I’m not sure what’s happening to the climate, but the controversy over global warming seems to be heating up. The latest twist, an outcry over stolen emails that seem to document a nasty conspiracy among some climate scientists to silence and discredit their critics while manipulating evidence to strengthen the case for human responsibility for climate change, looks bad all around. I’m as disgusted by people who steal and publicize private correspondence as I am by the behavior exposed in the emails.
As a Christian, I suppose I’m encouraged that modern science is providing us such vivid support for the truth of the basic Christian doctrine of Original Sin. “We have all fallen short, we have all gone astray.” Distinguished scientists turn out to be the same kind of conniving, egomaniacal backstabbers as the rest of us.
So far, the emails seem to say more about the moral character of individual scientists than about the science of climate change. As I’ve written before in this blog, I have less doubt about the reality of climate change than I do about the ability of the world’s governments to agree on and implement effective action against it.
But there’s another observation to make here. The scientists who are trying to isolate and discredit their opponents weren’t, I think, just doing it for the money and the prestige. They genuinely believe (and they may well be right) that the fight against global warming is a fight to save the planet — to preserve billions of people against misery, to save human civilization, perhaps to save the human race. When the stakes are so high, what’s wrong with a few ethical shortcuts?
When trying to build a public consensus in the United States for the struggle against communism, President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson made arguments which he later admitted were ‘clearer than truth.’ This, I think, is what the global warming scientists are trying to do. They look around the world and see selfish politicians, selfish lobbyists, and stupid, inattentive voters. Only by making the evidence clearer than truth can they hope to sway public opinion in time.
Ever since 1945, we have been living in an age of apocalypse. Science-fiction catastrophes threaten us on every side from nuclear war to man-made pandemics to runaway global warming and others too numerous to name. That list of potential catastrophes will only grow longer in this new century as the march of science and technology creates new and ingenious ways in which human beings can destroy themselves either by accident or on purpose.
As we move into this era, it’s going to be increasingly important to avoid the Achesonian temptation. The problems we face are serious enough without over-hyping. Letting the scientific consensus develop slowly while all objections are aired and all evidence sifted may slow down the process of policy change, but moving too quickly also has risks and costs.
So there are two lessons from this debacle. One is that political and intellectual debate needs to be carried on in a spirit of scrupulous honesty; the other is that many emails should never be sent, and that all emails should be deleted.