Ageism in the Climate movement

Introducing climate hogwash!

As you can imagine, as a mathematician, and someone who's worked very keenly on the models and modelling techniques subsequently used in many climate policy spaces, I see a lot of complete and utter garbage on my virtual travels on the web! If you have followed me for any length time, you'll have noticed the frankly utter contempt I have for politicians, racists and some cohorts in the sustainability consultancy space. Including those who blindly, and naively conflate carbon modelling (which is actionable) with carbon accounting (which is not).

Sometimes all those things overlap and in some other professions [Medical Research I’m looking at you] the arrogance of this cohort in particular becomes a passive enabler of climate change. If you are being swayed more by the look and feel of something than real complexity science (e.g. by Randomised Controlled Trials, which in the climate and complexity science field, doesn’t meet the standard required of scientific evidence), you're complicit in the propagation of damaging climate change.

Another area I totally abhor is the misappropriation of research by marketing and public relations. By now, we should all be familiar with the fact that results are often reported to the masses through the lens of media. If you've been asleep since 2016, the war in Ukraine, and how the Kremlin is controlling information fed to the Russian people, will awaken you to how dangerous that is.

The same not only exists in the gatekeeping of journals but also how marketing and the media covers research.?Each of those filters introduces confounding variables into an otherwise sound study, if it doesn't faithfully report the results and their limitations. It also happens to manifest innumeracy in both the authors and editors of such a publication.

Serendipitously, I recently accidentally called it “climate hogwash”. That term is growing on me so I think I might keep it.?

Hogwash is a statements or result disseminated, that sounds completely plausible and believable, but is actually based on a series of mistakes made in interpreting results, biasing or experimental design.

The latest one above, is nonsense from EcoWatch.

Interestingly, there is more than enough information to determine its hogwash in the above snip. For those who know the schoolboy errors made by reasoning in percentages, you’ll spot this immediately.?

Worse, studies like this almost always fall over another mistake. That you can take a cross section of society at any time t, with their generation of 10 years older and assume the same older people exist at time t+10 years. Cross sectional studies all fall over here, because of an implicit fallacy. A mistake assumed from the basics of frequentists stats, which all biological and soft sciences are based on. The population in the future is somehow Markovian (i.e. it doesn’t have a memory). That a population doesn’t age, their habits don’t come with them or that it’s somehow a different shape (often larger – how many people do you now that were born 65 years old?). It gets worse in this instance, because the number of people in a population age-group differs by time. E.g. the number of 20 year olds now are not the same as it was 50 years ago.?

population pyramids. Note how the population or peaks "ripples" through time, like waves.

What's it really?

The real reason is the elderly are using the same footprint they ever have, apart from in areas like health. Because they end up using the services three times as much as people in their 40s.

However at the same time, younger people are much more climate conscious. As a result they never consumed the same amount of Carbon, and rightly so.

What this does to the figures though, is keep the boomer footprint the same in tCO2, even with their small changes downwards, while younger demographics have rightly not consumed as much. This looks like it INCREASES the amount that older people contribute as a percentage, when in fact, that's not what the data says at all. The consumed the amount they always had, and younger people should be celebrated for changing the status quo.

Let's work an example. Imagine when they were young and had 15 tonnes of CO2 for each of 5 age groups.

• 0-19
• 20-39
• 40-59
• 60-79
• 80+

And to make the maths easy, the population is evenly distributed, per year. That's 75 tonnes in total. So the 80+ and 60 to 80 age group together, emit 30/75 = 40%.

Let's now suppose those in their 60s have died, those in their 40s are now in their 70s, and those in their 20s are now in their 50s etc. You have two new generations that have come along (millennial & gen Z), both of whom are rightly climate conscious and only use 3 tCO2 say.

The total CO2 in that case is still 15 tonnes for each of the new 40+ (45 tonnes total) and only 3 for the youngest two. Making 51 tonnes instead of 75 tonnes. The percentage that the oldest two generations emit, is 30/51 which is almost 60%, from 40% previously. Even though they have not emitted any more than they ever have done. And notwithstanding that they also make up a smaller proportion of the population as they age (since some die earlier than others), even accounting for lower birth rates.

Moral of the story: Watch out for implicit prejudice

The way the headline and article is are written, not only misrepresent what the data is actually saying, it does so in a way as to introduce a clear case of ageism, from an author who isn't numerate, hasn't the experience of hard science/maths, and a publication that isn't peer reviewed nor has it fact-checked the claim.

This isn't the first time. Due to underlying innumeracy, the climate movement has a tendency to blame the wrong thing or people (for example, it's viscerally racist. Which is why I left originally it as a young activist - racism is also the core driving factor of the overpopulation disinformation campaign). We also saw this during the EU referendum, where our society implicitly blamed older people for voting Leave, when in fact, the trouble was millennials didn't turn out. In essence, young people lost the country, not older people taking it back.

And yes there is a difference.

The EcoWatch article is the same class of problem.