By Ron Odom
“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency
--Emily Dickinson
In 1952 Albert Einstein wrote an essay entitled “On the Moral Obligation of the Scientist” in which he concluded by writing, “If the man of science of our day could find the time and courage to think honestly and critically over his situation and the tasks before him and if he would act accordingly, the possibilities for a sensible and satisfactory solution of the present dangerous international situation would be considerably improved.” The emphasis with italics here is mine because courage, honesty, and critical thinking seem something sorely lacking by scientists, and others who should know better, on a variety of different issues. Issues that one would think, here in the 21st century, where thinking would not be so confused. But apparently, they are, and this has led a number of authors, in the past five years, to write a number of insightful books, with the aim of clearing things up.
An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to the movie, by Al Gore is not one of these books, but it is a good place to start in a discussion on the obfuscation of the truth, and the spread of unreasonable thinking. Gore’s book is a study in the fallacious art of argument by simple assertion. Or in other words, an argument based on the idea: Because I say it, that makes it true. On the whole, the book has the appearance and look of a coffee table book, full of pretty color pictures of the Earth from space, of mountains, glaciers, oceans, and of Mr. Gore himself looking concerned and earnest. In between, and overlaid on, these pictures is text, usually in big bold font, proclaiming dire predictions about the fate of the planet unless all sinners against the environment repent and change their ways.
One thing that the book lacks however is an appendix, bibliography, or anything approaching a sources or works cited page. Given that Mr. Gore is not a scientist, one would think that he would want to support his assertions with some kind of data or evidence to lend credibility to his claims. Alas we are apparently supposed take what the former Vice President says on faith. This expectation is reflected by Gore’s smug proclamations, since the release of the movie that the debate on global warming is over.
One particular example from the book that epitomizes what is wrong with the entire work, is when Gore attempts to backup his claim that the debate is over by writing that there are 928 scientific, peer reviewed, articles supporting the theories of global warming, and 0 articles refuting the various theories. This is an absurd statement on the face of it, and it is simply not true. A mere hour’s worth of casual searching on the academic web site JSTOR produced nine articles and editorials by scientists casting doubt on many of the assumptions, findings, and methodology of their colleagues. The articles range in date from 1990 to 2000, and are mostly drawn from Science magazine and publications by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. Granted, the number of these articles, and others like them that must certainly exist, do not approach the 928 number Gore cites, but they do suggest that the debate is far from “over.”
Other portions of the book are simply comical. One section presents a satellite photo of Florida, and the same photo right beside it showing hypothetical water inundation of the state due to rising ocean levels resulting from global warming. It looks scary, but it doesn’t prove anything. Trick photography doesn’t constitute an argument. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the old, and equally ridiculous, anti drug commercial with the guy frying the egg. This is Florida, this is Florida underwater. Any questions? Yeah, here’s one: Where’s the evidence? In sum, the only thing inconvenient about An Inconvenient Truth is the amount of time wasted by giving it any serious consideration. The book looks as if it could be a part of the press kit for the movie The Day After Tomorrow and as such only serves to reinforce the beliefs of those who have already chosen to buy into the type of doomsday scenarios so often presented as unassailable fact by many in the environmental movement.
Ironically, a perfect counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth is found in a book that does not attempt to hide the fact that it is a work of fiction. Michael Crichton’s recent novel State of Fear is the story of a group of brave skeptics who battle radical environmentalists and their attempts to create global catastrophes in order the further their agenda. During the course of the story the skeptics travel around the world with other characters representing more moderate and sincere, but ultimately misguided and uninformed, environmentally minded people. In between harrowing encounters with the bad guys, these two groups debate each other, and within the framework of this entertaining story, many of the most important beliefs and arguments regarding global warming are discussed and dissected by the skeptics.
In course of the conversations between these fictional characters, more real evidence and data is presented than in Mr. Gore’s sober, “non-fiction” coffee table book. The arguments that the novel’s heroes put forth are fact based, and it is probably one of the few thrillers you will find that is footnoted and referenced with real sources like an academic article. Although the story is entertaining, State of Fear is worth its price for the appendix and lengthy annotated bibliography that Crichton provides of the sources he used in the writing of the novel. He also includes an essay entitled “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous” that everyone should read.
Two of the books mentioned in his bibliography deserve special attention, and the arguments contained in them must be considered by anyone who is sincerely concerned with global warming and other environmental issues. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, and former Greenpeace activist, is one of the most reasoned, balanced, and well supported rebuttals to much of the sloppy or hyperbolic thinking that underpins much environmentalist doctrine. Lomborg is, by his own description, “an old left-wing Greenpeace member” and his book was the result of research he undertook to disprove the findings of an American economist named Julian Simon.
Basically, Simon argued that many of the assumptions about the environment are wrong, or based on faulty reasoning, and that doomsday predictions about the environment are ill-founded. In the course of his research Lomborg discovered that much of what Simon said was correct. Lomborg then displayed a quality so rare today; the moral and intellectual courage to admit that he had been wrong about much of what he previously believed, and he then changed his views accordingly. The result is The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that tackles a number of important environmental and human welfare issues, with global warming chief among them.
Lomborg does not deny that the Earth’s climate is experiencing a warming trend and that man made causes have a lot to do with this change. What he disputes is the more exaggerated predictions and costly proposed solutions that have become such a routine part of the debate. On the subject of global warming his goal is “to separate hyperbole from the real problems and allow us to plot the best course of action for the future.” The book is rigorously and relentlessly supported by scientific data and studies, including data produced by organizations whose methodology he criticizes, chief among them being the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.
No review can do this important book justice but the following are among Lomborg’s most salient points and contributions to the debate. Forecasts of a six degree climate change by the end of the century are not plausible. The world’s temperature over the past century, a time when most of the world (especially the Communist parts) operated on very little pollution or environmental restrictions, increased a whopping 0.6 degrees Celsius. The computer modeling on which so many climate predictions are based is flawed in the manner in which they are used, and due to the very limitations of computers themselves. As the author puts it, “Computers are number crunchers and not crystal balls.” Proposed solutions like the Kyoto Protocol will do almost nothing to halt CO2 emissions and global warming (even Kyoto supporters admit this), and will be far more costly than global warming itself. Instead Lomborg asserts that “the world as a whole would benefit more from investing in tackling problems of poverty in the developing world and in research and development of renewable energy than in policies focused on climate change.” In other words, more poor people getting wealthier will help the environment more than costly regulations on industry will.
He also examines the flawed nature of “proxy indicators” like tree ring data, and discusses the implications of the seldom mentioned “Little Ice Age” lasting from 1400-1900, that present temperature data is often measured against. He also asserts that the claim that the temperature is higher now than at any time in the past 1000 years is not well substantiated because the data excludes ocean, night, and winter temperatures, and is based almost entirely of North American data. Global warming is not the cause of extreme weather like El Nino, or more numerous hurricanes, and studies over long periods that attempt to show an increase in extreme weather, as reflected by increasing monetary cost in damages, do not take into account the increasing population and wealth during that same period. When adjusted for this increasing wealth and population concentration, “The 1990s look like the 1920s, 1940s or 1960s.”
He advocates solutions in between the extremes of doing nothing, and the drastic Kyoto like regulations that would seriously harm the world’s economy and hurt developing nations and their poor the most. One general option he describes is one that reduces some CO2 emissions while accepting some greenhouse warming. Overall decisions have to be made according to considerations of when to make the cuts and to what degree. He advocates model solutions that take into account both costs and benefits of any proposed solution, and insists that a sensible middle ground can be found. However, he also acknowledges that we have the wealth to do something, and we should.
However, in closing his chapter on global warming he also acknowledges that real solutions are hampered by the ideological and political dimension of this debate that so often takes on the appearance and feeling of a religious fervor. For too many people the discussion of global warming goes beyond a simple concern for the planet, but also has “political roots as to what kind of future society we would like.” The issue is a political vehicle for advancing some larger vision, often one that has strong socialist aspects to it, advocating some kind of lifestyle and behavior control.
Lomborg’s emphasis on the importance of wealth creation to help solve environmental problems is something he shares in common with Peter Huber in his book, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. Huber is not an environmental scientist, he holds an engineering degree from MIT, and a law degree from Harvard, and is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. His book is not as lengthy, or as academic, as Lomborg’s but it is nevertheless a persuasive argument for a “conservative” philosophy on environmentalism. Whereas The Skeptical Environmentalist was a point by point, issue by issue, challenge that took the specifics of the arguments, and considered then in turn, Hard Green is broader in its challenge. Huber approaches the issue on the level of the general reasoning and scientific methods used by the environmental movement. Michael Crichton puts it best writing that, “anyone who clings to the environmental views that evolved in the 1980s and 1990s must answer the arguments of this book.”
Huber presents President Theodore Roosevelt, and his conservationist beliefs, as the model of the “Hard Green,” the conservative environmentalist. “Soft Greens” are of course the more traditional left leaning environmentalists, and Huber argues that Hard Green is “greener” than Soft, meaning it is more environmentally friendly and feasible than the ideas and methods traditionally applied by the Softs. The Hard Green philosophy is based on the virtue of free markets, wealth, personal choice, private initiatives, and small government to save the environment. It rejects traditional environmentalism’s fear of science and technology and its celebration of simple, minimalist living. In this regard, Huber devotes a chapter to the “sandpile” metaphor, so central to Al Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance that argues that increasing complexity inevitably leads to disaster and not progress. Nonsense says Huber, complex systems do fail from time to time, but in general the march of technology is a net positive. Modern jumbo jets are more reliable than the simpler Wright Brothers flyer. The Russian Chernobyl nuclear reactor was a simpler design than American ones, but there have been no comparable U.S. nuclear disasters to date.
Mt. St. Helens and the Cu Chi province of Vietnam are offered as examples of how nature is not fragile, but rather quite tough and resilient. Models, and the computers that are used to construct them, are a major target as well and Huber offers example after example of how these models have been proved wrong on subjects ranging from the world’s food supply, to CO2 levels, to the dangers of DDT.
Fears over DDT, nuclear power, genetically modified (GM) crops, and the myths of organic farming are some of the topics that Dick Taverne tackles in his book The March of Unreason. Taverne’s book is an examination of what he sees as the disturbing increase of irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-science, neo-Luddite attitudes. Across the political spectrum there is a feeling that science is “out of control” based on an exaggerated sense of pessimism and risk aversion. In its place has risen the popularity of less than scientific ideas like homeopathy, and the belief that “organic” food is healthier than food in general which, as Taverne points out, is also by its very nature organic. The very term “organic food” is therefore essentially oxymoronic.
Taverne devotes entire chapters to issues like organic farming and the fear of GM crops, providing insightful background to the opposition’s movement and ideas, and he articulates convincing fact based arguments for what is wrong with the thinking behind these movements. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is how he links these trends to a concomitant rise in hostility to both democracy and capitalism around the world. He explains that democracy itself works in a very similar fashion to the evidence based approach of science and the scientific method. It allows for self criticism and a diversity of ideas and viewpoints that guards against the ignorance born of dogmatism, and the intellectual inbreeding that occurs from fear of competing ideas. Likewise, free market capitalism operates in a decentralized, competitive fashion, where thousands of small trial and error experiments are conducted everyday that promote innovation and an increasingly high standard of living.
The historical alternatives he offers to this are predictable but effective, and make for a convincing argument: the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. These authoritarian governments also rejected science, and the evidence based approach, for ideological reasons. The exceptions to this were in the area of military technology, but as Taverne writes, “neither state made any major contribution to scientific knowledge as a whole while ideology ruled.” Likewise, Taverne argues that today a collection of different types of people are, for various religious and ideological reasons, irrationally rejecting science and reason. Specifically, he cites Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic religious fundamentalism as among the biggest threats to a society based on reason. Along with this, he also discusses the secular equivalent, what he calls “eco-fundamentalism,” the environmental extremists who are just as irrational and hostile to honest scientific inquiry as their theological counterparts.
Neither end of the political spectrum has a monopoly on irrationality. Liberation Biology by Ronald Bailey and The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney demonstrate that many on the right are just as fearful of science and progress as their counterparts on the left. Bailey is the science correspondent for the libertarian magazine Reason and his book tackles several of the most controversial topics in biological science today including GM crops, cloning, and stem cell research. His chapter on stem cells is perhaps the strongest of the book and is perhaps the best illustration of a scientific issue that attracts reactionaries from all over the political spectrum. Bailey explains the promise that stems cells hold for use in human tissue regeneration and the myriad of medical cures possible because of that capability. He also explains how stem cell research could mitigate the need for animal research in the pharmaceutical industry.
Bailey addresses the government’s efforts to oppose stem cell research beginning with a congressional ban adopted in 1996 that outlawed federal funds for research, and President George W. Bush’s limits on federal funding in 2001. He discusses how the issue is linked with the politics of abortion and why the logic of that link is so wrongheaded. Bailey explains that embryonic stem cells are removed from a stage in embryonic development called the blastocyst, which is a collection of undifferentiated cells, barely visible to the eye, about the size of a dust particle, and is not even close to being a human being. Opponents, mostly on the religious right, think otherwise and believe that those embryos are in fact people like you and me, and the fact that many embryos are destroyed in stem cell is tantamount to abortion to them. Bailey counters this belief with several types of arguments some scientifically based, and some merely clever and rhetorical. My favorite is the following simple thought experiment: “A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you can save either a three year old child or a Petri dish containing ten seven day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?”
A common type of anti-scientific argument is to point out the failures of scientists working toward a given endeavor to achieve immediate 100% success, and because of that, claim that the entire idea is completely invalid and infeasible. Opponents of ideas like stem cell research and the development of a missile defense system use this kind of reasoning. It is also a type of reasoning that is, inexplicably, used by actual scientists, and it ignores scientific history because it assumes that all scientific developments must take place within our life times, or some shorter period of time, to be valid.
To use just two examples, the idea that huge amounts of energy could be extracted from the atom was expressed as early as 1914 by the science fiction writer H.G. Wells, yet it was not until 1945 that this theory could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Likewise, mankind dreamed, and thought seriously, about the idea of powered heavier than air flight for centuries, a goal that vexed even such intellectual greats as Leonardo da Vinci until two Americans, lacking a high school education, from Dayton, Ohio figured it out in 1903. The whole purpose of testing and experimentation is to test out ideas and approaches to problems so that bad methods and techniques can be discarded, good ones can be retained, and progress can be made. That progress can only occur if such testing is allowed to take place unhindered by the government or moralistic special interest groups.
By the same token, when ideas that are clearly not scientifically valid, and have been roundly rejected as such, begin to return as a subject of serious debate, that is also a disturbing sign of today’s climate of unreason. No better example of that exists than in the debate over “Intelligent Design,” or ID. ID is simply creationism dressed in the garb of rarefied scientific language. ID is one subject of Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science, which examines various attempts by conservative Republicans obstruct progress on scientific matters. As Mooney explains, ID has origins that go as far back as 1802 and the “natural theology” idea that held that the complexity of natural structures like the human eye show signs of a conscious design by a creator. That idea has been updated by groups like the Discovery Institute that recruit scientists and other Ph.D.s who are also conservative Christians to put an aura of intellectual respectability on creationism.
The ID movement has attempted to infiltrate both academia and America’s public schools with their insistence to “teach the controversy” between creationism and evolution. But there is no controversy, beyond what the ID proponents have created, because ID is simply not science, it rests on an un-provable supernatural foundation. Because of this ID does not, scientifically speaking, have very far that it can go because, as Mooney explains, “It doesn’t provide any details that scientists might confirm or refute through future experimentation….it doesn’t explain anything or predict anything, a key requirement for successful scientific theories.”
These conservative, fundamentalist’s goal is nothing less than to destroy the teaching of evolution altogether based on a strained, convoluted argument that evolution promotes atheism (Charles Darwin was a devout Christian). They have found political support from the likes of Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a strong pro-life Catholic. Santorum attempted to slip “teach the controversy” language into the No Child Left Behind Act using language culled from ID theorists. However, Mooney points out that President Bush has not gone as far as Santorum in endorsing ID and that Bush’s science adviser John Marburger has stated that ID is not science.
Taken as a whole, the books mentioned above present assertions of their own, but they are backed up by tangible evidence, or at least sound reasoning. The earth is not doomed from global warming, “organic” food is not healthier than its non “organic” equivalents, nature is not fragile, technology is not our enemy, stem cells are not babies, and intelligent design is not science. None of the arguments in any of these books are completely unassailable either, but they deserve consideration because we shouldn’t take anyone’s argument on faith, the issues are too important. So important that they deserve the unbiased scrutiny of a microscope.
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