Political climate science

The global warming scam has been pressed upon us with frantic alarm by everyone from Al Gore to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia to virtually every teacher in the public school system. Life on the planet, we were told, is in mortal danger from climate change brought on by carbon emissions. The research was in, and there was a solid "consensus" in the scientific community. The only rational and morally defensible course was to empower governments everywhere to impose severe restrictions not only on manufacturing but also on every aspect of human life. Call it our own generation's "fierce urgency of now," as Martin Luther King Jr. put it with far greater justification.

Then we discovered that what we were assured was settled science as a basis for worldwide emergency measures was actually, as National Review's Rich Lowry put it, just "global-warming advocacy rather than dispassionate inquiry." Hackers made an embarrassing stack of CRU emails and documents public last December that revealed missing and erroneous data, manipulation and suppression of data, as well as what WORLD Magazine's Timothy Lamer called, "a pattern of groupthink and deception among influential climate scientists." One researcher in Colorado who was connected with the CRU was discovered to have lamented candidly, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." Yet they and their political allies were screaming at us to turn our way of life inside out and upside down on the basis of this research they claimed was as certain as the heliocentric universe.

All of this reminds us of the truth of what Francis Bacon wrote at the outset of the scientific civilization for which he argued. In the New Organon, his 1620 argument for a new kind of science based on the severe discipline of a patient and rigorous method, he warned against the unreliability of the human mind in investigating nature:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding (Book I, aphorism 49).

We like to think of scientists as objective inquirers into the truth, without taint of personal interest or political ambition. We have long ago given up thinking of other academics this way, i.e., people in the humanities and the so-called "soft sciences," like my own, political science. But it seems that even the priests in the white lab coats share our human weaknesses, and are tempted as we are. But of course our experience with the evolutionary biologists taught us that.