It's Time to Fire All Climate Scientists

This article originally appeared on VICE United Kingdom.

It’s time to lay off climate scientists.

I don’t mean go easy on them or leave them alone, I mean we should fire them, because they’re pointless. This week, the IPCC delivered the latest part of its fifth assessment, looking at "Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability" with respect to climate change. The respective answers are "bad", "dubious" and "very"; and remain essentially unchanged from the four previous reports in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007, which were basically ignored, ignored, ignored and ignored by the genetically, ancestrally and ideologically homogeneous natives of Westminster.

Each successive report has brought more evidence (and more sophisticated analysis of that evidence) to bear, but the impact of this extra work has been minimal in practical, real terms. At this point, continuing to fund climate scientists out of taxpayers’ money is like buying a really expensive Bose stereo system for your car, when you don’t actually own a car or in fact understand how to drive.

The following are already happening: Changes in recent decades have “caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans”; glaciers are shrinking steadily; the permafrost is thawing at high latitudes; a small number of species have already gone extinct; and many other species are moving about as aggressively towards oblivion as a nan in a cannon.

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Crop yields have been damaged, and the impact of an increase in extreme events has resulted in “alteration of ecosystems, disruption of food production and water supply, damage to infrastructure and settlements, increases in morbidity and mortality, and consequences for mental health”. And the poorer you are, the more fucked you are, which goes some way to explaining the spluttering denial on the right of the party political spectrum.

That’s from the first degree — over the coming decades, we can expect to see an increase of another two to four, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the IPCC report is that for all the political nonsense around climate change, governments are already planning for it — or at least trying as best as they can. Australia is already planning for sea-level rises and increased drought, energy infrastructure is quietly being protected in the US, countries across Asia are implementing new water-management plans. All this is already going on, yet there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the reality-based community and the wider public.

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Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is the audience. Last night, I watched a crazy man ranting about how Putin had the right idea on foreign policy and there was no proof that Assad used chemical weapons. Except he wasn’t down the pub, he was on my TV with Nick Clegg, who looked like he longed for the days when politicians just said “I agree with Nick” all the time because they wanted something from him. Watching Farage — a man who processes information the way a washing machine processes a brick — ranting about millions of Romanians coming to live in Orpington, two thoughts struck me. The first was how terrible it was that millions of immigrants' first experience of Britain would be Orpington. The second, that even though we — you, me, my friends on Twitter — understand that Farage is a moron who understands foreign policy like my granddad "understood" Teletext, loads of real people actually think he’s a genius.

The problem with debates like immigration and climate change is that it’s easier to argue the wrong position than the right one. People are fundamentally ignorant and paranoid — we know far less than we think we do, and we think everyone’s out to screw us. Which, to be fair, is largely because many people are out to screw us. That aside, It’s far easier to make simple points like "the government’s out to get you", "immigrants are taking our jobs", or "experts don’t know what they’re talking about" than it is to process complex arguments about economics or climate science, especially when pundits treat these kinds of debates like opposing fans watching Chelsea vs. Arsenal.

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If people are ignorant, then it’s partly because the press have done such a miserable job. Both the Mail and the Telegraph told MPs recently that they believe climate change is happening, yet the Telegraph employed James Delingpole to write about it, a man whose previous experience as a fashion writer probably wasn't all that helpful. Meanwhile, the Mail seem more interested in pandering to their readers’ bloody-minded hatred of anyone more intelligent than them, which unfortunately turns out to be most people. To understand how much Mail readers hate clever people, check out this comment, replying to a recent study suggesting — suggesting — people eat seven portions of fruit and veg a day:

The crippling fear for these people is that the government might team up with clever people to try to steal their precious tax dollars or bodily fluids. The irony is that even as they scream so loudly about one potential tax, our failure to deal with climate change is imposing thousands of taxes on them, eating away at their pay packets penny-by-penny — the price of bread rising 10p a loaf, or the price of hard disks suddenly rising, or the relentless uptick in the price of a barrel of oil.

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The great thing, though, is that the individual effects are small enough to ignore. For now. You can live in blissful ignorance for the time being, and then cry like a baby in about two decades when the council give up trying to keep your house above water. Or you can adopt the little-Islander mentality of Farage, a man who doesn’t care how far up shit creek Britain is as long as the French have lost their paddle.

It’s possible that we’ll find better ways to communicate science to the public, but the academic field of science communication has yet to produce anything of any practical value for people actually communicating in the real world, and in fact tends to hold them in a sort of weird contempt. The government and the BBC haven’t done a lot better, with both coming under criticism from MPs on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee for being uncoordinated, and prone to false balance. The inconvenient truth is that the biggest factor in persuading the public about the reality of climate change is when a dramatic event turns their living rooms into shitty swimming pools, with only a quarter of Britons denying that the recent floods were linked to climate change. Global warming is therefore the best tool we have for convincing people of the reality of global warming. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly the timeliest.

Ultimately, down the line, it will be the scientists and engineers of this world, the same community that the rest of society either ignore or shit on, to tackle the realities of climate change. Politicians lack the intelligence, drive and honesty, and the news media haven’t taken their jobs seriously for about 20 years — there are barely any serious science journalists left, anyway. Public attitudes will continue to shift, and in a few decades, as we watch Somerset and Norfolk slip beneath the waves, no doubt many of them will be demanding, “Why didn’t we do something sooner?” And somewhere, a scientist will facepalm.

@mjrobbins

Previously – Don't Use Selfies to Laugh at the Mentally Ill

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