Remarks on Global Warming

Ted Everett

Geneseo Philosophy Club debate, 4/10/07

I have nine things to say up front (I'll say them, then I'll try to explain them):

1. that global warming as a fact is different from global warming as a crisis.

2. that the beliefs of scientists, even majorities of scientists, are different from science itself.

3. that scientists are human beings whose social and political responsibilities may interfere with their responsibilities purely as scientists.

4. that we ought to decide empirically whether or not to accept the word of the current scientific majority regarding global warming.

5. that the historical track record of scientific majorities is mixed.

6. that in sensitive matters relevant to public policy, the track record of scientific majorities is poor.

7. that in recent environmental and related matters, the track record of scientific majorities is especially poor.

8. that the scientific majority currently favoring Global Warming Crisis Theory (GWCT) shows some common signs of being unreliable.

9. that for the time being we ought to maintain a skeptical position toward GWCT, despite its being favored by the current scientific majority.

1. Global warming as a fact is different from global warming as a crisis. People say as a slogan that "global warming is real". And few people deny that there is a current worldwide warming trend, one that that goes back to the late 1970s, or (with a long interruption) to the 1860s. But this is different from asserting the whole package of beliefs that goes by the name of climate change or global warming. The package includes not just the reality of global warming per se, but also the propositions (a) that GW is caused largely by human action (particularly through co2 production); (b) that it can be largely curtailed by human action (limits on emissions, etc.); and (c) that if we don't take serious action swiftly horrible things will result. This is Global Warming Crisis Theory (GWCT). The real political fight is not over the fact of global warming, but over the truth of GWCT, which is more controversial.

2. The beliefs of scientists, even majorities of scientists, are different from science itself. Like people in all walks of life, scientists have opinions, which they typically distinguish from established facts, though it is always hard to maintain a neutral attitude toward one's own work. The opinion of any majority of current scientists is also different from any fact that has been established by science itself. Science is certainly a social process, and majority opinions matter in the rational progress of science. But GWCTists are acting as if every time a large majority of scientists agrees on something, this closes the issue. This is an utterly false view of science, as most scientists are well aware. Majorities of scientists (especially about politically interesting issues) change all the time. The history of science is one of jerky, discontinuous, unpredictable, often startling growth, in which majorities have frequently been disappointed. In areas of little political interest, like theoretical physics, most scientists are content to remain uncommitted (though many are opinionated), until a sustained consensus under critical scrutiny has been established – and even then, most scientists pride themselves on stating very carefully the limits of their knowledge. In the global warming controversy, scientists seem to have gone wrong in substituting an immediate majority opinion for a genuine consensus.

3. Scientists are also citizens whose social and political responsibilities can sometimes interfere with their responsibilities purely as scientists. Indeed, if they are good people, and most scientists are, they ought to be very alert to possibility of such conflicts. If you like, there can be conflicts between what you know by the standards of detached inquiry, and what you know by the standards of necessary action. So, scientists sometimes find it necessary to become activists or advocates on matters in their fields, when things to them seem urgent, and there is not the time to do things in the ideal way. Scientific opinions then become in some sense partly political, not purely scientific ones. This is not a simple matter of scientific or intellectual integrity; it is rather one of balancing what they, citizen-scientists, owe to pure science with what they owe to politics. Especially among the many environmental activists in science, for whom GW is felt most urgently as a political crisis, choices must be made. Al Gore says, "the central organizing principle of governments everywhere must be the environment." This means that the central organizing principle of governments must not be liberty, equality, prosperity, security, or civil order. Any scientist who agrees with this statement has commitments that go far beyond the realm of scientific inquiry.

4. We ought to decide empirically whether or not to adopt the beliefs of the current majority of scientists regarding global warming. GWCT (if that is really the majority view, over and above mere GW) may or not be a rational good bet for our belief. This question should be investigated scientifically. There is a special problem for belief, here, though, in that the majority of GW scientists say must decide now. They claim that the truth, always elusive in empirical science, is at least settled enough for current purposes of setting public policy. The fact that the policies suggested by most GWCT scientists are almost certainly very costly would tend to count against a quick decision, but they argue that the costs of inaction in this crisis are probably so high that it is more foolish to continue waiting. This is a rational possibility. There can be situations so urgent that the probability of disaster from inaction clearly outweighs the expected value of seeking further information or analysis, even if the action recommended is a costly one. The Manhattan project, undertaken at great expense given the mere possibility of the Germans producing a nuclear weapon before we did, would seem to be such a case. The best empirical approach would look at the track record of past scientific majorities to determine when they are most and least reliable. Presumably, the more similar the cases are to the current GW situation, the better evidence we'll find in seeing how past scientists performed.

5. The historical track record of scientific majorities is mixed. Here are a few examples, of the dozens available, where majorities have been mistaken.

(a) Ptolemaic vs. Copernican cosmology. If scientists had had to vote on whether it was the Church and Ptolemy or Copernicus and Galileo who were correct about the sun and Earth in 1610, I think it is pretty clear that Galileo would lose. Galileo did lose for a long time, suppressed by the "consensus" of the scientific world, such as it was in his day. It was only the truth of Galileo's dissenting opinion that allowed it ultimately to prevail against the dominant politico-scientific position of his day.

(b) Newtonian mechanics was so much the received view among scientists a hundred years ago that Einstein's relativity seemed impossible, even logically impossible, to majority science, despite its obvious brilliance and elegance, until it was firmly established through experiment as a better theory. The quantum revolution quickly followed, producing a theory that actually is logically impossible. (Only kidding.) (No, I'm not.) In any, case, nothing that anybody was expecting. These are some standard examples of Kuhn's paradigm shifts in physics. If the contemporary majority of physicists is more reliable than those of the past several centuries, this is only because physicists are now much more skeptical of what the moment's majority says on any controversial issue, having been burned so many times before.

(c) In psychology, there have been several schools of thought in the past century, a few of which temporarily made for at least as much of a scientific consensus as GWCT does today. Freudianism and behaviorism both dominated academic psychology to such an extent that it was hard for any opposing view to pass through "peer review", the standard often used by GWCTists to exclude dissenters from the scientific conversation today. The situation is psychology is more eclectic, hence a little safer, now, but the field is still subject to senseless and destructive fads. Some of the worst recent abuses of scientific authority have involved "expert witness" activists, who have been used to frame innocent people in cases of alleged "recovered memory", particularly a series of day-care workers during the 1980s, some of whom were left in jail for years before the essentially fraudulent nature of the evidence against them was exposed. Looking back over a century, it seems that any year's "consensus" among psychologists is quite a poor indicator of the ultimate truth. Better, from the epistemic point of view, if people had just said they didn't know, and waited for a better theory.

6. In sensitive matters relevant to public policy, the track record of scientific majorities is poor. Again, a few examples:

(a) A hundred years ago, almost all credentialed scientists were racists by today's standards. And racism was only one element in an almost universal, Social-Darwinist approach to eugenics, expressed in American law through the authority of scientific consensus. Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes's famous statement in the forced-sterilization case Buck vs. Bell that "three generations of imbeciles are enough" was not the statement of a hard-hearted man, but of a person who simply accepted the scientific consensus of his day.

(b) Both Margaret Mead's anthropological studies from the 1920s on, and Alfred Kinsey's "sexological" studies of the 1940s and '50s were until quite recently almost unchallenged by mainstream scientists. In fact, they came largely to define the mainstream in their fields. They were also widely accepted as scientific support for progressive sex education and the sexual liberation movements of the succeeding decades, of which both Mead and Kinsey were well-known proponents. But it has turned out that both of these famous scientists were frauds by any reasonable standard, having made much of their vaunted research up out of whole cloth for essentially ideological reasons.

(c) In part because of the scientific paralysis created by Mead's and Kinsey's blank-slate ideology, the field of evolutionary psychology (nee sociobiology) has had to fight a thirty-year struggle for acceptability in academia. Only very recently have mainstream scientists admitted the potential validity of this intuitive and highly fruitful approach, and it still causes much political turmoil if the wrong people say the wrong things from this point of view, as witness Lawrence Summers's recent debacle as president of Harvard.

(d) In the anti-"Star Wars" pro-"nuclear freeze" movement of the 1980s, hundreds of the nation's most prominent scientists signed published letters insisting that the goals of Ronald Reagan's SDI program were chimeras, that it was technologically impossible to knock down a missile with another missile. It has been effectively established by now that this was false, as the SDI program has succeeded along the main lines initially proposed by the much-vilified Edward Teller.

7. In recent environmental and related matters, the track record of scientific majorities is especially poor. The evidence most relevant to judging the reliability of GWCT probably comes from other majorities within the broad left-pacifist-environmental movement among scientists since the 1960s, which has already spawned a number of well-falsified majority beliefs and prescriptions, some of which have led to real disasters. Here are three central examples.

(a) Rachel Carson's Silent Spring of 1962 is often credited with starting the contemporary environmental movement, with its successful attack on the pesticide DDT, widely used in Africa for controlling malaria. Current science views DDT as far less harmful than Carson and subsequent mainstream scientists believed, and DDT has recently been reintroduced in Africa. It is controversial just how many human lives have been lost to malaria in the meantime because of the DDT ban, but it is certainly millions.

(b) Another founder of the environmental movement is Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb set off a bomb of its own, with its widely accepted Malthusian predictions about human overpopulation. Here is a quote:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

This prediction was, of course, as we now know, utterly false. The population of the world is now about twice what it was when Ehrlich wrote, and food production has much more than kept pace. In the meantime, it has become commonplace among scientists and other educated Westerners to view parents with more than two children as selfish and irresponsible, with results that we are beginning to perceive in Europe, where an increasingly elderly population is increasingly dependent on the labor of culturally hostile immigrants who have no such scruples about family size. It is not clear at this point how European society can survive this accelerating process.

(c) A third major component of contemporary environmentalism is the anti-nuclear power movement of the 1960s and '70s, which proved so successful that no new nuclear reactors have been initiated in the US for the past 35 years, though most of the then existing plants have been allowed to continue operating. Academic scientists have long been members of this movement, supporting a consensus view that nuclear power is too dangerous be permitted. but as far as we know, there have been zero deaths caused by nuclear power in the US during those thirty-five years (and none in France, either, with its much more nuclear-based energy system). Coal power, on the other hand, which is the main alternative that has been in use in the US, has caused a large number of avoidable deaths during the same period, both among miners, through collapses and other accidents (about 2000 deaths), plus black lung disease, and in the general population through coal-based pollution. Mainstream scientists are only recently beginning to pay attention to these costs, ironically as GWCT makes CO2 pollution from coal-burning power plants increasingly salient, with the result that some environmentalists are now switching sides on nuclear power.

8. The scientific majority currently favoring GWCT shows some common signs of being unreliable. One such sign is the direct statements of some activist scientists that they must engage in propaganda, suspending their ordinary practice of honesty and devotion to the truth, because the GW problem is simply too urgent to wait for public acceptance of their theories in the usual, democratic way. Here is a frank, thoughtful statement from the Stanford climatologist Steven Schneider:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."

Well, he may hope that that means being both, but by the logic of his statement it cannot mean being both at the same time.

Another strong sign of scientific unreliability is the bullying behavior of some authorities toward dissenters on GWCT, now widely called "deniers", deliberately to associate them with people who deny the Holocaust. The treatment of Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist is the most prominent example. When Scientific American, one of the flagship publications of mainstream science, responded to Lomborg's books with a long, scathing review by four environmental scientists, they made it absurdly difficult for him to respond in turn, denying him the ordinary space in letters to the editor, and, when he tried responding on his own website, actually suing to prevent his taking quotes from their review. This is not how a fair-minded journal acts – ever, though Scientific American did finally retract its lawsuit, and Lomborg's rebuttal now appears on its website, along with their further response.

My own experience with several scientists regarding GWCT shows a highly political, even emotional response that is not compatible with objectivity. When Lomborg's book was chosen for discussion in a faculty reading group (it was my turn to pick), one scientist member refused to purchase the book, so as to keep his money out of Lomborg's and his publisher's hands. Another declared himself unwilling, on principle, even to read it. All this suggests that Lomborg is some kind of villain, rather than a mere dissenter. But for all that I can tell, Lomborg is utterly sincere in his writing, and while his work may contain flaws, it is his general approach of comparing the human costs and benefits of fighting global warming against those of fighting many other problems (such as unsanitary water in the Third World) that seems to drive mainstream scientists up the wall. He doesn't even question the existence of man-made GW, just it's relative importance. There is nothing, as a matter of science, to object to in this general approach. Only as a matter of politics, as a matter of his publicly doubting the urgency of action, can Lomborg's rational-balancing approach be faulted.

The saddest thing about GWCT, from the point of view of real science, is probably the wide acceptance of Al Gore, a non-scientist politician, as the public leader of this supposedly scientific movement. His documentary An Inconvenient Truth is just a travesty of actual science. A complete nonscientist like me can tell, on the basis of plain rationality, that this is propaganda, not real science. Anyone can tell that Gore's most prominent exhibit, a graph which supposedly demonstrates the causal relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global warming, can show at most a correlation between those two things. Anyone can tell that this same graph is too vaguely drawn to show whether the warming or the CO2 comes first. Anyone can tell that such unindexed graphs can be stretched or shrunken to make changes look as large or small as one might wish. Yet many prominent scientists have supported, or at least refrained from renouncing, those aspects of Gore's documentary that are most clearly false or misleading, on the explicit grounds of needing to shake people up, to frighten them into taking action against GW. This does not conduce to trust for anyone who is not already part of their movement. At the same time, millions of children are being taught, though showings of Gore's documentary in schools, that this is what is good science is like.

9. I conclude that for the time being we ought to maintain a skeptical position toward GWCT, despite its being favored by the current scientific majority. This very majority, by having placed the urgency of action above ordinary scientific principles, has disqualified itself from the position of respect on which it must depend for any further influence. Because of the well-know problems any short-lived scientific majority has in establishing the truth, especially in politically sensitive matters, because of the particularly poor track record of contemporary scientists about environmental issues, and because of the manifestly political behavior of so many scientists supporting GWCT, there is no authoritative scientific guidance on this issue. Rational laymen are left on our own to sort out, as objectively as we are able, masses of competing claims, both about GW and its causes and effects, and about all the other potentially urgent problems that we face. And I don't think that laymen have the resources right now, given the defection of so many mainstream scientists from their role as careful, critical evaluators of objective data, to come to any practical conclusions. We can't reasonably do anything drastic about GW without much more scientific proof than is available. This skeptical position does entail a certain risk of ultimate catastrophe, in case the worst predictions of the GWCTists actually come true. But how great a risk? There is no one we can reasonably trust who knows.