I Know Best. Roger L. Simon
science. A new version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible could be written about global warming/climate change with the deniers in the role of the Salem witches. Ditto Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo with the deniers in the role of the great Florentine himself, battling the received wisdom of his day, clerical and otherwise, as he insists the earth really does revolve around the sun.
The manipulation of science for political purposes is not new and the moral narcissism of whatever era is always there as a means to exploit science for ideological purposes, sometimes in a manner that truly is dangerous. In one notable and ominous example, in the 1940s Joseph Stalin used ideas that biologist Trofim Lysenko had derived from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—that acquired changes such as the enlargement of a muscle through exercise would be transmitted to offspring—to undermine accepted evolutionary theory and the Mendelian theory of genetic inheritance. Lysenko developed his erroneous conclusions in the field of agriculture, but Stalin and his totalitarian Communist minions exploited them to create the impression that human traits were not genetically determined and that a “new man” could be created in the Soviet Union, free of the encumbrances and reactionary values of the bourgeois past. In 1948, all scientific opposition to Lysenko’s theories was formally outlawed in the USSR, literally destroying modern genetics in that country for a generation and turning many legitimate scientists into enemies of the state. The commissars “knew best.” You’d better be a “new man”—or else.
To say modern day climate manipulation has gone that far is of course radically unfair. Climate deniers may have been made professional pariahs in some instances, but they’re not—unless Senator Whitehouse gets his way—in jail or the Gulag. But the Lysenko story should be a cautionary tale. Science should be shielded in a secure zone away from politicians and political leaders and separate from ideological bias from any side. Admittedly this is a tad idealized and complete innocence of motive is a bit much to ask in human affairs, but it should always be the goal to maintain the preservation of science itself. A significant percentage of environmental science these days—the climate science area in particular but a fair percentage of generalized environmentalism as well—has gone in the direction of virtually unquestioned cant. What was once called conservationism, something almost all people applauded and engaged in, disappeared in favor of a fervent and faith-like rigid belief system exemplified by the ritualized celebration of Earth Day as the modern Christmas. Mother earth had become the new Madonna and Child combined. At the same time, the more the environmental movement centered on climate Armageddon, the less attention we devoted to scientifically verifiable and often solvable ecological problems that will always be around us. They were just not glamorous enough.
How this happened psychologically and emotionally—how anthropogenic global warming became the dominant apocalyptic threat of our time, outdistancing even nuclear war, transnational terrorism, and other perils such as attacks on the power grid or computer hacks of military, government, and corporate facilities that could bring the world to a standstill—is at once fascinating and disturbing. Consistent with the premise of this book, moral narcissism was the culprit in making the weather, even now, the bellwether for determining one’s political correctness, one’s acceptability in polite society. As with so many trends, it was a matter of timing. A gap needed filling.
But before going further, I should note that at this moment a dawning disinterest by the public at large in the climate change narrative. This is not surprising—it is part of a common pattern. Morally narcissistic ideation typically descends from elites to the masses for their consumption, approval, and adoption. It remains that way until the masses, what Bill O’Reilly quaintly calls “the folks,” suddenly wake up and shrug it off—or even begin to think it’s cuckoo. But the damage is almost always already done. Legislation has been enacted; government regulations put in place; fraudulent business deals made. So it was with global warming. Late in the last century, elites informed the masses that the earth was warming due to man-caused carbon dioxide emissions, something that as yet can only be proven by statistical inference or computer modeling, not so far by experimental reproduction as per the scientific method. A few of these elites were knowledgeable in the science but most were not. Nevertheless, the much larger latter group—perhaps because they sought a kind of validation by association in a technological age (a makeup grade for college science embarrassment, you might say)—insisted that warming was imminent and potentially catastrophic. It was, after all, consistent with an already prevalent world view—that man was a despoiler. It was the next semilogical step.
Mass media—an ever-willing and in many ways dominant force among the elites because of its permanence—was crucial in this endeavor. A critical mass started to occur as the warming theory approached its apotheosis with the publication of Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth. This became the documentary for which Gore’s producer was awarded an Oscar. (Gore himself was a D student in geology at Harvard, speaking of makeup grades.) When the promised cataclysms never occurred, the rapid warming in the form of Michael Mann’s highly publicized “hockey stick” graph not replicated in reality, the elites informed the masses they were confusing weather with climate. Taking a page from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, “global warming” was removed from the lexicon and the new phrase “climate change” promulgated. It was a catchall for everything. Cooling meant climate change, just as warming had meant climate change. Frequent hurricanes, cold snaps, heat waves, and random tornadoes were climate change. And when it was pointed out that there were actually fewer hurricanes rather than the predicted increase, that was climate change too. How this new phraseology differed from the ever-variable weather that the public had seen in front of them all their lives was explained theoretically in various ways, but not in a way that could be easily comprehensible to the public or even to many of the politicians and pundits who were themselves trying to explain it. Theories such as the deep ocean water mitigating warming were proffered and then mysteriously withdrawn or bickered about. Others complained of excessive acidification of the oceans while still others worried about marine ecosystems. In January 2015, more scientists in the Oxford Journal BioScience were insisting this was all “group think.”
Before that, and more importantly, there had been the familiar email problems. In 2009, years of private communications from scientists at East Anglia University—the hub of climate research in the United Kingdom—had been leaked with indications that data had been fudged to “hide the decline” in warming. (This happened again as recently as 2015, in this case by America’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)6 The motivations for this fudging were all too obvious—professional reputations and cold hard cash were at play. Many rose to defend the scientists involved but the damage was done. So the politicians’ opinions were open to mockery, but those opinions, motivated as they were by moral narcissism and by donations from exceptionally wealthy backers like hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, themselves similarly motivated, rarely varied or even were revised an iota to account for the embarrassment.
Views based on moral narcissism are most often written in stone. Changing them can create an unbearable wound to the self, personality disintegration. Even when Patrick Moore—the cofounder of environmental giant Greenpeace—admitted there was “no actual proof” of man-made global warming, it made little lasting impression in the high-level global zeitgeist.7 The elites—Western leaders—were unmoved by the apostasy of one of their own. They couldn’t allow it. They just pretended he never existed. Similarly, when so-called “father of global warming” and mentor of Al Gore former UC San Diego professor Roger Revelle allowed near the end of his life that his original opinions on warming might have been “drastic,” Gore accused the multiple award-winning scientist of being dotty. Then, upon his death, Revelle’s daughter stepped in quickly to assure the world that her father had privately told her at the end of his life that he had never changed his mind. Global warming was a serious matter. Dissenting opinions could not be countenanced. By early 2014, one Rochester Institute of Technology professor even called for the political prosecution of “denialists.”8
After all, that void had been filled. There was no going back. At the end of the last century the ever-expanding environmental movement was stalling. Smog had significantly diminished as a major blight on American cities, leaving them without the most palpable evidence of looming environmental disaster. The skies even over Los Angeles were mostly clear.