I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about the controversy over the e-mails between climate change scientists that seem to impugn their findings. Before I begin, let me state the obvious: this does not disprove the theory of climate change. It still seems to me that there is a profound amount of evidence supporting the existence of climate change. What has been left shaken by the whole ordeal is my faith in the interplay between democracy and science.
How do I mean? Well, it was listening to the lead scientist of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talk about the IPCC’s proceedings that led me to believe in the existence of climate change. You see, as someone who is completely inept when it comes to all things scientific, I had no way to keep my eyes from rolling back into my head as he chronicled the panel’s findings. When he started talking about the procedure behind reviewing the data–thousands of scientists from around the world, questioning and challenging one another–that I really began to put my faith in the validity of the theory. The idea of rigorous review was something I could understand. If this idea had been put through the paces and emerged intact, it must be valid.
That is what makes the admission of an agenda, revealed by these e-mails, and the inability to reproduce raw data so disheartening. If judging the procedure is the only tool you have for making sense of (in this case, quite literally) the world, knowledge that the procedure’s integrity is not what you thought it to be leaves you feeling rather helpless.
The one thing I would say is this. Even if this somehow turns out to be disastrous for climate change-believers, let us not get carried away. The refutation of climate change would not be a refutation of environmentalism as a whole. Opponents of both like to conflate the two, but environmentalism is far larger, and it has a far more straight-forward and fundamental insight. That insight is that the planet is coping with two competing ratios–the rate at which the Earth can naturally produce and the rate at which human beings consume. It is merely common sense that the latter can only outpace the former for so long before disaster strikes.
I have to go now. My roommate just got home. He’s drunk and he got us a couch.
