So, to no one’s great surprise, nothing will be decided at Copenhagen.

The dire warnings about climate change we’re had recently from various luminaries [1,2,3] will not be ignored, but all the same, nothing will happen to rock the boat.This charming situation is owed in part to the work of people like Ian Plimer, who was heralded in the Spectator as a hero, despite the prevailing opinion that the science in his book is ‘rubbish‘. [1,2,3]

Y’know, our press needs to sharpen up.

It’s also a triumph for James Inhofe, whose minority report on climate change is much cited by everyone who wants to believe it’s not real.

When I first saw the Inhofe report, I was intrigued. How had I missed such an important document?

Well, huh. It seems the report may be a little… dare I say it? Sexed up. It took me about eight minutes to find something seriously misleading – a truncated quote from Joanne Simpson. Simpson is described as one of the most pre-eminent climate scientists in the world, so clearly what she has to say in this context matters. (Never mind whether or not it makes sense to describe someone as ‘most pre-eminent’ any more than it would to describe them as ‘ultimately supreme’. This whole area is filled with stuff like that, and it would appear that ‘arctic’ is the new ‘nuclear’ for political pronunciation…)

The report quotes her as saying:

As a scientist I remain skeptical…The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system…

That’s some genuine uncertainty – albeit it could be seen as methodological skepticism rather than human doubt, but hey. Fine. There’s a case here, then… Oh, except, not fine. Because the quote is incomplete. She said this:

What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical…

Seriously, Senator? You’re going to inform people on what is potentially the most important issue of our time using tactics which are a bit shameful even for movie posters? “This movie could have been awesome, but it has no plot, no character, and it’s less fun than a kick in the head. Don’t buy a ticket!”

More on Senator Inhofe’s report here. In brief, though, of those in Inhofe’s vaunted list of climate skeptics:

• Slightly fewer than 10 percent could be identified as climate scientists.
• Approximately 15 percent published in the recognizable refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
• Approximately 80 percent clearly had no refereed publication record on climate science at all.
• Approximately 4 percent appeared to favor the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not have been on the list.

In the end…

Simpson is saying the same thing Tim O’Reilly says in his eminently sensible post on the subject here: that the wise course is to act on the assumption that climate change is real; the evidence is sufficient to make that plausible or even likely. That it’s not proven beyond any conceivable doubt is not relevant; nothing in science is ever proven in the sloppy way we use the term in the non-science world. The issue is that people like Simpson think it’s likely enough that we need to act as if it was certain. What odds would you accept as being sufficient to trigger that choice? Fifty percent? Twenty five? Ten? If there were a one in ten chance that we were ending the world with fossil fuels, I’d say that was a crappy gamble.

It’s not even a hard choice any more – the issue of Peak Oil is getting a little nerve-wracking. It seems we need to do this anyway.

So I have yet to see anything which would lead me to believe that climate change isn’t a pressing issue. It seems that the only reasonable thing for a government to do is to function on the basis that climate change is an urgent problem. That being the case, the fact that our governments cannot get a deal to combat it is appalling. It borders on a constitutional crisis.

The question is not whether climate change is happening, but whether, in the face of this emergency, we ourselves can change fast enough.

Kofi Annan