A review hockey stick debate

A review hockey stick debate

How full is a bucket of indeterminate size, with unknown capacity and a questionable number of leaks, that is being refilled at an unknown rate that you cannot easily see? (Grubb 1993)

The hockey stick debate, or climate change debate is mostly driven and heavily relies on the information obtained from models. The main question is “how accurate are these models?” In the 1970s some scientist were concerned about global cooling (Sudhakara & Assenza 2009). The pattern or the trend has changed; the issue now is global warming. This issue is of hot debate among the scientists and policy makers. According to Sudhakara & Assenza (2009) this hot debate has divided debators into two catergories; the skeptics and supporters. Using the models to estimate/reconstruct the temprature changes of the past 1000 years the skeptics find it difficult to blame human activities on the climate changes. For example the models show that the The Little Ice Age was preeceded by the Medieval Warming from 950 to 1300 AD. The skeptics are now saying if the world was warmer in 1200 AD than today, and far colder in the year 1400 AD, why would we blame current temperatures trends on auto exhausts?

The supporters, on the other hand, are of the view that the climate is influenced by multiple contributing factors, including natural causes. Without adopting a mono-causal point of view, many supporters nonetheless argue that the theory of human influence on the climate is well established and that it would be irresponsible to wait with action (Sudhakara & Assenza 2009).

Clearly a totally comprehensive model cannot be developed, except in the sense that we are already living in it and will in due course find out the results of whichever rate of experimentation we choose to impose (Sudhakara & Assenza 2009).

Despite the fact that there are some great differences between the scientists on this issue of climate change the policy makers still rely of the scientific finding to make their decisions. The question is how do they choose the information to use? This is where data presentation and visualization come into play. A well-presented and visualized data can have an impact on the audience even if the data itself doesn’t say much (or meaningless). For example climate change has been related to conflict by officials of international organizations for research on the environment, such as Kevin Noone, Director of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP) who made the extraordinary comment that ‘‘most conflicts have something to do with the climate’’ (Nordås & Gleditsch 2007). One can easily deduce from this statement Kevin Noone’s conclusion was based on some kind of data that was presented to him. It is also very important to note that he has used the phrase “have something to do”. This phrase does not imply that conflict is caused by climate change nor related to climate change. The data that was presented could have had good correlations between areas in wars/conflict and climate change but that does not necessarily means one causes the other. It could be a mere coincidence.

Nordås & Gleditsch (2007) suggested that there could be chains from climate change to conflict. The starting-point for most of these is that climate change results in a reduction of essential resources for livelihood, such as food or water, which can have one of two consequences: those affected by the increasing scarcity may start fighting over the remaining resources. Alternatively, people may be forced to leave the area, adding to the number of international refugees or internally displaced persons. Fleeing environmental destruction is at the outset a less violent response to adverse conditions than armed conflict or genocide. But when the migrants encroach on the territory of other people who may also be resource constrained, the potential for violence rises (Nordås & Gleditsch 2007).

The other issue of importance is to relate catastrophic events with climate change. Is there any relationship between the two or are the catastrophes occurring randomly? Hay et al. report a careful statistical analysis which shows that in four highland locations in East Africa, where malaria has been increasing in recent decades, there was no evidence that warming has actually occurred, either during the study period or, indeed, during the whole of the last century. Instead, the authors suggest that the causes of malaria resurgence should be sought elsewhere such as changes in land use or human demography, or increased resistance to anti-malarial drugs.

Reference:

Grubb, M., 1993. Policy modelling for climate change : The missing models. Energy Policy, 21(3), 203-208.

Nordås, R. & Gleditsch, N.P., 2007. Climate change and conflict. Political Geography, 26(6), 627-638.

Sudhakara Reddy, B. & Assenza, G.B., 2009. The great climate debate. Energy Policy, 37(8), 2997-3008.