Earlier this year, I was playing golf with a guy, my partner in a match against another club. Good player, successful businessman, about 60, father of kids in Ivy League schools. A solid citizen. For some reason we were discussing the weather, and I interjected some global warming worry, as I am wont to do. He replied that the data he sees show that the polar ice caps are actually expanding.
Again, we had a match to win, he was my team-mate; I let it slide as if I didn’t hear. I knew he was a Republican, in a country-club, worry-about-entitlement-spending kind of way. But I ruminated over the comment, mentioning it at dinner to my daughter. I have doubts whether we’ll get enough of a handle on global warming to turn over a temperate planet to our children and grandchildren, whether democracies are even capable of that kind of necessary intra-generational sacrifice of present consumption for the future. Still, it surprised me to see that global-warming deniers have their own set of facts and often give few other indications of being delusional.
This comes to mind after reading this New York Times report — stunning, I thought. And also this by Stephen Walt. I’ve been around a while, and generally understand why opinions on issues go together in a psychological or ideological sense — why liberals are generally liberals across the board, etc. So it doesn’t surprise me that the person I believe has few peers in foreign-policy wisdom in the U.S. right now seems also to be on my global-warming page. But I admit to being a bit at sea about the mechanism by which opinions about the issue are formed. For people like my golf partner, it can’t be as simple as “if Al Gore says it, it must be wrong.” Can it?
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Scott McConnell wrote:
“But I admit to being a bit at sea about the mechanism by which opinions about the [global warming] issue are formed.”
That’s funny because knowing a little something of your background, Mr. McConnell, I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been as sure of the global warming hypothesis are you seem to be.
I.e., you’ve seen something of the politically correct herd instinct of modern intellectual elites, the desire among them to feel superior often being stronger than the desire to be right, the characteristic snigger with which they often have for dissenting views if not outright attempts to quash the hearing of those dissenting views, the outsized moralism with which they often express themselves on same, and etc., etc. And there’s no doubt there’s been at least a significant amount of same on the part of the warmists. (Not to say that among the hard-core deniers there hasn’t been outright bovine stupidity.)
Dubious behavior such as I noted above is certainly not true of all global warmers, but enough to make one uneasy, and I would have thought it would have turned you onto a more cautious mode about the issue having some experience seeing how The (Self-Assessed) Right People can behave. (Such as towards Pat Buchanan for instance which you saw close up.)
Anyway, as one who is just about “neutral” on the subject (in my mind meaning I accept that there’s been some modest warming over the last 100 years but is unconvinced that all of it was man-made and then also by the future predictions), I would just say that in addition to the au currant herd-like behavior of a lot of the warmists there are some decent reasons to be on the fence about their predictions.
As George Will has noted since the 70′s when the science seemed on the side of saying we were in for a huge global cooling, about one-third of those following years up until now undisputedly have seen no warming. Undisputedly really: 10-12 years or so now, although that might be broken by this summer’s heat. And none of this was predicted by the warmists’ computer models, which has been admitted (in a private email by one of the big warmists) to not only be inexplicable but a “travesty” in terms of the degree of validity that can legitimately cause foundational skepticism about the warmists’ science so far.
There’s lots of other “littler” things one runs into as well that can give pause to signing on in any large way to the warmists’ hypothesis (“littler” to my mind at least, but still stubborn), but then on the bigger or “meta” scale again there’s something further too.
Perhaps paradoxically, at least to me the greater than adamant certainty you see amongst too many of the big warmist’ scientists just gives off the smell that this isn’t seeming like good, solid science yet.
I mean, if you are indeed so confident of something, why the near *demands* that others sign on to your beliefs? After all if it’s as bad and imminent as you believe, presumably it’ll be clear soon enough.
So there’s a whiff of some “rock star scientists” among the warmists, just loving the attention, and then the bulk seeming not all that certain, and then you consider that … geez, they are dealing with an enormous, complex system, about which we really only have about 100 years of non-analog data (i.e., temperature readings), and yet you see this certainty that they not only know all the variables that go into that system but know their effects too—despite all their interactions—to a remarkably precise degree.
(Followed by what can seem periodic drips of discoveries of very possibly significant if not very large variables no-one even thought of before, such as the results of that recent CERN experiment—not the Higgs thing—seeming to unexpectedly show a very decided effect of cosmic rays upon cloud formation, with clouds much influencing global temps and so perhaps explaining historical events differently than otherwise understood and thus greatly throwing off understanding of mechanism.)
There’s then all the “littler” stuff I mentioned such as even what seems the foundational question of whether CO2 really is a warming forcing agent (with Lindzen of MIT I think questioning this even) and historical periods of great cold with high CO2 levels and everyone agreeing water vapor is a great forcing agent and….
Like I say, it just gives off an uneasy smell at the present time of not being enough like the science that has proven itself otherwise on other things to instill great confidence. And enough politically-inspired and economically special-interest driven smells that it surprises me that you seem to be at least a few notches more persuaded by it than I would expect.
Heaven knows though: It’s been hotter than hell here where I live this summer, following a winter that started early and never seemed to end, and a winter only a couple of years ago with snow to the roof. So I waffle. I can live with Manhattan and L.A. being innundated (indeed, happily!), but you give me more than a very very rare 100+ degree day here which we’ve now had in abundance and this gets my attention. I like it cold. Makes ice-fishing more plausible.