Among the factional disputes over which the coming war will be fought is climate change. (Specifically, I mean anthropogenic climate change, but for rhetorical economy I'll be omitting the qualifier.) The political left and right have both been wrong, but the right has been arguably more wrong.
I was never a denier of climate change, but I was for a long time unpersuaded that the problem was as severe as liberals were claiming. One reason for my skepticism was the perfect fit between the problem as they described it and the solutions they were proposing, most of which depended on an unprecedented augmentation of governmental power. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, had similar reservations, which he discussed in an article he posted on his own website in 2008, "Confessions of a Former Environmental Skeptic."
One progressive who used to be famous in the skeptic community, in a blog post I remember reading but cannot now find, faulted Shermer for having committed the genetic fallacy. That is the mistake of claiming that an argument must be fallacious, or its conclusion must be wrong, because of its advocates' bad motives.
That was not what Shermer ever claimed, though. He could not have been critiquing the arguments for climate change because he is not a climate scientist, and nobody but a climate scientist is qualified to critique the arguments used by climate scientists in defense of what they say about the problem.
In just about any public venue, including newspapers, journals of opinion, or almost any Internet discussion site, we're not hearing the scientific arguments for climate change. We are hearing assertions that there is a consensus, among scientists with relevant credentials, that climate change is happening and human activity is the primary cause of its happening. And the people making those assertions are usually political activists, rarely scientists and almost never climate scientists.
And when some of us asked, "Why should I believe that?" the usual reply was something like, "Trust me. Everyone who really cares about the future of humanity knows it's true." For many of us, that wasn't a good enough reason.
Shermer mentioned four books he had to read before he changed his mind. I did not know about those books and would not have had ready access to them if I had known. I did get an opportunity, though, to spend several hours searching the Internet for a layman-friendly summary of the relevant evidence and the arguments used by climate scientists to infer their conclusions from that evidence.
The results of my search were tentatively persuasive, but I had an advantage. I am more scientifically literate than the average layperson, so I understand the statistical jargon and other scientific lingo.
Is it "settled science" as some progressives say? Not to the same degree that, say, heliocentrism is, but it's all the science we have at this moment in history, and it is substantial. I don't see much room for reasonable doubt. I especially don't seem much room after examining the arguments of those who still dispute it.
We have to be careful with this, because of something called the "fallacy fallacy." We commit this if we say something like, "My argument must be valid, because my opponent's argument is invalid."
No, logic doesn't work that way. It can have some relevance, though, to which side a layperson should come down on in a scientific debate.
My scientific literacy does not extend to the details of climate science. I understand what they're saying when they talk in layman's terms, but I can't follow them when they're talking in their own technical language. What I can do is two things.
One is to apply what I know about the scientific method to my observation that there is an overwhelming consensus among the people with relevant expertise that climate change is a real thing and will have some nasty consequences for a substantial fraction of the world's populace.
The other is to apply what I have learned about disputing authority, which is something I do myself on a few issues. If you're going to say the authorities are making a mistake, you've got to be extra careful not to make any mistakes yourself.
In science, there is really only one argument for any theory. There can be any number of arguments against it, but only one is needed to falsify it, if it's a sufficiently cogent argument. The problem with climate science denialism is that its advocates have no cogent arguments at all. These people are all over YouTube, and I have yet to find one who validly infers their conclusion from any undisputed fact. This does not mean that there is no good case to be made against climate change, but it does mean that, so far as I'm aware, no good case has been made yet.
Since the deniers have had all the time they should have needed to make their case, it seems reasonable for the rest of us to accept the scientific consensus for the time being. To accept the apparent fact of climate change, though, is not to agree with anybody who tells us what we should be doing about it.
This is where the conservative community made its big mistake. That mistake was, apparently, to agree with liberals that their solutions were the only good solutions. Since conservatives could not accept those solutions, they backed themselves into the corner of denial. And in so doing, they gave their adversaries a convenient excuse to accuse them of being anti-science.
Next: Suspicious minds
(This page last updated on June 15, 2020.)