Cover Story
Global Warning
by Joanne Black
Faced with one of the great questions of our time – whether the Earth’s current warming is caused by humans – economist Gareth Morgan did what only a philanthropist can do: hired some top scientists to give him the answer.
Riding her motorbike north through Alaska, or across the Sahara, Joanne Morgan would occasionally pause to point out something – desertification, perhaps, or dying forests – and say to her husband, “See that? That’s caused by global warming.”
“I got bloody sick of it, to be honest,” Gareth Morgan says now. “And finally I said to her, ‘Joanne, for God’s sake, you can’t possibly make such sweeping statements.’” Her answer was that if he had read Tim Flannery’s climate-change book The Weather Makers, as she had, then he would understand.
So, he started reading it, but instead of being convinced that human activity – most notably the burning of fossil fuels – was causing global warming, Morgan finished each page with more questions than answers. He decided to hire some climate change policy researchers to investigate.
Early last year, he again read Flannery’s book, this time while heading to Antarctica, rolling around in an icebreaker in the Southern Ocean, accompanied by friend and writer John McCrystal, also a climate change sceptic.
“I was intrigued, but I wasn’t convinced by the arguments for anthropogenic [from human activity] global warming,” Morgan says in his company boardroom in a downtown office block overlooking Wellington Harbour. “I’m naturally sceptical about everything. God, I come from the financial sector and you get pretty sceptical about people’s behaviour there.”
His researchers returned with papers that were no use because they were about policy, “and I didn’t even know if climate change was true. I thought, isn’t it intriguing that countries are spending all this public policy money yet we don’t take the first step, which is to ask, ‘What is the problem we are trying to solve?’”
After speaking to Victoria University Professor of Geology Peter Barrett, Morgan decided to hire the best scientists in the world on both sides. The result is Morgan and McCrystal’s new book Poles Apart – Beyond the Shouting, Who’s Right About Climate Change?
Morgan likens the process to being on a jury: hearing all the evidence from both sides, but also subjecting the scientists to rigorous questioning and cross-examination before deciding which side has the most scientific credibility. Along the way, Morgan and McCrystal became deeply exasperated with what they considered the equal willingness of both camps to be activists for their cause, obscuring efforts to get at the science.
“People have very emotive, very predetermined views, and that typifies both sides,” says Morgan. “We’ve had some heated sessions with our alarmist scientists where they’ve been on the verge of walking out, saying, ‘How dare you question our conclusions?’ I had to keep saying, ‘Look, I have a completely open mind.’ But their fervour has caught the public, so they have found themselves – on the basis of partial knowledge – being rounded into either camp rather than simply being able to ask for some clarity and for someone to explain why it’s true and why it isn’t.
“If I had one message, it is, ‘For God’s sake, stay objective, don’t get wound up by either side’s polemics and emotion,’” says Morgan.
“It’s like people feel they must have a cause, and it turns reasonable people into nutters and they don’t see it. They only see it on the other side. I would say to the guys who helped me, ‘I don’t want to know about the other stuff, this is a scientific inquiry, for Christ’s sake’, and they’d get really offended. They might be professors and they’re not used to being spoken to like that; they are used to intimidating the public because the public is ignorant.”
Initially, Morgan says he and McCrystal were like weathervanes, persuaded by whatever they had just read. “You’d read a paper in the morning that said climate change was nonsense, and it would convince you, then in the afternoon you’d pick up a paper [that was] predicting hellfire and brimstone and us all being dead by dawn, and that would convince you.”
During their researching, both men learnt a lot of science. In doing so they have crystallised for themselves and their readers the core arguments of both sides of the climate change debate, and decided that anthropogenic global warming is the more credible argument.
“Are we satisfied as jurors that it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the cause of the warming is anthropogenic?” asks Morgan. “No, we’re not. But if we rephrase the question and ask, if, on the weight of the evidence presented, we think the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or natural, then we would say anthropogenic. But I would bear in mind that John Maynard Keynes quote with which we end the book, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ There could be some new development out tomorrow that makes us all look like chumps.”
Clearly, although they’re open to that possibility, the pair think it unlikely. Science, they explain, is on the side of global warming having human causes, notwithstanding huge variations in the world’s climate long before humans evolved.
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