Читать книгу I Know Best - Roger L. Simon - Страница 12
ОглавлениеGrandmother 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. That’s an admittedly severe, and possibly unfair evaluation, but the overall point remains. Science is under assault in the name of 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. Substitute causes like endangered species and the disappearance of the Amazonian rain forest, while evocative, lacked the immediacy, not to say proximity, to muster serious adherence and garner significant donations for an expanding community of interlocking businesses and NGOs. The movement needed a new cause. This decline in interest roughly coincided with the disputed, though ultimately failed, 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore. The former vice-president had been deprived of a lifetime ambition he thought he deserved and had won. For a while he acted like a wounded and rather disappointed animal, but then he found his mojo again. For some years a self-styled environmentalist, he seized on the opportunity to put forward the momentary imminence of global climate catastrophe. Almost certainly he did not exaggerate this deliberately, at least consciously, but if he had merely mentioned the problem as potentially one among many, as yet not fully scientifically determined, nothing much would have happened in the short run, if at all, particularly for him. Obviously, it did. Soon enough he was the most famous environmentalist on the planet, a shared Nobel Prizewinner and a nascent billionaire through green investments and carbon exchanges, the selling of so-called “carbon offsets” between businesses. That most of these investments failed and that the exchanges disappeared after being scrutinized for fraud was beside the point. Gore had already more than filled that void created by those relatively clear skies. These two factors, Gore’s desire to remake his mark with a new opportunity and the void in the environmental movement, united to create a climate crisis with moral narcissism as the glue that brought and held them together, that made it possible, and made people want to believe. A bourgeoisie, already identifying with the defense of mother earth, was ready to take that step. Controlling the weather was humanity’s most important cause.
