Late last month, the New York Times hired conservative Bret Stephens as an op-ed writer. Only 43 years old, Stephens had previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.
While Stephens isn’t an out-and-out denialist of global warming, he’s always tried to minimize its potential effects on our planet. As Physics Today wrote in 2013:
As recently as November 2011, in a column headlined ‘The great global warming fizzle,’ Stephens described ‘the case of global warming’ as a ‘system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen’ that, like religion, ‘is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.’
Stephens doesn’t appear to reject outright the data on temperature rise, or even the finding that humans are involved. But he energetically mocks warnings as hysterical alarmism. In a 2008 column he wrote with a smirk:
“What manner the catastrophe might take isn’t yet clear, but the scenarios are grim: The climate crisis is getting worse faster than anticipated; global warming will cause refugee crises and destabilize entire nations…. And so on.”
In December 2009, he published on the incident that he and others framed with the loaded term climategate. He charged that it involved ‘some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data.’ That column carried the headline ‘Climategate: Follow the money’ and the subhead ‘Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.’
They added that Stephens “has a record of indicting climate scientists through mockery.”
And indeed, in his very first column,”Climate of complete certainty” (April 28), Stephens continues this gambit, mocking not anthropogenic climate change, which he actually admits, but science itself, which, he says, has given us false certainty about the phenomenon. This is a confusing message, for it gives denialist readers some ammunition not just against climate change, but against the science that has ferreted out its existence and cause. Climate scientists, he argues, have, like other scientists with convincing data, “descen[ded] to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.” In other words, he’s indicting science for being arrogant and giving a false idea of certainty. And just as surely, that gives ammunition and hope to denialists.
First, his admissions:
The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?
and
None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.
But then he goes on to undercut both the nature of the threat and the “certainty” of science itself using these arguments (quotes from the article are in quotation marks):
- Polls and experts were virtually certain that Hillary Clinton would win the election, showing the fallacy of certainty.
“When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.
That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.
There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.
We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.
With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.”
The analogy to Clinton is flawed: scientists don’t take polls, we make testable predictions about climate, our “data” don’t consist of asking people what they’ll do (some of whom have motivations to lie), and the effects of global warming are already clear. Yes, polls can be wrong, and so can science, but that says nothing about whether the data supporting climate change are convincing. They are (see here, for instance). He adduces no evidence against climate change, but simply is telling readers to be deeply suspicious of science, as if science were the equivalent of a political poll.
- Climate scientists falsely convey an attitude of complete certainty, demonizing opponents as lunatics and moral inferiors.
“Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.
By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”
Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”
First, no scientist ever says they have the absolute truth. A spirit of openness toward conflicting data is in fact part of the true spirit of science (of course we’re humans, and that’s not the spirit of some scientists!). We always operate on probabilities, making the best inference we can from data. Yes, the data supporting climate change may be wrong, but the likelihood of that is very small. We do not have “total certainty”, but we have enough assurance to begin to take the problem very seriously and try to do something about it. (Stephens cavalierly dismisses climate-change models as “sophisticated and fallible”, as if they are surely wrong.) But what is the “hyperbole” that Stephens is talking about?
And really, “ideological intentions” underlie our desire to prevent the destruction of our planet? Why would scientists have a bias against finding climate change and an ideology that prompts them to lie about its possible disasterous effects? How would we benefit from that? As for making “few converts”, nearly half of all Americans already accept anthropogenic global warming, not a bad figure given that its disastrous effects aren’t yet clearly visible to the average person.
Further, surely the opposition to global warming is not based on scientists’ supposed “moral superiority”—no more than opposition to evolution (as strong in America as is opposition to climate change) does not rest on evolutionists acting “morally superior.” It’s based on religion; just as climate change is based on secular faith or wish-thinking that “everything’s all right.”
The parallels between Stephens’s attitude and Americans’ denial of evolution becomes clear at the end when he makes his last argument:
- The “total certainty” evinced by scientists in general degrades their credibility.
“None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.
I’ve taken the epigraph for this column* [JAC: see below] from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.”
We see here that Stephens’s real objection is not science, but “scientism,” normally taken to be the extension of science into areas where it supposedly doesn’t belong, but to Stephens it’s a form of scientific arrogance.
But there is no scientist who would say that we are absolutely certain about climate change, or about evolution, either. Stephens is tilting at a windmill. The best data available tell us that both pheomena are real, and the probability we are wrong is very, very low. Yes, we could both be wrong, but Stephens is using that very small possibility to do down science as a whole and—let’s face it—to give heart to climate-change denialists.
The Washington Post which is owned by the New York Times, has written a critique of Stephens’s column, as has Slate. The Post‘s piece in particularly good at pointing out the ambiguities and misstatements in Stephen’s column. They asked the Times’s editorial-page boss James Bennett, responsible for overseeing Stephens’s column, to respond to their critique, and got this response, which they call “Editorial Page Editor’s Boilerplate Kumbaya Response to Public Outrage”:
If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time, we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well.
The crux of the matter here is whether the questions Bret’s raising and the positions he’s taking are outside the bounds of reasonable discussion. I don’t think a fair reading of his column remotely supports that conclusion — quite the opposite, actually. He’s capturing and contributing to a vitally important debate, and engaging that debate directly helps each of us clarify what we think. We’re already getting some spirited and constructive responses, and I’m looking forward to reflecting those views in our pages, too.
A “fair reading” of Stephens’s column shows that he’s concluding that science can’t be trusted in general, and perhaps for climate change as well—at least as far as the certainty of the phenomenon is concerned.
In hiring Stephens and allowing him to spew anti-science rhetoric as opinion, the Times is doing the equivalent of publishing an evolution-criticizing piece by a closet creationist. To see that, just rewrite Stephens’s column, but substitute “evolution” for “climate change”. Would such a piece merit inclusion on the paper’s op-ed page?
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*[Column epigraph]
When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
— An old Jew of Galicia
