5 Mar 2014
Here is an Open Letter which responds to the BBC’s letter defence of the recent appearance of Lord Lawson on the Today Programme. My original complaint can be found here.
Dear Ceri Thomas,
Thanks for your response setting out the BBC’s defence of Lord Lawson’s appearance on the Today Programme (reprinted in full below). I understand that I am one of a large number of people who complained and who received your letter. What puzzles me, and why my complaint to the Lawson piece still stands, is your assertion that it is right to “offer space to dissenting voices where appropriate as part of the BBC’s overall commitment to impartiality”. While it could be argued that Lawson might have something to contribute to a discussion on policy, I would suggest that his determination to rubbish even the basics of climate science rule him out, given that he doesn’t accept the basis for the discussion.
In the recent book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which looks in depth at the generation of “doubt” in relation to climate change by various advisers and lobbyists, the authors write:
“The notion of balance … may make sense for political news in a two-party system (although not in a multiparty system). But it doesn’t reflect the way science works. In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one “side”. Imagine providing “balance” to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information. These matters were long ago settled in scientists’ minds. Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the seam reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming. Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn’t publish it either. But ordinary journalists repeatedly do”.
If the “dissenting voices” that appear on the BBC seek only to undermine established science, to sow doubt where there is none, then they are not appropriate, contribute nothing and do the listener a great disservice. Your piece wasn’t just about policy, it was also about whether a link between climate change and the floods can be established. It really needed to be one thing or the other.
As I noted in my previous letter, Lawson repeatedly misled your listeners, either cherry-picking or misrepresenting the science. Any listeners who were seeking insights to help them “judge how to assess the recent bad weather in the context of climate change” were appallingly badly served. They were misled, lied to, led to believe that there is a level of doubt in the science that is not a reality.
While it may be the case that ‘Today’ has a track record of interviewing climate scientists, I haven’t heard any of them and I am a regular listener. The Lawson piece was different in that it was served up in the prime 8.10am slot reserved for leading political figures or commentators or scientists with relevant insights on the stories of the day. Lawson is none of those things. He runs a think tank which refuses to reveal its funding sources and which lobbies for policies which benefit fossil fuel interests.
By all means have discussions about what we do about global warming, how we allocate funding and design policy as a response. But please, do not offer airtime to politically motivated deniers who seek only to sow doubt where none exists, and whose contributions to discussions about policy are undermined by their still being rooted in a fantasy world where climate change is a non-issue. You state that “this was the first interview on ‘Today’ with a climate change ‘sceptic.’“. I hope that the feedback you have received will mean that, as well as being the first, it will also be the last.
Thanks
Rob Hopkins – Transition Network.
* * *
Dear Rob Hopkins,
Thank you for your email. The BBC is committed to impartial and balanced coverage of climate change. Furthermore we accept that there is broad scientific agreement on the issue and reflect this accordingly. Across our programmes the number of scientists and academics who support the mainstream view far outweighs those who disagree with it. We do however on occasion, offer space to dissenting voices where appropriate as part of the BBC’s overall commitment to impartiality. The BBC Trust, which oversees our work on behalf of licence fee payers, has explicitly urged programme makers not to exclude critical opinion from policy debates involving scientists.
As was clear from the discussion, there is no conclusive proof as yet of a direct link between the storms hitting the UK this year and climate change. It was therefore reasonable for Justin Webb to ask Sir Brian Hoskins about the limits of scientific knowledge, in particular how the lay person should judge the evidence. But he also rigorously challenged Lord Lawson – in particular on his assertion that focusing efforts on developing green energy sources was a waste of money and that resources would be better spent on improving our defences against bad weather. Both lines of questioning were designed to help listeners judge how to assess the recent bad weather in the context of climate change.
Scientists do have a crucial role to play in this debate. ‘Today’ has a track record of interviewing distinguished experts on climate change such as Lord Krebs, Sir John Beddington and Sir Mark Walport; All three have appeared on the programme in single interviews in recent months. But politicians and pressure groups also have their place and in six weeks of flooding, this was the first interview on ‘Today’ with a climate change ‘sceptic.’
Whilst there may be a scientific consensus about global warming – that it is happening and largely man-made – there is no similar agreement about what should be done to tackle it; whether money should be spent, for example, on cutting carbon emissions or would be better used adapting our defences to the changing climate. Lord Lawson is not a scientist, but as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer is well qualified to comment on the economic arguments, which are a legitimate area for debate.
We believe there has to be space in the BBC’s coverage where scientific consensus meets reasonable argument about the policy implications of that consensus view. That said we do accept that we could have offered a clearer description of the sceptical position taken by Lord Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the introduction. That would have clarified in the audience’s minds the ideological background to the arguments.
I hope this helps explain our thinking,
Yours sincerely
Ceri Thomas
Head of News programmes
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4 Mar 2014
This month our theme is “living with climate change”. We’ll be exploring that from a variety of angles, speaking to climate scientists, hearing contrasting opinions as to what it could mean in practice, looking at the inner impacts it has on us. We’ll hear from Transition folks around the world as to what climate change looks like where they are, starting today with Joanne Poyourow in Los Angeles. It has been an extraordinary few weeks in the life of climate change here in the UK. I realise that any readers in Australia, Thailand, parts of the US, the Philippines, Alaska etc. will be thinking “welcome to our world”, but this felt like the moment climate change reached these shores, made its presence felt in a way that it never has before.
Much has been written about the floods and extreme weather, but for this piece I want to turn to a commentator on such things who I haven’t seen referenced in recent coverage, William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear has foolishly divided his kingdom between his three daughters on the narcissistic basis of which of them loves him the most. Cordelia, the one daughter who really loves him, tells him she thinks it’s a ridiculous process, for which he banishes her and divides everything between his other two daughters.
Eventually they cast him out, destitute, heartbroken and losing his reason, onto a heath in a storm. There then follows one of the most powerful passages in the English language as he hurls his anger and deluded self-pity into the face of the deluge:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Here is Sir Ian McKellen performing it:
While an extraordinary piece of writing, it also, unfortunately, seems increasingly to reflect the reaction of a substantial number of people to the recent storms. All manner of people and organisations have been, metaphorically at least, stood on the top of the nearest hill, screaming into the face the most extraordinary storms in living memory, believing that somehow their indignation, their sheer belief, their rightness, their complete absolution from any responsibility for what is occurring, can subdue and overcome nature’s fury and return everything to “normal”.
First there’s the government. Driven, in part, by the need to appease the UKIP elements of their own party, discussions about the storms have rarely mentioned climate change. When David Cameron initially suggested the two may be linked, at Prime Ministers Questions, he was booed … by his own party.
Although he has subsequently stated that climate change is “one of the most serious threats that this country and this world faces“, this is hard to reconcile with his acting as though the opposite were the case: pledging to somehow defy physics and revive the North Sea oil and gas industry (have you seen the production decline graph?), giving tax breaks for fracking, pledging to increase airport capacity and re-open some coal mines, planning for a fourfold increase in shipping by 2050, and so on.
This, remember, is a government whose Environment Secretary recently stated that climate change “is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting“. Try telling that to people in Somerset whose living room is three feet deep in silt and sewage. It is also a government whose Energy Minister Michael Fallon, argues that “unthinking climate change worship” has damaged British industry.
Nigel Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor and now director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and whose views on climate change represent those of many rank-and-file Conservative MPs, made a highly controversial appearance on Radio 4’s Today Programme (which we complained about here). “This is a wake up call”, he announced, but not to do anything about the causes, rather to “focus on making sure this country is really resilient and robust to whatever nature throws at us, flood defences, sea defences and so on”. He may just as well have climbed onto the table and recited “blow wind and crack your cheeks”.
The deluded belief is that we are so clever, so powerful, so brilliant, that all we need to do is to spend enough money and flex our technological muscle and we can overcome anything. It runs deep. King Lear would have recognised a kindred spirit, similarly trying to hang on to a world view whose time has passed, to a sense of control that is no longer appropriate.
Our media have been quite happy to join the politicians, hurling insults and indignation at the squall. According to Carbon Brief, just 206 of 3,064 press articles on the UK’s recent floods mentioned climate change (see right). Virtually everything that I heard or read was about how we needed better defences, the need to build better dams and drains, to dredge the rivers to get rid of the water faster.
Some economists are also joining in with this approach of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la”. The Telegraph recently reported that the flooding of prime farmland in the UK and droughts and other extreme weather episodes in other parts of the world, are leading to rises in food prices. For example, droughts in Brazil, which grows 40% of the world’s coffee beans, have led to a 50% rise in coffee prices. Economist Kona Haque, head of agricultural commodities research at Macquarie, is quoted as saying:
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have have seen weather risk creep back into the market”.
“Out of nowhere”?! This metaphorical hilltop has become an increasingly crowded place of late. Those government ministers and the press have been joined, among the sodden bracken and wind-lashed trees, by the very small but highly influential band of climate sceptics, who one had hoped these floods would have inspired to crawl off under a rock somewhere to rethink things in the light of the bleedin’ obvious.
Lord Lawson has been the most prominent one of late, but the BBC’s commitment to ‘balance’ meant not just that Lawson was featured prominently on the Today Programme alongside respected climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins, but also Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Delusion (yawn) was brought in to debate with Kevin Anderson. Montford’s “we’ve dealt with these things in the past, we can deal with them in the future” wins our Idiotic Statement of the Month award, echoing the even stupider statement by arch climate sceptic William Nierenberg in 1983:
“Not only have people moved, but they have taken with them their horses, dogs, children, technologies, crops, livestock and hobbies. It is extraordinary how adaptable people can be”.
Of course in the same way that debates on evolution no longer require the input of Creationists for ‘balance’, discussions on climate change now should be achieving balance by having guests who accept that climate change is happening, but disagree on what to do about it. For example, Kevin Anderson and Sir Brian Hoskins might have been interesting … just a thought.
About once a month on Twitter, climate sceptics round on me for a few hours before going off to have a pop at someone else. During one exchange, as a way of proving his point once and for all, one of them posted the following graphic which captures the sceptic position beautifully:
His point was that “10’s of 1000’s of deaths (erm, caused by substandard housing, not by responses to climate change), higher taxes (a tiny proportion of taxes go to doing anything about climate change), etc, versus a few °C”. “A few °C?” We haven’t seen one degree rise yet and the Arctic ice is in its death spiral (as captured in this chilling animation), parts of Austalia are becoming uninhabitable, typhoons are acquiring a previously unseen potency, Alaska is sinking into the permafrost and so on. Yet the sceptics continue to argue that there are flaws in the consensus.
There’s a beautiful encounter on YouTube between Naomi Oreskes (co-author of Merchants of Doubt, who we’ll be interviewing later this month) and Nick Minchin, a prominent Australian climate sceptic. In it she puts her finger on where such people are coming from:
“It makes me wonder if the reason you want to reject the science is that it has consequences. It has consequences for us about how we live our lives, how we run our economy, what our taxation policies are. I think what you don’t like are the implications, the political, social and economic implications. But what you’ve done, along with a lot of other people, is say “let’s shift the debate, let’s argue about the science, let’s keep the debate about the science going, because as long as we argue about the science, we don’t get to the question of what it means for us politically, socially and economically”.
This makes more sense again in the context of who many of these sceptics are. As Henry Porter put it in the Guardian recently, “Lawson, Lord Monckton, Christopher Booker, Samuel Brittan and Viscount Ridley – names that begin to give you some idea of the demographic”. And all the time the “debate” rumbles on, those “few °C” become an increasing inevitability.
For me though, I’ve found the experience of the storms of recent weeks far more deeply unsettling. Rather than trying to shout down the storms, I’ve experienced them on a visceral level in a way I never have before. What has arrived on these shores is a deep sense of uncertainty, of loss of control, a trauma over not just the scale of what happened but the intensity of it. Here are a few snapshots:
***
About 15 minutes before I leave work to cycle home, I note the ominous colour of the sky, take a photo from the office window (right) and tweet it, writing “Another wave of dark dark clouds moving into Totnes. Whatever’s in those clouds is what I have to cycle home through”. As I step out of the door the hail starts. During the journey home, it comes down in pulses of varying intensity. In all my 25 years as a cyclist, I have never ridden a bike in such conditions. It’s like trying to cycle in a car wash while a frenzied maniac throws icy cold gravel in my face from close range. Three times I have to get off the bike, stand with my hood held pulled down over my face, until that pulse passes. I eventually arrive home, sodden, freezing, the tops of my legs bright scarlet, and traumatised by the whole experience.
***
I’m in Dawlish, a seaside town close to Totnes, where 2 weeks previously, the beautiful, and precarious, stretch of trainline that links the South West to London and the rest of the country, crumbled into the sea at the height of the storms. John Clatworthy, Devon county councillor for Dawlish, was quoted in The Guardian as saying “I have been here for 44 years and we haven’t had storm damage like we have now. The storm last night was unbelievable”. I’ve travelled to Dawlish to see it for myself, although Network Rail and a security firm are ensuring that you can’t actually get anywhere near the damaged section of rail.
My son and I are up on the cliff path, the only place you can see the breached sea wall in the distance. We get talking to an old man on a bench, who tells us how it was a storm unlike anything he had ever seen before. After a while I ask him if he attributes it in any way to climate change. Not at all, he tells me, he doesn’t believe in climate change. He does however, he tells me, believe that it is inevitable that all the gases and pollution we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution have had an impact on the global climate, but no, he doesn’t believe in climate change. Go figure. [We’ll be picking up on what the psychology of this might be later this month in an interview with George Marshall].
***
I’m lying in bed trying to get to sleep, and outside a wild wind is raging. The mental picture that comes to mind is of the Wild Things from ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ all leaping around in the trees. The noise being generated is incredible, like something from a Hollywood action movie. I’ve never known a gale like it. This all feels like I’m experiencing an intensity in the weather where I live which I’ve never felt before, and it’s deeply unsettling.
***
Near the end of Lear’s speech, he exclaims, as he begins to sink into heart-breaking self pity:
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning”.
This has been a strong strand over recent weeks, that we are more sinned against than sinning. The very idea that our actions might be in any way to blame in any way for what we experienced is considered ridiculous. For Lawson, we should be blaming a “crazy and costly policy of littering the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels”. The Daily Mail blamed the foreign aid programme, arguing that it was crazy to be sending money to help people overseas when people in the UK were being affected by flooding. A UKIP councillor, David Silvester, blamed gay marriage. Christopher Brooker in the Spectator (see right), blamed environmentalists, the EU, the Environment Agency, anyone who places value on biodiversity and nature conservation.
Yet it is clear that our sins, our foolishness, like Lear’s, are coming home to roost. It’s not entirely our doing though, as the recent paper that pointed out that two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions were produced by just 90 companies made clear. As Dame Julia Slingo of the Met Office put it recently in relation to the UK storms:
“All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change. There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”
It is clear that we are now, indeed, living with climate change. It’s a new world. That’s a given. But what do we do, how to we act, how do we live with climate change? Do we decide, as Paul Kingsnorth will argue in an interview we’ll publish here in a couple of days, that:
“We have no control over the direction our climate’s now going in. And yet we labour under this illusion that if we can come up with the right plan we can sort things out, and we can’t. Once you accept that, you sort of walk off into this strange wilderness in which you’re not in control of things”
Or do we go with Kevin Anderson’s statement in his presentation to December’s Radical Emissions Reduction Conference that:
“Avoiding dangerous climate change remains a feasible goal of the international community. Just”.
I know where I’ll be directing my energy. This is no time to hurl our rage at the storm, to fall prey to self pity. For so long as Kevin Anderson’s “just” exists, these recent tempests have redoubled my motivation. They have refocused, for many people, attention on the link to climate change and the urgent need for action. They have given us a dose of what climate change will look like (i.e. not all sitting around in tshirts in our own vineyards topping up our tans). But perhaps the most important thing we can do right now is to find some space in our busy lives to sit with how the events of the last few weeks have impacted on us personally. How did those storms feel? How did they affect you? It’s a question we hope you might find time to sit with this month.
We hope you will enjoy this month’s theme, and look forward to your comments and to any thoughts you might have of what else we might cover this month.
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2 Mar 2014
No water. That pretty much sums up living with climate change around here, in Los Angeles. California is currently experiencing “the worst drought in 500 years.” We had one minor “rain event” in October just before Rob Hopkins came to town, and another minor rain event in late January. Up until this week, we’d had 1.02 inches of rainfall since last July, instead of our normal 15 inches. So much for our so-called “rainy season.”
As I write this, we’re experiencing an extraordinarily severe “biggest rainstorm in two years” (which may bring our total annual rainfall up to 3 inches, approximately the level of a prior “record drought”). Soon we’re headed into what are traditionally our dry months. In a normal year, zero rain typically falls between May and November.
Water wars
Up until this past week, statewide reservoir lakes were at an all-time low, and the mountain snowpack which should fill those reservoirs was at 12% of normal. Note that isn’t “down by 12%”. It is at 12%, which means down by 88%. Even with the current freak storm, the water situation continues to be very grave.
Some towns in California are now running out of water. Political debates are already underway between state agriculture versus city populations over who gets what water there is.
Agriculture is already affected. Some farmers have reduced their plantings; ranches are selling off livestock. Big parcels of land are going unplanted — not even with cover crops. Although we have not yet had Dust Bowl-style winds, the agricultural situation is the perfect setup for massive-scale topsoil loss.
A recent infographic warned the nation that extreme-to-exceptional drought in California will mean supply and pricing issues for 15 key foods. California produces 90 to 99% of U.S. almonds, walnuts, broccoli, strawberries, and tomatoes.
Next-to-no-rain means that deep-rooted trees and perennials in areas without artificial irrigation aren’t getting sufficient water this year. Some large plants will likely be lost. Others are probably ripe for massive onslaughts of pests and diseases, as has happened in previous (lighter) drought years.
In 2014, we’ve already had wildfires. Up until this decade, fires in January were pretty much unheard of (and I’ve lived in this area all my life). When our “normal” fire season arrives this summer and autumn, it’s going to be truly horrific around here.
In the meantime, this week’s freak rain storm is causing flooding, mudslides, mandatory evacuations, and property destruction as stormwaters rush unbounded through areas that suffered last year’s firestorms.
In our home gardens
At garden gatherings around L.A., everyone is noticing changes in seasonality. Tomatoes are over-wintering, summer crops are sprouting months early, fruit trees are flowering at odd times, and there are massive pest attacks on our normal winter crops like broccoli and kale.
Already we’re threatened by the rapid spread of nonnative pests, such as an Asian psyllid which carries a plant disease Huanglongbing deadly to citrus trees, and the glassy-winged sharpshooter which spreads the disease-causing bacterium Xylella fastidiosa, which kills grape vines.
Soil fertility will likely be troublesome this summer, since irrigation solely with our alkaline tapwater intensifies the pre-existing alkalinity of our soils. It will be a continual battle to add more-acidic material to our soils to bring them into the range that vegetable plants like.
If summer months bring any form of water rationing, our nascent urban agriculture is woefully unprepared. Most veg gardens here are set up on the paradigm of English or U.S. East Coast gardens, with raised beds and water-intensive vegetable selections, rather than the waffle-style gardens and drought-tolerant varieties we should be using.
Status quo continues
The vibe around town is that people have been highly aware of the lack of rain. Yet there still seems to be little in the way of large-scale, mainstream, emissions-reducing habit shift. No change in the social glamor of air travel, no inclination to eliminate unnecessary car trips. There are still very few people who acknowledge the ties between globalized chainstore consumerism and global warming emissions.
Despite the drought, lawns in my neighborhood are still unnaturally green (that means they’re still being irrigated) and gutters often run with water wasted by sprinkler overspray. The California governor has asked for 20% decrease in water use, but politicians are insisting that it be voluntary participation, rather than mandatory rationing. And there has been no progress on expanding any permissions for on-site greywater.
Studies the end of last year revealed that media reporting of Weird Weather events carefully dodge any connection to human-caused climate change and global warming. Locally, the deniers have adjusted their soundbites, from denying global warming is happening, to denying that it is human-caused, or denying that our 500-year drought is related. (Nationally, with Weird Weather taking a turn toward deep freeze, global warming deniers are having a heyday.)
Many people will undoubtedly look to this week’s freak rainstorm and presume it “solved” the drought; most are blissfully unaware of the scale necessary to deliver water to 11 million people. “California is running out of options to deal with the fact that it has basically been relying on more water than it has long-term access to,” warns David Hayes, a former U.S. Interior Department official. Yet most people still don’t get it.
Through it all, L.A. is continuing to expand freeways, continuing the debate over how to expand LAX airport, and trying to figure out how to “grow” the stalled economy.
The welling-up of meaningful action
In our Transition groups (and in oh-so-many groups that are not labeled as “Transition”) there has been a surge of interest in growing food. Water-wise food gardening and rainwater harvesting are highly-requested speaking topics. It feels to me as if people are insecure and “sense” that deeper troubles are coming.
In the poorer areas of town, I observe a lot more bicycling being used as transportation, but I’m guessing this is due to the price of gasoline and ongoing economic troubles (a recent study found that 27% of L.A. County residents live below the poverty line).
Beneath the headlines on local events, I’m seeing subtle shifts in the organizations themselves. Organizations which weren’t founded for environmental or climate-based issues, are now folding these topics into their descriptions of why they do what they do.
Organizations that never before were about environmental action are putting in place programs which could definitely qualify as “transition”-style projects, such as a local church diocese encouraging all of its church properties to grow food gardens, and a local art college setting up a Minor in Sustainability (which I am thrilled to mentor).
L.A. City is poised to ban fracking. A larger nonprofit is creating sweeping goals for the region for 2050, which reach beyond economic measurements, and in many cases overlap with what we might call “transition indicators.”
And through it all, L.A. has the heroic Andy Lipkis, who seems to be single-handedly barging forward with a paradigm-shifting way to overhaul L.A.’s water infrastructure which involves making wise use of what rainwater we do get. With the connections Andy has built around the city, particularly within city politics, if anyone can achieve this mighty goal, that person is Andy Lipkis.
But ultimately, when it comes to Living with climate change, we have to come back to that Living part. To me this means the quality of our lives and our connections, as we all weather this Wacky Weather together.
Earlier this month, our group helped host Seed School, a 7-day exploration of all things related to heirloom vegetable seeds. We shared marvelous information, but even moreso, the gathering grew astounding connections. Some people were doing seed-related activities for social justice, hunger, and poverty reasons. Others were doing it for education and kids reasons. Still others had ecological and biodiversity as their drivers. But altogether, this was a shining example of common action, collaboration across the miles, and the realization that, all over Southern California, there are so many people DOING really great stuff, which is all contributing to a new energy, a new culture, a new way of looking at life. That is living with climate change right now in Los Angeles.
Joanne Poyourow directs the Environmental Change-Makers, a cornerstone of the Transition movement for Southern California. Joanne blogs at Transition US, and is the author of several books, including 10 Practical Tools for a Resilient Economy. Follow her on Twitter @TLAJoanne
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