Source: John Crowther

There are two ways to approach scientific theories. The first is whether they affect our day-to day-lives. It doesn’t matter if the only thing you remember about Einstein’s theory of relativity is it somehow involved Yahoo Serious because most of us are unlikely to travel fast enough to notice the dilation of time. You get told about is once in Year 12 physics and then you go back to figuring out how to buy enough booze for Schoolies Week.

However, suppose you spend Schoolies Week at Rottnest Island off the coast of WA. When you try to step off your girlfriend’s dad’s boat too quickly  it pushes in the opposite direction, leaving you bobbing in the Indian Ocean. That’s Isaac Newton’s third law of motion and you won’t break it again.

Another view is whether the theory stirs a lot of controversy in the wider population. Depending on who you ask, evolution is either a sensible explanation of humanity’s origins or the most sinful happening since Eve said “I feel like an apple”. Charles Darwin’s hypothesis was so interesting it even inspired a high brow English film, which I believe was called Primates and Prejudice.

So can anyone name a scientific theory that both affects us and gets a lot of people hot and bothered? I’ll give you a hint, it is, or was, the greatest moral challenge of our time.

Climate change, like space exploration and cloned sheep, is a rare example of a scientific theory entering our mainstream conscious. It is the rock and roll of research. It is the scientific equivalent of Barack Obama, Lady Gaga and Game of Thrones all rolled in to one. To misquote noted conservationist Michael Dundee “That’s not a peer-reviewed explanation of the continuous warming of the climate since the industrial revolution, this is  a peer-reviewed explanation of the continuous warming of the climate since the industrial revolution ”.

Actually, the rock and roll metaphor is quite apt. Broadly speaking, conservative types think emission trading schemes are just a load of noise. Hardcore fans are ready to quit their jobs and follow Tim Flannery around the country. And the rest of us just want a recycling plan you can dance to to.

For all the stereotypes of rational professors in white coats, scientists can mix it rock stars when it comes to public spats and name calling. In 1990 biologist Richard Dawkins engaged in a Notorious B.I.G-style feud with science writer Stephen Gould over a patch of fossils discovered more than 50 years earlier. Dawkins called Gould “disingenuous” and accused him of misrepresenting the facts. In scientific circles this is the equivalent of calling your momma fat.

There is a good reason why scientists argue so frequently. In the same way you don’t proclaim the West Coast Eagles premiership contenders because they beat North Melbourne, you don’t accept climate change because someone says “hey guys, it’s hotter now than it was in 1984″. To win acceptance for your theory means you have to counter often long-established beliefs. You need to gather a large body of evidence and conduct experiments that can be recreated so others can test this evidence. You need to do the academic equivalent of beating Sydney and Hawthorn and even then people still won’t tip you.

This gladiatorial process occurs every time a new idea is suggested in the scientific community. The wider public never hear about it because they are focussed on things like interest rates or drugged footballers. So these cerebral conflicts are like a Fight Lab, where the first rule is you never talk about Fight Lab and the second rule is always have a control group.

But climate change’s rock star-status makes is different. For the last two decades every study, survey and census has been breathlessly reported on, even if the data has yet to be analysed. It’s top of the charts so any story about impending environmental catastrophe has found traction in the wider public.

The appetite for information on the subject is so voracious that everybody with an opinion has been interviewed, profiled and probably trended on twitter.

The increased public interest just means scientist have been forced to have their arguments in public, like two cousins fighting right in the middle of Christmas lunch.

Since I watched Rajan Datur’s video coverage of the WTTC Global Summit on Fastrack in Abu Dhabi last month (see last post), I’ve been unable to silence a song from my childhood that replays in my head – Danny Kaye’s musical rendition of the famous tale of Hans Christian Andersen: the Emperor Who Wore No Clothes. If you have children or grandchildren with any innocence left check out the old but enduring charming film. Click the image, start 1.10 mins in and let the message soak in!

I had taken a pause from blogging for four months for two reasons – to complete a project and to turn off the chatter of an over informed brain. Pauses clarify.

While in my first post of 2013 I expressed disappointment with the position taken by the Summit’s leaders, allocation of blame wasn’t my intent.

At this incredibly portentous time in human history, we’re each and all caught up in a web of denial that has become the sticky stuff that binds our relationships with each other and the natural world.

At best we are entranced; at worst addicted. Our neurological development has not kept pace with our technical prowess and, like the King in Andersen’s story, our hubris has blinded  and our constant “busyness” has deafened us to the wisdom of our subconscious.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale it took an innocent child with an unbroken heart and senses fresh and intact to see and speak the truth.

There’s been considerable research as to why humanity is acting so slowly in response to the converging change forces pushing us towards the cliff’s edge. The reptilian parts of our brains are wired to sense and respond to the personal threat that our senses register. The newer, frontal lobe that is the source of our technical brilliance and feeds off endless analysis and discussion, has not yet evolved similar response mechanisms. Furthermore, our need to belong and be accepted is more associated with this growing part of our neurological development.

We’re like movie goers on a Friday night who’ve settled down into a comfy sofa with popcorn and coke to accompany our hard earned night of entertainment and distraction. Someone yells “fire” and our reptilian brain leaps into action. But if there’s another reassuring voice saying the alarm was false and, since we can’t smell fire and no one else is scrambling to their feet, we relax deeper into our chairs. We’ve paid good money for our seats and we deserve a night off. Yet all it would take is the whiff of burning plastic and distant signs of rapid movement across the theatre and our urge to shift would be irresistible. Getting to the exit before death/injury by trampling or burning would instantly become our first priority.

So in that sense I am grateful for our lousy Spring weather – even though I am thoroughly fed up with grey skies and have felt colder here in the UK in May than I did in December. Extreme weather is nature’s kind way of arousing the reptile in us and perhaps it can do what armies of bickering scientists or retired politicians with slide decks and a huge budget have yet failed to do – wake us up to a reality no one wishes to contemplate. Research shows that the more we experience extreme weather events personally, the more likely we are to acknowledge that climate is changing faster than normal.

The Need to Focus
Over the past 2 years I’ve been invited to speak at over 20 tourism gatherings and presented my share of slides and facts joining up the dots of change, interpreting the clouds gathering on the horizon and suggesting responses.  (It’s all here on slideshare). But I now realize I have sold both my audience and myself short.  The message wasn’t clear and compelling enough.  The metaphorical “fire” in my story is actually frozen sunlight (carbon) – the fossilized remains of other species we’ve been burning to fuel the fastest most amazing economic and social expansion in human history. Carbon is not only the most dangerous, pervasive waste product of our “industrial civilisation” but, by focussing on the problems it generates,  we could also solve many equally challenging but derivative problems: biodiversity loss, economic disparity, food security etc.

We’ve got two worlds existing in tourism – the traditional mainstream that is preoccupied with business as usual (i.e., more of everything so long as that delivers more profit even if it delivers less value to the places it exploits). I don’t expect this group to like my message – yet.  There are plenty of agencies and consultants all too willing to provide the platitudes and spin to make the status quo feel comfortable and, as illustrated in Abu Dhabi,  even glittering and chic. They seem oblivious to the fact that the industrial model on which is it based inevitably passes its prime and starts to generate diminishing returns and less net benefit.

The other world comprises a huge but fractured, sometimes fractious fringe that is growing and spreading like multiple infections that haven’t yet coalesced.  By necessity, participants in alternative tourism are forced to focus on symptoms not causes of our malaise and because there are so many varied and increasing expressions of what is irresponsible, their efforts appear disjointed and only of local relevance. But the good news is that they are growing in number and their experience is highly practical, resourceful and their commitment to building a better tourism never to be underestimated or under valued. Their weakness, on the other hand, stems from the fact that they are too inward looking – applying labels, arguing over definitions and  decrying the expression of a problem but not joining up with their counterparts in society who are addressing deeper causes and systemic disfunctionality.

It’s as if we are arguing over the cut, make and style of the King’s clothes rather than admit he is, in fact, naked.

The REAL PROBLEM

The challenge facing us all transcends discussions about good versus bad tourism. Tourism – even in a better form – will not survive a failure to deal with the issue of carbon. Like junkies we are dependent and addicted.

Drug cartels and drug pushers benefit from their trafficking when they are not caught. It’s a very profitable business that absorbs participation from all levels of society. Carbon pushers – the fossil fuel companies  – are now are pulling our strings but are as addicted and at risk as the rest of us.

The real crisis of carbon is only just being recognized: $27 trillion in asset value can only be realized if that resource is burned. And, if it is – to quote the courageous head of the IMF, Yvonne Lagarde –  we all fry. If it is not exploited, it becomes a “stranded asset” infinitely less attractive to investors than a dubious Credit Default Swap.

The light is going on in the boardrooms of institutional investors, rating companies, and even in investment banks that fossil-based energy sources could pose a real and growing credit risk and if these fears are acted upon, it will cause the biggest market shift in human history.

I feel confident predicting that the next really big topic of conversation will be the carbon bubble that has the potential to dwarf all previous bubbles that burst in recent history. Furthermore, it’s in tourism’s best interest to prick that bubble sooner rather than later to avoid financial meltdown that will seize up markets.

Do you smell smoke? I can. It’s seeping out from the high rise offices of the financial community.

Time to move. The exit is over here (see next post). It was a crap movie anyway!

“Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?” Groucho Marx

If we follow Groucho Marx‘s line of reasoning then future generations do not matter because while we are able to grant benefits to them, they are unable to return the favour. A key requirement of Groucho’s ethic is that there must be some mutual benefit if someone is to do the right thing. One of the problems with this idea is that it excludes those who cannot reciprocate including severely intellectually disabled humans, infants, very young children and all non-human animals. People who hold this view believe the interests of distant people, future generations and animals are inconsequential.

The question of whether the interests of future generations matter is important in the climate change debate because while the burning of fossil fuels benefits the present generation, the consequences fall to future generations. Carbon Dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years and some of it for more than 100,000 years. A 2005 paper, Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time says,

“…we expect that 17-33% of the fossil fuel carbon will still reside in the atmosphere lkyr from now, decreasing to 10-15% at lOkyr, and 7% at 100 kyr. The mean lifetime of fossil fuel CO, is about 30-35 kyr.”

(1kyr = 1000 years.)  In his paper, A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption, Stephen Gardiner argues, “climate change is a substantially deferred phenomenon”. Because of this, it requires cooperation not just between nations but between generations. He illustrates this intergenerational problem with a comparison to the fabled Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two thieves have been apprehended and locked in separate cells. The prosecutor puts the following offer on the table: if prisoner A confesses, but prisoner B does not, A walks free while B does three years in jail. If both A and B confess, they each do two years. If neither confesses, they both do one year. What do they do? If the prisoners act on self-interest alone, they will betray each other as betrayal rewards more often than does cooperation.

A similar problem exists with whether to act to mitigate global warming. Individual nations understand that it is better for everyone if they all cooperate together, but on the other hand, it is beneficial for each individual nation to do nothing and free ride on the actions of other nations.  The same problem occurs between generations. Gardiner calls it the Pure Intergenerational Problem (PIP). There are two options facing each generation:

(PIP 1 ) It is collectively rational for most generations to cooperate: (almost) every generation prefers the outcome produced by everyone restricting pollution over the outcome produced by everyone overpolluting.

(PIP2) It is individually rational for all generations not to cooperate: when each generation has the power to decide whether or not it will overpollute, each generation (rationally) prefers to overpollute, whatever the others do.

In this situation, it becomes harder to argue in favour of cooperation because we do not have mutually-beneficial interaction. The generation that acts to reduce emissions absorbs all the costs but transfers the benefit to future generations who cannot reciprocate. If the current generation acts in self-interest alone, then they accrue all the benefits while transferring the costs to future generations. The problem gets amplified for each subsequent generation because we not only pass this cost on, we also add to it with our accelerating greenhouse gas emissions. Gardiner also suggests that future generations are less likely to comply with PIP1 if previous generations have not done so and so non-compliance by the first generation has a domino effect.

But do future generations matter? Should we be concerned about their interests?

In Moral Obligations Toward the Future, Burnor and Raley argue that future generations do matter. Suppose a terrorist group launches a missile at country x killing 100,000 people. By all ethical standards this is wrong. Now let’s change the story slightly and say that instead the terrorist group sends the missile into space where it orbits the Earth for 200 years. At this point in the future, the missile changes direction and heads back to Earth where it kills 100,000 people in country x. The fact that this event occurs in the future and is inflicted upon future people is not morally relevant. They argue that the “moral rights of people of any generation must be on a par”.

Economists recognise the interests of future generations. In a 1974 paper, What Is Permanent Endowment Income?, James Tobin argues,

“The trustees of an endowed institution are the guardians of the future against the claims of the present. Their task is to preserve equity among generations…This rule says that current consumption should not benefit from the prospects of future gifts to endowment.”

This argument makes sense. If a University receives an endowment it might be in the interests of people living in the present to consume the endowment in its entirety. But this would be at the expense of future generations. Universities and other institutions understand this and so a trustee is appointed to ensure that the activity for which the endowment provides will continue to be supported by the endowment in the future.

A similar argument can be made when a country gets a large proportion of its income from the act of mining and selling natural resources. In depleting the natural resource, they take away the future wealth of the country. Each generation acts independently in their own self-interest even though they know that depletion of this common resource is not in the long-term interests of the population. Some countries, like Norway, recognise this and have established sovereign wealth funds as a sort of compensation to future generations.

Burnor and Raley argue that if we are unable to prevent the depletion of natural resources – fossil fuels – or the trend in global warming from the burning of fossil fuels, then we have an obligation to compensate future generations who will be harmed as a result. They write,

After all, it is a fundamental principle of justice that if I harm another person by my behavior, I have an
obligation to compensate that person by providing him or her with something of roughly equal
value. At the very least, then, our present activities place us under an obligation to invest
significantly in research and technological development that could help future generations
counter the effects of our present activities. Specifically, if we cannot stop burning fossil fuels,
then we have an obligation to research alternate energy sources that could replace what we are
presently using up. Likewise, if we cannot keep from contributing to global warming, then we
have an obligation to take steps that could help shield future people from coastal flooding, that
could begin eradicating tropical diseases while they are still relatively contained, and that could
develop productive, drought-resistant crops to avoid future food shortages.

Bob Carter shreds the myths

Even High School kids could follow this.  Carter is an earth sciences professor at an Australian university so the talk does include some Australian references.

The Climate Lessons blogger says:  ”This should be recommended viewing for every teacher in the world.

I also think there are seeds in this video for ideas that could be used as and when the ‘authorities’ get round to creating a decent curriculum on climate for schools.  That might have to precede publishers willing to risk new books aimed at the young, and suitable for schools, with a more realistic and optimistic view of our climate system and our impact on it.

That might include the fact that we have never been in a stronger position than we are now to cope with climate variations.  So parents might like to take the initiative and tell their children that.  There will be troubles ahead from climate, just as there have been in the past.  But we are more ready than ever before to handle them.  Our abundant supplies of affordable energy are part of that.”

Getting rid of the Climate change department and the Carbon Tax will be a huge lift for Australia’s economy, trashed by Green Labor.

What did astonish me was to learn that Amazon had received a government grant from the UK for £2.5 million. I really fail to understand why governments should provide grants of any description to multinational corporations. There are better ways to waste tax payers’ money that giving some of it to Amazon.