Progressive dilemma
1st October 2005
I have been a subscriber to Prospect since you began, so I was interested in David Goodhart's remarks (October) on the occasion of your tenth anniversary. But there are two aspects of what he said that perturbed me. First, I am disconcerted that he should have placed Marxism Today in double harness with Encounter (a magazine which I read for very many years) as a fully-fledged precursor of Prospect. The other surprising thing was his use of a word which I thought had expired with the cold war: "progressive."
Robert Cahn
Cambridge
The London Magazine
10th October 2005
Elisa Segrave's letter (October), commenting on Alexander Linklater's article on the short story rightly pointed out that he failed to mention Alan Ross's London Magazine. In January 2002, I succeeded Alan as editor. Since that time, in 22 issues of 128 pages published every eight weeks, I have edited 65 short stories by distinguished writers, including two by Louis de Bernières and two by Desmond Hogan.
Sebastian Barker
London N15
Ban Opus Dei?
28th August 2005
I have read David Goodhart's interview with Abdul Wahid (September) and I still don't understand what makes Hizb ut-Tahrir worse than Opus Dei. The latter's history is closely tied up with anti-democratic movements, including ones given to killing their opponents; its campus recruitment activities have spawned a number of victim support organisations; and it appears just as much steeped in misogyny as HT. So should we ban it?
Trevor Pateman
Brighton
Britain's other Muslims
17th August 2005
Ehsan Masood (August) is to be commended for his considered analysis of the Muslim condition in Britain. But he is strangely selective in his treatment of "south Asian" Muslims: every time he talks of them, it turns out he means those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. But Muslims of Indian origin—almost all Gujaratis—provide some useful counterpoints to the complex British Muslim condition. They tend to be far more economically successful than their Bangladeshi and Pakistani co-religionists, and closer to their Hindu fellow Gujaratis. As has been pointed out, there appear to be no Indian Muslims in any al Qaeda-related activity. At the same time, Gujarati Muslims will surely resent Masood's implication that they are somehow "less" Islamic. Indeed, their success has enabled many Gujarati Muslims to become engaged in Muslim educational and other philanthropy; they are responsible for much of the money put into Muslim causes in Britain that doesn't come from Arab states. As they strive to balance their linguistic-cultural (Gujarati and Indian) and political (British) identities with the orthodox imperative to be Muslims first, British Gujarati Muslims offer a nuanced narrative within the pressing debate over the future of British Islam.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster University
Vidal misunderstood
27th September 2005
Duncan Fallowell (October) badly misreads Gore Vidal as an anti-American ingrate, a po-faced critic of abundance. Vidal's magnificent obsession is America as a revolutionary society, and the target of his disdain is the amnesia of Americans about their own revolutionary past.
Jeffrey Vernon
London SE15
Justice for lawyers
13th September 2005
Reading Roger Smith's defence of the Human Rights Act (September) and the need for all people, UK citizens and non-citizens, to be treated the same, raised my interest in the subject. So I went to the website of Smith's human rights NGO, Justice, to find out more. You can imagine my surprise when, on looking at membership, I found that Justice distinguishes between those who are lawyers and those who are not. Those who are get to vote at Justice's annual meeting and are called "members." Those who are not do not, and are called "associates."
Mark Breen
Wrexham
The Gerin oil debate 1
21st September 2005
It would be bad form to disparage the whole of Prospect magazine on the basis of one provocative and extremist, if predictable, article (October). Yet it is a shame to publish another tired rant by Dr Dick Rainwash against Gerin oil. Does such demonising really benefit the atheist cause, much as it may titillate the already-converted?
Martin Kimber
Abingdon
The Gerin oil debate 2
27th September 2005
Richard Dawkins vividly describes the drawbacks of using the powerful drug Gerin oil, but omits two vital points. Many parts of the world are infested with an insect species known as Earth feringus fly, or F feringus, to give it its scientific classification. This pest is capable of inflicting nasty bites on its human victims, and Gerin oil is a traditional remedy for the pain thus caused.
Moreover, Dawkins is not a disinterested observer, for he is in fact a purveyor of a rival remedy for F feringus bites, usually marketed under the trade name Seccine. Unfortunately, Seccine is too dry for many people's palates, and has side-effects of its own which users can find unsettling, such as amazement at the complexity and purposelessness of the universe. Unless Seccine can be made into a more sexy product (one with greater reproductive success), it will continue to lose market share to the long-established but more intoxicating Gerin oil.
Stephen Ashworth
Oxford
The Gerin oil debate 3
1st October 2005
Dawkins beautifully describes the results of Gerin oil excess. He does not acknowledge the equally dire results of Gerin oil deficiency.
In milder cases lack of Gerin oil is associated with weakening of community ties, and mocking of established institutions. A general lack of awareness of God and an indifference to any standard of morality develops.
In more severe cases, lack of Gerin oil is associated with a lack of purpose and with peering into the abyss. The view is not good and rather than taking enough Gerin oil, people will try anything else and end up pouring alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, sex, and any other mood-altering action they can down into their abyss. Despite their efforts, the abyss simply gets deeper still.
Over time there develops a complete blindness that prevents the sufferer from seeing any good that might have come from Gerin oil use. This blindness is described as a "true and complete grasp of reality" and is ignorant of its own partiality.
From this blindness evolves a need for new structures in the Gerin oil deficient's consciousness. This edifice will tolerate anything except theism, and instead puts its faith in multiculturalism, relativism, scientism and technological progress. The Gerin oil deficient have no need to believe in a future hell, being perfectly capable of creating hell immediately. One of their own high priests put it beautifully, "hell is other people."
Severe deficiencies are associated with the delusion that we ourselves are as god. Nietzsche told us this, but Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Amin, Hussein et al enacted this fantasy and set themselves up as god in their own countries, dispensing justice for the good of their people.
Coming back to reality there is a golden mean to be trod between excesses of religion and the total lack of religion advocated by Dawkins. Both the deficiency and the excess are dangerous.
Peter Davies
Halifax
The Gerin oil debate 4
23rd September 2005
Richard Dawkins's splendid atheist rant warmed my heart, but he cannot expect to prevail merely by reason and wit. Religion is rooted deep in human instinct. It is of course a cultural artefact, but it has been with us since the moment when our ancestors, in the flowering of mental capacity that made them human, realised the prices they must pay for their power to imagine and to draw comparisons: namely, their intensified awareness of pain, their foreknowledge of their own deaths, and their inability to imagine a state of non-existence after life. As our power to control the world increases, our powerlessness against the human condition becomes more humiliating. Religions confer power, give assurance, comfort the afflicted. The comfort may be illusory, and the assurance of righteousness is often used to justify evil. But I'm afraid an atheist sermon, even from an Oxford pulpit, makes the professor sound as if he's pushing a competing brand of snake oil.
Roger Owen
London SW19
The Gerin oil debate 5
3rd October 2005
Of all the religions exerting covert influence on our lives, the extraordinary Ecenics cult is perhaps the most powerful, the most extensive and yet the least understood.
Readers of Prospect are probably more familiar with the cult than most: both at a superficial level, from its archaic robed ceremonies designed to intimidate outsiders, to the glamorous image presented by Hollywood, which has a long, special relationship with celebrity Ecenics adherents; but also at a deeper level as cult members themselves, perhaps even of its rigorous hierarchy and sophisticated global information network.
As a destructive force, Ecenics has an outstanding record. Christianity's wars against heretics and heathens, the Muslim war against infidels—these look positively amateurish compared with the millions of deaths which the ingenious designs of Ecenics preachers have produced.
Without the zeal of Ecenicist missionaries, our planet would be a very different place. While it would not be quite so comfortable for us—well, for those of us in rich western nations, anyway—we would not have seen the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the soldiers of the first world war and the villagers of Vietnam would have been spared the effects of gassing and agent orange respectively; Saddam would have had nothing to test on the Kurds; the arms race of the 20th century would never have got off the starting blocks.
Ecenics missionaries and Ecenics-inspired mass hysteria have fallen heavily on other species besides our own. In England alone, our wildlife population has declined by over 90 per cent since farmers began taking spiritual guidance from Ecenicist pastors.
And "global warming," which Ecenicists stolidly maintain is the fault of absolutely everyone except themselves, has its roots in classic Ecenics-inspired enthusiasm—specifically, the tendency to make as much money as possible from any new discovery before anyone notices what the long term effects might be.
Ecenics surpasses other religions in the manipulation of public emotion (though, ironically, its clergy consider "emotion" and "emotive language" to be sinful concepts). Black-robed prelates in curious headgear hold bizarre ordination ceremonies annually in the seminaries. For everyday worship, the priests wear a traditional "white coat" also called a "lab coat" whose exact purpose is obscure—it may signify the wearer's supposed purity. For public appearances, the traditional corduroy trousers and tweed jacket may be worn, subtly indicating social superiority. The effect of this ceremonial wardrobe on the general public is to create a cowed respect and dread of the Ecenics priest's scantly understood power.
Not all Ecenicist priests are male, but some of its early saints can be seen from their own writings to have been somewhat misogynistic, and it took a surprisingly long time for women to be accepted as priests. Recruitment of women remains a problem; it may be that distrust lingers from the old days when early Ecenics preachers savagely persecuted non-Ecenics women who used un-ecenically-tested herbal remedies to cure the sick or to aid childbirth. Many of these remedies and practices have now been shown to be efficient, but the Ecenics hierarchy are forbidden to apologise for anything, unlike their opposite numbers in other religions, who are expected to apologise for all kinds of crimes, including things done before they themselves were born.
But none of this matters, for one of the secrets of the cult's success is that it is a one-way religion: Ecenics never looks back. Only the history of Ecenics itself is allowed to be studied under the Ecenics aegis.
And by invoking the same doctrine, Ecenics priests are able to claim enormous sums of public money for ascertaining the obvious, such as that "teenagers don't function well in the morning" or "if you squirt bleach in rabbits' eyes, they go blind" or "if you keep on killing whales, you eventually run out of whales."
The doctrine also enables Ecenics zealots to propose "new" policies which have in truth long been abandoned by civilised societies. One charismatic Ecenics preacher of our day, for example, advocates the freedom of parents to kill a baby any time up to three days after birth; any similarity between this proposal and the practices of notoriously cruel ancient peoples escapes the notice of his followers, because they are forbidden by non departmentia mea to expose themselves to fields of knowledge such as classics, literature or poetry.
What is most striking, to my eye, about the Ecenics religion is its ability to practice bigotry and intolerance while at the same time criticising these flaws in older religions.
Since the beginnings of the Ecenics cult (the word, as readers of Prospect will not need reminding, comes from the Greek ekenia meaning "If you don't agree with what I am saying, then you must be stupid, since I am never wrong"), Ecenicists have airily regarded all other faiths as interchangeable, rather in the manner of Victorian colonialists who called all their native servants by the same name because they could not tell the damned fellows apart. But in particular, because of perceived Christian snubs towards prominent Ecenics preachers which, according to Ecenics oral tradition, happened about 500 years ago, major Ecenicists spend a surprising amount of time attacking Christianity. Fundamentalist Ecenicists maintain that Ecenics and Christianity cannot be followed at the same time.
In America, a country which, incidentally, has probably spent more money on grand Ecenics projects—such as flying to the moon— than would be needed to save all Africa's children from death, there are a few oddball, equally fundamentalist Christians who hold the same view. Yet most of the world's billions of Christians admire and respect Ecenicists; and some gentler Ecenics pastors quietly admit in private that they combine Ecenicist observance with Christian beliefs.
The fundamentalist Ecenics response to any other religion—namely, to focus on its few fools, while belittling the achievements of its many wise men and poking fun at the spirituality of its ordinary followers—usually ends in declaring that all faiths (except, of course, Ecenics) should be banned. This policy has not been known to bring happiness when it has been tried in Russia, Burma, China.
Such intolerance, such pride, would be considered deeply sinful in a Christian. We can only pray that Ecenics will run the course of most young religions, learn to see its own mistakes and to recognise that there are more things in heaven and earth than it dreams of.
With no apologies whatsoever to Richard Dawkins,
Sarah Johnson
London W12
Saving Bacon 1
6th October 2005
As a well-known clinical biochemist, according to the University of Buckingham website, Terence Kealey (October) presents a surprisingly partial account of the discovery of what he calls sugar DNA by Oswald Avery in the early 1940s. Avery, together with MacLeod and McCarty, made the key observation that "R-form" pneumococcus bacteria could be changed into the virulent "S-form" by the addition of purified "S-form" DNA under the right conditions. Kealey bizarrely trumpets this work as technology rather than science. Yet the careful elimination of the possible involvement of other types of biomolecules by Avery and his colleagues is a fine example of the scientific method applied to a fundamental biological question. The fact that the research was done at a place called the Rockefeller Institute (private) is no more significant than if it had been done at the equally prestigious University of California, Berkeley (public).
Peter Brophy
University of Edinburgh
Saving Bacon 2
29th September 2005
Terence Kealey is so wrong that it is hard to know where to begin. He is wrong about Francis Bacon, who did not, as Kealey seems to assume, envisage a publicly funded body akin to the science research councils. Bacon preferred the idea of a closed priesthood of scientists who take an oath of secrecy "for the concealing of those [inventions] which we think fit to keep secret"—something closer to a modern biotech company, in other words. Kealey is wrong to suggest that science flows from technology, just as it is wrong to assert the opposite. Science and technology aren't just symbiotic, they are utterly merged, and their lexical separation is a convenient shorthand that it is silly to take too literally. Kealey is wrong to believe that private sector research could sustain itself without the public sector, as any entrepreneur will tell you. Not only are university labs the breeding grounds for private companies, but most universities now boast a stable of commercial companies spun off to develop fundamental research into new technologies. Kealey is badly wrong in imagining that the private sector is going to turn over its discoveries for public scrutiny; indeed, a recent study in Science showed that reluctance to share materials is hindering biomedical research. Most egregiously, he is wrong about the whole current climate of commercial research, which has become increasingly focused on short-term, product-oriented work. IBM and AT&T Bell Laboratories were once the great drivers of physics research in the US. Today their labs are a mere shadow of that past, as top scientists have jumped ship because they were fed up with having to pretend that their work would yield a commercial product 18 months down the line. In the UK, ICI has similarly abandoned most blue-skies research.
If we abort publicly funded research, we'll probably still get our iPod Nanos, but we won't get much science.
Philip Ball
London SE22
Saving Bacon 3
7th October 2005
I greatly enjoyed Terence Kealey's article "Bacon's Shadow," and kept waiting for the punchline, only to discover by the end that he actually meant it! His message is that the private sector should fund science because they do it so much better; we have been beguiled for 400 years by the advocacy of public science by Francis Bacon. However, the article is shot through with contradiction and flabby thinking.
For example, he claims that "technology grows out of technology, not science," citing a report that "shows" that 90 per cent of technological advances emerge out of what is already known, rather than "science"; and that the 10 per cent that does come from science is "economically marginal," meaning that it doesn't make any money. Later on he makes the completely contradictory claims that (a) private companies fund a lot of pure science anyway (why on earth should they do this if it makes no money?); and (b) that publicly funded R&D crowds out private investment, preventing it from doing its job.
Take the claim that "government funding of R&D actually seems to damage economies," based on a "regression analysis" of economic data from OECD countries. I haven't read the OECD report that makes this claim, but half a second's thought would show that it is flawed. Regression analysis is a statistical procedure, and therefore requires independent data. In what sense are the economies of countries independent? Advanced economies are at the top of the economic growth curve, having exhausted much of the potential for growth from existing ideas and infrastructure. Less advanced ones can still grow a lot just by moving further along the path of development, borrowing ideas from elsewhere. Advanced countries put a lot of public money into R&D, whereas less advanced ones do not: they don't have to, because foreign companies will come in and give it to them anyway—at a cost. Hence the spurious relationship. All countries in effect parasitise the R&D efforts of others. Does he seriously imagine that China's economy is so vibrant solely because of the technological innovation of its private companies?
I find it hard to think of a clearer example of the short-termism of the market-based fundamentalism that masquerades as a coherent philosophy. The point is that scientific advances take time to filter through to the market: that's why public funding of science is necessary. Craig Venter's private effort to sequence the human genome was based on the realisation that huge profits could be made by exploiting the publicly funded efforts of more than half a century of molecular biology. There's no problem with this process at all—it's the way the market works (although I personally am delighted he failed to patent human genes). But to claim that the short-term driven market can supply long-term research in the first place, is plain mad.
Let's put things round the other way, for clarification: can Kealey tell us of technological advances that do not depend on science? It's no good starting "science" off with Roger Bacon, disallowing every bit of knowledge that went before. As Richard Feynman used to say, science is the testing of ideas by experiment, rejecting those that do not conform to the evidence. This process has gone on since humans first evolved.
The right-wing attack on science in the US has been well documented by Chris Mooney's recent book (The Republican War on Science), together with the self-serving quiescent responses of many scientists. Kealey at least doesn't say that scientific ideas are just someone's point of view, the usual way that "postmodernists" view science. Scientific explanations of unknown phenomena are of course limited by the imagination, and among scientists this will be as "selective" as anyone else's. But the empirical testing of those ideas is the crucial difference between science and other systems of thought. Scientists should not lie down and accept ridiculous assertions such as Kealey's. Public funding of science should continue.
Francis Gilbert
Egypt
Saving Bacon 4
27th September 2005
In his travesty of the character and ideas of Francis Bacon, Terence Kealey describes him as an "unusually unpleasant" man "who collected… many bribes." On the contrary, JG Crowther demonstrates (Francis Bacon: The First Statesman of Science, 1960) that Bacon was "fundamentally incorruptible." Indeed he was almost alone among leading politicians in not paying James I for his offices and promotions. Nieves Mathews in Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (1996), argues that he was completely innocent of the charges of bribery and that writers such as Macaulay were themselves guilty of slandering Bacon's reputation and unfairly influencing later generations.
The best judges of Bacon's character are those nearest to him. To his apothecary Peter Boener he was "a noteworthy example… of all virtue, gentleness, peacefulness, and patience." To his editor Rawley, "if [ever] there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern times, it was upon him." Aubrey tells us that "all that were great and good loved and honoured him."
As for his ideas, Kealey completely misrepresents his whole philosophy. Bacon's lodestar was not power, as he suggests, but truth. He spells it out himself in his beautiful Proem: "For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth."
In other words, Bacon's "method" is as provisional as that of Popper, who completely misrepresents him. If modern science is based upon the presumption of error and fallibility, then Bacon remains its true trumpeter. Nor did he rely only on induction, as Kealey implies, for he insisted on a continual interchange between theory and experiment. When he wrote that "knowledge itself is power" he meant not worldly success or useful technology but the proof of scientific theories: "Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule" (Novum Organum). In short, only by making nature act in a certain way—exercising power—can we be sure that we understand how it does act, and only by knowing that can we control it. Bacon realised that science could be useful for the good of mankind but he also believed in knowledge and work for their own sake as "pledges of truth."
Finally, Kealey goes off the rails altogether in his paean to private funding of science. It was the co-operative and collaborative nature of scientific discovery that concerned Bacon, not the issue of the state's role.
Frankly, it is a puzzle why so many writers in England persistently misrepresent one of the world's greatest geniuses. Most of them would improve their scholarship if they read Bacon himself instead of parroting his unreliable commentators.
Brian McClinton
Lisburn, Northern Ireland
Academic journals
26th September 2005
In his article on university presses (October), Peter Watson correctly identified the decline in monograph purchases by university libraries. He attributed this to reduced government funding, diversion of university funds to other purposes and changes in library acquisitions policies. However, he missed the single most important cause of the decline in book purchasing by academic libraries: the unjustifiable increase in the prices of academic journals caused by the absence of genuine competition in the journal publishing market. Academic journal prices rose 300 per cent between 1986 and 2000, when other prices rose by only 75 per cent. In these circumstances, the only way even leading research libraries could retain access to essential research journals was to buy fewer books.
Universities are now experimenting with the direct dissemination of peer-reviewed research over the internet. The main attraction of this approach is the huge potential it has to open up free access to research findings, but, by placing journal publishers in a position where they have to act competitively, it may also have the beneficial side-effect of helping to moderate journal price increases and release more library funding for book purchase.
Phil Sykes
Librarian, Liverpool University
Children's literature 1
21st September 2005
I found Richard Jenkyns's article (October) on the new golden age of children's writing distinctly lacking in critical insight. If one is acquainted with the works of CS Lewis and Tolkien, as Jenkyns appears to be, it is strange to argue that JK Rowling and Philip Pullman "represent something new in children's literature: the grafting of a grander ambition on to a more modest traditional form."
Jenkyns claims that Pullman "thinks he is Milton." But simply using Paradise Lost as a model does not make you into its author. With regard to JK Rowling, Jenkyns gives us no examples of how she fails to create "at least one really first-class character." Most children, if asked, would name Professor Dumbledore, Hagrid, or Harry's friends Ron and Hermione.
Amanda Craig
London NW1
Children's literature 2
8th October 2005
Your contributor Richard Jenkyns, in his paeon of praise to the Eagle (October 2005), failed, entirely, to give credit to a seam of children's fiction more rich by far than anything Dan Dare and his senior NCO Digby gave to the nation: that wonderful world of the Wizard, Hotspur, Rover and Adventure.
Week after week after week these four magazines were published by DC Thompson, full to overflowing with solid stories—who can ever forget Rockfist Rogan, Limp-along-Leslie or, of course, the immortal Wilson. These characters did not appear as pictures with balloons from their mouths, but were described in prose with written speech. This is important because understanding was only achieved by reading just as it had been with the great Frank Richard's Magnet and Gem in the first part of the century (Harry Potter should have attended a real school like Greyfriars!). Their contribution to literacy should never be underrated and contrasts markedly with what now passes as children's comics, and in a way the decline to these poor publications was inspired by the Eagle and the Girl.
I had discovered the Thompson press before the Eagle took flight and utterly devoured all four magazines weekly: in fact I could hardly wait for them to appear: they were my lifeblood. And then my parents were persuaded that this new comic Eagle was "respectable and virtuous" and the kind of thing that nice boys on their way to grammar school should be reading. The pulp fiction was banned and the Life of St Paul was installed—I hated it and for the first time subterfuge entered my life: a plot with our newsagent to sell me my choice without my parents' knowledge combined with late-at-night and lavatory reading.
The tone and content of Jenkyns's article confirms that which I have always suspected: that this publication was a blatant social class con trick which had the effect of weaning working class children away from true reading skills to half-literate balloon blobs.
Peter Maddox
Beslon, France
Mental treatments
1st October 2005
Peter McGuffin and Steven Rose provided a stimulating exchange (October) on the scientific background to mental illness. As a psychiatrist and scientific editor, I was more impressed by the first of these views.
However, McGuffin was rather oversimplifying the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) when he wrote that it has "consistently come out on top in the treatment of depression." The value of CBT is closely related to the skill and experience of the therapist. Research data is mostly based on the activities of high-quality practitioners in specialist centres, but most people suffering from depression will never have the chance of being treated by such a person. To make it generally available in Britain would demand an enormous training programme that would provide effective supervision to therapists as they gained experience. There is no real likelihood that this would happen. Furthermore, for severe melancholic depression, CBT certainly doesn't "come out on top"; physical treatment is needed.
Rose agrees with Richard Bentall "when he argues for abandoning (diagnoses) and instead listening to the patient and trying to treat the symptoms." What do they imagine psychiatrists currently do? Read patients' palms? This is the most redundant advice ever offered, particularly to the group of doctors who listen to patients more than any others.
Rose is also confusing terms when asking for "an explanation of a diagnosis of depression in a working-class woman in Camberwell." An "explanation" at what level, and in what terms? Explanation is not the same as aetiology: the biochemical view is as relevant as the psychodynamic. If psychiatrists are concerned with serotonin it is because, in practical terms, they can be. Few have so simplistic an approach as to imagine that this can be the "cause" of so complex a phenomenon as mood disorder. And neither can working-class status, gender or residence. Most working-class women in Camberwell don't develop clinical depression. Rose's view suggests the supremacy of politics over science.
Hugh Freeman
London W1
Grubb and Kyoto 1
19th September 2005
I regret that Prospect has become a place for the publication of policy advocacy masquerading as informed opinion. "Stick to the Target" (September 2005) by Michael Grubb strongly supports the "combating of global warming" as proposed by the Kyoto protocol, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and British/EU energy and foreign policy rhetoric. But it is important to understand Grubb's credentials or lack of them.
Grubb describes himself correctly as "a leading international researcher on the economic dimensions of and policy responses to climate change and energy policy issues including renewable energy sources." He has indeed advised a number of governments and companies on climate change policy and presumably been well rewarded for this work. He is now employed half-time as associated director of policy at the Carbon Trust, a government-funded company set up "to help the UK move to a low carbon economy by helping business and the public sector reduce carbon emissions now and capture the commercial opportunities of low carbon technologies." He is not, however, an economist by academic training, having gained his PhD in energy systems analysis from Cambridge. As lead author for several reports of the IPCC he worked not on climate science, or even climate change modelling, but on the mechanics of possible technological and regulatory solutions to a problem whose existence and extent was assumed in his terms of reference. Nor has he any training in the social and biological sciences, fields of knowledge that my research has shown to be most critical of IPCC "predictions" and storylines.
Grubb wrote to counter doubts that the measures he is advocating might be solutions in search of a problem, for a clear causal link is needed between the advocated solutions and the climate threat as "predicted" by climate models relied upon by the IPCC. His life's work, and British/EU energy strategy, would be seriously weakened if the House of Lords report on the economics of climate change—to which he was responding—were accepted as worthy of serious debate. This is now likely, for the strategy that he helped to shape has already largely failed at the intergovernmental level - note the recent purely technology-based agreement between the US, Australia, China and India on climate co-operation, and the G8 Gleneagles outcome. The refutation by the American and Russian academies of a British sponsored statement claiming global scientific consensus in favour of Kyoto, might also be mentioned. Stringent post-Kyoto targets, allegedly essential for having a real impact on climate, are now vulnerable to challenge even inside Whitehall.
It galls me, an energy policy researcher with a political science and physical geography background, that the policy interventions advocated by Grubb et al are so vigorously justified on grounds that are not sound.
IPPC-supported solutions appeal not only to bureaucracies engaged in extending or regaining powers over economies, but also to a growing number of research interests keen to pursue grants in the current market system for academic funding. Supporting both lobbies are of course increasingly powerful environmental lobbies exploiting the zeitgeist shaped by the green religiosity of our era. Grubb is active in all these spheres. He remains visiting professor of climate change and energy policy at Imperial College and chairs an advisory group to Carbon Vision (Carbon Trust/ EPSRC/ESRC industry-academic joint R&D venture) and is a member of the UK Green Globe Network (advisory group to the British government on international environment policy).
Grubb and his group, for example at Chatham House, have for well over a decade urged upon the British major interventions into energy pricing and technology developments which, while technically feasible, require major political and financial commitments by state, business and of course society as a whole. To secure these commitments, which in the end means that the required resources cannot be spent elsewhere, a plausible rationale is required: society must be persuaded to devote limited resources on technological change—decarbonisation—rather than other matters. Society has not yet been consulted on the implied choices. It is well known, however, that higher energy prices affects the economically weakest, or most mobility dependent, groups most.
Decarbonisation in Britain, not to mention the world, will not come cheaply politically or financially. There may be future rewards, of course, but can they justify themselves on their own terms? And will these efforts indeed control world climate?
The IPPC computer models' predictions of dangerous warming caused by emissions from fossil fuels follow inevitably from the assumptions and interpretations fed into them—a circular and self-justifying process that Grubb uses to attack "the climate sceptics." These are not a tightly-knit band of conspirators but include a large number of serious scientists from a wide range of disciplines. What they have in common is usually no more than an instinct to test hypotheses before according them the status of established fact. Of course, some of them do want to protect the coal industry, others economic freedom. None of them should be so lightly dismissed.
Real climate remains a highly uncertain, poorly-understood subject compared to "climate change," a political construct making use, without an adequate empirical basis, of the latest information and computer technology. It is also cheap and dishonest to try to fend off legitimate debate by associating the arguments of his challengers with alleged evils of the US and the Bush administration.
Grubb can provide no evidence for his faith in the power of governments to control world climates. The international jury is still out on the severity of the "climate threat" and a more honest public debate is needed urgently. Decarbonisation as a policy has virtues in many places and circumstances, but the misuse of science for political (and policy) purposes must always and everywhere lead to loss of respect for the (only) pillar that supports a rational society. This is deeply worrying, especially when the academy itself is being pressurised to become complicit. A debate is overdue over whether major interventions in the economic life of this nation (and the EU as a whole) are justified by reference to a myth.
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
Editor, Energy & Environment
Grubb and Kyoto 2
13th September 2005
I was very pleased to see Michael Grubb's response (September) to Dick Taverne's article (August) on climate change, pointing out the inconsistencies in the Lords report and the article on which it was based. But climate change is the biggest political issue facing not just this country, but the planet as a whole and I do not think the issue should be allowed to rest there. Taverne's main points are economic: he argues that the Kyoto agreement will lead to economic costs which are not commensurate with the threat; that possible benefits of global warming have been neglected; and that future technology will get us out of this problem and international agreement on the diffusion of technology is the best way to go.
After Taverne's comments on the scientific uncertainties, his confident assertion of the correctness of economic forecasts comes as a surprise. I wish we had economic forecasts which were anything like as good as climate models. Factors which I suspect have not been accurately taken into account by economists are extreme climate events (rendered more likely by global warming), extreme political events (caused by migration from affected areas and disputes over resources), the benefits of technological developments to reduce carbon emissions, the human costs from loss of life and livelihood and the cost of damage to the environment. There is no agreement on how to handle these factors and no chance of accurately predicting their effects.
Because of this, accurate economic forecasts are limited to a few years, which can be contrasted with climate change for which the characteristic time-scale is a century. Consequently, the IPCC report deals with scenarios, not forecasts. The criticisms of Kyoto are based on forecasts.
It is unrealistic to expect benefits to arise from climate change. The problem is that a few degrees rise in temperature sounds benign and not alarming, but this is a large change in climate terms. A few degrees rise in sea temperature results in more evaporation with more energy dumped into the atmosphere. It's not rocket science to expect the probability of extreme events to increase. Large numbers of people live on the margins of habitable territory and a few degrees can change the margins radically. The fact that cold climate areas might ameliorate is no benefit to people living on the borders of the Sahara. Given a thousand years, we could adapt to quite large changes of climate, but the problem is that the speed of change does not give us the time.
There are also very worrying feedback factors acting in climate change which are effectively irreversible. One example is the melting of permafrost regions with the release of large amounts of greenhouse gases: another is changes in ocean circulation resulting in the loss of the Gulf stream. These changes, once initiated could happen rapidly, but would take millennia to reverse.
There is no doubt that something needs to be done and history makes it quite clear that nothing will be done unless carbon emissions incur a cost. I do not know whether the Kyoto agreement is the best way of bringing this about, but as Grubb says, at least it's a start.
Seeking international agreements on technology transfer is doubtfully useful, but will not solve the problem. Personally, I am quite pessimistic about the future. I do not think we shall be able to get away without very serious consequences and loss of life. And the reason is that we do not have political leaders who can take long term action and resist lobbying from entrenched interests. Taverne's article simply reinforces my pessimism
Chris Sennett
Malvern
