As I wrote in 2016, I don’t cover Climate Change any more, because it’s over. In the sense that Climate Change was ever “a thing”, it was primarily a media phenomenon, and now the media has lost interest, there really isn’t anything to talk about.
As a by-product of the media interest, there was a whole chunk of what passes today for scientific research going on, filling in details for the media to report. Like so much current science, it was basically worthless: a grinding out of suspect results from statistical analysis of big noisy data sets, and of computer modelling. It’s still there, but it’s declining, and will have pretty much died out in another decade.
It’s interesting to try to work out how the Climate Change phenomenon of the last quarter-century will be seen by history. I think mostly it will be just ignored. The fact that a large proportion of the most intelligent and educated people in a handful of western countries seriously believed that humanity was under threat from a warmer climate just won’t make it into popular history. I used to think that the internet made it hard to rewrite history, but I’ve had the experience a few times recently of trying to find news stories from just a few years ago, and it’s really difficult. They are there, in the main, but I don’t think doing a really thorough survey of what people were saying and thinking a few decades ago is going to be any easier than it was in the days of newspaper archives.
I was moved to re-address this dead subject because Ed West quoted from Stephen Pinker’s new book, which says
A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis]”
As I remarked, this causes no problems for history, because it has no relevance to the Climate Change media issue which is the real thing that happened in the 1990s and 2000s. The hypothesis that human CO2 emissions have a warming effect on the climate is reasonable, quite likely true, and fundamentally impossible to disprove. It is also of no practical importance. Climate change was an issue because of the idea that this warming effect would be large and self-amplifying — that is the question which was under serious scientific dispute. But both sides of that dispute were part of the “97%” who accepted that humans cause global warming. If it turned out eventually that the vast majority of scientists were wrong about the climate, that would be something difficult to explain away. But they weren’t and aren’t, at least in any kind of recorded formal way. If someone in 2040 were to claim, “Everyone in 2004 believed that we were under threat from Climate Change”, the answer would be, “no, no, there was a lot of hype in the press, but the science at the time was pretty cautious and sound, and didn’t imply anything of the sort. It was just a bit of media hysteria that some politicians made capital out of”.