I Know Best. Roger L. Simon
rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_17efe11a-48e4-544c-8729-8c010b12e6b8">The Weather
Grandmother always said, “In polite society, when you don’t know people, just talk about something neutral, like the weather.” That was then, this is now.
I am launching into this chapter on a particularly miserable day in Los Angeles, where it supposedly never rains; only today it’s been raining at a pace of approximately one inch per hour, enough to create a flood or floods. Traffic lights are out and cars are backed up everywhere. Local news hosts are broadcasting ankle-deep in mudslides washing down from the San Gabriels. Rainfall records are being broken. “Climate change” has struck!
Or has it? Is it just a stormy day the likes of which have ebbed and flowed forever? Or is Armageddon just around the corner? Nobody knows, although many say they do. A new film version of “Noah” was released in 2014, after all. Speaking of floods, 2015 was the year of the Lima Climate Change Conference, the sequel to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference of 2009. I attended the conference in Copenhagen, which took place in a near blizzard, the furthest thing from global warming imaginable. Nonetheless, the topic was discussed incessantly to the exclusion of anything else, as if the oceans welling up and destroying islands was a foregone conclusion. When I was a kid in New York City, there was a jingle that played repeatedly on the radio at the conclusion of the hourly news as a lead-in to the weather report: “Everybody talks about it, nobody does a thing about it—the weath-ther!”
How times have changed. Now it’s “The weath-ther. Everybody talks about it all the time. And we have to do something drastic about it, right now, right away. Otherwise, the volcanoes will erupt, the glaciers will melt, the rivers will overflow, and we’re all gonna die—the weath-ther!” According to such scientific wizards as John Kerry and, needless to say, Al Gore, weather—excuse me global warming, excuse me climate change, excuse me whatever new euphemism has or is about to appear—is the great cause célèbre of our era, surpassing even income inequality or, needless to say, such lesser insignificant crises such as the spread of radical Islam throughout the Muslim world and across the globe, not to mention the Iranian nuclear bomb.
Well, not everybody believes it. There are those people—some themselves scientists, some not—known as “climate deniers.” They have been given a name redolent of the Holocaust to impute to them the status of those terrifying sociopaths who think Auschwitz was just a 1940s version of assisted living. These attacks began over a decade ago in an attempt to make the so-called deniers pariahs. They were often successful, although there has only been the most minor, if any, documented global warming—anthropogenic (man-made) or otherwise—in going on two decades now. Nevertheless, as recently as December 2014 a group calling itself the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry1 released a public letter to the media urging journalists to use the word “deniers” rather than the gentler “skeptics” to describe those—they particularly had Oklahoma senator James Inhofe in mind—who don’t believe in the science. The committee members—who include television “Science Guy” Bill Nye and Carl Sagan’s widow—evidently thought the word “skeptics” too respectable. In a May 2015 op-ed for the Washington Post, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, went further, calling for the fossil fuel industry and its trade associations to be prosecuted under RICO racketeering statutes for engineering supposed secret payments to scientists in the manner of the tobacco industry. None of this ultimately has to do with whether global warming exists or will exist—and if it does, whether it is man-made and, if so, to what extent. Nor does it deal with the question of whether warming is finally good or bad.
This is all arguable and has been argued ad infinitum. The ins and outs of the science are worth studying, but they are not my subjects here. Although my father was a radiologist who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission at its beginnings, treating the Hiroshima Ladies and inspiring me to want to be a physicist as a boy, I gradually turned from the subject as a teenager—in part because of lack of ability—toward literature. I am not remotely qualified to discuss the finer points of climate science in any depth, nor do I intend to. I am an agnostic on the topic of global warming, man-made or otherwise, though I assume climate changes eventually. It always has. There was an ice age, several, in fact, and, from what I understand, a medieval warm period with people growing wine grapes in Scotland. What interests me is why people’s belief systems arose on this topic and why they think what they do; why they are so certain when they have no demonstrable reason to be.
Most of those who have an opinion on the subject have as little science background as I have, often less. This includes a large part of the Congress, the punditocracy, and the many people you meet at cocktail parties who are convinced that climate change is an approaching catastrophe and that it is necessary to spend an overwhelming portion of the national treasuries of the developed world to avoid this particular Armageddon.
Ask those same people about the second law of thermodynamics and they will most likely give you a blank stare and then, with some justification (it’s rude after all), feel insulted that you even brought up such an impertinent question. What does their lack of scientific knowledge have to do with the truth? And if you point out such minor inconsistencies as the lack of hurricanes this year or that the polar bear population is actually expanding instead of declining, the chances of an intelligent dialogue or even a respectful reply are slim. Your words will just disappear into the ether as if you had been flown in from Uttar Pradesh and were speaking in some obscure dialect of Urdu—or they will stare at you as if you had a cognitive disorder. And if a reply does come, more often than not they will deflect the discussion to the supposed consensus of scientists on the matter, many aware of the oft-quoted statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree on the imminent danger of warming (as if it were tooth decay), although the imputation of danger was never part of any larger study and the statistic has been debunked numerous times as inaccurate and, in some cases, deliberately skewed. This is, at base, the oft-debunked “argument from authority,” but if you don’t know enough science, what else can you resort to? That famous logical fallacy was employed in a tweet by none other than President Obama who declared on his personal Twitter account (who knows who actually writes this?)—“Ninety-seven percent of science [sic] agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Note again the use of the scare word “dangerous” that, Alex Epstein explains in Forbes, never appeared in the original scientific literature.2 This is because it’s hard to be sure whether warming is good or bad and scientists know this. There are arguments for both—and that’s to assume that there is any warming at all. The same Forbes article recognizes a measly 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 150 years, a number which is itself under dispute. Indeed in December 2014, the website WattsUpWithThat published ninety-seven articles contradicting the 97 percent consensus.3 And by February 2015, reports were coming from all over the world of an extraordinary amount of fudging of the temperature data that form the UN report in the first place. This was detailed in an article in the Telegraph of London, calling it the “biggest science scandal ever.”4
Just as contradicting facts go unnoticed, facts that confirm one’s narrative tend to linger past their sell-by date and often become indelible. Many will insist global warming is “settled science,” even though the notion of “settled science” is oxymoronic—Newtonian physics having morphed into Einsteinian physics, which is itself already revised, and so forth. Roughly thirty years ago Time and Newsweek trumpeted on their covers that a new ice age was imminent. Now warming is imminent but this time the science is settled. Why is that? Have we finally reached the apotheosis of scientific inquiry, making future study superfluous? That’s ridiculous on its face. As late as 1994, Time was still warning of an impending ice age, as did important US solar physicists in 2013.5 Russian scientists have emphatically predicted cooling and continue to, but as a country dependent on energy production, their opinions are suspect. What makes the assumption of warming being “settled science” particularly ironic is that climate science itself is a field that did not even exist as such during the years of those Time and Newsweek covers. Some say it doesn’t actually exist now as a justifiable, separate category of study; that it is just a foregathering of aspiring physicists, chemists, and geologists who couldn’t make the cut in their more stringent and demanding disciplines.