Letters to the Editor
-
Nature as victim
I caught your visit to Christopher Lyden's "Radio Open Source," where you explained your quasi-religious devotion to nature. While overall I found your insights to be thought-provoking, I couldn't agree with your accusation that environmentalists were casting Nature in the role of victim. Your thoughts on global warming here carry a similar theme: that Nature is so impossibly vast and sublime that we mere humans cannot hope to affect or offend it.
Certainly that's true if you define the natural world as "infinitely more than this tiny globe". But though I take comfort in being reminded that our current behavior has absolutely no effect on the small, furry creatures of Alpha Centauri, it's only a very small comfort when I consider the world we're leaving to the next generation.
There was a time when the Earth seemed very big, and we seemed very small. Our technology was very limited in the amounts of resources it could extract and the quantities and disruptive properties of the wastes it produced. At that point, the "grab what you can and throw it where you will" approach to the environment was sustainable, if not necessarily sensible or ennobling.
The last hundred and fifty years has seen something new. Tapping fossil fuels gave us access to abundant energy, energy which has given us great power over the natural world and spurred technological advances which have unlocked many of its deepest secrets. It has allowed us to grow our numbers and extend our influence, to the point that we are now consuming beyond our planet's capacity to provide.
You say that "nature will survive us all," and you're probably right. But for the statement to be correct, it isn't enough to assume that some fraction of the natural world will always be here; you have to also resign yourself to the eventual demise of mankind. Coming from someone who complains that our modern intellectual culture hasn't given us much to believe in or hope for, that seems like a profoundly negative view.
Environmentalism isn't just about loving or revering Nature as an abstract force. You have to love the details, including the millions of species we're driving to extinction (possibly including our own). Even the self-interested Ayn Rand readers of the world should be able to recognize the danger and stupidity of systematically shredding our life support system.
Which brings us to global warming. Your reasons for skepticism are -- as other readers have correctly (though often impolitely) pointed out -- all over the map, with no clear chain of reasoning linking nature's vastness, Al Gore's sentimentality, the woes of the developing world, and mercury pollutants in New Jersey. My impression is that your reasoning on this issue is entirely post hoc. That is, given a belief in the vastness and invulnerability of Nature, how to understand the emerging consensus that mankind is actually having a powerful effect on the climate of the planet? You're also the sort of person who seems to naturally abhor consensus and enjoy playing the iconoclast. I can deal with that, even if you're clasting my favored icons.
But when you've got the thousands upon thousands of scientists from the IPCC stalwartly on one side of an issue, and on the other side you have Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT*, it's disappointing to see laymen latching onto the idea of an ongoing, widespread scientific controversy. Certainly, individual scientists throughout history have taken stands against the understanding of their times, and been vindicated in the end. But the strength of the scientific edifice is precisely that such upheavals are so rare, despite constant efforts to bring them about.
In short, you who have decried the death of authority in the arts and humanities, are dismissing the authority of the studies, methods, and institutions that scientists themselves consider authoritative, simply because you're suspicious of widespread agreement.
Perhaps "consensus" seems like a suspiciously convenient talking point. What's the evidence for it? First, you have position statements by prestigious scientific institutions like the NAS, the IPCC, the American Meteorological Society, and dozens of others, all agreeing with the claims of anthropogenic global warming. The only notable dissent is by the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists).
There is also the survey done by Naiomi Oreskes, which surveyed over nine hundred abstracts of published papers regarding climate change. 75% of the papers either explicitly endorsed the scientific consensus or at least were written under the assumption that global warming is a real phenomenon. Some of the papers could have assumed that modern global warming is natural, but none of the papers explicitly argued the point. For 25%, the subject matter discussed required no presuppositions at all about the modern phenomenon. None of the papers explicitly questioned the consensus position. Unless we assume complete intellectual dishonesty on the part of the editors of scientific journals, it's hard to reconcile this result with the existence of a healthy community of dissenters. It shouldn't be hard for those legions of highly qualified skeptics to get enough funding for a statistically noticeable number of papers. I can only conclude that the research needed to back up the dissenters simply isn't happening.
I would like to try and address the hodge-podge of counterpoints you present, but without a listing of specific manipulations and distortions used in An Inconvenient Truth and an explanation for your fears that fighting global warming will have a detrimental effect upon the third-world poor, I'm not sure how to begin.
* It amuses me how skeptics always make sure to invoke Lindzen's full name and title, as though a middle initial was a sign of credibility, or as though Alfred P. Sloan -- who merely gave away lots of money -- somehow legitimized his views.