By Jeff Jacoby
Thursday, December 05, 2013
Back in 2006, around the time Al Gore's global-warming
documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," was released, I started a file
labeled "What Climate Consensus?" Gore was insisting that "the
debate among the scientists is over," and only an ignoramus or a lackey
for the fossil-fuel industry could doubt that human beings were headed for a
climate catastrophe of their own making. But it didn't take much sleuthing to
discover that there was plenty of debate among scientists about the causes and
consequences of global warming. Many experts were skeptical about the hyperbole
of alarmists like Gore, and as I came across examples, I added them to my file.
The thicker that file grew, the more shrilly intolerant
the alarmists became.
Over and over the True Believers insist that their view
is not just widely accepted in the scientific community, but virtually
unanimous apart from some crackpots. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has likened doubters to members of a
Flat Earth Society. CBS news reporter Scott Pelley, asked why his "60
Minutes" broadcasts on global warming didn't acknowledge the views of
skeptics, reached for an even more wounding comparison: "If I do an
interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust
denier?"
It seems to make no difference that those challenging the
doomsday narrative include some of the world's most distinguished scientists,
or that numerous experts in climatology and related earth sciences have
repeatedly gone public with their critiques. To climate ideologues, they're
invisible. "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is
real, man-made and dangerous," President Obama tweeted in May.
Really? That's not what the American Meteorological
Society learned from a recent survey of its professional members. Only a bare
majority, 52 percent, said that climate change is mostly being driven by human
activity. Scientists with a "liberal political orientation" were much
more likely to regard global warming as human-caused and harmful, the survey's
authors found — in fact, as a predictor of respondents' views on global
warming, ideology outweighed greater expertise. "This would be strong
evidence against the idea that expert scientists' views on politically
controversial topics can be completely objective," the authors observe.
In that light, consider the findings of a new study
published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Of 117 global warming
predictions generated by climate-model simulations, all but three
"significantly" overestimated the actual amount of warming that
occurred during the past 20 years. The models typically forecast that global
surface temperature would rise by more than twice as much as it did.
Why would so many scientists have relied on models that
turned out to be so wrong? The authors propose several plausible explanations —
volcanic eruptions? solar irradiation? — but their bottom line is that climate
science still has a long way to go: "Ultimately the causes of this inconsistency
will only be understood after … waiting to see how global temperature responds
over the coming decades."
That understanding won't be advanced one millimeter by
ideologues who thunder that the "science is settled" and that anyone
who challenges the current consensus is no better than a flat-earther or a
Holocaust denier. Perhaps all those climate models wouldn't have been
programmed to overpredict global warming if the pressure to conform to the
alarmists' view weren't so pervasive.
In a classic 1955 lecture on "The Value of
Science," the celebrated physicist (and future Nobel laureate) Richard
Feynmann warned that science would be hobbled if it tried to stifle its
doubters and skeptics. "If we want to solve a problem that we have never
solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar…. [D]oubt is not to
be feared but welcomed and discussed."
Science isn't settled by majority vote, and invoking
"consensus" to shut off debate is authoritarian and anti-scientific.
There are always inconvenient truths to challenge what the majority thinks it
knows. Ninety-seven percent of experts may be impressed with the emperor's new
clothes. That's no reason to silence those who insist he's actually naked.
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