I am not a climate-skeptic, let alone a denier; I accept the possibility of human-induced climate-change, but I’m far from an alarmist. Like most people, my interest is in the truth — in the science associated with the issue — and for that reason I’d like to see a debate about climate science in the media. That’s why I was delighted with President-elect Trump’s nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
The idea that human activity is causing climate change is based on science, but as a layman I must say that what I hear about climate science does not inspire confidence. As far as I can tell, what there is of climate science is based on the observation that carbon dioxide can trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape into space, and that various “feedback effects” increase that impact. That seems to be a generally accepted idea, but it tells us very little about whether human activity actually causes changes in such climate-related phenomena as storms, atmospheric warming and sea levels.
Scott Pruitt at his office in Oklahoma City, July 29, 2014. Picture taken July 29, 2014. REUTERS/Nick Oxford.
To get to that point, we have to have a model of how the Earth’s atmosphere works, and that is where the credibility of the science that the media reports begins to break down. It’s hard to believe that we know enough about the effects of things like clouds, oceans, vegetation, future economic growth, and a myriad other factors that affect climate, to build a credible model that connects carbon dioxide emissions with climate outcomes.
The last election demonstrates pretty conclusively that models of the voting public were wrong. The famous FiveThirtyEight, which called the 2012 election miraculously well, failed embarrassingly (for the proprietor) in 2016. If a model of the US electorate isn’t reliable — when we can test it continuously with polls and 200 years of electoral history to verify the assumptions— how is it that we can be so certain about a model of the Earth’s eco-system?
I read a lot of articles and books about science — anthropology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and the like — and what I see is that nothing is settled; everything is debated, most of it quite heatedly. Yet these disputes arise out of actual observations and experiments, not computer models. Those things that seemed universally accepted for almost a century, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, are now being questioned. Dark matter and dark energy are raising doubt about whether we really understand the most basic facts about the universe we thought we knew.
To me, the distinctive thing about climate science is that I see very little debate about it. Supporters of human-caused climate change say that 98 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a danger, or some stupendous number like that. It seems strange to me that climate should be the only area of science in which there is almost complete agreement, when it isn’t based on anything other than a model.
It seems strange to me that climate should be the only area of science in which there is almost complete agreement, when it isn’t based on anything other than a model.
It is disturbing, then, that I can read in The New York Times and hear on National Public Radio that new discoveries are causing scientists to rethink what they formerly believed, but I never see an article or hear a report of a dispute about climate change. Odder still is the fact that every report published in these popular media confirm, rather than question, the scientific “consensus.” It’s possible, of course, that climate science is different from all other sciences, but Occam’s razor — the simplest answer — suggests that the key disputes are simply not being reported. This is worrisome, perhaps another example of media bias in favor of the left.
Which brings me back to Scott Pruitt. As head of the EPA, he would be in a position to expose ideas about climate science that could not be ignored by the media. If there are scientists who are having trouble getting their dissenting views reported, they will now have an avenue for disclosure. Perhaps there will finally be a real public debate about the science of climate change. If there is no other benefit from Mr. Trump’s nomination, that would be enough.
