London, yesterday. Credit: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty
There’s a problem with writing about science — any science — which is that scientists are human like the rest of us. They are not perfect disembodied truth-seeking agents but ordinary, flawed humans navigating social, professional and economic incentive structures.
Most notably, scientists, like people, are social. If they exist in a social or professional circle that believes X, it is hard to say not-X; if they have professed to believe Y, they won’t want to look silly and admit not-Y. It might even be hard to get research funded or published if it isn’t in line with what the wider group believes.
All this makes it very hard, as an outsider, to assess some scientific claims. You can ask some expert, but they will be an expert within the social and professional milieu that you’re looking at, and who will likely share the crony beliefs of that social and professional milieu. All of which often makes it hard to disentangle why scientists do and say the things they do. Especially when it comes to scientific claims that are politically charged, claims on hot-button topics like race, sex, poverty — and of course climate.
I couldn’t help thinking about that as I was reading Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled. Koonin is (as it says, prominently, on the front of the book) the “former Undersecretary for Science, US Department of Energy, under the Obama administration”. The publishers are obviously very keen to stress the Obama link: “…under the Trump administration” might not have carried the same heft.
Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be. The book itself is best thought of as the extended version of that op-ed, with added graphs.
We can break down his thesis into, roughly, three areas. One, is that despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence. In particular, floods, rainfall, droughts, storms, and record high temperatures have not become more common, and although the climate is unambiguously warming and sea levels have gone up, it’s hard to confidently separate human influence from natural variability.
Two, he says, climate models are highly uncertain and struggle to successfully predict the past, let alone the future, so we shouldn’t trust confident claims about the climate future. And if we do accept the IPCC’s predictions, they aren’t of imminent catastrophe. Instead, they point to slow change which humanity can easily adapt to, and, broadly speaking, to humanity continuing to prosper.
And three, he continues, there is basically nothing we can do about it anyway, partly because carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for so long, but mainly because the developing world is developing fast, and using ever more carbon to do so, and actually that’s a good thing.
These are — according to Koonin — all, by and large, only what the IPCC assessment reports and other major climate analyses say. The public conversation, which he says is full of doom and apocalypse and unwarranted certainty, has become unconnected from the state of the actual science. And he blames scientists — and policymakers, the media and the public — for that disconnection.
So is he right? Certainly he has a case when it comes to Point One: I think he is correct that the media narrative about climate change is not especially well correlated with the IPCC’s own central assessments. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that the recent floods in London, China and Germany have been held up as examples of a changing climate. But the IPCC’s most recent assessment report, 2014’s AR5, found studies showing evidence for “upward, downward or no trend in the magnitude of floods” (see p214 of the AR5 Physical Science Basis document; be warned it’s a big PDF), and concluded that they were unable to be sure whether, globally, river floods had become more or less likely.
Similarly, I think there is a perception among many commentators and policymakers that storms, hurricanes, and droughts are all more common as a result of climate change, but the IPCC’s own report (see p.53 of AR5) has “low confidence” that those things are more common than they were 100 years ago. I know some scientists think the IPCC is overoptimistic, but it is the closest we have to consensus climate science.
That said, there is some fairness in accusing Koonin of cherrypicking. He spends a lot of time arguing about extreme daily temperatures, convincingly (to my mind) debunking a claim in the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR), the flagship US government climate science assessment, that US extreme daily temperature records have gone up. In fact, CSSR is comparing the ratio of extreme high temperatures to extreme low temperatures, and what in fact has happened is that extreme low temperatures have become less common. Which is interesting.
But the IPCC does think extreme daily temperatures have gone up globally (see p53 again). In his chapter on “Hyping the Heat”, Koonin doesn’t mention the IPCC, and the IPCC outranks the CSSR. His detective work is interesting, but he is fighting a henchman, not the end-of-level boss. Maybe the IPCC is wrong as well, but we don’t learn that here.
On Point Two, I don’t feel competent to assess the models; certainly it seems highly plausible to me that there are enormous uncertainties in predicting something as inherently chaotic as the climate, especially when to do so you first have to predict something as inherently chaotic as people. But my non-expert understanding is that broadly speaking the models have been getting it about right.
That said, I think he is right that, if you were to ask the average person in my social circle, you would hear that climate change will lead to catastrophe in the near future. And I think that is overstating what the IPCC reports actually say. For instance, it is true that the IPCC predicts more people will go hungry than otherwise would have: it says that almost 140 million children will be undernourished, in a world where climate change goes unmitigated, compared to 113 million in a world where there is no climate change (see p730 of this IPCC report). But that is still fewer than went hungry in 2000 – almost 150 million, out of a much smaller population. The IPCC predicts that a world with climate change will be worse than one without; but not so much worse that other things, such as economic growth and technological progress, won’t broadly keep the big things, like life expectancy and human health, improving. That does seem worth saying.
And Koonin’s Point Three is worth making too. If India were to increase its per capita emissions to those of Japan, “one of the lowest emitting of the developed countries”, he says, then that change alone would raise global emissions by 25%1. Realistically, we’re not going to be able to stop India — or China, or Brazil, or Mexico, or any of the other middle-income countries — from developing, and development at the moment means carbon.
More importantly: we don’t want them to stop developing. Richer countries have healthier, longer-lived citizens and are better able to cope with a changing climate. Even huge, swingeing cuts to Western emissions — politically unrealistic — would only go some way to offsetting the inevitable growth in the developing world. Those cuts may be worth doing, but there are limits to how much good they can do.
But even if Koonin is right about almost everything — if the best guess of the science is that we’re heading towards things merely getting better more slowly, rather than getting worse — then I think he’s missing a major point. That is, climate change models are uncertain. In fact Koonin claims they’re even more uncertain than we think. So they could easily be erring on the side of optimism.
And the one thing we should have learnt from the Covid pandemic is that it’s not enough to say “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, so let’s act as if it’ll be fine.” The correct thing to say is “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, but if there’s a 10% chance that it’ll be completely awful, then we need to prepare for that 10% chance.” Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world reduces the chance of some unforeseen but plausible disaster: as a happy bonus, it makes our cities more pleasant places in which to live. It will come at some cost, but hopefully not too high, because green technology is getting so cheap and effective these days.
Reviews by climate scientists have been unimpressed. “I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist,” starts one review, which goes on to not ignore it. Another accuses him of cherry-picking his fights (not entirely unfairly, as I said). A third says the book is “distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified”.
But none that I’ve read really addresses the nitty-gritty of his arguments — which is hard to do in a 900-word review, of course, but still. They usually pick some line out of the first chapter or two, disagree with it, and then say the whole book is therefore rubbish. But I wanted a bit more meat to the objections.
The third review, for instance, quotes Koonin as saying “The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” and then asks “According to what measure?” Well, Koonin tells you the measure, at length: absolute record extreme daily temperatures. Maybe he’s wrong, but he does answer that in the book. (And your next sentence is “Highest annual global averages?” He’s talking about the US! You just quoted that bit!)
Similarly, it complains that Koonin says that the sea is only rising about a foot per century, saying “The trouble is that while seas have risen eight to nine inches since 1880, more than 30 percent of that increase has occurred during the last two decades.” But again: Koonin addresses this, for pretty much an entire chapter. His point is that most of the rest of the rise came during an (unexplained by climate models, according to him) period of rapid warming from 1910 to 1940, before human influence should have been relevant. That, he says, is good evidence that natural variation is driving the current acceleration. Is he right? I don’t know. But the reviewer is not attacking Koonin’s argument at its strongest point.
In fact, none of them seem to: they just want to dismiss the book. They attack Koonin’s credibility and credentials, his temperament. They say he was only hired by the Obama Energy Department because of his contrarian views; they call him a “climate denier”, which seems de trop since he accepts most of the central claims of the climate consensus. The response felt more like a circling of the wagons than a serious effort to counter a serious argument. After all, it is unpleasant to hear reasons why you might be wrong about something: cognitive dissonance is painful.
I started this book confident that climate change is a serious concern, and I finished it only slightly less confident; Koonin has not persuaded me. But I’m glad Unsettled, flawed though it is, has been written. As I said at the beginning, science in a politically charged environment is very hard to assess. Scientists are as prone to groupthink and motivated reasoning as anyone else, and I know very well that there are some who feel they need to keep heterodox views quiet. The reviews, which make so little effort to engage with the substance of the arguments, do not reassure me that climate science is a uniquely groupthink-free discipline.
One thing Koonin suggests is a so-called “Red Teaming” of climate scientists: getting scientists to act as adversarial critics of the existing consensus, a method used by superforecasters, among others, to improve their accuracy by actively hunting out flaws in their reasoning. Science can only progress if assumptions are tested. Red teams in climate institutions — any institutions — seem like a good idea, and I’d support them.
Whether it’s possible or not, of course, is tricky to say. The climate debate is so highly charged, so borderline toxic, that it might be difficult for any climate scientist to take on the red-team role without making their own life more difficult. According to Koonin, one senior climate scientist told him “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.” The old “in my emails, everyone agrees with me” line is hardly a new one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a bit of truth in it.
But if the Catholic Church was able to stomach someone advocating for the Devil, then climate science should be able to stomach one doing it for the sceptics. And in the meantime, this book does an acceptable job.
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SubscribeThe bureaucracy of reporting fraud, which is something that comes tumbling through the phone and internet across my path unbidden in a way sex crimes don’t, is so off-putting that every time I am tempted to pass on information to Action Fraud I give up.
It seems this is not a problem for nonce hunters.
who polices the police who are paedophiles.
Just by law of averages , it’s reasonable to expect there to be a significant % within the Police force, that even the Met commissioner can’t sack
We see by many police forces reluctance to investigate these crime, cover them up many would say, that are they doing this because they told to, or kindred spirits
The police seem to recruit anyone who fit’s the right profile these days. Intelligence , integrity , critical thinking, knowledge of the law, empathy don’t seem to be required
Sobering stuff. I used to work in online child porn reporting and the evidentiary hurdles for a government agency to even block a webpage & refer to police, were bad enough.
From reading the article it seems excess bureaucracy is the fundamental issue. The ‘digilantes’ are able to do things because they don’t have the bureaucracy, and the police don’t get as much done as they should because of the paperwork.
Re-enact Thomas Cromwell’s:
“An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie”, otherwise known as the Buggery Act, 1533.
There are too many of those in Parliament and MSM for this to ever happen.
Thanks mate for your usual insight and campaign for the country to return to 1950, or maybe 1850 – or it seems 1550!. Very popular policy, certainly.
I’m not sure why having sex with people of the same sex has anything much to do with abusing kids (yeah, we know, a small minority of “homosexual” oriented people do – as do a small minority of heterosexuals, and some who don’t much mind either way.
Ancient Greece, normally accepted as the genesis of Western Civilisation, took a rather different viewpoint to all this.
Pederasty was socially acceptable and formed part of the education system. It even continued into later life as the antics of the homicidal Macedonian* pygmy, otherwise known as Alexander the Great show all too clearly.
However the somewhat unfortunate intrusion of Semitic culture into the Classical World in the late fourth century rather put a stop to all this ‘hanky panky’ for better or for worse.
*Not quite a true Greek/Hellene but near enough.
Pederasty, as you describe it, was not what I had in front of me on my PC day after day in handling child porn reports.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here.
Indeed. Pederasty was (usually) the sexual love of young men or youths and older and (supposedly) wiser men. No ages specified, but I think the evidence shows they were not paedophilic in the sense we have today of that word.
The pederasty that Charles ascribes to Alexander was for another adult. Hephaeston, I think his name was, or something like that…
Spot on sir, Hephaestion it was!
Perhaps the most ‘notorious’ example was that of Hadrian and Antinous which predictably ended in tears when Antinous was found floating in the Nile.
I’m not attempting to excuse the degeneracy that you describe, who could frankly?
However I am saying that the adoption of Christianity necessarily brought with it all the neurotic sexual mores and practices of an alien Semitic culture rooted in the Judean desert. Even nudity was regarded with abject, and quite irrational horror.*
Greece and later Rome were far more tolerant and open minded in this regard, and perhaps this lack of any urge to ‘suppress’ was very beneficial?
Off course so pervasive have the Semitic mores become, that today if anyone ever thinks off Ancient Rome it is usually about a culture of Bacchanalian orgies and so forth, which is both ignorant and somewhat narrow minded, rather sadly.
*Perhaps this has something to do with the prevalence of sand?
I think the shift away from the socially accepted practice of older men sodomizing adolescent (and much younger) boys was a step in the right direction. And I didn’t need the redeeming love of Christ to figure that one out either.
Most contemporaries seem to have regarded it as rather deviant behaviour, and particularly so if you were the ‘lock’ in the arrangement rather that the ‘key’*.
Caesar for example never lived down the humiliation of an incident with Nicomedes, King of Bythinia, and was known by his enemies as the “Queen of Bythinia”.
Even his fabled Legions sang a ribald song about the event during his Triumph. Loosely translated it went something like this: “Caesar scr*wed the Gauls, but Nicomedes scr*wed him first.
*To use a ‘technical’ term.
Part of the reason why I abandoned the humanities and academia is because I could never tolerate the odor – that smell of ancient tweed and un-shampooed hair. Almost as a reflex one can imagine wrinkled pedants who can barely master a doorknob dazzling a dinner party clique with anecdotes about buggery in the Roman Empire.
Ha! You didn’t “figure it out”!. We are all the product of a very particular Western Christian civilization that has existed for over 1500 years, including we atheists. The Romans and the Greeks for example had no pity for for the poor or for crucified slaves etc. Theirs was a very different and quite alien civilization in many respects.
If you try and logically argue for moral principles, you rapidly get tied in knots. Why exactly is it bad to exterminate an inferior race whose genes are polluting yours?
Why downvotes?
Very fair description of the culture.
I never had ATG described as pygmy.
Both Arrian and Curtius describe ATG as ‘nano’.
Some modern authorities have speculated that he may even have had a spinal disorder.
Is there some particular reason why your (erudite!) but often provocative musings so often have little to do the subject? Distinctions matter.
A socially sanctioned form of homosexual relationship, (where actually the sexual elements might have been not even included “buggery” that you referred you to above), between an older, supposedly wiser man, and a youth, whom he was supposed to be educating, is not the same as raping pre-pubescent kids.
Who polices the utterly useless judiciary who have been letting every foreign nonce off recently? On HR grounds.
If we don’t do it ourselves it won’t get done. In fact nothing will get done anyway. The police need a complete riot and branch sea change … it’s coming.
Maybe it would help if detectives investigated paedophiles and not tweets.
In a woke tick box culture it is easier, safer and more advantageous to investigate tweets and upsetting words than actual attempted crimes.
This line is getting rather old. Of course detectives investigate paedophiles… there are literally whole departments dedicated to it.
Not really. If no tweets at all, ever, anywhere were investigated…and all “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” dismissed out of hand as derisively as possible…rather than carefully recorded…those unit might be a bit bigger. And there might even be the odd PC available to patrol the High Street and tackle shoplifters.
… or if they ceased knocking on grannies’ doors for having done absolutely nothing wrong, apart from pissing off local councillors who complained to the police!
That seems to depend on where they were born, what colour they are, and by what name they call God.
Surely that has played a part in the rise of vigilantism
Who is responsible for keeping our communities safe? Modern society contracts it out to the police and then washes its hands and says ‘Not my business, mate’ as someone shoplifts, or vandalises or picks a pocket.
In history, the perception was that everyone is responsible for good order in their local community, and that the police were the ultimate enforcers – the end of the process and the force to take on situations that were too big, or too dangerous for local admonition. They are professionals who emerged from local vigilance – the end point, not the start point of law enforcement. The support put in place to assist the law abiding.
Instead, we seem to have a situation where the police are placed as the sole enforcers of the law. The public must keep out – report but don’t act.
Along the way, the police have retreated from their ‘fire-fighting role’ – doing the dangerous tasks and work that the public should avoid. And increasingly they are tied in legal knots where law breakers get protection, and the law abiding are prevented from taking action to protect themselves or their communities. The police are supposed to be on a side – they are not neutral – and that side is the side of the lawful who need help.
What’s worse is that the police seem increasingly to be making poor decisions about which crimes to chase and which to skip – picking cases that are easy over those that are important in defending community safety and trust. I’m uneasy about the paedo-hunters and vigilantism but shouldn’t the police be responding to public priorities?
Mob justice is terrifying, but better than no justice.
It’s what inevitably happens when the government fails at one of its few essential functions.
In the country of grooming gangs, vigilante justice is very far from the top of the list of problems that police needs to address.
Nobody was suggesting they should…..
It offers moral certainty…
It gives moral superiority.
An addictive rush, puffing up self-regard without yielding any self-knowledge.
After capturing their quarry, do the hunters go home and fiddle the income tax return, or use foul language in every other sentence while in conversation in the pub?
Miss Marple and Father Brown provided the wellspring for these unofficial associates of the police, strangely being invited to share in the investigation and tolerated as a fount of wisdom.
I suppose the ubiquitous prevalence of these crimes is the explanation for why men caught with child sex abuse images are almost never imprisoned? I was beginning to suspect complicity on the part of the judiciary.
PS It’s “sliver” of doubt, not slither.
I would guess most of those imprisoned were primarily for offences attempted or committed with actual children, which led to the discovery of the child porn possession as a secondary matter. But even where the latter was the only offence, there are loads of factors to consider, such is this the perp’s first offence? Did they create the images in the first place, or have they distributed them to others? Do the images include videos, which are considered worse than photos? Also of course there is the age of the subjects in them to consider, and whether they look distressed or constrained in any way, etc, etc.
But I think (or hope!) the number of hardcore paedo critters attracted to pre-teens or even infants is very small, perhaps a couple of thousand tops in the UK, and probably most child porn “stashes” that come to light are of early teens. It’s also worth bearing in mind that these days anyone active in dealing with child porn will take determined steps to conceal their activities, using VPNs and encryption and so on. So I would guess that possession-only cases which incidently come to light involving early teens, though technically illegal, are in the absence of aggravating factors usually treated by the courts in much the same way they would some daft old fool who has been found with a rusty unlicenced WW2 revolver in his garden shed!
Yet another point to consider is that much of this apparent tsunami of child porn is produced by children themselves, by exchanging saucy snaps with each other on their smartphones! So provided no adults are involved, I don’t see why the police, instead of clogging up their forensic service with children’s smartphones for examination, don’t simply let the randy little sods get on with it!
I’ll be very interested to see any comments on the above by user Dumetrius, who has declared they worked professionally in this area.
This grooming by adults of children in chat rooms could be prevented if the exchanges had to be video only. Despite recent spectacular advances in AI, I imagine it will still be quite a while before a devious paedophile can use a video avatar of a child to converse with another “real life” child, without the latter (or the chat software) easily detecting the ruse.
I think the machete wielding drug youth in the Canarias likely fell – its a treacherous place to walk – sober or not, but i don’t know. I am less convinced the woman walking her dog “fell”. The dog was dry – and you know how much we owners love our dogs. But i don’t know. The writer does though – perhaps he’d like to share why he is so certain with the Juez de Primera Instancia in Tenerife. Also maybe its time the UK started a similar system – instead of just using hearsay the Juez de P.I. has to dig into the facts – an inquisition if you like. If he is lax his colleagues, the public and particularly the families of the deceased will get uppity.
I should imagine that any sane mother or father whose child or children have been abused, welcomes justice by whatever channel it is delivered. It’s hugely regrettable, as Dominic has described, that those formally authorised to provide that justice are then bogged down with bureaucracy. I do think Dominic’s idea of a ‘licensing’ regime is good, and you would hope that it would raise the bar in terms of separating those who are genuinely concerned with confronting this evil from thrill-seekers. Any youngster spared from the hands of perpetrators is a victory for child protection, but I have seen some ‘digital arrests’ where the subsequent trophy display goes beyond straightforward capture and handing over to the police, and does make you cringe. A license and training would encourage professionalism, but there is always the risk of political interference, which has been exposed in the many cases of rape and torture gangs being ignored for political expediency. How do you manage that? The vacuum left by the lack of day-by-day, visible policing is a magnet for crime and, subsequently, for people to take it upon themselves, rightly I think, to confront that crime. We need a visible, active police force that fights serious crime and is not wrapped up in issues that are within the remit of politicians and social workers.
“the offender’s laughably short sentence”.
So many reported sentences are laughable (esp compared to those for hurty memes etc) that it seems as if the porn hunters should spend more time around judges!
Perhaps if the police weren’t tied up so thoroughly in red tape (12 page form for doing what a member of the public can do perfectly lawfully) they’d have more time and more motivation to go for criminals.
If you want an example of the ridiculous regulations that have forced police to fight with one hand behind their back, I thoroughly recommend the book ‘Wasting Police Time’ by the copper who goes by the pseudonym of David Copperfield.