Global Warming Doubters

August 23, 2008

It has been a relatively cool summer here in Wisconsin. Emily has been complaining (!) about how cool it is when she gets out for a jog in the morning. We know we're in the midst of global warming, but current temperatures are a reminder that changes in global weather will influence different regions in different ways. I found the above map of global average temperatures for May 2008 to be quite enlightening on this topic. Sure enough, there we are in Wisconsin sitting under a wave of cool blue dots. But then looking north toward the Arctic Circle and over to Africa and Asia it is clear there are plenty more places that are exceptionally hot.

I have been thinking lately about what evolution debaters and climate change doubters have in common. One obvious point is an unwillingness to listen to experts. I don't mean the talking head labeled as "expert" on television.. but someone with genuine academic credentials and peer-reviewed publications. There is a breathtaking willingness on the part of evolution debaters and climate change doubters to call into question the thought and experience of people who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to understanding an issue. It is an armchair critical spirit that assumes experts are guided by some deep bias and can therefore be dismissed.

There is a general pattern of attacking expert positions by means of "hole punch" arguments. That is, a counter construction of evidence and events is not offered, rather doubters feel confident pointing out an anomaly here and a counter-fact there in order to call into question the big picture put forward by experts. Both evolution and climate change are complex processes that scientists are doing their best to figure out.. and nobody claims to have all the answers. For climate change there are multiple models about how all that carbon in the atmosphere will change global temperatures. It is not enough to point out problems in this or that model.. because everyone can do that. The point is to present a model that makes sense of what happens when all that carbon sits around in the atmosphere, and the people working on models are unanimous that change is coming.

But there is a meta-point to be made here. We live in a complex world in which it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on multiple topics. The expert is a necessity of our ever-ramifying structures of knowledge. The modern world is based on acceptance of these structures. Just stop and think about all the places in life where we listen to experts! I do lots of things and accept lots of facts concerning which I have no direct knowledge. That does no make me a fool, that makes me a modern person. We exist by a sort of faith in the properties of electricity, the binary code, radio waves, and metal. We know that people have worked on these things—people we call experts.

When evolution and climate change are debated it feels to me almost like the rending of a social contract. The level of skepticism suddenly grows exponentially when one of these two issues comes up. People who move through life with unconscious acceptance of expert opinion now toss out objection after objection. But if this level of skepticism concerning expert opinion was generalized, life would become unlivable.. since we can't master every topic in order to evaluate what we should and shouldn't do.

I wonder sometimes if the long term legacy of the evolution debate will not be climate catastrophe. Whether young Bill in rural Georgia learns evolution instead of creation science is not in the long run a big deal. But to stop climate change will take the buy-in of a large segment of the American public, and that means what young Bill in Georgia thinks about climate change does matter. The problem is that the intellectual water has been polluted by the irrational levels of skepticism directed over the past century at the theory of evolution. The fight against evolution has been waged by assigning liberal and secular biases to working scientists, effectively calling into question the nature of expert scientific opinion. The resulting generalized doubt has been used by corporations, whose interests are in continuing the status quo, to keep the public confused. It may be a great misfortune for the world that the evolution debate played out the way it did.