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The Assault on Science
Recently, the Attorneys General of a number of states launched an effort to use the RICO anti-organized crime statute to prosecute opponents of climate change alarmism. This truly shocking action is nothing less than an all-out attack on science.
There are several vital issues involved here, involving not only substance but, even more importantly, process. Let’s start with the latter. Science is not a collection of facts, but a process of discovery. Alongside its sister, conscience, it is based on the signature western individualist belief that there is a fundamental property of the human mind that — when presented with sufficient information — is able to distinguish right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Matters of science must therefore be determined by reason, not by force. To attempt to prevail in a scientific dispute through the use of force is equivalent to the use of a gun to prevail in a courtroom, or, for that matter, of rape to prevail in courtship. It is nothing less than a criminal rejection of a basic principle of our civilization.
It is also prima facie evidence that the case requiring such enforcement is severely defective. No valid scientific theory has ever required the use of police powers to prevail. No Ptolemaist was ever burned at the stake by Copernicans, nor did the Relativists ever find the need to round up the hard-core Newtonians or Etherite dead-enders. Even counter-intuitive theories like quantum mechanics and the Big Bang have done just fine without the assistance of Gestapo raids directed against their detractors. In the courtroom of science, you don’t need a gun if you have the facts on your side, and juries would be well-advised to distrust the case of those parties who choose to use weapons to silence adversarial witnesses.
But the supporters of the New Inquisition say that the catastrophe skeptics are wrong and, as they are spreaders of doubt of essential beliefs, their heresy requires suppression for the public good. However, as consideration of the list of successful theories in the preceding paragraph illustrates, most of the important ideas now established in science were at one time heretical. Therefore, it is the permission — and not suppression — of heresy that is vital to scientific progress.
That said, let us consider the substance of the Inquisitors’ complaint, to wit, the undermining by skeptics of the following argument:
- The Earth is warming.
- That this warming is caused by human industrial activity that emits CO2.
- That this CO2-driven warming is very harmful to humanity, wild nature, or both.
- That, therefore, policies must be implemented to counter such warming.
- That the best such policies are regressive measures that increase the price of fuel, electricity, food, and other basic goods.
In making the above case, the alarmists have only one demonstrable proposition, the first of the five listed above. The Earth is indeed warming, and has been since about 1600. We know this for a fact, not from the doubtful claims of researchers who attest that they can measure ongoing global temperature increases averaging 0.01 degree C per year, but from historical accounts, such as those in Dickens, which attest to snowy winters in London in the mid-19th Century, or frost fairs held on the frozen Thames in the age of Cromwell. So the minority of doomsday-skeptics who base their case on rejecting Proposition 1 are, indeed, on weak ground.
However the fallacy of the alarmist position is that they jump directly from the scientifically demonstrable Proposition 1 to the demonstrably brutal Proposition 5 without considering the very questionable intervening logic. This is an equivalent fallacy to maintaining that the reality of the theory of evolution — as amply demonstrated by the geologic fossil record — requires adherence to such repugnant political programs as eugenics, Social Darwinism, or National Social Darwinism (i.e. Nazism), as indeed all these movements actually did. So let’s look at the argument a bit more closely.
Proposition 1 is true. Proposition 2 (that the warming is caused by human activity) might be true, but is not demonstrable. The atmosphere of the Earth has been enriched over the past century from 300 parts per million CO2 to 400 parts per million, a rate which is consistent with human fossil fuel use, and based on well-known laws of optics, this could cause a temperature rise in the range of what we see. However there are other industrial gas emissions that are global cooling agents, and the observed warming began long before human industrial activity was sufficiently large to be a credible agent of climate change. But let’s stipulate Proposition 2 as being true, regardless.
We then come to Proposition 3 (that the warming is harmful) which is manifestly false. Indeed, contrary to the claims of the anti-carbon crusaders, both the CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere and the global warming that it may have caused, have been greatly beneficial to both humankind and wild nature. Based on the theory of photosynthesis – which is as widely accepted as that of the round Earth – the enrichment of the CO2 content of the atmosphere should accelerate plant growth, and such quickening has indeed been repeatedly measured in many studies, in the lab in the field, and from orbit. Furthermore, the warming that has occurred over the past century has had the further useful roles of increasing net global rainfall and of lengthening the growing season, as shown, for example, by this map, published by the US EPA.
Lacking scientific honesty, the alarmists almost never choose to mention these inconvenient truths. Instead they seek to make doomsday predictions based on the theory that global warming must necessarily cause a disastrous flood. But this prediction is also clearly unsound, as shown by the fact that, despite four centuries of global warming, no prominent port city of the early modern era is now underwater. For example, here is a map of Boston, comparing its coastline in 1630 to that today. It can be seen that the Pilgrims’ famous City on a Hill has actually increased its land area since its founding. And while some of this increase is due to landfilling activity, there is no evidence — either in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, or any other American colonial city — of a general coastal retreat in the face of an advancing ocean.
Moving on, if Proposition 3 is false, then Proposition 4 (that we must take action to counter warming) must be false as well. In that case, Proposition 5 (that the correct policies to adopt are those that increase the price of industrialization and energy) has no rational basis, unless one were to claim that, despite the falsity of the entire supporting climatist argument, making fossil fuels and their products less available to humanity is a valid goal in and of itself. Let us consider this possibility.
Here is a graph comparing average global per capita income, in inflation adjusted 2010 dollars, to total human carbon use. It can be seen that average human well-bring has risen in direct proposition to carbon utilization, with a tenfold increase, from $900/year to $9,000/year in just the past century. In secular terms, this is the greatest story ever told, but it still has a long way to go. The average American income is $45,000 per year, and we still have some poverty here. To raise the world average to anything like our current level would require multiplying global carbon use several times over. Restricting carbon availability to what it is now — or, even worse, rolling it back — would require keeping or returning billions of people in crushing poverty. Such a policy is not moral.
So it is not the doomsday-skeptics, but the carbon-benefit deniers who are diverting the public with potentially catastrophic misinformation.
This is not the first time that the authority of scientific orthodoxy has been abused for reactionary purposes. As noted above, eugenics, Social Darwinism, and National Social Darwinism all sought justification for their horrid programs in evolutionary theory. But unlike Nazi Germany, in the United States — at least up until now — such charlatanism has been open to challenge. In the early 20th century, for example, millions of poor southerners contracted pellagra, more than 100,000 succumbing either to it or diseases made fatal by the weakness it induced. Using enormous compendiums of data, the eugenicist establishment was able to show that, in the great majority of cases, pellagra victims had others in their family or ancestry who were also pellagra victims, and that pellagra must, therefore, be a hereditary disease. As such, they argued that the necessary remedy was to allow those afflicted to die off, thereby improving our national racial stock via natural selection.
In 1914, however, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, of the US Public Health Service showed experimentally that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency disease, which could be readily cured by a proper diet including adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables, or alternatively, vitamin pills. These findings, predictably, provoked the anger of the eugenicist establishment. But while they could slander and demean Goldberger — he was a Jew, after all, and his experimental sample was much smaller than the eugenicists’ vast storehouse of medical records — they could not block his publications, let alone lock him up. The debate of data and counter data therefore continued and, since he was right Goldberger’s pellagra theory won the day by the 1930s, freeing millions of Americans from a horrible disease. But imagine what the outcome might have been had the prosecutors of the day decided to take it upon themselves to defend scientific orthodoxy by silencing the heretic.
As outrageous as it sounds, such is the threat we currently face. The measures proposed by the climate alarmists – carbon taxes (i.e. sales taxes focused on basic goods), cap and trade (a form of carbon tax farming, even more pernicious than direct taxes), and crony capitalism (involving state-enforced direct transfer of funds extracted from the general public to the super rich via rigged up energy prices) – are all extremely regressive. Nevertheless, they claim that such brutal policies are necessary, as purportedly demonstrated by “scientific” authority so unimpeachable as to make contradicting it a criminal offense. But this is nonsense. Real science never fears contradiction; rather, it relishes every joust with opponents as a chance to prove its worth on the field of intellectual battle, or honorably salute the victory of a stronger challenger in the never-ending contest to advance the cause of truth. The demand by the climate alarmists that no one be allowed to enter the lists against them is proof, not of strength, but of extreme weakness.
The facts of the fossil record do not justify denying poor people the opportunity to purchase a healthy diet, just as the the facts of the weather record do not justify denying them access to affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists – or anyone else, for that matter — the right to free speech.
Published in Science & Technology
You need time in prison – nay, solitary confinement – to consider the errors of your ways.
Even Proposition 1 may be challenged. Your evidence suggested warming from the little ice age to the 20th century. But you used the present tense. Much evidence suggests decline in temperatures between various post WW2 baselines and today. I believe the recent controversies about fudging data have related to that period.
IMHO, there may be a very small CO2 driver, but this has recently been overwhelmed by reduced solar activity.
Skeptic: I think you are exaggerating the effects of climate change to justify greater government authority.
Bureaucrat: …
Skeptic: …
Bureaucrat: You should be in prison.
Second.
If you hate poverty, then it’s imperative that you love energy.
While I think the Galileo Gambit — i.e., comparing one’s opposition to a given scientific orthodoxy to that the 17th century Italian regarding the motion of the planets — is a real and overused thing, it’s also sometimes true.
I didn’t know anything about Dr. Goldberger and I’m glad I do now.
General Electric announced in February that it will soon cease manufacturing those awful corkscrew CFL light bulbs in favor of LED bulbs. Not only are LEDs much more energy efficient but they give off a warmer glow. Progress. We will soon have better lighting and will be using less energy to produce it. All because some real smart people spend their days thinking and tinkering and experimenting.
Science teachers across the country ought to convert this post to a print version and pass out copies to their students, especially with the hope that they will then pass it on to their parents. Cutting the world’s carbon emissions back to 1957 levels will do nothing about so-called climate disruption (that’s the new phrase, people – get on board!) but will impoverish hundreds of millions. But you can bet the farm we can fix this if we allow ourselves the freedom to ask questions and challenge orthodoxies.
Even more than CFLs, they are also quite expensive to make. I wonder what the carbon footprint of their manufacture is.
Yes, more expensive now, just as computer chips were quite costly to make back in the early days of the computer revolution. But we can always rely on human ingenuity and a free market to bring the costs down. That is if the busybodies and pretend know-it-alls don’t get in the way.
This link shows operational cost numbers that seem fudged.
They base their numbers on what appears to be 50,000 hours of use over what would be a 25 year period.
They apparently underestimate conventional bulb life, asserting a consumption of nearly two bulbs per year over that period, while asserting the LED would last the entire period.
I was reading a study a while back about water levels around the world. One thing that was brought up was the amount of water level changes caused by weather pattern changes. I believe they were discussing that normal weather pattern changes have cause the water levels in the South Pacific to rise as wind blow the water that way. Of course this means the level drops in other areas. The other item mentioned is that these South Pacific islands are in danger of sinking because the continental plates were tipping and thus sinking in that area. I guess the point is that our world has always been in flux. Things blow around, sink, rise, erode, build up, etc. Why do so many alarmist not understand this and want the world to be static? It can’t be, it never has been and it never will be.
Wow, the price figures are off there. You can get a six-pack of 60-watts LEDs for $19 on Amazon.
I agree the other figures are worthy of some skepticism.
I was about to order a bumper sticker that says “I <heart> Global Warming” but now I’m going to see about adding a QR code with a link to this article.
The efficiency of light bulbs is wildly overrated because it assumes that the heat given off is wasted. In many, many situations that heat contributes to warming the room to a comfortable temperature, and at that point the incandescent bulb is 100% efficient. And it usually heats more efficiently than a central furnace by targeting more directly. And we naturally use more lighting at night when it’s colder, and we naturally use more lighting during the shorter days of the winter months when it’s colder.
So the incandescent bulb has s a natural, organic, synergistic efficiency that’s just unappreciated. I wrote about this effect here.
A bit Bill Cosby used to do. He said that he would get up from his chair to get something. He would get distracted and forget what he was getting. He would go sit back down and the moment his butt touched the chair he would remember what he was getting. His conclusion: His memory cells were located in his butt.
Honest questions: Does more CO2 cause more warming? or Does more warming cause more CO2? Has it been proven that they are even causally related? I don’t know the answers but I do know: Correlation is not causation.
All other things held constant, yes. C02 is transparent to visual light, but blocks infrared.
One of the problems with climate science is that it’s impossible to isolate one variable, and the real-world second and third order effects are massively complicated.
And as Robert says, warming isn’t necessarily bad.
That’s my understanding, as well.
Wait till the High Sparrow sees what you’ve written.
To be fair, when you get one fairly right, and well argued, you deserve credit. Very well done.
Proposition 1 always amuses me. It needs to be written “The Earth is warming or cooling. If it was standing still, we should worry.”
I’ll disagree on the first part.
Fundamental to the very definition of science is the use of the Scientific Method, requiring experimental confirmation or rejection of whatever hypothesis has been created through whatever path of reason or discovery.
Without experimental confirmation you don’t have science… which should make the rest of the argument pretty straightforward.
The useful idiots of the AGW cult, the masses, are unfazed when prediction after prediction fails to come true. They keep repeating their mantra, their 23rd Psalm: “The science is settled, the science is settled….”
And the high priests? Didn’t they admit, at the recent summit on Paris, that temperature (the infamous 2 degrees) is only a “proxy”, that the real agenda is a one-world government with radical wealth redistribution?
Which, since they will ban use of the fuels by means of which we’ve created wealth, has to mean there will be precious little of it to go around?
i have a catastrophic prediction of my own: when Prez Omega leaves office, he will move over to the UN, and continue to hector our country, denigrate, dilute and destroy its culture, and immiserate its people, from a high sinecure among the globalist elites.
Data from Lindzen several years ago using high altitude balloon data suggests that higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere correlate with higher amounts of radiant heat leaving earth into space. His data raise a question as to whether CO2 is actually a heat transfer molecule that is a climate modulator rather than a global warming molecule,eg, works in a conductive way to transfer heat out of the earth’s atmosphere into space. No one seems to have noted this or commented on it anywhere that I can find. Anyone have any information on this?
Thanks!
Winter is coming.
Actually no, the AGW crowd seems to be worried about summer coming.