The Non-Scientific Appeal of Global Warming

With the science of climate change so uncertain, why, one must ask, are people like Al Gore, James Hansen, and (according to some surveys) the majority of scientists working in climate-related fields, so convinced of the truth of the anthropogenic global warming thesis? What explains their fixation on CO2, a minor greenhouse gas that is necessary for plant growth and comprises less than 4 parts in 10,000 of the earth's atmosphere? The answer here is probably to be found in what an older generation of social scientists called "the sociology of knowledge."

We like to think of scientists and scholars as honest truth brokers only minimally influenced by factors other than their overriding concern to assess the truth. And in many cases this is clearly so. But scientists and scholars, even some of the most gifted, are human beings and under the right conditions are subject to fads and foibles no different than anyone else. Experience shows just how often the case is that scientists and others with specialty knowledge exaggerate the importance of their own field and their own projects and often distort the situation that concerns them most. Public health scientists have often exaggerated the importance of public health threats; military and defense analysts routinely exaggerate the threat of hostile foreign forces; homeland security experts exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism. The importance and prestige of those in any given field is usually enhanced by hyping developments in which their expertise would be called upon and their knowledge needed to prevent grave social harms.

MIT's Richard Lindzen, a long-time skeptic of the Gore-Hansen Model of global warming, has explained how the serious challenge to American scientific and military dominance posed by the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite in the 1950s sent a clear message to the American scientific community that has stuck with it ever since. After Sputnik, says Lindzen, it became clear that the way to gain status, prestige, and, above all, government funding for one's scientific research, was through the medium of public fear and crisis creation. A similar dynamic was at work earlier, he says, in the creation of the Manhattan Project, which was originally established as a counterweight to what was believed to be an advanced Nazi atom bomb project. The threats and crises for which the government will shell out big money may be entirely real, of course, and not in need of any exaggeration or hype. But they may also be bogus or grossly inflated, a condition that Lindzen thinks accurately describes current global-warming concerns of the Gore-Hansen variety.

The New York Times science editor John Tierney offers a similar take on the global warming issue, stressing both the self-interest of scientists involved in crisis mongering and the more general, herd-like conformism that afflicts scientists along with everyone else. "I've long thought that the biggest danger in climate research," Tierney writes, "is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the 'consensus' about global warming. That's partly because it's easy for everyone to get caught up in 'informational cascades,' and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem -- and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it. … Given the huge stakes in this debate -- the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions -- it's important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?" (John Tierney).

The last sentence was an oblique reference to attempts by many climate scientists to suppress skeptical voices, which was so clearly in evidence in the scandalous Climategate emails. A commentator on Tierney's blog adds the following valuable insight: "To survive, most workers in scientific fields must follow the grant money. If all the grants this year are for work on the crisis du jour, then that's the work which gets done. The annoying fact is that somebody pays for science. The 'somebody' may be an Evil Oil Company, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, or anyone else with bags of money. We shouldn't be too amazed when we find that the 'somebody' tends to get the science he or it wants to see."

A Substitute Religion

That money, power, vanity, and prestige may influence a scientific debate -- or non-debate in the case of global warming -- should not be very surprising. As I have said, scientists and scholars are human beings and prone to all the foibles and distortions of the human condition. This was the great insight of the mid-20^th century "sociologists of knowledge," and before them of most Calvinists and other discerning Christians (including most notably James Madison in Federalist No. 10).

But I think there is an additional element here that is less talked about but probably as important as the kinds of issues Lindzen and Tierney bring up. This is the attraction of global-warming orthodoxy not as a falsifiable scientific theory or source of research funding but as a substitute religion that engages all the energies and capacities to enhance meaning in life that an earlier generation of secular scholars and scientists often found in various brands of socialism or psychoanalysis. With the general decline and discrediting of both Marxism and Freudianism over the past thirty years radical environmentalism in various forms has taken their place in the lives of many secular intellectuals as a source of existential meaning and purpose. The insular, defensive, cult-like behavior displayed by so many global warming advocates when they are confronted with the concerns of informed skeptics reinforces such an interpretation and explains their refusal to debate dissenters. True believers have no converse with heretics. And such cult-like behavior reinforces one final suspicion: like socialism and Freudianism, global-warming alarmism may prove in time to be a God that failed.

On Writing

Kevin DeYoung has a good post today on what made C.S. Lewis’s writing style so effective and memorable. I thought it might be helpful to repost a couple of comments containing Lewis’s counsel on writing well.

C.S. Lewis’s last interview was on May 7, 1963—six months before he died. One of Sherwood Wirt’s questions was on writing: “How would you suggest a young Christian writer go about developing a style?”

Lewis responded:

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.

The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

(“Cross-Examination,” in C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley, p. 555.)

Seven years earlier (June 26, 1956), Lewis responded to letter from an American girl named Joan with advice on writing:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

(C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children, p. 64.)

The Power of the Poached Egg

I love writing. I the love the learning that goes before writing and the teaching that can happen through writing. Most authors love these two things too: learning and teaching.

I also love the craft of writing. This doesn’t make me a better person or even necessarily a better writer. But it makes me interested not just in communicating truth, but in communicating in a way that is winsome, clear, and memorable.

All of us appreciate good writing. We may not know that, and if we know that we probably don’t know why. But we all prefer to read something written well. There’s a way to communicate the truth and have it sound muddled. There’s a way to make it understandable. And then there’s a way to make it sing. That’s the difference between clear prose and great prose.

Let me give you an example from C.S. Lewis.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (56)

Almost every evangelical knows this paragraph. Many of us could just about recite it from memory. We all love the liar-lunatic-Lord trilemma. But what makes it so memorable?

[Incidentally, I'm setting aside the objection that there could be another "L"-legend. Lewis was writing for a British audience in the 1940s that didn't doubt the authenticity of the gospel accounts by and large. Today's apologetics might have to start by examining whether we can trust what the Bible says about Jesus in the first place. But that's beyond the scope of this post. Let's just look at Lewis' paragraph as an example of solid apologetics (considering the context) and a wonderful piece of prose.]

For starters, the paragraph exhibits clear logic. The argument makes sense and is easy to understand. And yet, the logic is not pedantic. Imagine if Lewis wrote, “Jesus Christ can have one of three identities. One, he could be a lunatic. Two, he could be a liar. Or three, he could be Lord. Let’s look the evidence for each possibility.” Bo-ring. Notice, Lewis never uses the explicit syllogistic language of liar, lunatic, or Lord. That’s just how we remember it.

Moreover, Lewis has a good sense of rhythm. The first five sentences go long (37 words), short (9 words), long (22 words), long (28 words), short (5 words). The shorter sentence give the reader a chance to breathe. They are breaks from the rhetorical flourishes in the previous sentence(s). The short sentences stand out and pack a punch because of the paragraph’s cadence.

Lewis also writes with authority. He addresses the reader directly (“you can shut him up” is much more effective here than the stately “one can shut him up,” or worse, “one can silence him”). He firmly challenges the reader with the phrase “patronising nonsence.” And the last line (“He did not intend to”) is the perfect final note to the crescendo—clear, staccato, and resolves the chord (so to speak). Notice too, Lewis doesn’t care about ending the sentence (or the paragraph, or the chapter) with a preposition. How lame would “It was not intention to do so” sound?

Perhaps the greatest strength of this paragraph—and it’s what makes Lewis such a good writer in general—is the vocabulary. There is no jargon. There is no purple prose. Lewis is not trying to impress or hide his meaning from the uninitiated. He wants to be understood. And yet, the vocabulary is still fresh. He deals in specificity instead of ambiguity. Words like “lunatic,” “patronising,” “madman,” and “Devil of Hell” grab your attention. They are not difficult words or phrase, but they are interesting.

Best of all is the phrase “poached egg.” Lewis doesn’t need this line. He could have left well enough with “lunatic.” But he went one step further and made lunacy laughable. Thinking of a man who thinks he is a poached egg is memorable. And funny too. People call it a “sense” of humor, and that’s what it is. You have to feel what fits. “Hamburger” seems too ordinary, whereas something like “bacteria flagellum” would have been too bizarre. Poached egg fits perfectly, though I think beluga whale could have done the trick too.

And finally, lest you think good writing is all about counting words in a sentence and inserting the right vocabulary in some master Mad Lib, let me hasten to add that memorable prose is never the product of axioms adhered to faithfully. Every good rule of writing can be broken (including this one). You must develop an intuition for what sounds right and looks right. You need a feel for good rhythm and a feel for what feels predictable.

How do you get this intuition? Reading books on writing is one place to start; I have learned something from every such book I’ve read. But besides some basic gifting and inclination, there are really only two indispensable means for growing into a good writer: writing a lot, and reading even more.

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