Another jesting Pilate
Susan Matthews at Slate on that climate change denial column by the New York Times’s new mavericky guy Bret Stephens.
His debut column, “Climate of Complete Certainty,” published on Friday, supports my theory. The thesis of the column is that we would do well to remember that there are fair reasons why people might be skeptical of climate change, and that claiming certainty on the matter will only backfire. He casts himself as a translator between the skeptics and the believers, offering a lesson “for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy.”
He talks about the overconfidence of the Clinton campaign.
He then goes on to compare the Clinton failure and the science on climate change. “Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?” he asks facetiously.
I will be honest, I do not know what “100 percent of the truth” means. But I do know what Stephens is doing here. He is sowing the seeds of epistemic uncertainty. He is telling readers that the experts’ wrongness during the 2016 election is a good justification for doubting other established facts. People are right to look around at the institutions we once held onto and to doubt the veracity of the information they give us. It is entirely reasonable to stop trusting expertise, Stephens subtly suggests. Remember Clinton?
Clever people can get overconfident, therefore, assume all experts are wrong. Not so sure I agree 100% with the logic there Lou.
This is a classic strain of climate change denialism. Stephens does not call a single fact into question throughout his piece. Instead, he’s telling his readers that their decision not to trust the entire institution of science that supports the theory of climate change might actually be reasonable. “Ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism,” he writes. “They know—as all environmentalists should—that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”
So just laugh merrily, fill up the SUV with 40 gallons of gas, and drive off into the sunset, leaving your children to deal with the floods and droughts and mass migrations.
The final shoe drops in the last lines of the piece:
Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
What he is suggesting here is that the rational way to go forward with a conversation about climate change is to admit that climate change might not be certain. This is similar to the torturous logic he puts forward throughout the rest of the piece—the only way to be reasonable about this topic is to give in to those who are unreasonable about it. While he calmly insists he is the only logical person around, he is spewing complete bullshit.
Trump will probably invite him to Taco del Mar next weekend.
This is what passes for argument now? Person A was very confident, but Person A was wrong. Therefore (?) if Person B is confident, Person B is probably wrong, too. But was Person A wrong because of their confidence, or in spite of it? Why should confidence or certainty be taken as proof of inaccuracy? I don’t understand this “argument” at all.
I can understand saying, “Certainty is no guarantee of truth.” Sure. That’s reasonable. In that case, look at the evidence and go from there. Is there evidence that supports the experts’ theories and conclusions about climate change? Are the experts merely certain (bad! boo hiss!), or are they certain based on evidence?
This is probably why the Times is getting a lot of (cough) mail.
Scientism! Because science is just another religion, right?
OK, I’ll play along. Let’s say we address climate change by radically cutting our use of fossil fuels and massively increasing our use of renewable energy sources. Then it turns out scientists were wrong. Unless I own a whack of shares in fossil fuels or work in the industry, I don’t see much downside.
Now, what happens if we follow our course of ignoring climate science and continue our current use of fossil fuels. Then it turns out scientists were right. In that case, we’re toast – or at least our offspring are toast.
The logical decision on this is real easy, but I doubt Stephens is much swayed by logic.
Yes. Yes there are. They’re all synonyms for ignorance.
I wonder how much longer I will be allowed to teach about it in my Environmental Science classes? After all, I work at a public college, and our legislature has been cracking down on other agencies that deal with the topic, and not allowing them to attribute things to climate change. Since most people seem to feel education should fit with the goals and desires of the majority, and I am in a state that voted overwhelmingly for the current simian in the white house, am I going to be gagged soon? And if so, will I feel like I can buck the system so close to retirement? I want an end to 80 hour weeks…but I also want to be honest with my students.
Does he smoke? We wouldn’t want to let our lives to be affected by the pesky ol’ certainty when it interferes with our bases profits.
I call bullshit on the “if only climate scientists expressed less certainty” argument.
Science deniers of all stripes routinely use scientific uncertainty and willingness to admit and embrace error and imprecision as arguments against science.
Climate deniers in particular are right now pushing the argument that, gee, these scientific projections come with error bars, and if the actual temperatures end up being two standard deviations cooler than the mean prediction (which is within the 95% confidence interval), then we’ll barely have any problems at all! Which, aside from the silliness of basing your argument on the tail end of a probability distribution, also ignores the fact that there’s a tail on the other side, i.e. temperatures could be much higher than the mean prediction.
It’s a can’t win proposition: scientists who express confidence in their predictions are chastised for being arrogant and overly certain, while any acknowledgement of uncertainty is distorted into being some supposedly fatal admission. “The only way to win is not to play.”