Making sense of science, fossil fuels and climate change

 

The recently concluded COP28 global climate conference was seen as a success by many, but also a failure by some. More so than at earlier conferences, COP28 brought an oversized participation, and possibly influence, by the fossil fuel industry.

Was that good or bad? It’s complicated. The industry fiercely protects its own interest, so it’ll push back against any efforts to cut or reduce demand for their products. But at the same time, you can’t talk about climate change solutions without having such critical players being part of the conversation.

Many among the wealthy see a ban on fossil fuels as a direct assault on their lifestyle and prosperity. It’s hardly surprising then that the privileged – which include the oil companies, banks, insurers and much of the ecosystem of today’s economy – would fight to protect their privileges.

The fossil fuel industry has a long history of suppressing the evidence, often from their own scientists, on climate change. They’re using the same playbook the tobacco companies have used to suppress the deleterious health effects of tobacco, often facilitated by the same set of public relations and lobbyist guns-for-hire.

Today, however, none of the “Big Oil” firms officially deny climate change any more. Instead, they’re pivoting to their preferred climate “solutions”, whether it’s carbon credits or carbon capture and storage or other carbon abatement technologies, with the goal of moving the spotlight away from fossil fuels themselves.

Almost all big oil companies have scaled down their own earlier commitments on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Their addiction to oil is dwarfed only by their addiction to the huge profits they’re making out of today’s high oil prices amid a very strife-torn world.

There are many others elsewhere who outrightly deny it though. They are almost all non-scientists – lawyers, engineers, architects and everything in between – though they do include the odd – often very odd – Nobel Prize winner or two whose expertise lies elsewhere.

About ‘hidden hands’

Are these “deniers” wrong? Often when you lift the veil you would see the hidden hands of some fossil fuel interests, so that makes their motives very questionable. But what about the others who seem truly sincere in their denial? Where are they in this equation?

The first scenario of the “hidden hands” is when it becomes easy not to understand something when your paycheck requires you to not understand it. The second is more of a human condition of wanting so badly to prove what we believe regardless of facts and evidence, which is also called “confirmation bias”.

Consider this hypothetical case: you’ve seen 99 doctors who say you’re sick, but you refuse to believe them. You keep looking for that one doctor in a hundred who would say you’re fine. While theoretically it’s possible the 99 are wrong, is this how you would live your life though?

That’s how it is with climate science too. Something that’s becoming more and more “proven” by the day will still not convince those who do not want to be convinced, for whatever reason.

We can, and should, ask whether we can believe the “science” in climate science. Let’s examine how science works first. Everybody agrees with the definition – science is an evidence-based methodology to understand how the natural world works, and stands or falls based on the validity of its evidence and proof. So, let’s go with that.

We all know of the old story of how some blind people, upon first meeting an elephant, touched its tail and thought it was a snake, touched its legs and thought it was a huge tree trunk, and that its body was a wall, etc.

Well, the climate is an earth-sized elephant so huge that many can’t even grasp its tail, but only its individual hairs. They spend a lifetime just to prove the hair is not bear fur or pig bristle or a sheep’s wool, but a part of something else that remains to be identified.

Journey of discovery

It’s the same with those who can only examine its toenails, and not even its actual toes or feet or legs. But puzzled as they are, they know whatever is in front of them is huge and significant and important, and must be studied.

In that journey of discovery, there are many dead-ends and blind alleys. Somebody holding its ear may think it’s a fan or a curtain, and a tusk may be mistaken for a spear or a horn. But eventually, a consensus forms.

Science is boring – read any scientific paper and it’ll put you to sleep. Such papers are full of discussions about assumptions and errors and caveats and exclusions as well as dense references to other researches and findings. Solutions and answers are not often obvious – doing science is certainly not for the lazy.

The “elephant” in this example, which is that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun-warmed earth, has been long recognised. That it’s mostly produced by human activities releasing carbon trapped in long-dead organic matters, such as fossil fuels and increasingly the thawing permafrost, is also no longer a scientific debate.

Neither are the much-maligned scientific “models” that all predict a warmer future. These models incorporate every scientific variable one can think of, whether the solar cycles or the earth’s wobbles, and if they miss anything at all, it’s possible that they don’t account for human stupidity.

What scientists say

So, if you do care about the science of climate change, you can take the word of the world’s community of scientists working on this matter. We’ll discuss later though on how, for many, taking the word of such scientists is no longer done.

While fossil fuels have powered the industrial age, they’ve also killed millions of people over the centuries, either from the process of extraction or from the resulting pollutants. Many people continue to die even today. Coal is clearly the worst of the polluters, but even modern petroleum products aren’t very clean.

Fossil fuels are deadly and dirty, with or without its impact on warming the climate. For that reason alone, we should be looking for better sources of energy, ones which are cleaner and available to everybody everywhere on earth.

The obvious solution is that first we must stop burning dirty and dangerous fuels for our energy. We must tap other sources, principally from the sun, whether directly through photo-voltaic electricity, or indirectly through capturing the energy of wind and waves and rivers.

There are other sources too such as geothermal and especially nuclear fission, and possibly fusion, though anything nuclear comes with its own set of immense challenges. Regardless, the sooner we banish fossil fuels, the better it is for our life on earth.

Of course, nothing, especially something that is so integral to the life of the entire population of the world, can ever be that simple.

To be continued

 - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.