Popper, panic and the Perhapsatron: arguments for small science

Abstract

It is difficult to improve upon Karl Popper’s description of the pace and difficulty of technological progress, and its twin dependence on invention and discovery, when he said (Bondi 1992): ‘We advance like a person walking through a swamp, first painfully on one leg and advancing it, and then on the other. One leg is labelled ‘technology’ and the other ‘science’’. Popper’s words came to mind (with several other thoughts!) when, in the space of a few days, I read about the difficulties in international efforts to develop fusion energy generation (Brumfiel 2008a; Clery 2008a, 2008b; Editorial 2008), a call from a UK academic funding agency for suggested long-term (20–40 years) challenges (EPSRC 2008) and an article that appeared in the UK newspaper, The Guardian, on 1 August, (Simms 2008a) with the headline ‘The final countdown’. The Guardian article was promoted with the apocalyptic message that we have just ‘100 months to save the world’. The ‘100 months’ is the time the authors, a ‘group of global warming experts’, suggest it will take for the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere [actually, CO2e, a calculated carbon dioxide equivalent (Simms 2008b)] to reach the ‘tipping point’, beyond which ‘potentially’ irreversible changes will occur in the climate system. I am not a climate scientist or even a global warming expert (with or without inverted commas). However, I wonder what the contributors to the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose data are the basis of the calculation, make of the precision of this estimate and the failure to provide measures of the associated uncertainty. Nor is there any discussion of the different probabilities of irreversible effects arising from exceeding the critical CO2 concentration for 5, 50 or 500 years, before bringing it back below this level. For a better argued pair of (different!) perspectives on the climate change debate, the reader could do much worse than read James Lovelock’s polemic, ‘Revenge of Gaia’ (Lovelock 2006) and Bjorn Lomborg’s ‘Cool It’ (Lomborg 2007). The Guardian article is typical of those that use science to underpin scary scenarios about climate change to catch public attention. From a reading of the 431 subsequent comments on the Guardian website (Guardian 2008) few minds have been changed. Indeed, the 100 month estimate seems to have been received with derision in some quarters and could deflect attention away from the more serious points the authors seek to make. The authors, from the New Economics Foundation, suggest that resource use should be cut, by ‘re-engineering’ the UK economy along the austerity and command lines of the Second World War. They believe that the UK government should unilaterally set an example by not permitting the building of the third runway at London’s Heathrow airport nor the new coal-fired power station in the county of Kent. They also believe that developing countries would then follow this example. Perhaps significantly, the article failed to make any mention at all of the availability of a developed, effective and readily deployable alternative technology, namely nuclear fission, that might aid the controlling of anthropogenic CO2 emissions as part of the transition to more sustainable energy-generating technologies. Nor, following the logic of the 100 month argument, was there any call to divert funding away from fusion research, whose development into a workable and deployed technology is only likely to appear in 3–400 months, if then, long after the supposed ‘tipping point’. This set me thinking about the N. Winterton (&) Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZD, UK e-mail: N.Winterton@liverpool.ac.uk