There is the view – recently expressed by TFPO’s fearless editor Ari Noonan – that the word “denier” is colloquially reserved for Holocaust deniers. This is news to me. A denier, unless my command of the English language is faulty, is simply someone who denies, which seems pretty straightforward. We are all deniers about one thing or another – the Holocaust NOT being one of them except within the lunatic fringe. Most of us, for example, are flat earth deniers. There are a multiple of truth-claims whose truth, or even possibility of truth, we deny or at least strongly doubt. Yet when it comes to climate change we have the rather puzzling situation of climate change deniers denying their own denial.
Particularly interesting is how climate change deniers voice their hurt and offense at being labeled “deniers” for, well, denying climate change while accusing environmentalists and climate scientists of being frauds, liars, alarmists, chronic deceivers and malevolent conspirators. Who is calling whom names? Of course there are rhetorical blowhards on all sides – Harry Reid counterproductively overplayed his argument with the slavery analogy — but climate change deniers seem to have especially adopted a tactic favoured by creationists: Play the victim of bullying and elicit sympathy for the underdog.
Into this comes the call for more debate, more discussion, more talk. There’s nothing wrong with discussions, of course, if it serves an educational purpose. But there comes a time when talking is merely a stalling tactic to avoid the need to act. It’s much like creationist attempts to use calls for “academic freedom” and “teaching the controversy” – reasonable on the surface – as a wedge to propel their religious agenda by undermining the science of evolution.
A key point is that science does not work by debate in the sense of two people arguing with each other like sophists. Scientists don’t go with the theory that is best talked about; they go with the evidence with the provision that theories are open to revision or rejection in light of new, better evidence. Experiments must be valid, in the sense that they must measure what they are intended to measure. They must be repeatable – an experiment carried out in one lab must yield similar results in another lab using the same experimental protocol. And they must be open to peer review. Of course, science is a human enterprise with all the strengths and imperfections that entails. There are scientists, like Korean veterinarian researcher Hwang Woo-Suk, whose work was proven to be fraudulent. There are cases of fabricated results and credit wrongfully taken. But science as a method provides a built-in framework for dealing with it,and it doesn’t involve holding debates. It’s all about finding better, accurate data — more evidence, in other words. This may seem a bit rosy-eyed, but we can think of it as analogous to open-source software — an entire community of scientists, just like a community of programmers poring over software code, eventually weed out the errors and fabrications through a combination of philosophical commitments to truth and the twin human abilities of cooperation and competition.
The Debate Worth Having
The idea of lay people debating the science of climate change to determine the truth of global warming, then, is a bit nonsensical. Debating policy – what to do about climate change – is not. But how can we get to discussing policy if the science itself isn’t accepted? If it sounds cavalier to say the “debate is over,” even though debating isn’t quite the right word to begin with, it’s because there are plenty of resources explaining the science for anyone who wants to take the time to learn. Think solar flares are warming the earth? Climate scientists have considered it. Convinced that there has been a cooling trend since 1998? The truth about that is available.
It should be said, incidentally, that skeptics of climate change have been engaged by the scientific community instead of merely ignored — skeptics like unmarried marriage counselor Bjorn Lomborg, the statistician and political scientist whose book, the Skeptical Environmentalist, provoked both praise and condemnation for its contrarian view of global warming. Some skeptics – like Michael Shermer, a skeptic in the proper sense of the term – even reached a point where it was no longer reasonable to doubt the science.
(http://www.michaelshermer.com/2008/04/confessions-of-a-former-environmental-skeptic/) The point he makes about how off-putting environmentalists can be in their rhetoric – a bit like PETA and veganism – are worth paying attention to. But at the least, and as an advocate of science, he doesn’t resort to discrediting the world science community or level unproven allegations of hoaxes and fraud.
Unlike the garden-variety deniers, like Sen. Inhofe, Lomborg and Shermer are willing to work with the science and move to the policy debate. Are Lomborg and Shermer correct in supporting a sort of economic triage and cost-benefit analysis that sees adaptation rather than mitigation as the solution? Is it better to cut CO2 emissions as much as possible and keep the planet from warming any further? That’s the debate worth having.
Next week, then, I will get to what I intended to address this week, namely, the answer to this column’s title: the confusion and equivocation of political and scientific considerations.
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week’s column at his blog, www.inkandashes.net
