Ambiance

An Open Letter to Thomas Friedman

February 22, 2010 at 5:33 pm (Guest Post)

A Guest Post by Callimachus

answering Friedman’s 2/17 column “Global Weirding is Here.”

Quick credentials: I generally agree with you. I’m a historian/journalist, internationalist, lifelong secularist and apologist for the scientific method; I’ve gone to the mat nationally and locally in public in the ugly fights against creationism and bogus “Christian America” history texts. References supplied upon request.

And this misguided crusade over global warming compromises scientists as a class. Memories of this debate will be an obstacle to anyone who wishes to promote scientific methods. Science will seem to be no better than, no different than, ideology, theology, or political mania.

Look at the language. Skim the AP articles and see how often scientists defending the catastrophic global warming scenario cast their opponents as “the skeptics.” When scientists define themselves against “skeptics,” we’re no longer talking about science as I recognize it.

The “skeptics” may not have tenure, but they have something respectable the other side wants: Horse sense.

You lament the term “global warming” as a bad one — it’s been lamented as a bad one from the beginning by the sober heads who really understood the research. Why did it prevail anyhow, and what does that say about the movement?

You want to change it. It’s too late to change it, just as it’s too late to change “evolution,” a term Darwin lamented (and used only once), but which was thumbtacked to the public mind by Spencer and the social darwinists and eugenicists — the scientific enthusiasts who took it all too far in the name of a better tomorrow.

So if — as in your own recent column — widespread cooling is touted as evidence of “global warming” — you can’t be surprised that the common people increasingly are skeptics. To your credit, you make that point.

Yet the fault is deeper than a mischosen word. For years there had been evidence of a lack of warming in Antarctica. The “skeptics” sometimes noted that inconvenient fact. And the global warming enthusiasts found a way to claim that lack-of-warming in Antarctica was entirely consistent with — even predictable in — their global warming doomsday model. Then some zealous scientists found, in fact, evidence of warming in Antarctica. And that was brazenly welcomed as evidence of global warming.

When “X” and “not X” both prove theory Y, we are no longer talking about science as I recognize it. I go with the horse sense crowd. I’m with the skeptics.

The skeptics see a group of powerful and vocal people trying to ram through an agenda of massive societal and economic change (up to and including capping capitalism and redistributing wealth from rich nations to poor ones) on the plea that to do anything otherwise than exactly that is to deliberately let the planet burn.

And they remember that the same people were pushing the same agenda long before anyone coined the phrase “global warming.” They also remember the number of scientific certainties that have been upended in their lifetimes. Perhaps they even remember that a century ago the scientific consensus was that human races are biologically definable, rankable, would never be equal in their capabilities, and their birth rates ought to be controlled for the good of the species.

No corporate chicanery paid for those racist conclusions. They came out of the minds of scientists, who were products of their cultures and societies. Some of the best scientists of our times, Stephen Jay Gould, for example, devoted much of their work to warning us that scientists are as susceptible to self-delusion and groupthink as any other humans.

If you’re a scientist today researching this topic, what’s your incentive to publish honest results that fail to show evidence of imminent global warming catastrophe? What’s your likely penalty for doing so? You don’t have to be a scientist to ask that question and guess the answer.

The horse sense skeptics are mocked and humiliated for it by the eggheads. They not only insist on crying wolf, they will slap you if you don’t listen. Which is an awful mistake for eggheads to make, but they seem to have been carried away in this by their veteran leftish politician allies. The horse sense people are not dupes of the oil companies: They’re deeply suspicious of and hostile to them, too. Instead, they are approaching the global warming catastrophists with a skepticism I wish scientists used in choosing their allies.

Global warming scientists and their allies often equate global warming skeptics with creationists. Evolution is a statement about what happened in the past, based on millions of fossils and millions of living species, with a full set of subsidiary sciences (genetics, etc.) that can be tested daily in a middle school lab.

When people predict what species and ecosystems will look like in the future, that’s not evolutionary science, even if biologists do it (and generally they are smart enough not to). It’s whimsy, it’s science fiction.

Catastrophic global warming is a prediction about the future, based on computer models.

The scientific study of climate and how it changes didn’t even exist before about 1960. Those who study it still have no consensus about why it changed in the past.

The Earth’s climate changes over time. The change can be catastrophic. We still don’t know what makes it change. What we know for sure is the Earth has been much warmer in its recent past, and much cooler. There’s no guarantee on the climate you see around you.

Why were there Ice Ages after tens of millions of years without them? Why were there dramatic warm spikes in the middle of them? Why has world climate been relatively stable for the past 4,000 years? Nobody knows. No good scientific model of world climate change yet has been constructed.

One of the old books I like to take down and look at sometimes is a school geography text from 1876. I like to see the world as it looked to people then, the world that people learned about in school.

The book opens with the bland statement that the Earth is a sphere. But then it goes on to acknowledge that it doesn’t look this way to us who walk on it, and then the authors tell why geographers know it’s a sphere.

It only takes about two short paragraphs, but it’s something that dropped out of our way of learning. It acknowledges that even a child’s objection that “it doesn’t look that way to me” is worth answering, and that in fact this is a wise question, not a stupid one, and that any authority that makes a bald statement owes it to his students to produce evidence for it.

Nowadays, it’s supposed to be sufficient that an expert says something. Anyone who doesn’t accept the word of the expert, who even dares to ask “How do you think you know that,” is dismissed as a rube or worse. Ross Gelbspan decries “greenhouse skeptics” as “criminals against humanity.”

I wish the people who expect me to join this religion would take the time to make it palatable to common sense and to admit that intelligent people of good will might not be convinced by doomsday movies.