Following the Right Scent on Climate

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Dr. Christopher Essex:

Healthy, effective scientific research requires the participation of trained people with many takes on a subject. Trying to eradicate the participation of those who do not share one politically approved view on climate has been a profitable political tactic, but it is completely destructive for science, which has been seriously damaged by climate activism.

Recent attempts to openly attack prominent scientists have crossed a line, raising this destruction to new heights, making real scientists think twice about working on climate. The attacks are carried out with a particularly pungent red herring that makes it nearly impossible to keep the hounds from distraction.

Ideas, Events, and Gossip

There is a saying that great minds discuss ideas, broad minds discuss events, and small minds discuss other people. Let’s name those types of discussion I, II, and III respectively. Science and mathematics is type I. The subject of climate is definitively science and mathematics, yet for more than 25 years, popular and press discussion has dwelled obsessively on it as a type III discussion instead. Scientifically, climate is a deep, daunting mystery, wrapped in a complexity that tests the limits of what humans know or what they may ever know. Yet somehow the profound human limitations brought out by its scientifically uncompromising, rugged, alpine face gets lost in a socio-political fog rooted in grade school reasoning based on what daddy says and mendacious tattling about what the bad kids did when teacher was not looking.

Libelous websites devoted to such tattling have been with us for years. There are many distortions and falsehoods on them. But what did the bad kids actually do wrong? Well, nothing. That is, unless you feel it is wrong to be seen in public with an acquaintance of the dentist of someone who worked once for an oil company. Moreover it is not that libelous to falsely accuse people of being paid for something when there is nothing wrong with being paid for that thing in the first place. However, there is such a powerful fossil fuel taboo in some circles that even private organizations, advocating skepticism about the prevailing climate dogmas, desperately try to avoid any hint of funding from anything mildly connected with fossil fuels.

What is the problem with receiving such funding? Apparently oil companies give handsome sums to climate activist organizations that do not find it taboo to take oil money. Those very recipients simultaneously damn others for taking such funds, even when none were received, sought, or offered. Why should oil companies fund skeptical groups to say what they would say anyway? They’d get nothing but a kick in the pants for their trouble from the dogmatists.

Does this tattling make any sense? This is the climate fervor. Sense has nothing to do with it. The tattling is sleaze over sense, and soap opera over substance. But let’s burrow into the internal logic of it, anyway, without implying any external coherence.

Scientist A gets paid by Person B to say something scientific, C. If A does not believe in C, then A is dishonest. There is a commandment about bearing false witness, so this is as basic a sin as there is. Person B is complicit. The larger the payment, the worse it appears. But what if Scientist A believes in C, then there is no lie. Moreover if B only gives money to help A express C, then B supports a truth, even more so if B does not care one way or the other about C.

It all depends on what A really thinks about C and whether B actually cares about C. But it gets more complicated if B and A do not quite agree on what C is. They may not even be aware of their disagreement. What then? B could be complicit in a lie while A is completely innocent, and of course A could be dishonest even if B is innocent. The calculus of sin can be quite messy. If that were not complicated enough, A could be seduced into believing C. B sends flowers, and A likes the way the light falls on B’s shiny hair. A and B might both be honest but just distracted, and so on.

The Right Scent

The fine moral shadings of the inner machinations of A and B over C are legion. But none of them (none!) concerns the truth or falsehood of C. Science is unequivocally about C and nothing else! Science has nothing to do with the inner struggles of A and B. Scientists, when being scientific, don’t test the virtue or morality of experts to decide what’s true in nature, because they don’t believe any experts. That’s how they got to be experts. History shows that humans do an excellent job at getting things wrong, even without lies. Not believing experts is scientific. If you want to know the truth of C, just test it. Test things, not persons!

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