The Truth, Still Inconvenient

New Krugman, from the New York Times:

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming.

More here.

This is, by now, a very familiar story. People who are serious and principled about knowledge and inquiry, and who are necessarily not blinded by ideology, defer to the scientific consensus on climate change: global warming caused by human industrial activity is a very real phenomenon that stands to devastate civilization. People who are not serious and principled about knowledge and inquiry, and who are deeply wedded to "free market" ideology, however, glibly dismiss scientific consensus on climate change: the science is just wrong, they insist, or it's all a liberal conspiracy to end capitalism, even though getting enough scientists on board to create a pseudo-consensus strains credibility, to say the least.

Despite the story's familiarity, I continue to be shocked and amazed that this is happening. When scientists tell us something along the lines of "the recent earthquake in Japan was so strong that it slightly altered the Earth's rotation," we don't bat an eye. We accept their findings and go to bed well assured that if we really wanted to do so, we could study up and see exactly what they're talking about ourselves. That is, we Americans generally trust the scientific method as a very good philosophy for making sense of material reality, and leave the heavy lifting in science to the people who have spent decades training to do it, such that we aren't forced to personally verify every assertion coming out of their mouths. That's a good thing. We've farmed out the science to a large community of people who are good at it so we can do other things with our lives, like making society function.

But when what scientists are saying conflicts with deeply held beliefs, all that goes out the window. Whether it's evolution, or the big bang, or weapons of mass destruction, or global warming, if it conflicts with pre-existing notions about the universe and our relationship to it, it's just plain wrong. Unless you've got the intellectual balls to reconsider your cherished beliefs, of course, like this guy Muller. But he's kind of the exception that proves the rule. Whatever his earlier problems with climate change were, he was ready and willing to change his mind when the evidence reached a certain threshold--I guess that's not so surprising when you consider that this guy is a scientist, rather than a pundit or politician. Most global warming deniers don't seem to be able to do this. I mean, they are able to change their minds, but they don't. That is, they're intellectually dishonest.

And it's the sheer scale of intellectual dishonesty on global warming that continues to shock and amaze me. It's like seriously insisting to grown adults that Santa Claus exists, and then getting thoroughly pissed off when people say you're wrong. Except that it isn't one guy pushing the Santa Claus theory; it's millions of otherwise intelligent individuals. Worse, the Santa Claus theory is inconsequential. Global warming will destroy civilization.

Maybe the human race has reached its limit on this. Perhaps this is a biological flaw in our species, that we just can't bring ourselves to do what needs to be done in order to save us all. Maybe we deserve to die.

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