What climate emergency?

For very many problems, the problems are combinatorially explosive. You cannot conceivably search the entire space of a problem like climate change. We aren’t even sure of all the variables that need to be searched. We do not have the time, the machinery, the resources to search the whole space. But life demands that you act, it demands a decision and there is no escaping it because not making a decision is itself a decision. To solve the combinatorial explosion problem, early experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning got stuck and needed to revert back to study how human’s make decisions. Human instincts are highly evolved to efficiently exclude the infinitude of options and focus on what is most relevant, most functional. Even today’s most powerful chess computers make their decisions without exhaustive analysis of every available move.

So ostensibly there should not be anything controversial that our governments together with leading experts have decided that climate change is real and that our release of carbon into the atmosphere needs to be dramatically curtailed to avoid a catastrophe. Like the chess computer, a decision is made not on an exhaustive analysis but on the best available information.

What then do we make of the August 14th 2023, declaration by over 1,600 scientist that “there is no climate emergency?” The signatories could not be unaware of the likely opprobrium they will attract. The statement flies in the face of many decades of official government policy, and repeated rounds of well publicised global agreements. Fact checking sites will no doubt accuse the signatories of being in the pay of the coal and gas industry, and raise a myriad of questions concerning their credentials. The signatories include 2 noble laureates, professors, teachers, geologists, researches, government bureaucrats, lawyers, publishers, writers, explorers… There are 321 of them from the USA, 142 from the UK, 190 from Italy, 86 from Germany,102 from France, 186 from Australia, 122 from Canada…

The “No Emergency” Declaration is not the first of its kind to challenge the consensus.

In 1997, The Oregon petition was signed by over 30,000 including over 9,000 signatories with PHDs opposed to the Kyoto protocols.

Back in 1989, Climatologist Stephen Schneider infamously stated that gaining “broad based support” meant having “to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” Climate change advocacy walks a tightrope. They must exaggerate to grab the public’s attention and priorities but not exaggerate so much as to project hopelessness. 

The latest “no emergency” statement has not made many headlines in mainstream media. Our media are too busy covering Megan and Harry, Biden’s dementia, Trump’s growing mugshot album, the lack of ammunitions in Ukraine, inflation, transgender, racism… There are just too many higher priority subjects.

The “there is no climate emergency” declaration calls for a return to scientific integrity, and hackneyed truth telling:

1. The declaration reminds us that Earth’s climate has forever been subject to cold and warm phases

2. Both natural and human-made factors are spotlighted as contributors to climate change.

3. The statement contends IPCC global warming model predictions have repeatedly failed.

4. It asserts that CO2 is not the enemy as it enriches the atmosphere

5. They dispute that global warming is the cause of hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters.

Governments have been donning the hero’s cape, vying for supremacy in the “green” game for decades. They’ve been drafting policies tomes based on IPCC’s climate findings, racing toward net-zero emissions. as a result, coal mines and nuclear power plants have been shut down; our electricity and gas bills have soared. In 2022 Europe disconnected itself from cheap Russian gas. The subsequent NATO sanctions against Russia – a leading exporter of fossil fuels – have caused a surge in global inflation and subsequent economic contraction.

It is not controversial to claim modern civilization and the last 200 years of dramatic technological improvements would not have been possible without ready access to cheap fossil fuel energy. There is a powerful appeal to move away from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewables, whether or not carbon is responsible. The question is whether the urgency and cost of change exceeds its benefit; whether, the climate agenda is guilty of a myopic groupthink that has entrenched silos of power whose sole purpose is simply to perpetuate itself – or not.

Questions:

Wasteful Spending: Annually trillions of dollars are thrown at renewable energy projects with questionable returns

Policy Over-Reach: Over-zealousness over-reach pre-emptively scuttling nuclear, gas, and coal for no measurable benefit.

Causing:

Rising levels of unemployment, economic stagnation and runaway global inflation.

Is climate change a religion?

Instead of surgically working thru the scientific complexity, we may have created a climate change religion, inciting a posse of enraged climate priests and handed them an economic sledgehammer.

Embrace uncertainty

The climate debate, like the pandemic, and the war on terror before it, showcases the problem of combinatorial explosion in an increasingly interdependent complex modern world. The dangers of bureaucracy and myopic government-funded policies, leading to wasteful spending, and destructive policy over-reach are also not imaginary. History is littered with it. Politicians readily find all sort of reasons to raise fear levels.

Combinatorial explosion means we can never be certain that our decisions are right, but we still need to decide and act. Moving forward we need to be open to new evidence, and the possibility that our previous decisions were wrong and harmful. Are we big enough, in those circumstances, to admit we got it wrong and change course?