to falsification. Too often, he says, arguments in the media for global warming fail this test -- record high temperatures are quoted, but record lows, such as those experienced in South America over the past year, are less widely reported.

"You mustn't simply cherrypick evidence to support your pet beliefs," Dutton says.

He admits there are "persuasive arguments" for global warming -- and adds that he is "daunted" by the scientific academies who have taken that position -- but he also says, and Campbell agrees, that consensus doesn't necessarily make a theory true. Dutton believes that we could be seeing something known as an "informational cascade" -- in crude terms, a herd instinct in which we don't want to risk being seen as wrong, so we agree with what is widely taken as right. A sceptical US scientist, John Christy, also believes that this has happened to fellow scientists in the global-warming debate.

But once you start introducing doubt, it's a short trip from there to apathy.

Campbell worries about this, and he says the site has had reader feedback along those lines -- that in presenting sceptical arguments as being equal in value to the more widely accepted views, the site could be doing real damage.

His solution? Keep an open mind but also apply the precautionary principle -- basically, that if there's any risk, it's worth taking precautionary measures.

Dutton, of course, politely disagrees.

 

- © Fairfax NZ News