Debating Climate Change

Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians

Last night at the Asia Society and Museum, a panel of notables debated the merits of the proposition "global warming is not a crisis." Arguing for the motion were the folksy (and tall) Michael Crichton, the soft-spoken Richard Lindzen and the passionate Philip Stott. Arrayed against were the moderate Brenda Ekwurzel, the skeptical Gavin Schmidt and the perplexed Richard Somerville. (Note: all the adjectives are mine.)

The hosts--the Rosenkranz Foundation and Intelligence Squared U.S.--asked the audience to vote both prior to and after the event. Early voting skewed heavily against the motion: 57 percent in the audience favored dismissing it while only 30 percent supported it. But that was before anybody opened their mouths.

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Robert Rosenkranz, chairman of the eponymous foundation, brought up the first bugaboo of the night in his introduction: "I am old enough to remember the consensus on global cooling." And the second: how can we know what the future climate will be when we can't even predict the weather a year in advance, something that would be worth billions of dollars?

1. As Somerville later pointed out, any consensus over global cooling was more in the media hype surrounding it than anything else.
2. Climate and weather are two separate things, climate being the average of weather over a given time period. We cannot say that it will be 76 degrees F next March 15 but we can say, based on atmospheric physics, that 20 years from now the month of March will, on average, be warmer than it is now.

As Lindzen noted in his opening remarks, the climate is always changing. The question is whether the warming we are currently experiencing--and every panelist agreed that warming was happening--is worrisome and/or manmade. For example, Lindzen argued that in a warming world we might expect less severe weather as a result of the decreased temperature difference between the poles and the equator. And he noted that India has warmed in recent decades yet its agricultural yield has increased. (Perhaps Prof. Lindzen is not familiar with the Green Revolution?)

But Lindzen shared a dry, dispassionate presentation of potentially confusing science with all of his colleagues on the opposite side. They came to debate the physics of climate change but ended up in a debate about the morality of it. For example, Somerville, a distinguished IPCC author, called the global warming crisis a "decisive change for better or worse." Scientifically reasonable perhaps, but hardly inspiring. "Science can inform these decisions but it cannot determine them," Schmidt added (though he did slightly better by likening climate science to CSI), before noting the lawyerly tactics of his opponents and urging the audience to "spot the fallacy." And Ekwurzel struggled to make the metaphor of a doctor diagnosing a disease without knowing all the particulars of how the patient's body works: "choosing not to fight global warming is as foolish as not treating fever in a child."

All fine and good except that they were faced with the folksy anecdotes of Crichton and the oratorical fire of Stott. As the novelist mused, the weather is changing, no one is arguing that, but "all anybody wants to do is talk about it, no one wants to do anything about it." Adding "if they're not willing to do it why should anyone else?" And, by the way, shouldn't we be focusing on poverty today rather than the weather 100 years from now?

When Stott took the microphone he chastised everyone for their hypocrisy. Humans have been changing climate by land clearing and farming since they evolved; scientific consensus is not infallible (remember eugenics?); and Tony Blair (Stott is British, though he also noted Al Gore's extravagant energy budget) refuses to curtail his flying. As fellow Schmidt later noted, if we could just harness the energy of the old style Marxist debater Stott, a switch away from fossil fuels would be easy.

The proponents of climate change crisis had nothing to offer other than the science. Where was the anti-Crichton? Maybe Bill McKibben? Al Gore may have had a personality facelift and started calling climate change a moral crisis but he probably would have looked wooden next to Stott, perhaps Jon Stewart? The proponents seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprisingly, it swung against them, particularly when Schmidt made the fatal debating error of dismissing the ability of the audience to judge the scientific nuances.

Despite presentations riddled with suspect science--cosmic rays featured prominently, though they show no trend that matches the observed warming--the audience responded to Crichton's satirical call for a ban on private jets more than Ekwurzel's vague we need to throw "everything we can at the climate crisis." By the final vote, 46 percent of the audience had been convinced that global warming was indeed not a crisis, while just 42 percent persisted in their opinion that it was. The whole debate, for better or worse, can be heard on WNYC AM 820 on March 23 at 2 PM EDT (podcast and webstream will be available via that link as well). And check out Gavin Schmidt's take on the event here.

Listen closely. Obscured by the rhetoric was significant common ground: global warming is real, it is a problem (though how big remains debatable) and it is primarily an energy problem. Lindzen does not buy the global cooling red herring; Crichton thinks humanity will "de-carbonize" its energy sources anyway; and Stott just wants us to focus on poverty and human misery as the key crisis to be addressed. There is no doubt that the billions of people living without access to clean water, suffering from curable diseases, and unable to escape penury because of a lack of cheap energy is an absolute crisis. What he may have overlooked is that these problems may be worsened by climate change (shrinking glaciers in the Tibetan plateau do not bode well for thirsty Indians and Chinese) or solved by implementing solutions to it (photovoltaic cells for those in sunny climes unconnected to any grid). No one is suggesting an end to foreign aid in favor of concentrating exclusively on climate change. In fact, foreign aid and technology transfer must be part of any global effort to combat the problem.

And there are other changes the developed world can make to ease the burden of climate change on those not rich enough to adapt: yes, Michael Crichton, changing a lightbulb is important. Switching one 75-watt incandescent light bulb for the equivalent compact fluorescent will save 55 pounds of CO₂ every year. Those pounds add up and there are a host of similarly easy and cheap changes to make. Modern technology offers us a range of cleaner, better, faster products; a car from 1972 cannot compare to a car from 2007, nor can similarly aged coal-fired power plants. Why wouldn't we want to buy a modern one? Does anybody detect a consensus on that?