[Please read Part I of this post first]
Part II: The Science of Climate Change
From this point, it becomes too vague to refer to “climate change.” There are several knowledge claims at issue, and the availability of evidence, and the caliber of this evidence, differs across claims.
For instance, there’s lots of evidence that the planet has been getting warmer over the past N years (choose your own time frame, as you understand the evidence to be). Put another way: the statement that the planet has been getting warmer, for some time, has been tested. In alternative language, it has been subjected to vigorous and rigorous attempts at falsification, and thus far, has survived.
But that’s not the question that drives the climate change controversy. This is not an argument analogous to whether agriculture started 10,000 years ago, or 12,000, or whether Moore’s law of doubling no longer holds in memory chip production, or any kind of argument about whether a quantity, such as temperature, is high or low, changing fast or slow.
Climate change is controversial because we must decide whether to take an expensive and disruptive action. We have to do less of something that, for good economic reasons, for more than a century, we had been doing more and more: burn fossil fuel for comfort, convenience, and wealth creation. To burn less fossil fuel is going to intrude on our daily lives in a hundred ways. It will inconvenience millions. And, everybody has to do it for the remedy to work. It’s analogous to subjecting millions of children to have their bodies pierced many times by needles, and their bloodstream injected with what are colloquially called germs.
You don’t do that sort of thing unless you have a high degree of confidence in an underlying causal proposition. Here, that vaccination reliably prevents collective misery and death, at a small cost in terms of unexpected but rare negative consequences. You wouldn’t let that be done to your child if you thought there was a non-trivial chance of a serious complication like autism. You’d want to know, “Is [underlying causal proposition] true?” And if the reliability and safety of vaccination had become controversial, perhaps because of a peer-reviewed study published in a reputable scientific journal—what would you say to a concerned parent?
I’ve picked on panicky parents resisting vaccination, since many people regard vaccination as one of the great contributions of medical science to human well being. Speaking personally, if the benefits of reducing carbon in the atmosphere were as certain as the benefits of vaccinating my children, that would be good enough for me (my children got all recommended vaccinations, BTW).
But you may know parents who are not entirely convinced of the benefits of vaccination. To get you back into a Popperian spirit, and concentrate your mind on the intrinsic dubitability of scientific work, here is a list of statements. All, from time to time, were said to be backed by scientific evidence. Some still are—or so some people would say. All are statements that people have insisted are true—not possible, or probable, but true. Like anthropogenic climate change.
As you read each, make one of the following judgments:
a) I feel relatively certain this reflects true scientific knowledge
b) I feel relatively certain this statement is contravened by the best available scientific evidence
c) I’m not sure what is true here
Take a stand: which statements have the weight of scientific evidence behind them / against them, and which ones represents conjectures where the jury is still out?
- Marijuana has a higher potential for abuse, relative to cocaine and morphine
- Mercury in dental amalgam has no negative health consequences
- Reducing your consumption of saturated fat will improve your health outcomes
- GMO foods are safe
- Better to eat margarine instead of butter
- The bodily effects of high fructose corn syrup are the same as any other form of fructose
- Reducing your cholesterol will reduce your risk of coronary heart disease.
- Making contraceptives more widely available to teenagers leads to an increase in teenage sexual activity.
- Raising the minimum wage leads to loss of jobs.
- Carbon in the atmosphere follows a drug dosage model: when it increases, the planet gets warmer, and when it is made to decrease, the planet cools back down.
See the debrief for some perspective on each of these claims. The fallibility and transience of many scientific claims should now be more apparent, making you more likely to pause at statement #10. Likewise, if you review these together with an associate, one who is not a close friend, you two will almost certainly check different statements as certain or uncertain. And if I was particularly fortunate in my choice of statements, and careful in constructing the debrief, then by now I will have offended readers all across the political spectrum.
Face it: some of you are going to shun GMO foods, no matter how much evidence you are shown. Some of you will lobby for a higher minimum wage, no matter how many studies you see in opposition. We treat scientific evidence, in the nutritional and societal spheres, as dubitable, as fallible and conflicted as we need it to be. Just like parents who say, “I’d rather be safe than sorry when it comes to vaccinating my child.”
Only in the case of climate change, and only among those with particular political sympathies, is doubt ruled out of order.
As science spread out from the astronomic observatory and the chemical laboratory, and began to perfuse everyday life, in the form of economics, psychology, sociology, and now the daily weather, the assertions made by individual scientists exploded in number. If you are to be a scientifically literate citizen–knowledgeably accepting things established empirically and explained theoretically, and knowledgeably rejecting what is only supposition, hearsay, or data-grubbing; then your writ, your charge, and your challenge has been greatly expanded, here in the 21st century..
That development, that explosion of claims and counter-claims to scientific knowledge, is what underwrites the usefulness of the climate change controversy, in contemporary reflections on science and scientific knowledge.
Come to think of it, there is one other scientific topic of discussion where doubt is ruled out of order, and where Popper has also been thrown out the window: Darwin and evolution. Creationism is false, and Intelligent Design is pseudo-science. Richard Dawkins knows this to be true, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
I propose to you that the debate about Darwin and Creationism lurks in the shadows behind debate over climate change. Politically, the two controversies line up well. Evangelical Christian voters are thick on the ground in states and counties where fossil fuels are economically important, places that would bear much of the economic burden of actions against climate change. In turn, devout Darwinians, and climate change insisters, often hail from the sort of secular, liberal, urban precincts where Evangelical Christians are thin on the ground.
The battle over Creationism anticipated the battle over anthropogenic climate change, laid down the rails along which it would steam. Darwin, and the need to defend Darwin, marked the beginning of the end of Popper’s reign as the best available defender of science, and of falsifiability as the best available demarcator for distinguishing science and pseudo-science. Darwin was not to be doubted. Ever. Evolution by natural selection is not a conjecture; it is science.
Was it fair of me to attach the word “devout” to Darwinian, two paragraphs back? Strictly speaking, devout is a word that applies only to believers in a context of faith. Scientists do not believe in the evolution of species via random mutation and differential reproductive success: they know it to be true.
What’s Popper got to say to that? Richard Dawkins doesn’t sound very provisional.
The transformation of science into its opposite, faith, began with the need to beat back the religious assault on Darwin. The fervor that animates some climate change insisters is the same as the fervor of those who fight to keep religion out of state-funded schools.
[…] Climate Change and the Nature of Scientific Certainty, Part II […]