There’s an interesting article about climate change up now at the New Statesman that should set some environmentalist pulses racing. In the face of apparently ‘overwhelming’ evidence, British astrophysicist David Whitehouse claims that that global warming no longer exists — not as a matter of opinion, but as a statement of ‘observational fact’. Apparently it reached its high-water mark in 1998; since then, global temperatures have remained roughly constant, despite ballooning carbon emissions. The cause of the phenomenon is unclear: Whitehouse offers the possibility that aerosols are counteracting the greenhouse effect, or that the earth’s oceans have begun to exercise a cooling effect on the atmosphere. Either way, he argues, the science of climatology is far from ‘settled’.

This should raise some hackles. Since An Inconvenient Truth, we have been told, in increasingly unequivocal language, that the debate on global warming is ‘closed’ and the Science — always capitalized, always undisputable — has been ‘settled’. But this certainty has bred secondary absurdities that are grist for the right-wing op-ed mill: in online forums, radicals demand ‘Nuremburg trials’ for global warming ‘deniers’, Holocaust denial now being a common (but absurd) point of comparison with climate change skepticism. When the British quasi-documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle screened on the ABC in June, its director, Martin Durkin, was attacked as part of a right-wing cabal of oil company CEOs and slavish neo-con court-scientists. Little commentary on the film actually took the time to disassemble its simplistic premise (Ian Lowe’s recent Quarterly Essay was the shining exception) and many commentators seemed more comfortable — what journalist, after all, has a good working knowledge of climatology? — constructing monochrome polemics on the boundless crimes of the Howardites.

Whitehouse’s views might seem like heresy (or oil-company spin) to some, but he is cut from a different cloth than ‘skeptics’ like Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen; for one thing, he accepts Al Gore’s figures on the levels of atmospheric carbon (remember the hockey-stick spike from An Inconvenient Truth?) as well as the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, which are (news to me) based on ‘very sound’ principles of physics. According to Whitehouse, the period between 1980 and 1998 experienced a marked increase in global temperature in line with carbon emissions, which has since flattened off even as carbon levels continue to rise. The received wisdom, that carbon emissions will continue to drive up global temperatures, triggering off the Apocalypse, may not be as inevitable as many think. In a system as chaotic as the earth’s climate, in which even measuring global temperature reliably is difficult, it is entirely reasonable to argue that other, less-understood processes may be exercising a countervailing force upon global temperatures.

For died-in-the-wool global warming ‘denialists’ and coal-industry satrapies, this has the power of revelation, for if there’s no clear scientific link between rising carbon levels and rising temperatures, the global warming hypothesis becomes untenable and there’s every excuse for government and business to ignore it. But Whitehouse’s avowed concern is scientific, not political:

I have heard it said, by scientists, journalists and politicians, that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.

Of course, this is not to say that our policy-makers shouldn’t be planning for the worst case scenario. But to assume such a connection, as many commentators do, is to confuse the dictates of science with those of political morality. The climate change debate, as it is played out on television and in the opinion pages, is not a scientific debate in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a political debate about ends and means, about the limits and desirability of human development — a vitally important debate, but far from a ‘scientific’ one. At its worst, it degenerates into mud-slinging and ad hominem attacks, which run counter to the spirit of scientific enquiry. But in theory, it can provide a powerful spur to action to head off the effects of climate change. After all, economies based around the large-scale consumption of fossil fuels are clearly unsustainable, and will have to face the reality of the planet’s limitations sooner or later. Similarly, the moral (or non-rational) imperative of preserving old-growth forests, even at considerable economic ‘cost’, is not something that can necessarily be quantified in rational terms. Action to head off the effects of climate change need not wait on a pure, unattainable ‘consensus’ among climate scientists, since scientists, like academics, will always disagree on one thing or another; it is justified according to simple principles of risk management.

Scientific debate, on the other hand, values dissent and challenges accepted truths. However valid his science, Whitehouse is right about one thing: the political or moral argument for action on the possibility (probability?) of climate change should be decoupled from the mosaic intricacies of specialist scientific debate on the issue. Dressing up politics in the objectivity and skeptical enquiry of science only discredits both.