Climate change and the arguments, tactics and folly of denial

The latest issue of the Queen’s Alumni Review features an opinion piece by John P. Smol, who’s a biology professor at Queen’s as well as an alumnus. An earlier issue of the Review, which focused on the research currently being conducted at Queen’s to address the issue of climate change, drew critical feedback from a wide range of readers who question the science – and the scientists – at the heart of the matter.

Being one of those scientists – and indeed, one of the world’s leading climate change researchers – Dr. Smol naturally felt compelled to address the notion that he and his colleagues were “ignorant, deluded, and/or purposely deceptive in the pursuit of research money or promotion.”

“I began my career at Queen’s in the 1980s,” Smol explains, “when I cut my teeth on the major environmental issue of that time – acid rain. Like climate change, it would not have been my first choice as a research focus… but at that time it was the most important environmental issue and acid rain was a problem that needed solid scientific data (as opposed to opinions and wishful thinking) to inform the policy decisions that had to be made. When I look back to that time… I think there is much we could learn from the acid rain debate when we talk about climate change today.

“The arguments and tactics used by some climate change deniers now are essentially identical to those used about 25 years ago with acid rain. The sequence also follows similar patterns.

“Stage One was simple denial: Acid lakes have not acidified, because they have always been acidic. The foundation of this claim was that given the lack of direct long-term monitoring data of lake acidity we could not determine if lakes were naturally acidic. This gave the acid rain deniers some satisfaction – well at least until our Queen’s lab and other colleagues showed that we could reconstruct long-term trends in pH… from information contained in dated lake sediment profiles (just as we now can do with climate change studies). Science clearly demonstrated that many lakes had acidified.

“That led to Stage Two – shift the blame: This argument acknowledged that lakes had acidified, but suggested that acidification was not caused primarily by industry but by… and you fill in the blank with almost anything, including trees, ducks, etc. With further scientific work, it was shown how closely emissions were linked to acidification, and the deniers deleted Stage Two from their portfolio.

“Many then moved to Stage Three: The problem is too expensive to fix, which can be summarized by saying, ‘OK, so lakes are acidifying, and it is our fault, but now it is too late to do anything. So why waste money trying to stop it?!’ Of course, this was a final, desperate plea, but things had to be done, and thankfully some actions were taken, and the situation started to improve, albeit slowly.

“The ‘economic card’ was and is commonly played, but in such cases the cost of doing nothing or too little is seldom calculated. When this type of economic analysis was done for acid rain mitigation, it showed what enormous savings occurred when appropriate action was taken, rather than resorting to delaying tactics and obfuscation. Quite frankly, the stakes involved in climate change are too high to allow this issue to reach Stage Three.”

The opinion piece as a whole is well worth reading. You might say it’s an excellent contribution to an issue that we ought to be well past the point of debating. And if it gets a few more minds on the right side, then so much the better.

“I do not believe it is too late yet to take aggressive action,” Dr. Smol concludes, “but it is very, very late.”

Posted in Uncategorized