Climate Change and the Nature of Scientific Certainty

In this election year, belief or disbelief in climate change has become a litmus test: take a position, and you reveal yourself to be either Democrat or Republican.  In keeping with the polarization of these times, there is no middle ground, no possibility of being unsure, no viable agnostic position.

As a consequence, the debate over climate change may see the final interment of Sir Karl Popper’s influential views on science. Or maybe some pretensions that have become attached to science—the scientism that infects contemporary debate—will be punctured.  Either way, debate over climate change provides a timely and pertinent platform to think about science, what it is, what it is not, and what the limits on scientific knowledge, if any, might be.

Consensus views of science are in flux. Neutral terms like paradigm are no longer in vogue.  Harsher epithets, like heresy and corruption, are bruited about.

Popper and Truth

Popper famously argued that scientific truth was always provisional, and that science advanced by making bold conjectures, submitting these to rigorous tests, finding each one only partly satisfactory, and setting it aside, to be replaced by a new, more encompassing conjecture. That cycle had no end in Popper’s view.  Newton’s physics of motion superseded Aristotelian views, and was superseded in turn by Einstein’s profoundly different relativistic formulation.

Here Popper and Popperians run into trouble.  Logically, Einstein’s theory must one day fall by the wayside too.  It does not provide a true formulation of the world, but only the best account available today. And Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot be taken as true either, but only as a better formulation than what came before it. And the theory of anthropogenic climate change via excessive release of carbon into the atmosphere, also cannot be true; rather, it must be treated as a bold conjecture, to be subjected to rigorous testing, ultimately to be replaced by a different and superior formulation, as science marches on.

I think you see the problem: Popper starts to sound like one of those @#$%&! climate change deniers, a Republican before his time. And to treat Darwin so cavalierly—what would Richard Dawkins say?!?

Well, who cares about a dead white male named Popper? Allow me to enlighten you. He’s a more important part of 20^th century intellectual history than you might think.

Popper and Science

Popper rose to prominence as part of the demarcation debate.  This debate, at its peak during the middle of the 20^th century, sought to identify elements that made a discipline scientific or not. The hope was that a bright clear line could be drawn: this discipline here was astronomy, and a science; that one other over there was astrology, and naught but quackery.

Only embers of this debate remain in the 21^st century, but the fires burned hot either side of 1950. And the embers have not gone out; it remains important, among elements of the American intelligentsia, to have grounds to declare that this discipline here is evolutionary biology, a science, and worthy of being taught in the public schools; but that one over there is Creationism, which is only religion, which ought not to be inserted into a textbook purchased by the American state, for use in schools funded by a state bound to remain separate from any Church.

Popper predates the contemporary debates over Creationism; he had a different target. He wrote when Marx and Freud could be mentioned in the same breath with Darwin and Copernicus, as revolutionary thinkers who had overturned prior orthodoxy with their new and superior formulations. Unfortunately for Marx and Freud, their more importunate followers were wont to assert that what they had replaced was all of conventional science, and its Enlightenment substrate: the assumption of a rationally discernible objective truth. The new science—dialectical materialism for the one, psychoanalysis for the other—punctured the pretensions of the old scientists to be neutral arbiters of truth and fact, when they were only pawns of the bourgeoisie, or slaves to repressed memories.

Pushback soon ensued.

It’s dangerous to kick a wounded Establishment; and the intellectual establishment of the West was wounded, there in the early middle of the 20^th century, with Newton’s synthesis shattered, Soviet Communism triumphant, and National Socialism darkening the horizon. Popper was part of the Establishment’s immune system response, an antibody injected back into the philosophical bloodstream, designed to engulf and destroy the threat posed by Marxism and psychoanalysis, and any other pseudo-science which might follow in their wake. Condemnatory term, that; but it was Popper’s sincere belief that Marx and Freud were not scientists, but only pretenders to that status, dangerous imposters, a threat to the health of intellectual discourse.

we do well to recognize that science has been politicized for a long time; the pitched battles did not start with climate change.

The problem for Popper and his ilk was how to get beyond name-calling, and establish a sharp demarcation criterion, one that would persuade observers who still held to Enlightenment canons that yes, Newton and Einstein lay on this side of that bright line, while Marx and Freud fell on the dark side. That was the purpose of the doctrine of falsifiability,* one of Popper’s key contributions to the debate.

*The falsifiability criterion holds that a doctrine that cannot be falsified by any conceivable test is not a knowledge claim, but only a statement of faith, hence, not science.

Popper believed he had found the Achille’s heel of Marx, Freud and the rest: they could not ever be shown to be wrong. The truth of their statements was final, complete, and unassailable. Rather like the truth that climate change is anthropogenic, triggered by excessive release of carbon into the atmosphere.

Sorry about that transparent maneuver. But you glimpse where I’m going.

Returning to Popper: to introduce falsifiability as the demarcation criterion was a brilliant piece of intellectual jiu-jitsu. In most discourse, claiming to have found the truth, the real truth, the final truth of the matter, would be a source of strength.  Who wants to stand against the truth? What, after all, are Western intellectuals supposed to seek, but the truth?

Popper’s brilliance was to seize on the fact that Newton had been proved wrong, and to make that unexpected development a good thing rather than an intellectual horror.  We forget, today, how Newton was regarded before Einstein came along, and the central ideological role Newton played in the struggle of Science and Progress against the backwardness of Tradition and Religion. The poet Alexander Pope said it best:

“NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

Newton had been proved wrong, as had been Aristotle before.  Therefore, for Popper they could be declared scientists, engaged in a bona fide scientific enterprise. But Marx could never be found wrong—his followers brooked no opposition. Therefore, Popper could conclude, Marx was not a scientist, and his science of history was anything but. Scientists were demarcated by their willingness to see their ideas fail, and indeed, their acceptance of the principle that conceptual failures were expected, and the norm.

Popper performed a real service for the intellectual Establishment of his era, and was rewarded with position and prestige. His views became widely diffused among public intellectuals, and also among practicing scientists, especially social scientists. He had performed a necessary ideological task, allowing Marxists and Freudians to be dismissed as wrong, up until such point as they could accept being wrong. Heads I win, tails you lose.

There’s another reason for Popper’s popularity among, say, economists, which I’ll return to later; but he isn’t only popular among fledgling social sciences. The eminent quantum physicist David Deutsch, in his book The Beginning of Infinity, makes over a dozen often very favorable references to Popper.

The one intellectual community that has not been receptive to Popper has been his colleagues in Philosophy departments. The problem with Popper’s views, when regarded through a philosophical lens, is straightforward: it seems a language error to apply the adjective “provisional” to the noun “truth,” on a par with describing someone as “only a bit pregnant.” In Western philosophy, a statement is true or it is not; no statement can be both true and not-true. The truth of some matter can remain unknown, and there may be some truths which are unknowable; but there cannot be knowledge which is true at one point and no longer true at another.

If Newton’s conception of space and time is mistaken, now, it was always incorrect; it was never true.  Beliefs may be held at one point, and then discarded at another; but knowledge is different than belief. Or so the philosophers say. Scientists don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change—they know it to be occurring. Science is justified knowledge, not tentative belief.

You see the problem: Marxists know that dialectical materialism gives a true account of history; this is not a matter of belief subject to revision, but of scientific fact. Freudian psychoanalysts know that any resistance to their diagnosis stems from repressed feelings about your mother. It’s no good saying that ideas about repressed memories are a bold conjecture, worthy of being subject to further empirical tests; no conceivable test could refute the psychoanalytic hypothesis. Likewise, there is no conceivable evidence that would refute the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change due to excessive release of carbon; it’s an established scientific fact.

Oops.

The climate change debate thus puts scientists, academics, members of the intelligentsia, conscientious citizens, and anyone else who cares to know the truth about the world, in an uncomfortable position. If it is true that excess carbon release is causing the planet to warm catastrophically, then we have a very expensive problem to solve, and it is hugely important that we take action to solve it, the sooner the better. Oil company owners, and others whose ox must be gored, who prattle on about needing more evidence, are a problem, on the order of homeowners with concrete block homes, who pile flammable brush next to the wooden houses of neighbors.  Or homeowners with a leaky septic system that drains into a reservoir used for drinking water, who claim they are too poor to fix it.

Or maybe, climate change deniers are like parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated against dangerous communicable diseases because someone told them that vaccines cause autism (…uh-oh).  Or like Karl Popper, who tried to stifle the liberating insights of Marxist scientific history (umm …).

“If it is true.” What an annoying, disconcerting, and uncomfortable phrase. What if it is not true that excess carbon release is the focal and remediable cause of imminent and disastrous climate change? Then scarce resources that could have been used to lift people out of poverty, or eliminate infant malnutrition, and so forth, will be squandered on a proposition as fallacious as “Vaccines cause autism—don’t do that to your child.”

But wait—has that vaccination claim been disproved—or does it remain a bold conjecture worthy of further testing, while in the meantime, concerned parents must act as they see fit, in the absence of conclusive evidence concerning vaccines and autism? And if you are a concerned parent, how could you be sure?

“If it is true.” Neither Marxists nor psychoanalysts need consider that clause. And there is one other field of thought, the elephant in the room of this essay, which must and always will reject that tentative-sounding catchphrase, “is it true?”

That field of thought is the historic opponent of science in the West: religion. No good Muslim need ask whether the Koran is or is not the word of God. Nor does any good Christian need question whether Christ died for our sins, and was resurrected. It is true that Jesus is the son of God.  It is true that the Koran is the word of God.  (How very unfortunate that those truths are not the same.)

Christians, Muslims, Marxists and Freudians need not inquire, concerning articles of faith, “Is it true?” No person of faith can be, only tentatively, a person of faith. Faith is not provisional either.

Should we add to this list of articles of faith: “if we reduce the release of carbon, beginning right now, we can arrest deleterious climate change”? We know that statement to be true because … science? Yes, that is not an article of faith, but scientific knowledge! And scientific knowledge claims are true in a way that no religious tenet can be, because … because …scientific claims are always provisional?!?

Whence Popper now?

Thus the discomfort engendered by the climate change discussion, among those who lack the necessary zealotry: science enthroned with religion, and granted the same status, as beyond questioning. Science metamorphosed into its historic antagonist.

That seems a dangerous conflation, worth combatting in an essay, even if it leads to my being scorned as one of those @#$%&! climate change deniers.

Continue to Part II