The New Green Inquisition
by Andrew Bissell
Throughout the history of science, skeptics and radical thinkers have often battled entrenched orthodoxies -- imposed by religious and political institutions -- to achieve a better understanding of the way the world works. Galileo and Pasteur come to mind. Today’s global warming skeptics, it seems, sometimes have it no better.
Like the churches and inquisitions of yesteryear, today’s environmentalists wish to declare their thesis of climate change beyond the pale of rational scientific discourse. That thesis is simple: manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s atmosphere to warm. So far, so good; it makes sense that all the carbon we send into the air would have some effect, and the theories of how it contributes to atmospheric warming are sound.
The problems creep in when these same theorists try to construct models to extrapolate how drastic those changes will be, or what impacts they might have on the weather, or to what extent the current warming trend is caused by manmade factors. It is here that we begin to slip beyond the realm of science and into Doomsday proclamations: hurricanes and tornadoes will be more powerful! we’ll have a new ice age! millions will starve! human sacrifice! dogs and cats living together! mass hysteria!
The flaws in these catastrophic predictions, and the models and theories used to support them, are well-documented. In the last quarter-century, surface temperatures have risen at about the same rate as between 1915 and 1945, a period when CO2 emissions were still relatively low. (This suggests that we’re in the midst of a nature-driven warming trend, which our own emissions have done very little to accelerate.) Models used to predict temperatures over the next hundred years conflict with satellite readings from the upper atmosphere, which has not warmed as quickly as those models said it should have.
Faced with these objections, proponents of catastrophic climate change theories have a ready-made response: trust the models, doubt the data. After all, the models must be sound, since a “consensus” of interested scientists has judged them to be so.
But reality is not shaped or perceived by consensus. As science-fiction author Michael Crichton said: “I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that e=mc squared. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
Proponents of global warming theories presume that the scientists who make up this consensus have been motivated by the purest of motives -- concern for the planet, and a desire to seek scientific truth. In fact, in the highly politicized field of climate change research, the rewards from the public till -- research grants, prestige, the chance to testify before Congress or write a U.N. report -- often go to those scientists whose research makes the most frightening predictions (and therefore, the most compelling case for expanding government power and regulation).
Which is not to make the ludicrous postmodernist claim that all science is just lies and half-truths used to further the prejudices of its practicioners and financial backers. Some very real weaknesses have been exposed in global warming theories, but they are met with chiding, ad hominem attacks. After all, why deal with an opponent’s arguments, when you can point an accusing finger at his funding sources and compare him to Holocaust deniers instead?
In fact, this was precisely the tactic employed against Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish environmentalist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a scientific tract that questioned traditional environmentalist dogmas about many issues, including climate change and its solutions. When Scientific American published an 11-page attack on his book, he was given only a page-and-a-half to respond. When he decided this wasn’t enough and published a full response on his website instead, the magazine threatened to sue him for copyright infringement. As Crichton put it, “further attacks since have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy.”
What Scientific American and its ilk are engaged in is not science. It is the persecution of the apostates of environmentalism, the worldview which Crichton observes is now “the new religion of the secular West.” Indeed, it must take quite a leap of faith to believe that catastrophic climate change predictions, of events which have yet to occur, are as certain as the historical truth of the Holocaust. But the greens have their faith -- that humans are doomed to extinction by their own hubris and excess -- and force all other pursuits, including climate research, into this narrow perspective.
Every age has its irrational belief-systems. The tragedy is that environmentalism has once again dragged us into an age where science is corrupted by the pervasive evils of religious orthodoxy and political power-grabs.
This column originally appeared in the Montana Kaimin on April 19, 2005.
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