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When I asked global warming skeptics what it would take to make the case for global warming, what standard of evidence would be satisfying, I was being perfectly sincere. I’d really like to know what the threshold of evidence is for answering the question as to whether or not global warming is real and whether or not we are the cause. It’s like a game, in a way. You win when you achieve the winning conditions defined by a set of rules. So, what rules would satisfy global warming skeptics? What are the winning conditions?
I admit to having an ulterior motive in asking the question, however: to shamelessly bait thefrontpageonline.com’s Fearless Editor, Ari Noonan, into joining the fray. This he very kindly did, in a recent editorial that regrettably doesn’t answer any of the questions I asked, but illustrates an important disconnect in communicating the science of global warming.
“Have you noticed how striking are the similarities between the evangelicals in the global warming movement and the Original Evangelicals in fundamental Christianity?” Mr. Noonan asks, employing a rather dubious sort of inductive reasoning by analogy. To wit:
1) Global warming advocacy reminds Mr. Noonan of Fundamentalist Christian Evangelicals
2) Christian Evangelicals base their commitment on faith
3) Therefore, global warming science is based on faith. “…secular evangelicals, suffering from excessive chutzpah, mistakenly label their faith as mathematical proof,” says Mr. Noonan.
The equivocation in the argument is astonishing. In true po-mo fashion, Mr. Noonan reduces scientific discourse to yet another faith-based, subjective enterprise. While he is quite correct in pointing how Christian Evangelicals rely on faith to support their commitment to God, he doesn’t seem to understand that science works differently from religion and is based on different epistemological principles. Science relies on key notions such as: testability (a hypothesis must be testable to be valid) and repeatability (others must be able to replicate experiments and obtain similar results). Science is based on observation, measurement, experiment, peer review, and reasoning (e.g. logical, mathematical). Religion, by contrast, typically makes claims based on revelation, textual authority, and tradition, although there is a trend of using science to prove religious notions. Depending upon one’s perspective, religion and science can conflict, co-exist independently, or even cooperate.
Science is Not Religion
It cannot be emphasized enough that the encounter between religion and science has always been in terms of epistemology – of how knowledge is obtained, defined and shown to correspond to truth. It would be necessary to devote more than the space available here to fully explore how religion and science have come into contact, but here’s an example of why Christian Evangelicals asking why their proof is unpersuasive in the face of scientific attack isn’t equivalent to asking why global warming science is unpersuasive to people like Mr. Noonan. With religious arguments, the problem is actually rather fundamental: What is God? How do we know God exists? Is it really God, or is it Yahweh, or Allah? Maybe it’s not one God, but many? If we don’t know what we’re talking about, if we can’t agree on what “God” is (and we certainly don’t), we can’t really make heads or tails of statements like “God exists.” And with so many religions to choose from, so many theologies, one can hardly get to the question of how we know God exists, let alone debate what God wants us to do with ourselves.
Not so with global warming, which is easily defined as an increase in the average global temperature. Furthermore, we can define the conditions in we can determine whether or not global warming is occurring and what consequences higher temperatures entail – increasing temperatures measure over a long time span, the presence of greenhouse gases, changes in weather patterns. These are empirical propositions with specific testing methods that include statistical analyses and computer modeling, but also physical methods involving tree rings, atmospheric chemistry, ice core sampling, weather measurements, and much more.
Call it Evangelical Denialism
Mr. Noonan claims that a body of thinking does not constitute consensus, but I think Mr. Noonan confuses consensus with unanimity. When global warming advocates talk about the scientific consensus, they mean that the majority (not necessarily each and every single individual) of the world’s scientists and scientific organizations are in agreement based on a review of available evidence – consensus, after all, does mean “general agreement.” Coby Beck, in an article (http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/13/221250/49) addressing the very issue of consensus, offers an excellent explanation of the scientific global warming consensus along with a huge list of the scientific groups that form this consensus.
Global warming isn’t a matter of faith, and saying it is for whatever reason doesn’t make it so. In fact, the refusal to acknowledge, let alone understand, the scientific nature of global warming fits the very pattern Mr. Noonan criticizes in global warming educators – albeit with a twist – while illustrating the need for better scientific education. Call it evangelical denialism. To borrow from Mr. Noonan: evangelical deniers commonly dismiss scientific claims that problemize their belief that scientific knowledge is merely another faith-based enterprise and thus to be rejected if inconvenient, unpleasant, or otherwise undesirable. In discussing global warming, then, the challenge isn’t only to discuss the science of global warming, but also to discuss the practice of science itself.
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