[ExI] Scientists Behaving Badly

[Damien Broderick]

NYT: December 15, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Four Sides to Every Story
By STEWART BRAND

San Francisco

CLIMATE talks have been going on in Copenhagen for a week now, and it 
appears to be a two-sided debate between alarmists and skeptics. But 
there are actually four different views of global warming. A taxonomy of 
the four:

DENIALISTS They are loud, sure and political. Their view is that 
climatologists and their fellow travelers are engaged in a vast 
conspiracy to panic the public into following an agenda that is 
political and pernicious. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and the 
columnist George Will wave the banner for the hoax-callers.

“The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply 
untrue and not based on sound science,” Mr. Inhofe declared in a 2003 
speech to the Senate about the Kyoto accord that remains emblematic of 
his position. “CO2 does not cause catastrophic disasters — actually it 
would be beneficial to our environment and our economy .... The motives 
for Kyoto are economic, not environmental — that is, proponents favor 
handicapping the American economy through carbon taxes and more 
regulations.”

SKEPTICS This group is most interested in the limitations of climate 
science so far: they like to examine in detail the contradictions and 
shortcomings in climate data and models, and they are wary about any 
“consensus” in science. To the skeptics’ discomfort, their arguments are 
frequently quoted by the denialists.

In this mode, Roger Pielke, a climate scientist at the University of 
Colorado, argues that the scenarios presented by the United Nations 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are overstated and 
underpredictive. Another prominent skeptic is the physicist Freeman 
Dyson, who wrote in 2007: “I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate 
model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers 
predicted by the computer models .... I have studied the climate models 
and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid 
dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of 
the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the 
clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and 
forests.”

WARNERS These are the climatologists who see the trends in climate 
headed toward planetary disaster, and they blame human production of 
greenhouse gases as the primary culprit. Leaders in this category are 
the scientists James Hansen, Stephen Schneider and James Lovelock. (This 
is the group that most persuades me and whose views I promote.)

“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which 
civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted,” Mr. 
Hansen wrote as the lead author of an influential 2008 paper, then the 
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have to be 
reduced from 395 parts per million to “at most 350 p.p.m.”

CALAMATISTS There are many environmentalists who believe that industrial 
civilization has committed crimes against nature, and retribution is 
coming. They quote the warners in apocalyptic terms, and they view 
denialists as deeply evil. The technology critic Jeremy Rifkin speaks in 
this manner, and the writer-turned-activist Bill McKibben is a (fairly 
gentle) leader in this category.

In his 2006 introduction for “The End of Nature,” his famed 1989 book, 
Mr. McKibben wrote of climate change in religious terms: “We are no 
longer able to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger 
forces — now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms 
and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man. That was what I 
meant by the ‘end of nature.’”

The calamatists and denialists are primarily political figures, with 
firm ideological loyalties, whereas the warners and skeptics are 
primarily scientists, guided by ever-changing evidence. That distinction 
between ideology and science not only helps clarify the strengths and 
weaknesses of the four stances, it can also be used to predict how they 
might respond to future climate developments.

If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet 
undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is 
that the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical 
this time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and 
the calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim.

If climate change keeps getting worse then I would expect denialists to 
grasp at stranger straws, many skeptics to become warners, the warners 
to start pushing geoengineering schemes like sulfur dust in the 
stratosphere, and the calamatists to push liberal political agendas — 
just as the denialists said they would.