A couchsurfer and a neo-hippy's views on climate change

Talking to a couchsurfing host last week I was reminded of the extent to which people's political and social opinions affect their grasp of supposedly objective science. My host made his living through hedge funds and thought that the market could solve most problems in the world, which led to a discussion about the future of the UK, immigration, and the monetary value of children and pregnancy! (inspired by the Melbourne baby train incident). When our discussion turned to climate change I just knew that he would not exactly be of the opinion that it was a big deal, and I was right: he argued that it was not a large threat, that humans are so good at technological innovation that this could solve any problems it did cause, and finally, that as shown by the correlation on google trends between searches for Al Gore and searches for global warming, both of which peaked in early 2007, the public didn't care anyway and therefore politicians wouldn't do anything about it. Then compare him to the anti-capitalist Dalai Lama fangirl I met in India who took such delight in informing us that we wouldn't be able to come to the Himalayas for much longer, because we were destroying the ecosystem at such a rate that soon, very soon, no one would be living there at all.

I'm not any more knowledgeable about climate change than either of these two, so I'm not going to argue the science, but from these observations and those of people's views on climate change generally it seems that some really want climate change to happen, just to prove they were right about the evils of capitalism, while those that have the biggest investment in the system can't believe that the prism through which they view the world could actually be causing it harm. Some might say this is because intelligent people who understand science are more likely to share left-wing political views, while the stupid and ignorant will share right wing ones, but this was definitely not the case with my couchsurfing host and is a pretty prejudiced and ignorant viewpoint itself. Tim Mitchell, who gave a lecture at the LSE on the politics of oil a few weeks ago has a good answer to why it really is. He was arguing that the study of oil reserves is mistakenly viewed as purely geological, whereas due to the impossibility of measuring these reserves to a large degree of accuracy, the simple question of how much there is becomes one that must be answered by looking at the economies and politics of oil producing and consuming countries.

I think this argument also applies to climate change. Not to the science measuring CO2 concentrations or mean annual temperature rises, but to the less certain and more controversial questions about long term effects, mitigation and adaptation measures, definitely. This is the reason why I find the issue so interesting: it brings politics and economics into contact with, and frequently into conflict with a science that is supposed to be boringly objective.