By Julie Kelly
Monday, June 05, 2017
When Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” endorsed
Donald Trump for president, the “Clinton bullies,” as he calls them, came after
him with full force: “They started calling newspapers, demanding they drop
‘Dilbert,’” Adams told me from his Berkeley-area home last week. “My speaking
engagements dried up to zero. My income dropped by about one-third.”
He initially endorsed Clinton to protect “his own
personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump
supporter where I live,” he wrote in his blog last September when he officially
switched his endorsement to Trump over concerns about Clinton’s health and
estate tax plan.
Now Adams is emerging as a key provocateur in an area
even more brutally divisive than presidential politics: climate change. The man
who has satirized corporate culture and groupthink for nearly 30 years is
agitating the groupthink on both sides of the climate change debate. “I’m
looking at this through a persuasive filter. The argument is absurd on both
sides,” he said. “People have convinced themselves they understand it, but they
don’t. There could be a third option on this.”
Climate Models Are
the Result of ‘Magical Thinking’
He regularly posts columns on his blog and hosts
Periscope videos called “Coffee with Scott Adams” viewed by thousands of people
where he discusses a range of issues, including climate change. Armed with an
MBA from the University of California-Berkeley, the cartoonist is taking aim at
the dubiousness of climate models used to justify costly public policy and sway
individual decision-making.
He calls climate models the result of “magical thinking”
and the least-credible thing scientists do. “Science can’t know the future. Of
the hundreds, if not thousands, of climate models, how many were wrong? How
many models did we have in the past that didn’t work out?” he asks. Adams
thinks the climate models aren’t persuasive on accuracy, but may be
directionally right.
He also questions the dearth of economic models tied to
climate change. “We know that, in economics, nobody has created a long-term
economic model that has been right. Economic models are nonsense.” Therefore,
Adams says, there is no way to know what to do or when to start to address
climate change. “The information has to be weaponized. Meanwhile, no citizens
have any useful information.”
That leads to what Adams calls the climate activists’
retreat to a version of Pascal’s Wager: how to weigh the probability of
catastrophic climate change. This is an approach I often hear from folks who
demand solutions to manmade climate change. The catch is, even if we are wrong
that humans are causing climate change, so what? The worst we have done is
clean up our air, our water, our land, they conclude.
But this rationale exposes the selective ignorance of
climate activists. Policies to mitigate manmade climate change have inflicted
economic damage to industries, cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars
in regulations and subsides, and prevented developing countries from pursuing
energy independence via fossil fuels.
“Their thinking is, we can’t be certain of climate
change, but since we don’t know, we should prepare for the worst,” Adams said.
“But there are too many potential catastrophic events to pick just one to spend
trillions of dollars on. What about shielding us from a nuclear attack, or a
meteor hit, or a pandemic?”
Taking Fire From
the Usual Suspects
Of course, by not unequivocally agreeing with the
scientific establishment’s groupthink about human-caused climate change, Adams
has landed in the “denier” camp, even though he believes humans contribute to
global warming. He’s become a target of some of the climate cabal’s most
high-profile leaders. (Adams has also coined the Dilbert Principle: “Leadership
is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.”)
In a May 14 “Dilbert” strip mocking both climate and
economic models, Adams unwittingly made the climate scientist look like Michael
Mann, the Penn State climatologist and creator of the infamous “hockeystick”
model to prove global warming. Adams told me he had never heard of or seen Mann
before he drew the comic, a comment sure to offend Mann’s delicate ego. Mann is
suing National Review for libel and
recently compared himself to a Holocaust victim.
After the strip was published, Mann took a break from
pushing Trump impeachment conspiracies on Twitter to blast Adams and his
followers, whom he said are “text-book cases of Dunning Kruggerism.” Mann said
he was honored to be “featured” in the cartoon (he wasn’t) that “expressed
climate ignorance” (it didn’t). He then spent the next few days retweeting
sycophantic messages from other climate lemmings, giving their support to Mann
and predictably calling Adams a science denier. Some even threatened not to buy
next year’s “Dilbert” calendar, a harsh move by any measure (yes, I’m joking.)
Mann doesn’t know he is proving another of Adams’ points:
the failure of science communicators. “They don’t understand the science of
persuasion and communication. There is no communication from scientists to the
public. I don’t know if climate change is a big problem or not because the
scientists haven’t effectively persuaded me even though they have plenty of
evidence on their side. As a non-scientist, I need some kind of context.” Adams
has a book coming out this fall about the use of persuasion in elections.
As for Trump, Adams called the president’s recent
overseas trip “a home run” and said he’s doing well on the “big stuff, like the
economy, jobs, treaties, relations with other leaders.” He says Russia could be
anything from “a hallucination to something real that doesn’t matter.” At a
time when our country seems more like a cartoon show than real life, perhaps
it’s only fitting that a comic strip writer may shift the public debate on an
intractable issue like climate change.
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