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
