Opinion

Prudence should be cardinal’s virtue

Cardinal George Pell’s outspoken views on climate change put his intellectual credibility on the line, writes Tim Wallace

Why has Australia’s most senior Catholic cleric taken such a stridently sceptical position on global warming? Is his resistance to the consensus scientific view that human activity is driving current warming another example of the same sense of religiious rectitude that once led Church authorities to reject the idea that the earth revolved around the sun or that life had evolved through natural selection?

Cardinal George Pell could take no offence to the question, since he posed it himself in his 26 October address in London to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, one of many groups established in recent times to fan doubts in the public mind about the scientific validity of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

He had recently been asked, he told his audience, by one of his parish priests as to why he was commenting so publicly on the role of carbon dioxide in the climate given in the past the Church had made a fool of herself in other scientific disputes. “I replied that I was well aware of at least some of these instances and that one reason why I was speaking out was to avoid having too many Christian leaders repeating these mistakes and to provide some balance to ecclesiastical offerings.”

He had first become interested in the question of AGW “in the 1990s when studying the anti-human claims of the ‘deep Greens’, so I had long suspected that those predicting dangerous and increasing anthropogenic global warming were overstating their case”.

Appeals to the “consensual view among qualified scientists” were “a cop-out”, he said, “a way of avoiding the basic issues”. What was important and needed to be examined by lay people as well as scientists was “the evidence and argumentation which are adduced to back any consensus”. The basic issue was “not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm”. He suspected too many educated people, including politicians, had “never investigated the primary evidence”.

These points are, with certain crucial minor qualifications, legitimate and reasonable.

Anyone with an interest in the debate about climate change could not have escaped noticing that the most extreme views invariably come from those with the least concern for accuracy, balance and fairness. In the spirit of not appearing overtly partisan, Cardinal Pell might have acknowledged that is so on both sides of this argument.

Nor could anyone with a regard for truth have failed to note the disquieting tendency of some elements of the environmental movement to over-egg their arguments, blaming every extreme weather event on global warming in what seems like a bid to scare an apathetic populace into action – or at least to score media coverage. If politicians like Bob Brown are bothered by the degree to which the muddled argument of sceptics have muddied the public’s understanding of climate science, they should pause to reflect on how their own exaggerations have been grist to the same mill. Again, in fairness, Cardinal Pell might have noted that sceptics have mirrored “warmist” hysteria with equally far-fetched claims about the economic armageddon likely to ensue from curbing industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

Any humanist, Christian or otherwise, should also be disturbed by an all-too fashionable attitude within the environmental movement that regards the mere existence of humans, rather than how they consume resources, as a root environmental problem. Rare is the public forum on climate change where someone doesn’t bang the drum for population control; it even happened at a forum last month at the University of Notre Dame’s Fremantle campus. Never mind the fact that the only non-totalitarian way so far found to limit population has been to substantially increase material wealth and to sanction abortion as a matter of personal autonomy, and that by and large it is those societies with the lowest fertility rates that have the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

So Cardinal Pell has good cause, as a conscientious prelate, to enter the debate around climate change.He has decidedly less cause, however, to embroil himself in the debate about climate change.

Though optimists might detect a softening in his stated concern about the debate being the adequacy of the explanations proffered to a largely unschooled public, there was much in his recent address sugggesting he has all too readily accepted claims by sceptics without investigating the primary evidence. It still appears that his understandable concern about certain policy prescriptions in vogue within the environmental movement has led him to adopt the view there is no problem requiring a solution. He continues to wager his intellectual credibility (and to a certain extent his spiritual credibility as a man committed to seeking the truth) on a long-odds bet that the small minority of climate-change contrarians are right and the overwhelming majority of scientists are wrong.

“As a general rule I have found those secure in their explanations do not need to be abusive,” Cardinal Pell said. One wonders, then, why in March he thought it prudent to describe the head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Greg Ayers, as “obviously a hot-air specialist”. He had been stung, perhaps, by Dr Ayers (a former chief of marine and atmospheric research at CSIRO with a doctorate in physical chemistry) pointing out that nitrogen was not, as Cardinal Pell had suggested, a greenhouse gas.

“I regret when a discussion of these things is not based on scientific fact,’’ he said at the time. “I spend a lot of time studying this stuff.” Which makes it most inexplicable that, after more than a decade of research he could as late as 2010 still be expressing surprise at discovering carbon dioxide constitutes less than 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere (a fact, he said last week, that seems “a well-kept secret outside scientific circles”).

Equally perplexing is why he would think, in a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic system”, it is telling that temperature changes are uneven despite carbon-dioxide concentrations generally being the same. Or why he mistakenly believes the global temperature has not risen in the past 10 years. Or why he thinks an estimated 40 per cent rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide over about a century (to a level unprecedented in at least 600,000 years) has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and land-use changes.

Much of his talk was devoted to arguing that what is called the Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP) was global and warmer than present. A more cautious analysis would show this as a matter of great uncertainty and dictate there is no compelling reason to regard one study as “particularly significant” while ignoring the rest that contradict it. One might merely note that questions about the global extent of the MWP were posed as early as 1982 by no less than the very paleoclimatologist who first identified it, Hubert Lamb.

Towards the end of his address Cardinal Pell expressed support for the recommendations of Bjorn Lomborg. It is worth noting, therefore, what Lomborg said in an address in Melbourne in March presented by the Australian Institue of International Affairs.

The first point he made was that “global warming is real, man-made, an important problem, something we need to fix. So let’s get the whole denialist argument to rest. I think there’s very little argument left over to say nothing is happening and people have no responsibility. I would actually argue this is on the agenda, thanks to Al Gore and many others having put it into the American mind and certainly around the world that this is a problem we need to fix.”

As Cardinal Pell noted, prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues. On this issue, would it not be wise to practise what he preaches?

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