The Evil That Environmentalists Do
A significant, even paranoid, criticism leveled against global warming is one that equates consensus with conspiracy. This is the view that because there is some dissent, but it hasn’t overturned the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming, then the scientific community must be engaging in a conspiracy to suppress the truth. In his book State of Fear, outspoken climate skeptic Michael Crichton takes this even further by positing a band of evil ecoterrorists who manufacture environmental disasters for the purpose of scaring innocent dupes into controlling green gas emissions. Of course that plot is fiction, but it illustrates the contempt “climate skeptics” have toward global warming: it’s not just a conspiracy, it’s a scam, too.
This is, of course, an attack on science and on scientists for being complicit in the scam, and it’s all the more surprising coming from a man whose novels have all pursued cutting-edge scientific topics. Regardless, it’s important to understand that science is not a democracy nor a committee: It is driven by evidence. Studies must hold up to critical scrutiny (peer reviews), experiments must be replicable, theories must have predictive value, the evidence must support the theory. And just because someone, somewhere, disagrees with the consensus doesn’t, by itself, make the consensus wrong. Interestingly, this kind of attack is common to creationists, who either misguidedly or dishonestly believe that scientists’ squabble over details about how evolution occurs is proof that evolution itself is in doubt.
The history of science is a history of ideas that, through robust theorizing and solid evidence, have often challenged the accepted wisdom of the day. (Think relativity, tectonic plates, quantum mechanics, the heliocentric model of the solar system.) Insofar as global warming is concerned, dissenters haven’t made their case to the majority of climate scientists. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore mentions a survey of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers, of which none were found to disagree with the consensus that human activities are causing a change in global temperatures. That study was conducted by Science Magazine, an important publication by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1880 with money from Thomas Edison. You can read it here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686.
Further undermining the climate conspiracy theory is that dissenters like Michael Crichton haven’t been prevented from publishing or discussing their views. State of Fear, with its footnotes and graphs, is as much a critique of the science as it conspiracy-mongering. It has been thoughtfully critiqued and discussed by numerous individuals, from scientists to the founder of the Skeptics Society Michael Shermer (himself a former climate skeptic, interestingly). See NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies climate modeler Dr. Gavin Schmidt‚s discussion of Crichton‚s book at Real Climate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74.
In Part 2: Another hero for climate skeptics, more muddling, and the ultimate irony.