Blair gets hot under the collar

Meyer, R (2006) Arbitrary Impacts and Unknown Futures: The shortcomings of climate impact models, Ogmius, Fall/Winter : 17

Shackley, S, Young, P, Parkinson, S & Wynne, B (1998) Uncertainty, Complexity and Concepts of Good Science in Climate change: Are GCMs The Best Tools? Climate Change 38: 159-205


Ryan questions the wisdom of predicting additional diarrhoea deaths from climate change given uncertainties in “unstable government, a fragile and decaying agro-economic system, or …a transitioning economy with the [increasing] capacity to eradicate disease”. He questions how the value of different parameters are established and writes that models “do a poor job at dealing with distributional issues (who will be affected and how much)”.
The issue of GCMs has particular resonance with stories in the UK media at the moment. On return from holiday, Tony Blair was asked, and refused, to give up his holiday flights ‘to the sun’ for the sake of reduced carbon outputs – subsequently he was reported to have off-set his carbon through tree planting. I was reminded of the thesis of Shackley et al. (1998) that GCMs lend unconscious support for technocratic and instrumental management responses to climate change. This does little to challenge root causes and inequities in consumption of the world resources. A de-centring of GCMs as the ‘reality of global warming’ and consideration of other forms of evidence, might help to re-imagine and ultimately re-engineer social relations under-pinning climate change. Unsurprisingly, in discussion we were left with many questions as to what this might look like and how it could be achieved.