This ran a while back on Splice Today.
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There is nothing quite so sad as a sad technocrat. The technocrats know what is best for all of us. They know how to bring that “best” about. They have charts and science and graphs—oh, the poignant, unlooked-at graphs! But though they know all, though they see all, though they can save the world, none will heed them. Though they cry out in the language of science, their wisdom is mocked and their efficiencies sneered at. The world, they know, will die, all because the fools would not listen!
It’s a familiar story, reiterated once again in this endless and wretchedly self-vaunting post by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower, experts who, together, have the proportionate prose style of a flaccid guppy.
But we are not here for the prose style, but for the insight and the wisdom. Varki and Brower have gotten up upon the soapbox to tell you that global warming is a real problem, and that those who do not treat it as such are deluded fools. The emotional climax of the piece comes when the authors reminisce about a 2007 conference they attended in which “some of the oldest and best-known American societies that focus on the value of knowledge” came together to insist that “in order for democracy to succeed, it must be based on real knowledge of the facts of the world around us.” The conference attendees even wrote books about it. And yet, the authors lament, despite the clear directive from important knowledge societies, people still just kept on being people, believing in dietary supplements and natural cures and all that nonsense. “Why is it,” they wail, “that so many humans are attracted to these illogical doctrines?”
In answer, the two spout completely unproven theories about humans’ need for illusions in the face of mortality. They also promise that we can achieve a “complete recognition of reality,” but only if we are as knowledgeable and thoughtful as Richard Dawkins, who, they fail to mention, is kind of an ignorant xenophobic shithead.
Also worth noting is that, in the course of their discussion of climate change, they claim that as one effect of global warming, “it is plausible that we could… tip the planet into an ice age.” Which sounds like it can’t be true, and, in fact, appears to be untrue. If you’re going to lambast the rest of the world for not being as smart as you are, the least you could do, you’d think, would be to get the science right.
I understand why Varki and Brower are frustrated. Global warming and environmental degradation are real and dangerous problems, and we need to confront them. Our political institutions have been very reluctant to do this, and a not insubstantial minority of people has actively denied that anything is wrong. The obvious conclusion is that those people are dumb, and that our political institutions are ineffectual.
And you know what? People really are often dumb, and democratic politics is a grim slog against the rampant imbecility of the majority. I don’t deny that.
The problem is, when you say “people” are dumb, that’s not just that guy over there drooling. It’s everybody. Everybody is dumb in some ways, sometimes. If you’re not denying global warming, you’re seriously suggesting that human gullibility should be repealed because you attended some stupid conference. If you’re not burbling about the dangers of vaccinations, you’re burbling about the coming ice age.
Knowledge is great, vital and useful. Reason is a powerful tool, and can help us get out of nearly as many messes as it gets us into. But there’s nothing smart, or reasonable, about talking to your fellow citizens as if they’re idiots, and there’s nothing particularly reality-based about condescending to your fellow human beings as if you think you are gods. Varki and Brower want to convince their readers that global warming is a serious problem. But all they really manage to do is to show that technocracy can be a kind of idolatry, and that being impressed with your own overwhelming knowledge is a sure way to make yourself sound like a fool.
I hate to defend people who sound so undefendable, but I have to quibble with your claim that they are wrong about ice ages. Most of what follows I learned from Wallace Broecker while I was an undergrad at Columbia 20 years ago. Broecker was one of the very first scientists to call attention to the possibility of human caused global warming back in the 70’s, but what follows is based on what is actually fairly simple mathematics. (Ok,
fairly simple if you have a Ph.D. in math and specialize in dynamics, but those happen to be true of me.)
The mathematics says that complicated systems (like global climate) can, when knocked out of equilibrium, behave quite erratically and unpredictably. The technical term is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, the non-technical buzz words are “chaos theory”. (The book Chaos by James Gleick is quite good if you really want to know an awful lot more.) Now say we take the global climate and change it by raising global temperatures by a few degrees and melting a bunch of polar ice. Then it seems a fairly good guess that we will have kicked a complicated system out of equilibrium. After which the really scary part is that anything can happen and it can happen quite quickly. Including reverting to equilibrium, sudden and dramatically more intense heating, and sudden and dramatic cooling. For all intents and purposes which of those you get is fairly close to random.
To give a touch of concreteness, a purely speculative “example”: the cold weather in the US for the last week was caused by the failure of the polar vortex. I.e. by the failure of strong winds that normally keep cold air trapped at the pole. Perhaps global warming will cause this vortex to fail more or less permanently, causing the entire northern hemisphere to suddenly become much colder most of the year round. Maybe this cooling cause such political mayhem that there will be a nuclear exchange between various countries, knocking out much of civilization, ending much of our current carbon emissions, and feeling the sky with heat blocking particles. Bang, ice age.
That example is specifically designed to sound unlikely and cock-eyed, but the point is that once the system is out of equilibrium, unlikely and cock-eyed things are no longer unlikely. Of course reality is probably a lot more imaginative than I am, and so there are probably more interesting ways of ending up with an ice age. But anyone claiming that we can rule out an ice age as a result of global warming is claiming a lot more confidence in their model of climate and their ability to compute exact outcomes than is anywhere near plausible.
To be clearer: not all complex systems behave in the random way described in the last post. But “most” complex systems do and it is very hard to determine whether a given complex system will. We just don’t know enough about climate to rule out that the climate is such a system.
So climate change denial is the fault of the hubris and incompetence of scientists. Got it.
In other news, how can global warming be real when it’s winter? The earth has gone through cyclical temperature changes since its creation in 4004 BC.
The issue isn’t that it sound unlikely or that it’s impossible. The issue is that (at least as far as I can tell) the scientific consensus at the moment is that this is really extremely unlikely. They say the hollywood ice age movie could happen in 60 years. I don’t think any reputable scientist thinks that’s the case. The summary I link pretty much gets at what the consensus is on this, which is that apocalyptic ice age scenarios are bullshit.
Now, they could certainly say, most climate scientists believe this is bullshit, but we disagree because of x, y, and z. But as far as I can tell, the consensus on no ice age is not significantly less firm than the consensus on climate change occurring. There’s always the possibility that something unexpected could happen. But saying, “something unexpected could happen” and saying that an ice age is plausible are two pretty different things. They’re doing exactly what they accuse their opponents of doing, it seems like.
No, climate change denial is not the fault of the hubris and incompetence of scientists. But the hubris and incompetence of scientists doesn’t help.
Noah, ok, a sixty year time scale for major shifts in climate is really short. After all, depending on who you ask, we might not really be “out of equilibrium” till around the end of that period. But I would actually be surprised if Broecker were to say it was impossible and he is about as reputable as a climate scientist can be.
I actually think a lot of climate scientists do where blinders and think their models are far more complete and comprehensive than they are in reality. I think they do this in part in response to pressure from the climate change denial crowd, but I find it not at all convincing. One here’s quite regularly of factors they don’t understand that might lead to dramatically more rapid warming, like loss of polar ice and permafrost melt releasing lots of methane. Or like the beatles that are killing trees in the American West contributing to forest fires and otherwise causing carbon stored in trees to enter the atmosphere. One doesn’t hear much about mechanisms that might make it a lot colder. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any such mechanisms, it just means that people aren’t looking for them.
I’ve looked fairly hard at the climate science and think there is a convincing case to be made that human greenhouse gas emissions are going to considerably change the earth’s climate. But I don’t think there is a convincing case to be made that we know what will happen as the climate changes. Some climate scientists have models that will make some predictions, but there is wild variation in the predictions they make and lots of assumptions in the models that are very difficult to justify completely based on the current state of knowledge. The funny thing is that this gets brushed under the rug to avoid attack from climate change deniers. But if understood correctly, it should make you more afraid of climate change not less. The chance of forces we don’t understand precisely balancing the bad news we know about and leaving things hunky dory is absurdly small.
Oh, that makes sense to me from what I’ve read too. There are too many factors for them to know for sure what’s going to happen.
For that matter, from what I’ve been able to glean, we’re pretty much fucked at this point no matter what we do. Lowering greenhouse gas emissions isn’t going to make much of a difference considering how much co2 we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere.
Yeah, I read something somewhere recently where Broecker was quoted talking about how one might develop the technology used in current clean coal smoke stacks to pull carbon dioxode directly out of the atmosphere. Apparently there are technological difficulties in that the smoke stack versions use the fact that the air there is very, very hot. But it also seemed like the technological difficulties were partly overcome. The real difficult is that to remove significant carbon from the atmosphere this way would probably cost a couple of trillion dollars… More details can be found at the end of
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/20751-climate-change-2013-where-we-are-now-not-what-you-think
which otherwise is quite long and depressing.
For all the contempt you affect for the scientific community you don’t dispute the reality of global warming, so I wonder what strategy you recommend for motivating the public. You are aware that there have been no shortage of efforts to tie environmental consciousness to new and old religions over the past several decades, are you not?
No, global warming is real. I don’t know that there is any great strategy for motivating the public, unfortunately.