A thoughtful Piece from Ex CRU insider and Tyndall Centre chief Mike Hulme:
” Now, a hundred years later, and at the beginning of a new century, heightening anxieties
about future anthropogenic climate change are fuelling – and in turn being fuelled by – a new
variety of the determinist fallacy. Although distinct from the politically and ethically discredited
climate determinism epitomised by Ellsworth Huntington and his followers, climate has regained
some of its former power for ‘explaining’ the performance of environments, peoples and
societies. In seeking to predict a climate-shaped future, the complexity of interactions between
climates, environments and societies is reduced and a new variant of climate determinism
emerges. I call this ‘climate reductionism’, a form of analysis and prediction in which climate is
first extracted from the matrix of interdependencies which shape human life within the physical
world.
Once isolated, climate is then elevated to the role of dominant predictor variable. I argue
in this paper that climate reductionism is a methodology that has become dominant in analyses of
present and future environmental change – and that as a methodology it has deficiencies.
This way of thinking and analysing finds expression in some of the balder (and bolder)
claims made by scientists, analysts and commentators about the future impacts of anthropogenic
climate change. Here are some examples of claims in which emerge from this climate
reductionist form of analysis:
• Every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead;
• We predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37%
of species … will be ‘committed to extinction’;
• 185 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of disease directly attributable
to climate change by the end of the century;
• The costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global
GDP each year, now and forever … [rising to] 20% of GDP or more;
• I think there will be substantial change [in climate] whatever we do. If we do nothing
over the next 20 years it will be catastrophic. If we do nothing over the next 50 to 100
years it might even be terminal.
Download the full paper here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
People hate not knowing what the ocean-atmosphere system will do, and they hate not knowing why it has done what it has done. In response, they have been murdering “witches” and other weak folks for a long time.
A subset of these climate-fearers wish to believe that computers can deliver them from having to experience climate at all. As denizens of the 21st century, these people, which includes most of the computer modelers, are offended by such powerlessness.
While their computing power is vast, their intellectual power is limited, and Hulme is right to call them out on this. I discuss computer modeling in Chapter 5 — Rise of the Machines — in my new book: http://amzn.to/w3FQx8
By the way, I am grateful to computers for the innumerable ways that they have increased the quality of my own life and the lives of just about everyone else on Earth. That said, it is clear to me that manmade machines will not reduce the climate system to something that can be known, in terms of successful multidecadal forecasts, anytime soon.
Tallbloke, if you let me know how to contact you I will get you a copy of the book in electronic or paper form if you so desire. Happy New Year to you and everyone here!
[Reply] Email incoming – thanks! – Rog
“In seeking to predict a climate-shaped future, the complexity of interactions between
climates, environments and societies is reduced and a new variant of climate determinism
emerges. I call this ‘climate reductionism’…”
This is an excellent point, and one manifestation of this climate determinism is the creation of many new masters and PhD programs. Several examples include “Cliamate Change Environmental Degree,” “PhD in non profit management (tackle emerging issues)” and degrees in “sustainable development studies.” These armies of experts will emerge in the coming years taking up positions in government and other sectors, appearing and making bald and bold claims about the effects of co2 and methane in the atmosphere during every natural weather disaster, and afflicting the rest of society with their expertise about what is “sustainable.”
“Every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead”
Not exactly on topic, but I’m glad someone brought this up because it gives me an excuse to present a graph I put together a few years ago. It’s a plot of estimated climate change deaths by region (India, Southern Africa, Europe etc.) in 2000 against surface air temperature change between 1976 and 2000 which is when pretty much all of the pre-2000 warming occurred. Here it is:
It shows a negative trend, clearly demonstrating that global warming is actually good for you.
And the data are from the World Health Organization study which concluded that global warming was killing people (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2007/9789241595674_eng.pdf )
@Zeke These armies of experts will emerge in the coming years taking up positions…
That won´t happen as the magnitude of the economic crisis has been underestimated and those “experts” will have to survive by working in real jobs.
Perhaps you may wonder how I dare to make such a prediction. I do not, it has happened many times before, and btw it´s already happening in Europe.
All arguments about the relation between man and climate do not take into account reality: To begin with, any normal human being (of course not a professor from the academia) would ask: What is the SIZE of a human being compared to the Earth´s diameter?, Does it count for the earth´s environment such a microscopic being?; can you, when flying on a plane at 45,000 feet high, those “human beings” of your fancy…or they are just “molds” on the surface of the earth?
BTW molds and human breath oxygen…curious, isn´t it?
In any case, and fortunately, the size of their well fed egos does not count, because it is an imaginary figure 🙂
Harold;
My first glance at your comment picked up, “The Ruse of the Machines”. 😉 Possibly such a chapter would have a sub-section on “prestidigitization”?
Roger;
I wonder if the WHO has studied the 3 decades of cooling, 40s to 70s, and developed a chart of deaths due to global cooling. My intuition is that it would be very steep, indeed!
Brian
If in the 1970s the WHO had studied the 40s-70s cooling they would undoubtedly have found that it had killed millions of people. After all, we were on the brink of another ice age at the time.
[…] Mike Hulme: Deficiencies of Climate Reductionism […]
Adolfo Giurfa says:
“That won´t happen as the magnitude of the economic crisis has been underestimated and those “experts” will have to survive by working in real jobs.”
I can’t imagine what they would have qualifications to do. By “real” job we usually mean working at something that provides some good or service that people require or desire. This will be utterly impossible for them to do, as their whole training and raison d’etre is to impede all productivity through regulations. But at least some coal plants should be opened just for them to work in. (:
Back on topic.
” Now, a hundred years later, and at the beginning of a new century, heightening anxieties
about future anthropogenic climate change are fuelling – and in turn being fuelled by – a new
variety of the determinist fallacy. Although distinct from the politically and ethically discredited
climate determinism epitomised by Ellsworth Huntington and his followers, climate has regained
some of its former power for ‘explaining’ the performance of environments, peoples and
societies. In seeking to predict a climate-shaped future, the complexity of interactions between
climates, environments and societies is reduced and a new variant of climate determinism
emerges. I call this ‘climate reductionism’, a form of analysis and prediction in which climate is
first extracted from the matrix of interdependencies which shape human life within the physical
world.”
Whatever happened to plain, comprehensible English?
Basically all Hulme is saying is that the CAGW bunch have gone overboard trying to make people believe that we unspeakable carbon-belching humans are destroying the planet. But anyone who isn’t a CAGW fanatic and who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last ten years already knows this, and burying the message in buzzwords doesn’t make it new.
So – nothing to see here, move along.
Roger;
Yes, that was the point. The difference is that they would have been right that time.
Roger; I find Hulme precise and eminently readable. But then, I did a university degree in history and philosophy of science. 😉
I think Mike Hulme is heading back into the bright light of reality. he has a broader understanding of the relationship between science and society than the rest of the ‘Team’ IMO.
When he believed more strongly in ‘the cause’ he was willing to yoke this understanding to the propaganda efforts of the Tyndall Centre. Since his resignation from that post we have seen a gradual but steady shift in the sceptical direction from him.
Roger, Your plot does indeed indicate a negative slope as you say. It is -60.6 deaths per degree (if my manual “digitisation” is reasonable, with a standard error of 40.2, giving a t value of 1.73 and probability of about 12.2% (assuming normality). Not all that convincing, I suppose, but I’d go along with your suggestion. All data points lie well within the 95% confidence interval bands, as one would expect. Incidentally I’ve not been able to track down the original data.
I was not aware that Mike Hulme had resigned from the Tyndall Centre. That’s brave but also wise, I think.
Hi TB:
I envy your ability to read Hulme. However, I did my degrees in geology and geophysics, and words of more than three syllables were just too much for most of us dirt-diggers.
But I do agree that Hulme is undergoing some sort of epiphany, one which started with climategate and which has been evolving slowly since then. I don’t think he will ever join the ranks of the AGW deniers, but he already seems well on the way to becoming a climate realist, which in my book is pretty much the same thing as a skeptic. 😉
The last line was good;
“If we do nothing over the next 50 to 100 years it might even be terminal.”
Terminal to the idea that co2 causes catastrophic warming, or indeed any warming at all.
I reckon that conclusion will be reached in about ten years once we get some way past solar max.
Mike Hulme:
The epistemological pathways offered by climate models and their derived analyses are only one way of believing what the future may hold. They have validity; and they have relevance. But to compensate for the epistemological slippage I have described in this article it is necessary to balance these reductionist pathways to knowing the future with other ways of envisioning the future.
I wonder by what kind of assessment Mike Hulme is claiming that climate models and their derived analyses have validity.
These models don’t include a host of variables we have identified but so far have been unable to develop algorithms – even good heuristics for. Any model run is soon going to head off into wide error bands wrt the future.
Temperature might go up, or it might go down, or it might remain about the same.
Of this I’m certain. 🙂
I hope you’re right, TB, but to me Hulme’s essay reads as a verbose piece of “magical wishing” – he seems to have recognised that blanket lowering of living standards simply causes civil unrest, riots and general mayhem, but has no practical ideas on how to lower emissions on a grand scale without these undesirable side effects … so he opines that future “human ingenuity” will resolve these problems
Perhaps it will, but clobbering reliable, economic energy supply without equally reliable, economic substitutes is not a credible position, IMO
Pollyanna at her best, I think
Whilst on holiday in Spain during the summer of 2003 I was one of many admitted to hospital with heat distress. The doctor who treated me said that I presented with sufficiently high blood pressure for her to prepare a ‘bolsa para transportar cadáveres’, luckily she also resorted to an injection of Valium and an infusion of saline solution.
I was thus very nearly a casualty of global warming… the overnight room fan had been removed to reduce the carbon footprint of the hotel.
The paper nonetheless offers some well made points about relying on solely cause and effect when assessing impacts.
If the climate modellers range of temperature estimation can be seen to slide into the realms of fantasy through wrong or missing inputs, then unmitigated impact statements rest atop this prediction with zero accuracy.
An estimation of UK deaths last year through fuel poverty or instead harsh winter temperatures should offer some insight into the difficulties of attribution.
i’d like to share a related article mentioned on WUWT concerning the thoughts of Hulme’s scientific method.
Gray says:
December 27, 2011 at 3:26 am
Whilst on holiday in Spain during the summer of 2003 I was one of many admitted to hospital with heat distress. […] I was thus very nearly a casualty of global warming…
=======================================================
Mad dogs and Englishmen in the midday sun … casualty of the weather. 🙂 Common sight on our Aussie beaches.
Roger –
Like you my first degree was History and Philosophy of science. However, it was a few years ago, and the first read through of Hulmes essay left me feeling smothered with vagueness. It took a second reading for the precision you noticed to come through. My first reading heard waffley social science, my second (slower) some very clear thinking.
To anyone else, I recommend making some further effort if it appears as gobbledegook.
I think more than anything, Hulmes study pertains to psychology and how we inevitably construct visions of the future. I don’t think much has changed in human mentality in a generation or two – we still create false pictures by extrapolating a single variable and using imagination to make the picture unrealistically frightening. We’ve always done that, and we should use that historical knowledge to be sceptical about what appears as certain catastrophe – that vision merely means we’re picturing the future as humans have always done. It means things are pretty normal.
What we need to do is make sure mass hysteria doesn’t take hold and we either start burning ‘witches’ again or turning off the electricity in the hope that it’s going to influence the raininess or windiness of the planet in a hundred years time.
TB,
I have come to find that the majority of scientists suffer from PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY SYNDROME.
This means anything not temperature data based is not included and ignored as of no significance.
@Tallbloke: Epistemology is too big a word to use it in such a limited as “climatology”.
It is funny to observe that their epistemology does not include intuition (their stomachs are too busy digesting trash food or going after the next girl who crosses their field of sight, that it is impossible for them to perceive anything of a higher energetic order) and their whole intellectual activity is limited to counting and naming, being their favorite method statistics and their cosmology astronomy (the naming of stars). Anything different becomes then something “surprising” and “unexplainable” 🙂
So…..If we do nothing over the next 20 years (to stop such an exaggerated “democratic order”, driven by a wrongly understood principle of equality, which has taken to positions of power and leadership to the fool and sick) it will be catastrophic. (And…) If we do nothing over the next 50 to 100 years it might even be terminal. 🙂
Anteros said @ December 27, 2011 at 9:54 am
“Roger –
Like you my first degree was History and Philosophy of science. However, it was a few years ago, and the first read through of Hulmes essay left me feeling smothered with vagueness. It took a second reading for the precision you noticed to come through. My first reading heard waffley social science, my second (slower) some very clear thinking.”
Sadly, that’s academicese for you. But I agree, Mike Hulme is quite a clear thinker even though his expression is cloaked in the conventions of academe. I thought his book “Why We Disagree About Climate Change” excellent. For a while, I thought he might have been FOIA, but he denied this during an interview on radio.
Never got around to finishing my degree in history & philosophy of science; I was sidetracked.
Unlike what I read in the Hulme paper, I found Diamond’s “Downfall” (book) take on societies and the environment very much a study in how humans’ response to environmental changes, rather than the environmental changes themselves, are the key to seeing prosperity or despair. For one example, the Vikings/Danes in Greenland insisted on being European outside of Europe. They wanted beef, then sheep, and disdained fish, although fishing stocks were (to this day’s way of thinking) bizarrely plentiful. They starved in the midst of plenty, but not the type of plenty they wanted. The Easter Islanders insisted on fulfilling their cultural desires at the expense of forests they needed for all sorts of other practices. It was the cultural failure – really, the failure of individuals to put their personal, immediate desires ahead of the collective’s larger and longer needs – that brought doom. Not the environment.
What the prior thinking on climatic determinations (or neo-determinism) say to me is that the dominant factor is not climate at all, but cultural ossification: the tendency of an established cultural group to hold onto behaviour (not beliefs) that are self-destructive. This ossification and destruction, however, is not of the general populace, but of the elite. The status quo benefits those at the top far more than those at the bottom (or middle) for simple multiplier-effect reasons: if 10 people do the effort which produces what you enjoy, even if the results of that effort decline significantly, you still – at, say, a 3:1 ratio – enjoy a significantly improved standard of living. I may no longer have fires burning in my hearths 24-7, but every time I get up I can have the fires roaring, while the firewood-gatherers freeze in the dark.
Cultural ossification: is this not what the climate-change argument is all about? That the over-consumption, throw-away society will lead the world – the poor, particularly, to a resource impoverished, environmentally degraded situation? And who will do this to us but the richest, the most consuming group of the planet? Ironically, it will be the Al Gores and the David Suzukis, who have the multiple homes, motorized transports and energy consumptive lifestyles, and whose life paths would be most affected by moving towards a more “sustainable” future.
Cultural ossification, as I see it, explains the downfall of civilizations quite well. It is not the inability to change in response to the environment (local or global) but the refusal to change.
I have worked for a number of corporations that fell apart because, and only because, those at the top refused to adapt to the changing “environment” of business, economics and their success in technical pursuits. Their self-identity was too determined by how they worked, and how they appeared to others as they worked. The product of their work was secondary to them, despite what they might say. The mantra was (and in large corporations commonly is), ‘do exactly what we always do, but this year be more effective, more profitable and in a bigger way. Do anything you need to do, as long as it isn’t different from what we have done in the past, and doesn’t require more effort on the part of the upper management.’ Isn’t this what we see on a larger scale socially? Cultural ossification is as powerful a determinant of a business as it is of a nation or civilization.
The very strange aspect of the neo-environmental determinism as described here is that, when applied to the past, it fails to reflect historical truths. The world, prior to humans, was much warmer than today, and had much more CO2 in the air than today, and the biosphere was clearly more robust. From the Devonian all through the Cretaceous, warmth and CO2 lead to a vibrant world. Today, though, a 2C increase in global temperatures is supposed to cause an end-Permian style catastrophic, global loss of life. A 2C average – or, say, 5C, increase in the temperature of central Europe is supposed to cause termination of human existence there, while the 5C increase in temperature of the Mediterranean 15,000 years ago (at the end of the last glacial period) allowed a great expansion in that regions’ life. Deserts would expand (probably) in a warmer world, but the growing seasons and liveable portions of the planet north of the Canadian-Alberta border would not.
To one with thinking power, the pessimism is bewildering. We are told in Calgary that. were our temperatures to rise to become similar to those of northern California, our vegetable gardens would die and our fruit trees bear smaller fruit. Come again? If we become like, say, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, where we go for vegetables, multiple fruit and lots and lots of wine, we would starve to death? And if Saudi Arabia on an average summer day became like Saudi Arabia on a hot-summer average day, millions of Arabs would flee to the steppes of central Asia?
If anything, cultural ossification would have everybody staying where they already are, fretting away and making do. Perhaps Californians would come to Calgary, and Arizonans, to California. The Amazonian jungles would creep up the eastern Andes. Peruvian natives in coloured ponchos would take their ponchos off during the day. That, I could imagine. Or that the poncho-making business would fold and poncho-makers riot in the streets for government subsidies to the poncho-making industries. Very likely. But all of this nonsense of collapsing human societies is just, well, nonsense.
If successful human adaptation wasn’t in our genes, we wouldn’t have human societies from the Inuit to the Kalahari Bushmen. If cultural ossification wasn’t part of our heritage, we wouldn’t have had the Easter Island meltdown or the Jim Jones, Guyana massacre (now there was an elite who wouldn’t change under external pressure).
How the environment changes affects peoples’ lives in different ways. The Canadian West was, in the explorer Palliser’s experience, uninhabitable when he travelled across it in the early 1870s, yet increased rain made it a bread basket and immigrant’s dream only 20 years later. We move to enjoy better things and to avoid bad things. These days, there is practically no room left to move; we are stuck with where we are at. But not all change – even linear temperature ones – are ruinous in a world with such variety. It is beyond foolish to think that the biosphere will collapse as a whole under a couple of degrees of temperature rise and (if at all) an oceanic pH change from 8.1 to 8.0. For those who insist on behaving tomorrow like they did yesterday, even though the material things of the world are no longer the same, the Bernie Madoffs of the environment, of course there will be “negative” consequences. But they are (less than) the 1%, and are at the top, not the bottom. Tough.
This, from someone who thinks Global Warming is only a scam, by the way.
Excellent post Doug… Why do things have to change?
Further to what Doug posted, Anteros says above, “we still create false pictures by extrapolating a single variable and using imagination to make the picture unrealistically frightening. We’ve always done that”. And the proponents of relying on that single variable often gain sway, and then sputter out and are replaced by another lot. Not such a big deal when all they take down with them is a corporation, but it gets serious when a whole civilization is at stake.
My sense of the flow of things, though, is that despite the time-tested machinery of crowd-mind-control being run at full bore, there’s now too much that bypasses those nets and corrals, and we’ll stop the de-industrialization effort before it goes too far — with a strong helping (Invisible) Hand from the economics of (even minimal), self-interest. The “No Gain” part of the counter-adage is starting to bite. Defunding of the inane adventures in ethanol, solar, and wind has just begun, e.g.
I must agree with those who find Hulme’s style difficult to stomach. I think it pretentious and turgid. There may be a great mind lurking under the verbosity, but why deliberately obfuscates the message if it is has merit?
Much prefer the plain, logical language of real scientists, who make an effort to ensure their message is clear. A great example of this is a one sheet paper spotted by PG on the post below, titled the Unified Theory of Climate…
Mike’s signature tune …
I think climatology’s main problem is the length of time it takes for models to be falsified. Synthetic and medicinal chemists (and others) are much more familiar with the cold slap of reality when great ideas come up against the real world. It makes it easier to throw away failed experiments. I’ve picked up not a few journal articles where modellers compared their results to other models, with reality not receiving a mention, even when there is existing experimental data in the literature.
Needless to say, a computational chemist can appear much more ‘productive’ than one in the laboratory.
Doug that was excellent reasoning. I think that from the historical perspective you are on the right track. As one who reads Scripture, I found myself thinking of the collapse of society in the old Kingdom of Israel, as stated in Isaiah. Your comments are right on with the observed decay of that period. One can observe similar decay amongst the elite in the Roman and the Greek periods of history.