The New Skeptical Position on Global Warming

Posted on December 16, 2004 in Global Warming Journalists & Pundits Reading

Over Thanksgiving, my family talked about the recent cold snap which brought snow down to the three thousand foot level on the Santa Anas, the unusual hot summer in the Pacific Northwest, and the heavy rainfall predicted for the winter. When we all put our anecdotes out on the table, I grinned and said “But remember: there’s no such thing as Global Climate Change.”

Ten to fifteen years ago, there was still little enough information out there for a large group of genuine skeptics to hold back their opinions on the matter. Sites devoted to debunking UFOS, ghosts, ESP, and quackery often included links and articles questioning global warming. Since then, the evidence has mounted and the scientific mainstream has accepted the greenhouse effect as genuine. F. Sherwood Rowland won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work demonstrating how rising carbon dioxide levels and ozone depletion are causing the average world temperature to increase. Scientists now fear that carbon dioxide levels — which are now at 380 ppm (up from a 400,000 year old global equillibrium of 300 ppm) — may reach 500 ppm by the year 2040. (Most of the rise has been generated in the last ten years!) This is no longer about thirty year cycles and environmentalist alarmism, mainstream scientists concur, but about our way of life changing the very air we breathe!

Among the phenomena observed by scientists at a June conference on climate change hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

• Sea levels are rising
• Ice caps are melting
• Glaciers are retreating (Imagine a Mount Rainier, for example, without its white shield of living ice)
• Animal species are adjusting their ranges (fish have disappeared from the Aleutians, for example, because the warming of the waters makes them less oxygen rich than before)

No self-respecting scientist dares question the findings any more than ordinary people question that the sun will appear to rise in the morning. The future holds the uncertainty of mathematical imprecision: changes will not come steadily but in jumps and jiggles. The models and predictions, on the other hand, accurately reflect what is happening to the planet.

The only intelligesia who still claim that there is no such thing as global warming are those with a political ax to grind and the journalists who write down everything they say as gospel. In his Doubt and About column, Skeptical Enquirer staffer Chris Mooney has this to say:

It would be a stretch to say that the theory of anthropogenic climate change has become as firmly established as, say, the theory of evolution, but there are telling similarities. Both views have won broad acceptance by the vast majority of scientific experts and now only come under fire from a small band of contrarian outliers. Moreover, the outliers aren’t contributing much real science at this point. With a few exceptions, they’re taking their case straight to journalists and public policymakers, an end run around the peer-review process. And, of course, when the debate isn’t going their way, they cry persecution.

Skeptics should recognize many of these traits; we’ve seen them before, not just in antievolutionists but among a wide variety of fringe scientists. At the very least, then, it seems that anyone who claims to be a science defender — but questions the reality of human-induced climate change — should have to answer the following question: Why trust the mainstream scientific community on other issues but not this one? One possible response — dismissing today’s climate science as warped by environmental alarmism — strikes me as simply untenable. If we truly believe that ideology can so corrupt the scientific method in one field, then why place any more trust in the rest of science?

To know the faults of the extreme Right, I have often said, see what they project on the rest of us. And here the fault (as it usually is) is ideological purblindness coupled with a belief in magical thinking: they don’t want themselves to be seen as mouthpieces for evil, here defined as those agents which promote the way of life which is undoing the atmospheric integrity of our planet. Plus they seem to believe that they can will science to their view by rousing the mob. The only arguments against global warming are political: for this reason we can solidly reject Fred Singer and Patrick Mitchell as part of a well-funded lunatic fringe. What they are up against, however, is the Truth. They may win the hearts and minds of the ignorant and the unschooled, but the Earth will continue to act beyond human will. The only defense they can make in the end is to deny that the sun is indeed rising on hot days and altered ecosystems.

And denying what is right before your eyes is not now, never has been, and never will be Science. To question the facts without contrary and verifiable evidence is not skepticism, but crackpotism.