I don’t get invited to give a lot of speeches. And by the end of this one, you will have a pretty good idea of why.
In the next few minutes, I will do two things. First, outline what “we” knew, how, when. That’s based on time and really diminutive instances of space from this spot where we stand today, Parliament Square
Second – I will ask two questions. “What does it mean to be a good scientist?” and “Are you willing to try to be not only good citizens, but good scientists?”
I suspect if you asked most people walking past this demonstration how long governments have known about climate change, they’ll guess twenty years or so. Some of the older ones might – just might – remember Margaret Thatcher in September 1988, addressing the Royal Society two and a half miles from here.
The geeks might know that Thatcher was briefed about carbon dioxide build-up only a hundred or so metres from here in May 1979, by her chief scientific advisor, John Ashton. Thatcher replied with an incredulous “you want me to worry about the weather.”
But let’s go further back I’ll pass over the Frenchman, Fourier, and the American, Foote, and the Anglo-Irishman Tyndall, because time is short. The Swede, Svante Arrhenius pointed to the long-term impact of increased carbon dioxide on the Earth’s heat balance in 1895. Other scientists – mistakenly – said it wasn’t so. Then, in 1938 a mere steam engineer, Guy Callendar, addressed the Royal Meteorological Society and said it was carbon dioxide build-up that was warming the planet.
Things really kicked off in 1953 with the work of Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass. Through the 1950s, in newspaper articles, academic articles, speeches and more, the spectre of climate change from carbon dioxide build-up. Including many many in the UK.
Three miles from here, fifty seven years ago, in 1968 Lord Ritchie Calder gave an address to the Conservation Society – the title “Hell on Earth” tells you what he thought was coming. He mentioned carbon dioxide build-up, something he had been aware of since 1954 at the latest.
In 1970 the very first Environment White Paper was drafted in offices close to where we stand now. It included reference to the carbon dioxide build-up problem.
All this seems abstract. But in April 1989 again, meteres from here, there was a whole one day meeting of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet devoted to the greenhouse effect and what to do about it.
The following year, in May 1990 the Met Office’s John Houghton was invited to brief the cabinet on the very first Working Group 1 of the IPCC report.
I could go on, but surely, I do not need to say more. Since the birth of carbon dioxide build-up as a public policy issue in 1988, we have had promises, pledges, plans, speeches assurances., amborees of advice giving, special cabinet meetings. Politicians have KNOWN it as “an issue”, without ever seeing how much of one it really is.
Politicians around the world have been warned by good scientists – Martin Holdgate, John Houghton, John Mitchell, Chris Folland, Barrie Pittock, Graham Pearman, Herman Flohn, the list could go on and on and on.
So why have I told you this? Partly to get you intrigued enough to visit my All Our Yesterdays website, of course! But to lead into the main questions I want to pose you. Again “what does it mean to be a good scientist?” and “are you willing to try to be not only good citizens, but good scientists?”
A scientist – natural or “social” – tries to see patterns, and to explain the mechanisms underneath them. Scientists pride themselves on finding facts, bouncing these facts off theories in the hope of testing those theories, making better theories. (I know some of the philosophers of science will be cringing at the moment – I know it’s more complicated than that – but this is a short speech, not a 300 page book.)
Science is there to help us see the world more as it is, less as we have assumed it to be, less as we would LIKE it to be, less as it is comforting to believe it is.
Or, to put it in the much better words of the late great Richard Feynman
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
A good scientist doesn’t keep running the same experiment and expecting a different result because they want a different result.
But here we are. Thinking that the problem is that the scientists aren’t being heard and therefore the solution is for them to speak slower, louder.
But by sticking to a naive “information deficit” model, believing that science must be “brought” to politics is to continue with the myth that what is lacking is knowledge. To quote Sven Lindqvist – “It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions”
A good scientist looks at the results of previous experiments and changes the hypotheses accordingly. Thesis, antithesis, new hypothesis…
And so I urge you to be the good scientists I am sure you are, and look at the evidence of the last 35 years. The politicians atop the British State have had all the information they ever needed. It is not knowledge we – or they – lack.
And I ask you – and this is where I will lose anyone I haven’t already lost – to be not just good citizens, as you undoubtedly are – but good scientists about your good citizenship. I ask you think about why we have had waves of public concern about climate change that come and go in three or four year spasms. 1988 to 1992, 2006 to 2010, 2018 to 2021 or so. (Yes, there’s activity outside those periods.) But ask yourself what you, as scientists, think are the reasons for that. What is it that civil society – professional bodies, unions, charities, pressure groups, social movement organisations – need to do DIFFERENTLY? What are the barriers to acting differently? What can you, with your training in the spotting of patterns, do to help individuals and groups spot their patterns and devise experiments to get out of those patterns?
You’re scientists. You have a responsibility not just to speak up about this issue, to pressure the politicians. You have a responsibility to act as scientists regarding your citizenship. We cannot afford to run the same experiments, and get the same results.
Because the emissions are rising, the concentrations are rising, the seas are rising, but the last best hope for civilisation – the people of the Western democracies who could, in theory at least, transform the world’s economies and cultures? They, they are not rising.
Thank you.