"In politics, the notion that climate change can’t be falsified—everything only serves to confirm it, nothing imaginable can contradict it—has been a marvelous boon. In science, the fact that climate change can’t be falsified seems to prove, mostly, that climate change isn’t science: There’s no way to test for it, no way to quantify it, and no way to demonstrate it.
If politics is the human activity by which collective decisions are made, then (whatever the structure of the regime, from the most coercive authoritarianism to the most radical democracy) all government depends on some kind of agreement. Our political instincts have developed over many millennia, but the essential commonality is that we are most comfortable when we shape our opinions to the consensus of our group. As a general matter,
- we’d rather be wrong in a group than
- right but alone.
Science, on the other hand, is a methodological tool by which we coordinate observation, logic, and experiment to attempt to discover facts. Science doesn’t deal in either certainty or consensus. Every well-formed theory contains a set of testable hypotheses. When these hypotheses fail confirmation by repeated experiment, the theory has to change. Thus the progress of science is halting and erratic, ultimately convergent on,
- but never achieving, final explanations of our world.
Naturally, that means confusion reigns when scientists dabble in politics and politicians attempt to explain science—as when we are confronted by such oxymorons as “settled science.” And, unfortunately, in the worlds of climate change, such confusions seem to be happening a lot—from the United Nations agency that got caught taking an environmental activist group’s unsupported (and mistaken) word that Himalayan glaciers would all be melted away by 2035, to the Times Atlas that recently decided global warming would be more striking if 15 percent of the Greenland ice cap were arbitrarily erased from the map. To say nothing of the 2009 case in which bizarre emails between influential scientists and activists, hacked from a server at the University of East Anglia (which is climate-change central, keeper of international temperature records), were released to the public.
Professional scientists are people, of course, and thus participants in the rough and tumble of political debate. Professional politicians are also people, of a sort, and they’re always eager to use the prestige of science to claim support for their political goals. Most of the time, these crossover category errors stay relatively minor. Occasionally, however, conflations of politics and science snowball into disasters for both politics and science—and the debate over climate change is as clear an example as we’ve had since stem cells rolled into public view.
An hour’s poking around on the Internet reveals that no scientific consensus on massive human-caused climate change actually exists. Those afflicted with what economists call “perverse incentives,” however, want scientific consensus to exist, and they try, hard, to pull that consensus into being. Naturally, the debate is skewed toward the faction which controls the most political and economic resources—particularly the United Nations, on the commanding heights of
- resource allocation for activists through the mechanism
- of its various interlocking directorates of committees and NGOs.
The result is an astonishing tangle of mostly ad hominem arguments. Proponents of catastrophic global warming claim that their opponents are in denial and corrupted by corporate funding. Skeptics counter that these alarmists are corrupted by government funding and political pressure. The result has been good for neither politicians nor scientists, with every new poll betraying smaller numbers of those who trust either government or science to speak the truth—much less to fix our strange and broken world.
As far as the actual facts go, they go quickly, the first casualties in the battles at the crossroads of science and politics. We do know that there have been periodic ice ages for the past million or so years, and that the period of those ice ages is on the order of 100,000 years. About 10 percent of discernible history is made up of warm periods (such as our current climate), and the rest much colder, with large portions of the earth covered with thick ice....
Within each era, variances of climate occur, as warmer and colder periods of several hundred years come and go. The causes of these changes are similarly uncertain. Is there an ideal global average temperature? If so, what is it? And how do we measure it? Can our species influence these changes? If so, should we? In which direction? What are the costs, risks, and benefits? These questions
- are not, to say the least, in any realm of settled science.
Enter the climate scientists. The research enterprise in the modern world is a large-scale activity. Difficult questions are raised, and hypotheses are generated to move toward an answer. This requires hiring staff, recruiting experts and consultants, purchasing equipment, and putting all of it in a building, preferably on a university campus. Most of all, what’s needed for this kind of research is oceans of money. And where money is the driver, politics is the unavoidable road down which the scientist has to race. Grant-making authorities, whether in government, industries, or foundations, tend to have a preferred perspective on the process and outcome of research. These preferences are not lost on the applicant researchers.
A few research centers have dominated the study of climate change, and these are typically funded by national governments, [ie, TAXPAYERS] with the approval of U.N. agencies and the transnational perspective that U.N. agencies represent. What has emerged, in other words, is a political consensus that emphasizes the claim of ongoing climate change which (1) tends toward warming, (2) is caused by human activity, and (3) threatens to be apocalyptic.
- Groupthink then emerges as the dominant social response,
- with ostracism of skeptics and excommunication of apostates.
As the grant-achieving scientists congealed their opinions around the hypothesis (and now doctrine) of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming—warmed, themselves, by their presumptive guardianship of truth and virtue—some have succumbed to the temptation to cut corners. Dissenting investigators have been marginalized, their research papers viewed with prejudice by academic journals. The principle of free availability of raw data has been ignored. Peer review has degenerated into pal review. Cases of
- data destruction and tampering have been documented.
Through all this, public opinion has remained bemused, and only mildly interested, with polls suggesting a small decrease in concern over catastrophic manmade climate change and a gradual increase in disbelief about the whole thing. Which has to concern the people whose livelihood depends on predicting catastrophe. Prophecy demands belief.
Perhaps the greatest reason for any of us to feel skepticism about climate change, however, is the unchanging politics of those who employed it to advance their agendas. Are we wrong to suspect that most global warming activists are merely using global warming as the latest in a long series of tools with which to demand fundamental changes in Western civilization?
Think of it this way: The premise of catastrophe produces the conclusion that the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded. Governments must take control of economies. Capitalism must give way. All decisions
- must be made by our scientific and political elite,
- for only they can save us from doom.
Now, in a purely logical world, the rejection of the premise would mean that we don’t have to accept the conclusion. If A, then B and not A together produce nothing. But the people who’ve been lecturing us for more than a decade now about global warming and climate change didn’t start by holding A.
- They began by holding B—
the conclusion, the proposition that Western civilization must change. And it is, literally, a nonfalsifiable proposition: If global warming and climate change help lead to it, then hurray for global warming and climate change.
- If not, well, then, they’ll find something else.
Yet facts remain stubborn things, and the thesis of climate change, at least, is clearly in decline. The once-proud carbon-trading market in Chicago is now defunct. Similar European schemes have collapsed in confusion and fraud. Alternative scientific theory is beginning to find its footing. Flawed methods have been exposed. Leaked emails indicate a corrupted scientific process. Most of all, public opinion has not been stampeded,
- in spite of
- intense climate-change advocacy in the media.
Skepticism, the prime scientific virtue, still lives, in other words. If nothing else, Ivar Giaever may yet be able to rejoin the American Physical Society."
'Psychiatrist William Anderson teaches at Harvard University. Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of The Second Spring: Words into Music, Music into Words.'via Tom Nelson
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