By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, December 07, 2018
So, as often happens, a weasel crawls up your tailpipe (I
mean of your car, sicko). It then gets caught in the doohickey connecting the
thing to thing that goes mmmm-chicka.
And now your car is busted. The mechanic says it will cost $5,000 to de-weasel
your diesel engine.
But you don’t have five grand lying around. So what do
you do?
Obviously, you ask the mechanic how to raise $5,000. I
mean, he’s an expert on how to fix your car, he must also be an expert on how
to pay for it. Right?
Of course not.
My point here — or at least my first point — is that
expertise doesn’t necessarily transfer over from one field to another.
A second point: Some problems cannot be undone simply by
reversing the steps that led to the problem in the first place.
If someone stabs you in the chest with a metal spork
(very difficult to find, by the way), you don’t necessarily want to pull it out
immediately. That could cause you to bleed out. You can’t un-spill milk or
un-spork your victim.
That leads me to a third, closely related, point. Just
because someone can identify a problem — a weasel in the tailpipe, a spork in
the chest, whatever — doesn’t mean they know the best way to fix it.
I’m no doctor, but if I see a spork handle protruding
from your chest, I can give you a pretty good diagnosis of what your problem is
— at least your medical problem. I may not be able to tell you why someone
thought it necessary to stab you with a spork in the first place. But, beyond
saying, “Dude, you should probably get that looked at” or, “I think you need to
have that removed,” I’m not going to be a hell of a lot of good to you, save
perhaps as a ride to the hospital.
I love those scenes in movies and TV shows where the
medieval king or Roman emperor is sick with a fever or some other ailment, and
the doctors come in and do a pretty good job of identifying the symptoms, if
not necessarily the underlying malady. But when it comes time to prescribing treatment,
they might as well be toddlers with beards. “Have his excellency eat the tails
of four newts every morning before the sun clears the horizon. Then he must
snort the dandruff of a Corsican beggar no older than half the King’s age minus
seven. But not if the beggar is a ginger, for they are touched by the devil.”
A fourth point: Some enormous problems have no immediate
solution, which means that committing massive amounts of energy and resources
to fixing them now is a waste. When I
was a kid, I read a science-fiction short story about humans embarking on an
interstellar trip to a far-off habitable planet. The hitch: They didn’t have
faster-than-light technology. I can’t remember whether their solution was to
use suspended-animation chambers so that they could sleep for the several
centuries it would take the ship to reach their destination or whether they
planned to reproduce en route so that
their descendants would colonize the planet (both standard devices in these
kinds of stories). Either way, just as they were on the outskirts of the solar
system and about to fully commit to the journey, an alien spacecraft appeared
on their scanners or out the window (again I can’t remember). And then,
suddenly, the alien ship vanished — traveling faster than light speed.
The captain’s response always stuck with me. “All right,
let’s go home.”
The captain didn’t want to go home because he feared anal
probing or anything like that. Rather, he realized that taking 500 years
getting to some other planet was an enormous waste of time. Now that he knew it
was possible to travel faster than the speed of light, there was no point to
their journey. By the time they — or their great-great-great-great-great
grandkids — made it to Alpha Centauri, or wherever they were heading, humans on
Earth would surely have cracked the puzzle. Indeed, the fact that he knew it
was possible made it infinitely more likely they’d figure out the technology
because they now understood it was doable.
So what am I really getting at here? I’m trying to
explain how I think about climate change.
Among the
Believers
Max Boot, as part of his conservatism-renunciation tour,
has been pestering me about climate change. Once a skeptic, he now proudly
shouts all of the shibboleths of climate-change alarmists. He “believes” in
science. And science speaks in one voice about the issue. The scientists — a
monolithic bloc in his telling — have not only incontrovertibly diagnosed the
problem, but they have also prescribed the only solution. And anyone who disagrees
with either the diagnosis or the prescribed remedies must be doing so for one
of two reasons: They are either prostitutes for the fossil-fuel industry or
science-denying brainwashed ideologues.
Much like a man who thinks he can ride a wild polar bear
to work because that way he can use the HOV lanes and park in the electric-car
spots at his office garage, this is a stupid idea, I think, for a lot of
different reasons.
First of all, while Boot’s depiction of Big Oil might be
music to the ears of the green Left that still thinks the world looks like a
Thomas Nast cartoon — with titans of industry portrayed as pigs at a trough or
fat cats in fancy suits — that’s not the reality. Max wants a carbon tax.
That’s an intellectually defensible position. But you know who else favors a
carbon tax? ExxonMobil. You know what else ExxonMobil does? They spend huge
amounts of money on low-carbon R&D. They just closed on the biggest wind
and solar deal in the industry.
As for the notion that everyone else who disagrees with
him is an ensorcelled science-hating ideologue, Boot needs to get out more.
There are scads of people who are vastly more well-versed in the science than
either of us who reach an array of different conclusions other than those of
the chicken-little caucus. That doesn’t mean they’re all right — they can’t all
be right because they have meaningfully different points of view — but it also
doesn’t mean they’re all luddite ideologues. Roger Pielke, John Horgan, Judith
Curry, Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, Ronald Bailey, Steve Hayward, and many
others are serious people, many of whom concede the reality that man is
changing the environment and climate in undesirable ways, but they get
demonized by the climate-change industrial complex for poking holes in, or dissenting
from, the groupthink.
From where I sit, it looks like Max, understandably
dismayed by the realization that the people he relied upon to do much of his
thinking for him are not who he thought they were, has simply decided to let a
different group of people do his thinking for him.
But enough (already) about him. My own view of the
climate change issue is that it is real. I do not think it is a hoax, though I
do think there are plenty of people, institutions, and interests that use the
tactics of hoaxers to hype the problem. I assume that the vast majority of them
are what you might call “hoaxers in good faith”: They think the problem is
grave enough that it is worth exaggerating the claims, hyping the threat, and
hiding contrary evidence in an effort to rally public opinion. Others suffer
from confirmation bias, immediately believing the worst-case scenarios from
wildly complex — and historically unreliable — computer models without checking
the math. Just last month, the authors of a widely publicized study saying the
oceans were heating up much faster than thought had to issue a major
correction.
The 2007 IPCC report claimed “science” proved the
Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. In 2010, they had to retract the
claim:
The UN’s climate science body has
admitted that a claim made in its 2007 report — that Himalayan glaciers could
melt away by 2035 — was unfounded.
The admission today followed a New
Scientist article last week that revealed the source of the claim made in
the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was not
peer-reviewed scientific literature — but a media interview with a scientist
conducted in 1999. Several senior scientists have now said the claim was
unrealistic and that the large Himalayan glaciers could not melt in a few
decades.
Three Cheers for
Skepticism
There are really two kinds of skepticism at work here.
The first is the skepticism about the science itself, the other is skepticism
towards the vast array of interests that benefit from climate hysteria,
psychologically, politically, or economically. Both forms of skepticism are utterly
defensible. But they shouldn’t be lumped together.
Science is
skepticism. Science is questioning, testing, replicating, and re-verifying.
Yes, there are some things that are “settled science” — the decay time of some
isotope, the existence of gravity, the superiority of New York pizza — but what
science is primarily about is unsettling settled science. All — all — of the great scientists in human
history were, to one extent or another, great because they shattered or transformed the scientific consensus of
their time.
The second skepticism isn’t about science, but about
scientism — the effort to use the language, techniques, constructs, and
imagined mindset of science to do things science cannot do. “Scientism,” writes the philosopher
Edward Feser, “is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge —
that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of
science.” I would go slightly farther and say that scientism is a form of
religious thinking that thinks it is unreligious because it rejects traditional
notions of religion. Back when engineering was considered the cure-all to our
problems, “social engineers” (once a positive term) argued that they should be
empowered to guide human affairs because science was the only legitimate source
of truth.
In this way, scientism is a kind of priestcraft — a term coined by the writer James Harington to
describe the way clergy would use their divine authority (back when everyone
saw God as the ultimate source of truth) to serve their own interests. Or as
Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters,
“Back off man, I’m a scientist.” Neil deGrasse Tyson is a leading practitioner
of this secular priestcraft, arguing
that we should pick up where the Jacobins left off and organize society around
the rule of scientific reason as determined by people, well, like him.
There is a profound irony at work when people such as
Boot insist that his opponents are driven by self-interest when they disagree
with him. Is it inconceivable that, say, Al Gore — who has made hundreds of
millions as a climate-change Jeremiah — has a vested interest in climate
change? This isn’t to say that Gore is lying. I’m sure he believes what he’s
saying. But couldn’t he be a bit like Colonel Nicholson in Bridge over the River Kwai? A man so invested in a single idea he
can’t see the costs of his actions or the possibility he’s taken a good idea
too far?
Ultimately, I have no fundamental problem with people who
think climate-change “deniers” are suffering from groupthink of some kind. What
enrages me are the scientific practitioners of priestcraft who cannot imagine
the possibility that they suffer from the same human foibles. I mean, they
aren’t even consistent champions of science. They cherry-pick the issues where
science lends political and cultural power to the stuff that they want to do
anyway. When the issue is sex and gender, many of these same people might as
well start a bonfire using medical and biology textbooks as kindling. The
science has been slipping away from these people when it comes to abortion,
particularly late-term abortions, for decades, but you won’t find these
“believers in science” changing their positions any time soon.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing a “Green New Deal.”
As I’ve written 7 trillion times (give or take), progressives have wanted a
“new New Deal” even before the first New Deal was over. Painting an age-old
progressive idol green has nothing to do with science and everything to do with
marketing.
So What Would I
Do?
As I suggested in the bit about the science-fiction
story, I don’t think there is very much to do right now. Oh, I am very much in
favor of R&D for all sorts of things. Cold fusion would be the equivalent
of discovering faster-than-light travel. Personally, I am very interested in
geoengineering — the science of actually fixing the problem. I am convinced the
world has a low-grade fever that could get dangerously high in the future. That
fever isn’t all bad by the way: E.g., it extends growing seasons and
accelerates tree growth.
But if you eat bad clams and get a fever, doctors treat
the fever. They may also talk to you about your diet, but they first address
the illness. We don’t have anywhere near the expertise or confidence to start
seeding the atmosphere with particles that would reflect more sunlight, but we
could get there in the next generation or two. The funny thing is that whenever
I talk to people about this sort of thing, the science worshippers suddenly
freak out and say, “What if the scientists are wrong!” That’s a great question.
But not only when someone proposes something you don’t like.
And I’m open to a carbon tax and things of that sort, but
the thing people lose sight of is that the United States really isn’t the big
problem. They want a New Deal regardless, and the green part is just a
rationalization. Meanwhile, China, India, Africa, etc., very much want to be
rich (or at least not poor), and they will not agree to anything that
substantially deters that mission. And we should want them to get rich. Wealthy
societies protect their environments as treasured luxuries, poor societies use
their environments as useful resources (and don’t get me started on the
violence the first New Deal inflicted on nature).
In the meantime, climate change is crowding out concern
for, and resources from, all sorts of other problems that have far more
immediate effects. I worry far more about eroding biodiversity, over-fishing,
ocean acidification, plastic pollution, and the like than I do about climate
change. Climate change contributes to some of these problems, particularly
ocean acidification, but these are far more fixable right now. Elephants aren’t being wiped out by climate change. And
a Green New Deal won’t save them.
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