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Old Wine in New Bottles

Science magazine has published two articles this week that suggest that “the wheels of global climate change are in motion, and there is little we can do to stop them, at least in the short-term.” These articles, which no doubt are quality science done by accomplished researchers, suggest to me that discussion of climate change increasingly recirculates the same stories and same reactions – a clear sign of gridlock.

There are several relevant points here. First, while the new studies may add some details, the notion that we are committed to changing the climate is an old story. For example, in 1995, Pekka E. Kauppi wrote in Science that the goal of the Framework Convention on Climate Change was either “unattainable or irrelevant … If GCM projects are right, the climate will change, there will be dangerous effects and the Convention objective will be unattainable” (Science, 220:1454). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 1996 that “even with the most ambitious abatement policy, some climate change seems likely to occur” (WGIII, p. 188). And I wrote (PDF) in 1998, “even under a scenario of aggressive mitigation most experts expect climate change.”

Second, new studies reconfirming that we are committed to changing the climate is easily spun by both sides of the current political debate. For example, The Denver Post reports that Gerald Meehl, lead author of one of the two studies in Science this week (the other study was authored by Tom Wigley), “hoped the results are interpreted as cause for action, not pessimism.” On the other side Steve Milloy writes at FoxNews.com, “[Wigley’s results] purport to show that global warming would still occur even if we completely stopped emitting greenhouse gases… neither Kyoto nor Son of Kyoto will accomplish anything — other than, of course, driving the world, particularly developing countries, toward economic ruin.” I’ve seen no interpretations that suggest that the new studies suggest that we need a fundamentally new approach to climate. (See this commentary by Steve Rayner for an example of what a new approach might look like.)

The recirculation of “news” on climate is an obvious sign that debate and discussion remains stuck in a cul-de-sac.