Disputes - Scientific and Otherwise

Scientific controversies are not uncommon and often are necessary and valuable in areas where conclusions are conjectural and the known information is changing. An obvious example is the question of whether the best guess from the facts and analysis available  is  that the universe will continue expanding indefinitely or eventually contract back into a state leading to another big bang. Each side of the question has seemed the more likely at various times, and the disputes have been lively and useful. However, in this and in other such controversies, those favoring one side or the other -  while they might get excited and even consider their opponents foolish, hidebound, or just not smart enough to get the right answer – would not think of labeling them as  unbelievers, deniers, or embodiments of evil.  That sort of disputation belongs in the areas of politics and religion, not science.  Yet it is precisely what we see from the advocates of global warming as an apocalyptic disaster in the making and something totally and unquestionably due only to people’s burning fuels.

Their  mode of expression thus should serve as a clue to an objective observer that the public discussion on global warming has left the realm of science and entered that of religion and politics. The political aspect is obvious. Politicians and bureaucrats  of the left have  hopes  to use a scare over warming to increase their power. In some ways it is a last refuge for them. The religious is almost as obvious. The green movement posits a former ideal state corrupted by humanity’s sins, offers sinners a path to salvation based on self denial, threatens the world and its unbelievers  with a horrible future fate,  condemns its critics as not merely mistaken but evil, offers believers an assurance of righteousness  and superiority based solely on holding correct beliefs, and is uninterested in facts  which contradict its doctrines  or events which invalidate its prophecies.  By what is commonly called the quacking duck test, it is a religion, and a dogmatic and crusading one at that. The apocalyptic view of global warming is part of its holy writ. 

A very  instructive illustration of how far all this is from science or scientific behavior came in the last couple of days from a US senator from Rhode Island who, representing what one might call the jihadist or Dominican branch  of the green faith, suggested throwing dissenters into prison for their heresies. That should help to show a fair minded person just how much  this  business really has to do with science and how much with faith and power lust. It should also brand that senator as an anti-American authoritarian unworthy of holding any office in a free country ( and also as an opponent of free scientific inquiry).

Of course the behavior of scoundrels and fanatics does not prove there is nothing to  the notion of   burning fuels contributing to warming as some conservatives have claimed.  Burning fuels does have an effect, and it would be useful to have a better understanding of what sort of effect that is and through what sort of feedback  or other mechanisms it occurs.

                                                                                                                           

Warming's True Believers

We are now hearing from human-generated global warming’s journalistic true believers that recent blizzards are caused by global warming. Indeed for these people, whatever happens is caused by global warming, and nothing that happens or may happen can shake their faith. This is nothing new. One could substitute “angels” for “global warming” and have the same sort of all purpose explanation. After all, if angels by hypothesis can do anything, then anything that happens can be caused by them, and nothing that happens can cast doubt on the explanation. Similarly if every change in weather or climate is by hypothesis caused by global warming, then no observed facts or set of observed facts can cast doubt on that explanation.

This sort of thinking is commonplace and has been throughout history. It is not, however, scientific. There is a good reason that critics call this stuff a religion.

Global Warming

It is a good idea to start on global warming with what seems to be well known. Temperatures on average have been hotter in recent decades than they were in the 1700’s and early 1800’s at least in places where we have records to compare. The most recent complete decade, the 1990’s, was particularly warm. There is a known mechanism whereby carbon dioxide in the air can contribute to warming. Throughout the last hundred and fifty years people have discharged large and usually increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the air by burning large amounts of coal and petroleum products.

Combining these facts, it is natural to conclude that the carbon dioxide so produced has contributed to the trend to higher temperatures. And in fact there seems to be a fairly broad agreement among informed people that such is the case.

The next question of course is how large a contribution. Is the carbon dioxide from burning the sole cause of the change in climate? Is it a largely insignificant input to a trend driven by other and weightier factors? Or is it something in between? It is here that the legitimate controversy begins.

However, before talking about the legitimate controversy, it is interesting to talk about the political controversy, which is something else entirely. Opinions there range from those who are certain that human actions are not only the sole cause of the warming but in fact the only possible cause to those who dismiss the entire notion of warming as a hoax or worse. Throughout the rants and discussions, axes are ground, logs are rolled, and very little is said that is useful.

One reason for this is that neither side has a whole lot of credibility.

On the right many of the conservatives who are skeptical about global warming seem indifferent or hostile to science as such. Some of these, for example, also oppose evolution and favor notions such as creation science. Others project their disagreement with leftist policies on warming back onto the question of warming itself. It can be hard to put much trust in their scientific objectivity.

On the left you have first a large number of people who so deeply want it to be true, whose yen to regulate and control their fellow citizens’ lives is so great, that they will grab onto anything that might offer them a supposed justification for their desire, be it global warming or whatever. Then you have those who have been pulpit thumping evangelists for every bogus impending ecological apocalypse of the last forty years and have learned nothing from being wrong so often. (Even if one is afraid that the sky might fall in, he probably doesn’t want to rely on Chicken Little for the news.) Finally you have the anointed spokesman for the left’s position Al Gore – a sufficiently, consistently mendacious ignoramus that, if he were to call Brittney Spears a silly slut, reasonable people might feel compelled to at least consider the hypothesis that she is a fine and gracious lady, unfairly maligned in the press. It can be hard to put much trust in their scientific objectivity also.

So the political arguments have mainly only entertainment value.

As to the real question of how much our burning of fuels contributes to warming, I don’t know, and I don’t expect ever to know. There are two reasons for this. First it seems to be a big, hard problem that is more likely to have a statistical and probabilistic answer or set of answers than a definite one. Second, and more important, I do not know whom to trust.

Very few people are experts on, say, quantum electrodynamics or the molecular biology of enzymes or the detailed nuances of paleontology. Almost nobody is an expert on all of them. If a reasonable non-expert gets curious about one of them or some other scientific theory, he finds a good source and reads about it at a technical or popular level appropriate to his interest and background and then usually believes the results at least tentatively and provisionally -- not because he has studied every bit of data and verified every inference and calculation – but because they make sense to him and because of a broad and justified belief in the way science works. He assumes that others have studied all the data and verified the conclusions, that this has been done more than once and sometimes by people other than the authors of the theory, and that in the main those involved have behaved honestly and objectively with truth as their first objective. When he looks at a subject where there are competing theories he behaves in a similar way, looking at accounts of the different explanations, perhaps reaching a (usually very tentative) conclusion about which theory is the most plausible and best supported, acting on an assumption of the general scientific integrity of the people and processes involved . Since no one has time to become an expert on everything, this is a sensible way for people to behave.

It seems to me that this is what I cannot do on the question of how much of the warming is caused by burning fuels. I cannot do it, because the involvement of the politicians and their friends has so polluted things that I do not feel justified in assuming people’s scientific honesty and objectivity. There are too many incentives and opportunities for shading, slanting, and manipulating data and results. I really believe that it would be necessary to review the data, check the code and assumptions of the computer models, and analyze darn near everything involved oneself before reaching a defendable conclusion. That is more nearly a career than a desultory afternoon or two of study. So for now I am resigned to being permanently agnostic.

As to policy, even if burning fuels caused all the recent warming, it would in no sense justify the sort of fascistic control over the lives of others that some leftists want. On the other hand there are good and well known reasons to move away from dependence on oil, irrespective of whether the climate warms or cools or why it does. If the flap over warming helps us move to using other sources of energy in an intelligent and sensible way, we will be better off for it.