Ethics and activism: more than fifty shades

I’ve stayed out of the Jonathan Moylan debate because recent events have left me a little fearful of controversy. More on that later*.

If you came in late, Moylan issued a fake press release that briefly caused the price of a company called Whitehaven Coal to fall. The fall was only temporary, because the hoax was discovered and reversed; but the outcome has been a frenzy of pro- and anti-Moylan moralizing.

Apart from simplistic 140-character attack-defend-change-tack arguments on Twitter, there’s been serious words written by Bob Brown, Christine Milne and others on both sides. Because The Greens decided to endorse Moylan’s activism, they’ve become a secondary target for criticism from the centre and the right.

(Personally, as a strategy I’m not so sure their position will harm The Greens. If their constituency is genuinely “old Reds”, hardline activist positions will help them more than trying to become filthy Fabians!)

I’m not competent to assess the legality of what Moylan did, so I’m happy to leave that question to the courts. If he’s charged and found guilty, it would seem pretty clear that he broke the law; if he’s charged and cleared, it’s pretty clear the other way. It’s only an open question if ASIC decides not to lay charges.

What of the ethics?

Unlike Edward Spence, http://theconversation.edu.au/whitehaven-hoax-was-an-unethical-act-that-was-harmful-to-all-11571 writing in The Conversation, I don’t see it as a simple ethical question. I don’t regard the “informational environment” with the same awe as Spence, for a start – mostly because I don’t think such a thing exists as a single thing. A cat video on YouTube isn't quite the same as a climate denier blog isn't the same as a stock exchange announcement.

It seems to me that the essence of disobedience and activism is that you must be aware of the possible or likely consequences of your actions, and willing to accept those consequences.

In short: there is no “clean” act of resistance.

There is no way to break a law without creating an ethical quandary.

When Mahatma Ghandi led the Salt March, he was encouraging his followers to break a law (a tax on salt).

It’s easy, 80-plus years later, to endorse his position; but as it happened? When one of the immediate results of the march was 60,000 individuals sent to prison, the ethics must surely have troubled Ghandi’s sleep. He was human.

The ethical example we get from Ghandi is more complex than good-versus-evil. The activist must renounce violence; and the activist must be prepared to accept the consequences of his resistance.

It’s interesting to note that Ghandi did not consider financial harm to be the same as violence, by the way. The Salt March was directed against a particular, oppressive tax, and he wanted all Indians to boycott British textiles.

Institutions are legitimate targets of resistance. They must be: because that’s what resistance is for, to force change upon institutions. An act may be wrong-headed and ineffective (which is where I feel Moylan went wrong), but it’s not evil merely because it’s directed against a particular institution that a particular ethicist feels is sacrosanct.

*I mentioned a fear of giving offence. I’ve found myself subject to a sustained campaign against the business that I run with my wife. In particular, there are those on social media who, if they dislike what I say, bring the business into the argument. There is also a persistent troll on TripAdvisor.

Because the impacts are immediate and devastating, it is an effective threat, and one that I have to work hard to resist.

But people who will hide behind anonymity to attack individuals on the basis of what they say or believe must be resisted. To do otherwise is to cowardly hide from cowards. So I guess the risk I bear is that I will continue to be attacked. Fortunately, I have more than one way to pay the mortgage. For now, we will survive.

Misrepresenting Antarctic ice and climate change

Tim Lambert over at the Deltoid blog would probably be better at this, but he’s been quiet lately and I have a few minutes to spare, while I wait for a university to answer my call.

The Australian, courtesy of Graham Lloyd, is running with the old “what about Antarctic sea ice? Huh? Huh?” line, here. As is noted all over the world, at a time when Arctic sea ice has shrunk dramatically, there has been an increase in the sea ice down around the Antarctic.

And because there are still people in the world who want to muddy the climate change waters, the Antarctic is now becoming the poster-child for the denialist mentality.

So I guess I may as well spend a few minutes on the issue. I’m not going to refute The Australian point-by-point, but here are details to keep in mind when skeptics roll out the “Antarctic sea ice growing” argument.

      1. Most of the Antarctic’s ice is on land, not sea – and the land ice extent is shrinking, because the southern land ice loss is greater than the sea ice gain (source: http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm).

2    2. Sea ice formation in the Antarctic is being influenced by factors like the ozone hole (which reduces atmospheric temperatures), water freshness (rising, which makes it easier to freeze), winds and so on.

3
3    3. While the extent (ie, the area in square kilometers) of Antarctic sea ice is growing, some research suggests it might be getting thinner (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012JC008141.shtml) - so the change in the overall volume of sea ice is much less well understood.

4    4. The Southern Ocean is still warming (http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Deep-Ocean-Warming.aspx).

That should do for now, I suppose …

Can we just forget about the polar bears for a while?

Not that I don’t care, but ever since An Inconvenient Truth made the polar bear the iconic image for climate change, it’s become a distraction from the real debate.

Take this piece of logical legerdemain from Matt Ridley. Admitting through gritted teeth that actually, really, oh-all-right the Arctic sea ice is retreating, he plays a misdirection game: “In the Holocene Optimum there was no collapse of the polar-bear population”.

Keep calm and carry on, people, the polar bears will get by somehow.

That, of course, ignores two itsy-bitsy ever-so-tiny details.

• 1.     Polar bears and arctic foxes are only so-so as a proxy to answer the question “what impact would an ice-free Arctic have on species in the region?” Ridley somehow manages to overlook species, like the muskox and the steppe bison, that may have suffered a population collapse in the Holocene. It’s odd that he’d miss these examples, since he’s a zoologist.

 

• 2.     The survival of the polar bear is not a benchmark for the impact of warming on human society.

Ridley ends with this red herring:

“The sea-dominated Southern Hemisphere is certainly warming more slowly than the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere, but it has still been warming. If warming is supposed to be "global," shouldn't sea ice retreat at both ends of the world?”

That’s a misleading question – since it’s been answered. Ridley seems to be placing a bet that his readers don’t know this. His readers don’t realize that the Antarctic is land, not sea; that the freshening of the Southern Ocean allows it to freeze more readily.

Most importantly, if all of the Antarctic ice is taken into account – both land and sea ice – the Antarctic ice cap, like the Arctic, is shrinking.