Climate Change Denier, Part 2

In Part I of this two-part feature, Jacques Delacroix began his review of problems with the public presentation of climate research. He continues now.

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Sins Against the Spirit of Science

Now, some objections that have to do with the logic of the overall scientific endeavor. Many or most individual studies of climate change may be well or even perfectly designed. However, there is also an implicit design to the macro endeavor. I mean the large set of scientific studies as arranged in the collective minds of a semi-educated media — their own synthetic presentation of the relevant scientific enterprise. The latter is, of necessity, what most citizens must consume, lacking time and expertise to do anything else. The implicit but very clear design of this synthetic presentation is fatally flawed, impossibly unscientific, lacking even in simple logic.

Many scientists are incapable of keeping themselves on the straight and narrow. Some cheat; many more are overcome by love for the findings they want their hypothesis testing to produce and thus become honestly blinded. To circumvent the regrettable consequences of such love, of such blindness, science invented the diabolical practice of double-blind peer reviewing.

To put this briefly: strangers who remain anonymous throughout, strangers who may be ill-disposed or inimical to the findings the author reports, are put in charge of judging the merits of his submission. In respected journals, those referees are given license, are even encouraged, to devastate the submission, to look for hidden defects, for covered-up bias, for anything they want. Often, the first thing they do is check for faulty design. The knowledge that this could happen to your piece, to your baby, tends to make you prudent, even if it never actually happens. The results of such savagery are not always perfect; some bias does survive. But in general, the results of research that has gone through this savaging process are considerably more trustworthy than those that have not.

Yet the overarching endeavor of climate change research, the way many research items are put together, the way that most affects decision making, does not benefit from this kind of scrutiny. Although each and every one of the studies that feed into it may be competently reviewed, the general endeavor is allowed to continue with bad design. I’ll explain.

Suppose I am a medical researcher testing a new fever-abating drug. I design an experiment thus: I will take so many feverish patients’ temperatures, administer the medication, and determine that if the patients’ temperature falls after they take the drug, the drug is effective. And if the patients’ temperature rises, I will also consider the drug effective. Should that happen, you would know I was doing something wrong. You would tell me that I had to choose. The drug may have no effect but, if it has one, it either raises or lowers temperature. In general, you can’t have it both ways.

I first heard from the media, including the highbrow media, that rising (manmade) hothouse gases —including CO₂ — caused global temperatures to rise. It was called “global warming.” I recognized a familiar causal form: The more X, the more Y. That’s at the heart of the scientific endeavor, of course. Then, I heard on the occasion of several extreme winters somewhere or other that it was also true that the more hothouse gases, the lower the temperatures. I recognized the other familiar form. The more X, the less Y. If memory serves, that’s when “global warming” was replaced by the term “climate change.”

I did not bat much more than an eyelash at the juxtaposition of the two propositions: the more X, the more Y and, the more X, the less Y. That’s because these opposite relationships occur in nature (and also in society), arranged sequentially: If it’s cold in the morning, when the ambient temperature rises, I feel increasingly comfortable; past a certain point, however, as the temperature keeps rising, I feel increasingly uncomfortable.

Then, I was told that rising hothouse gases caused an unlimited number of categories of unpleasant meteorological events judged to be extreme by the unreliable yardstick of individual living memories (almost never with even a simple recourse to easily accessible archives such as those found in local newspapers). At that point — where I am now — the overall representation of aggregate alleged findings looks like this: The more X the more Y, and the more X the less Y, and the more X, the more W, and the more Z, and the more X, the more anything that’s objectionable to believers — all this, without apparent limit.

I don’t know for sure if the absurd model above is true to what duly authorized scientists in the relevant disciplines would say. I wouldn’t know how to go about ascertaining this. And frankly, it’s not my job. I am only an alert, fairly well-informed consumer of this sort of information. I can’t even go to the general authority, the IPCC, for an answer. If I don’t understand this organization’s prose when it’s explicitly trying to communicate with laymen (see above, Part 1, under “Lack of Clarity”), surely I can’t explore abstract issues in its scientific reports.

By now, HCC apologists, I have lost faith in your capacity to do simple logic. That’s true no matter how many ad hoc explanations you mention to explain deviations from the starting proposition (the more hothouse gases, the warmer the globe becomes) in addition to the absurd expansion of the overall model I just described. I become especially worried if you seldom discuss this apparently faulty logic. When you put me in that situation, I think we are outside of reason, in a religious zone, perhaps.

Measuring: The Thermometer Problem

Here is another simple but serious technical problem: in science, as when installing draperies at home, it’s very bad practice to switch measuring devices, or measurement procedures, in the middle of the job. That’s because different instruments may give different measurements in ways you don’t know. Take the medical experiment described above. Suppose you take the patients’ temperature rectally before administering the medication, and then take their temperature in the armpit at the end of the period of observation. Anything wrong? The former reading may be systematically higher or lower than the latter.

I have seen serious research published in a respected science magazine (not a scholarly journal) where annual temperatures are measured by reading tree rings (no objection) for most of the 19th century, and by reading scientific instruments from early in the 20th. Anything wrong, this time? Any reason to be suspicious? Surely tree rings are available for the 20th century. Tree ring-based measurements for that period could have been presented side by side with measurements produced with high-tech tools. I mean tree-ring measures in addition to them. It could even have been done in a footnote, or in a technical appendix, or on the magazine’s website, online, to save trees.

Arbitrary Period Sampling

Finally, still in the bad science category; this bad science may be performed mostly by nonscientists who report on what they think are scientific findings; I wouldn’t know. There is a problem of period sampling that plagues public declarations on global warming specifically. It’s conceptually difficult for most people, so don’t feel bad if you don’t grasp it, and just skip this section and move on. This part is not indispensable to the overall demonstration of the weakness of the HCC narrative.

The February 7, 2019 issue of the Wall Street Journal — not usually a trumpet for the HCC narrative — has an inside page (A3) feature titled, “2018 Was Fourth-Warmest Year Since 1880.” That’s according to data from two federal bureaucracies “which track annual climate change” (“climate” not just temperature?) affirms the article. The feature includes three images covering three different time spans. I have to ask: Why is “fourth warmest” significant? And, especially, why since 1880? What’s special about that year? What would be the ranking of the year 2018 since 1890? Since 1860? Since 1990? Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Why not since 1879? What would be lost in the demonstration by choosing this seemingly arbitrary year?

The logic problem is this: give me reasonable variation in the thing being observed and give me enough possible periods of observation, and I can create an impression supporting almost any assertion. The number of separate periods of observation available between 1800 (an artificial date for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution) and 2019 veers toward infinity. It’s like this: 1800–1801, 1800–1802; 1802–1803; 1800–1850; 1800–1851, 1852–1873, beginning of 1800 to mid-1800, and so forth. Let’s now limit ourselves to ten-year periods of observation, for some imaginary legitimate scientific reason. The number of resulting periods now available is reduced, but it remains very large, like this: 1800–1809; 1801–1810; 1802–1811, 1803–1812, etc.

With such an abundance of periods of observation to pick from, and with vagueness about what constitutes a record, it’s easy to produce every other day some sort of record, for some sort of period. This looseness allows for massive cherrypicking: “Hottest year in two years, in three years, in the four years between ___ and ___.” What would happen if a contrarian cherrypicked the coldest years for some period of observation chosen to optimize the impression that global temperatures are actually dropping? I myself lived through the two coldest hours in central California in 30 years. Should I contend it’s relevant to something or other? How long does a period of observation have to be, to make it legitimate? Can it be chosen any old way? Is the answer to both questions: whatever suits my purpose?

Well, here we go, from the Wall Street Journal again: “For the first time in at least 132 years, the temperature didn’t hit 70 degrees in downtown Los Angeles, in February.” Global cooling at work! (“California’s Weather Cycles,” unsigned editorial, March 4, 2019.)

Of course, the images accompanying the February 7 Wall Street Journal feature — though they are difficult to read together or in conjunction with the story — lend the whole thing an appearance of seriousness, of scientificity (I know I just made up this word; it deserves to exist.) A normal reading of the whole newspaper item by a normally intelligent but normally busy citizen will add some credence to the oft-repeated assertion that there is overwhelming evidence in support of the climate change narrative. It shouldn’t; it doesn’t; it’s just anecdotes until demonstrated otherwise.

I have no objection in principle to declaring contrary events meaningless, like this: the accumulation of CO₂ gradually raises global temperatures in the long run. A few extremely cold weeks in the American Midwest in winter, 2018–2019, are just glitches that don’t undermine the validity of the general statement above. Someone has to make the declaration explicitly and also consider publicly the possibility than an extremely hot summer in the US in 2008, or in another year, may likewise be just a glitch — and that the hottest summer on record seems to have occurred in 1936, before the accumulated emission of CO₂ was much advanced. I would even expect some respectable spokesperson to contradict aloud the multitude of untrained voices clamoring that two hot summers necessarily prove that climate change, etc.

Missing Links?

Sometimes I wonder if there may be somewhere a piece of research of good quality asserting that most climate scientists are skeptical that there is significant climate change, or that it’s caused by human activity, or that we need to worry about it right now. If there happened to be one such piece, would I know about it? I am pondering the likelihood that it would come to my attention without my actively looking for it. There is a good place to look: the contrarian website Watts Up With That. The website is presented on Wikipedia in mostly derogatory terms. Why would that be? Seekers of balance may be outnumbered and not be able to keep up with “crowd” contributed changes in the relevant Wikipedia entry or entries, changes that nearly anyone can effect. Note that this scenario does not require a conventional conspiracy, just plural enthusiasm.

I also ask myself what is the probability that such a piece of research could actually be published in any refereed journal, with all the advantages such publication confers in terms of credibility. I have to ask, for two reasons. The first is that refereed journals have a well-documented anti-negative bias. Other things being equal, a submission that claims that something happens has a better chance of making it through the refereeing process than one that announces that, on the contrary, nothing of the sort happens.

Here is my second reason to doubt: I suspect there exists a well-established, high-brow, politically correct orthodoxy that makes it difficult to consider, process, and finally accept even a very well-constructed scholarly paper denying the reality, source, or importance of climate change. It’s well documented that even reputable scholarly journals are often loathe to retract anything. This is true even when they don’t object to the reasons for which the retraction is requested. (See, for example, “Confirmation Bias Hurts Social Science,” by Robert P. George, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2019, A15.)

I spent 30 years in American academia. I have witnessed there the construction of intellectual orthodoxies from their earliest beginnings. I have suffered from some of them (not much), and I may have benefited from one. It happened in and around the discipline of sociology — which has a reputation for being soft, it’s true, though it’s a reputation that has not been much deserved for 30 years. I am not pointing here to the kind of cynical publication conspiracy I evoke elsewhere but to smaller, more tacit cultural movements within academic subspecialties. Such orthodoxies regularly emerge spontaneously and aboveboard. They do not require bad consciousness from believers. Some may even be inherently virtuous.

So, if I were not a skeptic, I would have to believe that given its scarcity in scholarly journals there is no good research on the other side of the HCC narrative divide regarding the credibility of all, or even of part, of this narrative. Is this possible, I ask? It seems to me that to raise the question is to answer it. This section is somewhat subjective. I don’t expect it directly to change anyone’s mind. It’s useful to raise the issue though. At least it can hurt no one, except the devout.

Unused Usable Metrics

I wrote above of the importance of proper measurement and of the possible suppression of non-conforming information. The two ideas blend with respect to the matter of uninterrupted series of measurement going back a long time that are readily available but seem mysteriously absent from the public discussion of climate change.

One of the most dramatic features of the HCC narrative is the purported rise of the ocean. In the past five years, a good consumer of news, I have seen two sorts of very different expressions of the assertion. One is the kind of imagery in which a guy in a loincloth stands up to his belly in seawater while telling us that he used to help his father when he was a kid grow taro exactly where his feet are now placed. (Seen in the old and lovely French television series “Thalassa”; it was taking place in some remote island in French Polynesia.) The second kind of measure related to the rise of the ocean with which I am familiar involves esoteric satellite metrics.

I dismiss the first kind of testimony out of hand because I am impressed, both from my research experience, and from daily life, with most people’s bad memory and by the ease with which they are influenced. I hold the second kind in high regard, but it’s the sort of superstitious regard that was in the hearts of the first New Guineans who saw an airplane. I am incompetent to judge myself, and I don’t know what or who is competent, to vouch for those measurements. And no, I don’t suspect a monstrous plot to feed us false and alarming measurements. I suspect instead a great deal of collective self-indulgence if the measurements are the least bit ambiguous. (And wouldn’t they often be ambiguous, I inquire — naively, to be sure?)

I also have some conceptual trouble with the impression that little effort is made to explain to the unwashed masses (me) how the ocean level can be durably different in different locations. After all, it does not happen in my bathtub, or not for long. (Yes, the close proximity of references to “unwashed” and to “bathtub” is deliberate.)

Against this background, I have to ask why no one appears to be using the obvious to make the rise of the ocean obvious to rational nonspecialists like me. Here is a practical case in point. The English Channel and the North Sea are lined with nations possessing a long maritime past associated with an age-old economic dependence on fishing. Still today, thousands of small boats on both sides of the Channel go up and down entirely according to the tides. The same boats spend a significant portion of each year resting on muddy or sandy harbor bottoms during many low tides. In spite of the construction of convenient deep-water marinas everywhere, many pleasure boat owners, and some fishermen, still find their movements in and out of harbors constrained by a complex tide regimen. Until recently — in my lifetime — all boats in that region except the biggest naval ships were so constrained. Approximately the same situation prevails in the Baltic (which I don’t know as well). I am told it’s also true of Japan, of course. It’s probably the same on much of the Chinese and Korean coastlines facing the Japanese archipelago.

All the societies I mentioned have one thing in common besides their maritime positioning. They have all included fair numbers of literate people for a thousand years or more. Accordingly, in those with which I am a little familiar, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, there are detailed written records going back hundreds of years about conditions affecting the movements of boats and ships. These include water height on given dates at tight spots, which are largely the same as today. In some harbors, on both sides of the Channel, large iron spikes in seawalls mark record high tides.

This is all easily usable material and also convenient of access. To exploit it requires only inexpensive, low-tech methods (comparable to reading annual temperatures from tree rings). It would seem to be perfect raw material for many graduate students in search of data. The exploitation of individual records would not even need to be coordinated to contribute to our understanding. And finally, any such endeavor would have the immense advantage of being intuitively clear to ordinary, alert people. It’s mysterious why none of this seems to have been undertaken. Perhaps it’s considered superfluous to be clear to the rank and file on this issue also.

But maybe the kind of studies I long for have actually been done, and they escaped my attention. If that’s true, I must ask why? I explained above, when presenting my credentials, that I am literate, very interested, and well connected to the media. If I failed to notice such intuitively accessible research, how many other, responsible parties also did? Whose fault?

Partial Solutions Missing

HCC narrative advocates seldom propose reasonable partial solutions to the greenhouse effect that do not require government intervention or any sort of centralization of power. Also, almost everyone understands that the main solutions actually offered (as in the 2015 Paris Agreement) involve a significant decline in the standard of living of presently well-off societies.

HCC believers do diffusely promote a handful of tiny personal solutions that have the merit of making individuals feel virtuous but that cannot make a dent on disasters of the magnitude they predict. Those include, for example, biking to work (I don’t knock it; it’s good for the bikers; it helps to alleviate traffic congestion), and buying electric cars. (I understand that these are marginally less polluting than contemporary internal combustion vehicles, when you take into account the processes by which electricity powering them is produced.) When it comes to big, non-government global-level efforts, I hear only silence.

I am wondering, for example, how difficult it would be to plant two additional billion trees each year (20 billion in ten years). Supposing that half survive after two years, the world would still have an additional ten billion CO₂ reducers. Any semblance of success would probably create a salutary contagion to repeat the process. Perhaps this number, ten billion, is too low to make a difference, but some number of trees must be able to mitigate the existing CO₂ emissions, or begin to. I don’t know what the number is, but I am sure that every little bit helps and that trees are cheap. A Swiss scientist, John Christian, claimed recently that 1.2 additional trillion trees would absorb all (current) emissions. If half the current residents of the earth (roughly) each planted 15 trees every year, we would be there in 20 years, without major transformation of society, or mass impoverishment (but this assumes that CO₂ emissions were kept at the current levels). It all seems feasible, if there’s enough space available. The same Swiss author affirms that there is. I couldn’t check.

Whatever would be a useful number, I am also certain that planting billions can be done in a decentralized manner, even on a personal basis, in the absence of a permanent organization, without resorting to the coercive power of government. Individuals, including schoolchildren, households, clubs, affinity groups, could do it on their own and at their own pace. Billionaire philanthropists would be glad to pay for the saplings, I think. (They would cost about a quarter each, wholesale.) Planting a tree, or two, or three, could easily become the fashionable thing to do. It might morph into a nearly universal ethical obligation, because everyone likes trees. A single family in Brazil planted more than two million trees in eight years.[1]

Globally, there are plenty of vacant lots, urban rooftops, roadside paths, rights-of-way (such as abandoned railroad tracks), and other unused land available for planting. Most of the US, most of Canada, much of South America, most of Australia, and most of Russia are nearly empty. Not all of this land is already covered by forest, and the density of trees could be improved in much of it. Even China, even Japan have mountainous areas unsuitable for agriculture, some not already forested. In some developed, old industrialized countries, such as France, close to major CO₂ pollution, former agricultural land is quickly returning to wilderness. (In about 80 years in the 20th century, French forests increased by 50% as a result of the abandonment of agriculturally marginal lands. {B. Cinotti, Évolution des surfaces boisées en France: proposition de reconstitution depuis le début du XIXe siècle [1996].) Spontaneous reforestation in such areas could simply be helped along by volunteer actions. The same is true for other parts of Europe. Remember that if HCC is really global, trees planted anywhere at all are somewhat helpful. We might also try to open a worldwide subscription, a vast GoFundMe to purchase and maintain more expensive nut and fruit-bearing trees. NGOs could give them outright to villagers in the Sahel without otherwise intruding in local affairs. This enterprise would get us a two for one: less CO₂ globally, and a rampart against further desertification locally.

My own skepticism about the HCC narrative would not prevent me from subscribing to such pleasant, optimistic, and joyful endeavors. (I would hope there would be a humble “Delacroix Grove” somewhere, of course.)

I raise the idea of planting trees because we have now nearly forgotten that CO₂ is also plant food. It’s common knowledge and (as far as I understand) still undisputed that trees can consume large quantities of CO₂. Strangely, I almost never hear this fact mentioned anywhere in my casual, haphazard following of diverse media. The only time in several years when I have come across the idea that rising temperatures and especially rising CO₂ levels are both separately beneficial to plant food production was in an item apparently smuggled into the pages of a small (circulation 45,000) conservative weekly, the Washington Examiner. (“Scientists: CO₂ the ‘miracle molecule’ key to feeding the world,” February 26, 2019.)

It’s a mystery why the kind of proposal exemplified by my tree planting scenario has not already been pushed vigorously. I am thinking of the likes of National Geographic, which never publishes a single issue lacking some sort of catastrophic climate prediction. It’s a mystery, unless some other agenda than saving the planet is involved here, or unless climate change is relevant to something else, something I can only guess at. The list of potential nongovernmental remedies to increasing CO₂ emissions appears endless to me. Why doesn’t it seem to occur to Green activists? Aren’t they interested in innocent, painless, heartwarming, noncoercive solutions with little potential to induce poverty?

What’s Going On?

Of course, I have been asking myself what accounts for the viciousness, the ludicrousness, the gobbledygook, the inconsistencies, the bad faith, and the plain deceitfulness, which the social movement that has grown around the HCC narrative demonstrates so frequently. The attachment to bad scientific presentation and, to some extent, to bad scientific practice by those who ought to know better perplexed me for a long time.

For several years, I told myself that the Green opinion current was made up of amiable, foo-foo headed treehuggers, plus some disappointed or disoriented leftists. When they started to make demands that governments should impose big, significant restrictions on nonbelievers — on everyone, indeed — I thought they would eventually go away. I scoffed at Al Gore’s crude, mendacious movie An Inconvenient Truth. But some around me treated it with complete seriousness. As the Green voices became increasingly shrill, I began to get a sense of déjà vu. I realized little by little that I had been there before, perhaps even twice.

When I was growing up in France, in the ’40s and ’50s, the French Communist Party regularly pulled more than 20% of the votes in legislative elections. It was always the first, second, or third largest party. Communist leaders were everywhere in the newspaper and on the radio. My family’s aspiring middle-class apartment block was next to a blue-collar block where everyone was a Communist, a fellow traveler, or else kept quiet. Of course, I went to elementary school with children from that block and I knew some of their parents. Truth be told, in many ways they were similar to people in my more familiar Catholic environment: most of the Communists lived by faith alone. Looking back on them, it seems to me that eight out of ten Communists were naive True Believers (I use the words as Eric Hoffer did in his book by that title [1951]), vaguely hoping for a better life and for abstractly defined “social justice” They put their faith in Comrade Stalin, and in his dwarfish deputies in their own country. The cult of personality was out in the open, unabashed, and it borrowed openly from familiar forms of religious devoutness. (Some of my neighbors even lowered their voices piously when they mentioned His name.) They thought that soon, very soon, France would become a fair society, as the Soviet Union already was.

Of every ten Communists whom I knew or knew of, one was a determined and cynical seeker of power, and another was in transition. The Communists, in the papers, on radio, and on the street, treated viciously those they considered their class enemies (not me, for sure). Their faith in the Soviet Union and in the forthcoming Communist utopia was ludicrous. They seemed to speak two languages. Their everyday language was normal; I mean that it was like mine. Yet when they explained why the victory of socialism was inevitable, they became incomprehensible.

There were even evening Party schools that young adults attended, just to be able to understand the esoteric language of “dialectical materialism.” Some just pretended. Attendance at the schools was a requirement for good Party standing. In their second language, the Party-Marxist talk, they made no sense whatsoever. But then, neither I nor most of my friends understood Mass Latin.

The Communists always left some things out of their description of the Soviet paradise, small things such as famines, mass arrests, and concentration camps. (The latter were well known already in the ’50s.) When confronted with contrary facts, they first insulted viciously; then they just lied. It appears that the lies were enough to stop sufficient numbers of followers from asking further questions. The French Communist leadership came and went, but there was never any grand moment or reckoning. Unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself (under Khrushchev), the French Party never said, “We were wrong on this and that.” Communists and fellow travelers had such influence on attitudes and language (same thing in the long run) that by the time I was 18, being overtly anti-Communist constituted a kind of social death. Only two brave French public intellectuals stood firm throughout (Raymond Aron and Jean-Francois Revel).

The Communist Party as a political force eventually almost disappeared through attrition, leaving behind little left-wing parties composed of those who had parted company at various times, and of those who were excluded for ideological sins. The remnants of the Party and its leftovers keep re-supplying a foul residue of vague and murky statism. They have been poisoning the French political discourse ever since. In the current (2018–2019) “yellow vests” crisis in France, participants are even unable to voice their demands in other than vulgar Marxist terms. I believe the French Communist Party and its offshoots destroyed long ago the conceptual vocabulary the protesters would now need.

Of course, French Communists — adopting Karl Marx’s shameless claim — contended that their analysis (of society) was “scientific.” (Scientism had long been a source of holiness.) The scientific pretension was their quick path to inexorability. Incidentally, they believed and declared that their actions would save not only themselves but the whole of humanity. (Little philosophical problem here: the victory of communism is inevitable, but our deeds are necessary to its victory. This probably requires a little muscular persuasion.) I believe, however, it never even crossed their minds to affirm that their actions would save Mother Earth herself. They were a backward lot, you might say.

The HCC narrative promoters promise us worse than hell on earth, the end of earth itself — if we don’t take on an emergency-basis step that entails a massive enlargement of government relative to the rest of society, and an increase of several orders of magnitude in the coercion applied to ordinary people. The solutions proposed also constitute a kind of drastic deindustrialization. They would cause large-scale impoverishment in the prosperous countries and a diminished likelihood that poor countries would ever achieve the prosperity of currently advanced ones. The only political processes imaginable to implement the key propositions associated with the HCC narrative involve a hefty form of authoritarianism and the suppression of dissenting forces, as well as a fair degree of popular participation. That’s a textbook definition of fascism, of course. (Maybe, see my “Fascism Explained.”) This is not a difficult guess, as the process is observable already in attenuated forms in several countries.

The authoritarianism I forecast does not come out of my imagination. The impeccably democratically chosen Chancellor Merkel decided pretty much on her own that Germany must abandon the production of electricity from fossil fuels within a few years, starting immediately. She also decreed the rapid closure of nuclear plants. She could do all this in spite of predictable hardships the decisions would entail because a large fraction of German public opinion was already persuaded of the imminent danger global warming posed. (The discussion of the dangers of nuclear energy had been closed long before.) Chancellor Merkel’s decisions trod on minorities of opinion in a manner reminiscent of the crushing of the religiously unorthodox everywhere. (To be fair, she did not propose to burn anyone at the stake.) The moral weight of electoral majorities, and even of simple pluralities, was in this case sufficient to begin the dismantling of the admirable edifice of centuries of German effort and ingenuity.[2]

In its most extreme manifestations, the HCC narrative and its policy implications look like the latest avatar (but not the last avatar, surely) of the same strand of authoritarian collectivism that appeared before as Communism, and in various other brands of Fascism. And like the narratives of these other millenarian social movements, the HCC narrative has a pronounced religious character.

New or Old Cult?

The parallel between the climate change movement and Christianity has been drawn many times, by me and others. After all, the movement has its dogma, a hatred of heretics sometimes bordering on the murderous, repeated attempts to remand heretics to the “secular arm” — government — for legal punishment, and a strong sense of individual sin. It also traffics constantly in apocalyptic imagery.

But I have now come to think that the sociopolitical movement associated with the HCC narrative is not pseudo-Christian but more like an older cult, some Bronze Age religion. It harbors no idea of individual redemption, it has no Messiah, and, certainly, it entertains no nonsense about God becoming human and thus exalting Man. Its deity does not heed the prayers of the faithful, but yet demands from them complete and exclusive submission. It does seem to respond to incantations (in the mass media). It craves sacrifices. When I see two middle-class parents each towing a toddler in tiny trailers behind their bikes, near blacktop-level, at night, sharing the street with old men in trucks, I think Moloch, I think Baal. The stern but caring God of the New Testament is nowhere to be seen. And Jesus seems to have gone home early.

Note, please, that if all the HCC models are factually correct and if all the predictions they entail are also, it does not negate the religious character of the corresponding movement. It’s just that the more obviously true the HCC statements of all kinds are to ordinary people, the more superfluous is the religiosity attached to the movement.

Where Do I Stand?

In the end, am I deeply convinced that there is no climate change caused by human activity that demands quick solutions?

I am not. I am not convinced of anything, at this point. All it would take is exposure to one good document, to several good discussions, preferably ones with an overall design that does not betray basic logic, to make me fall off the high stool of my skepticism. The discussions would have to be principled, along traditional lines, fairly respectful of the presentation of opposite viewpoints. They would incorporate no insults and no condemnations of a quasi-religious nature. They would take place in the local vernaculars of ordinary educated people rather than scientific and pseudoscientific jargon. I must admit that I fear it may be too late to hope for any of this, because so many careers are at stake. I would like to be wrong, though.

Even a single good book, a clear, well organized book, would do it for me. But the last good books I read on environmental issues are old. One is Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday (2012), which does not directly address the HCC narrative though it has much to say about climate. The other is the statistician Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg currently accepts the main tenets of the HCC narrative but he agrees with almost none of what the movement presents as its unavoidable policy implications.

Concretely, it would take two or three steps to undermine my skepticism.

First, I would have to become convinced that the earth has been warming abnormally, based on all that we know of past temperatures. I am not even convinced that it has been warming abnormally in recent years — because of a few inconvenient scattered facts. One is that Greenland was warmer during the 1000–1200 period than it is now. I gleaned this by reading the same environmental activist and serious intellectual Jared Diamond. Here is what I gathered from his best-seller, The World Until Yesterday: the Norse settlers of Greenland ate significant quantities of beef. Now, it seems to me that there were only two possible sources for that beef. Either they imported mature cattle for butchering from Iceland or from Norway in large numbers, in their little boats, or they raised cattle right in Greenland. The first explanation I discount as technically and economically untenable. So the Norse evidently raised cattle in a part of the world where you could not do it now. You could not because Greenland is too cold to produce the hay necessary to feed cattle during its long winter season. Greenland was warmer then than it is after nearly two centuries of big human CO₂ emissions. I am pretty sure Norse peat fires were not at fault.

Second, one would have to demonstrate to me the likelihood of a causal link between CO₂ emission and warming. I am too moderate to ask for actual proof. Fairly tight coincidence in time between the two variables — with the purported cause preceding the alleged effect — will not kill my skepticism outright, but it will give me pause. Of course, no trick, no hockey stick! All the data available must be used, or a good reason provided as to why they are not. The consequences of not using all data available must be carefully and frankly explored and explained.

In the above, substitute any reasonable variable connected to the climate for “warming” or “temperature,” if you please. “Frequency of extreme weather events” would be conceptually fine with me but I warn you it’s a can of definitional worms! It’s the kind with which HCC advocates have not been dealing too well as a far as I am concerned.

After accomplishing the above, HCC narrative promoters must provide some verifiable metric prediction that’s truly dreadful if they want me to even consider the possibility of adopting any part of their lethal agenda of authoritarian deindustrialization. I warn you, HCC militants: if you warn me that average global temperature will be 2 degrees centigrade higher in 50 years, I won’t care. If you tell me that the ocean will rise by three inches, I will say, “Call in the Dutch; they will know what to do!” You are demanding of this citizen something extremely alarming. Your admonitions have to be irresistibly alarming.

I would also be more likely to pay attention if the bright features of climate change were mentioned more often. It would be nice if those who did it were famous exponents of HCC. It would be even nicer if they had scholarly credentials. (I can imagine teams made up of one scholar and of one famous, trusted media person.)

Finally, it would help the credibility of HCC declaimers if, once in a while, they reached out and made a public example of the myriads of enthusiastic, ignorant fools who at all times babble irresponsibly and without foundation about climate change.

Oh, and I almost forgot, no more of the kind of vicious insults historically associated with religious fanaticism!

Been There?

Filling my mind with any sense of urgency is going to take some doing anyway, because of past experiences. I was a young adult in the good old days of the Club of Rome and of Paul Ehrlich’s glory. The first published The Limits to Growth in 1972, promising us a series of calamities, and especially of famines, if we did not change our ways radically. We did not. Global food production increased radically instead. The consensus of the Club of Rome was if anything more impressive than the HCC consensus. It included just about everyone who counted — scientists, of course, other kinds of scholars, business decision makers, prominent politicians.

The entomologist and mite specialist Ehrlich (also a Nobel Prize winner, but not in anything related to climate disciplines) had earlier also promised famines, due to overpopulation. His 1968 book The Population Bomb began with these words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” (Emphasis mine.) Famines within 12 years. Does this time horizon sound familiar?

Ehrlich was wrong; the Club of Rome was wrong. The former continued his distinguished academic career at Stanford University pretty much as if the facts had proven him right and the earth had swallowed hundreds of millions of victims of hunger. The Club of Rome is still in existence. It’s a well-funded, apparently respected organization.

Of necessity, dire predictions pertaining to global warming ensued. According to AP’s Peter John Spielman, in 1989 a senior UN environmental official declared that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000”! (“Notable and Quotable: Warming.” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2019, A17.) I observe with interest that in that early case, the time allotted to remedy the situation did not even reach 12 years; it was only 10.5 years!

That previous apocalyptic narratives with an environmentalist inspiration were wrong, that no one stood up to apologize, does not prove that the current HCC narrative is also wrong. Still, experience should inspire intellectual prudence. Given those past fiascoes — in addition to the enormous stakes involved — rigorous, critical scrutiny is in order. The more esoteric the topic, the more removed from the average citizen’s competence, the more exigent must one be with respect to the general credibility of the exponents of the narrative. Collectively HCC narrative activists have low credibility, in my estimation. That’s why I think there is no reason to worry right now. The HCC narrative still bears watching, though, just in case proponents of the HCC narrative clean up their act and turn out believable. But using the very numbers that they, the HCC proponents provide, it’s still hard to see how all human CO2 emissions together, plus cow burps and flatulence, can do much damage to our atmosphere, compared to your medium-size volcanic eruption, or even to three consecutive above-average El Niños.

How About You?

I mean you, supporters of the human-caused disastrous climate change narrative, you who assess the evidence supporting the narrative as overwhelming, you who demand immediate and drastic action: what would it take to turn you around? To clam you up even a little? Anything at all?

I believe it’s up to those who would upend our pretty good civilization to persuade me, without appeal to the sort of quasi-religious abracadabra we left behind in the 18th century. I refuse to put to sleep my rationality and even my common sense before unverifiable claims of expertise. I also don’t want to be forced to master arcane areas of the physical sciences just to be able to stop my government from doing something irreversibly destructive. That’s not too much to ask.

Personally, I would like to walk away from the messy and often acrimony-inducing issue of climate change. I can’t afford this luxury because I am afraid that someone is going to do something with it that’s incredibly stupid and harmful to me and mine.

P.S.: If you are attracted to the minutiae of climate research and if you want a reliable source of detailed, quantitative, scientific contrarian information about the HCC narrative, you may wish to visit this blog. That outfit has posted a globe displaying a number of graphs summarizing much climate information, including some severely at variance with the popular version of the HCC narrative. And Wikipedia in French (for some reason) has published a list of credentialed experts who have expressed skepticism about HCC. I have not checked its credibility; I probably wouldn’t know how. The list includes Nobel winner Gary Becker of the University of Chicago.