'Scientists say'

The blessing and curse of writing well is that in college you can produce term papers full of nonsense and get an “A.” A discerning professor will flag it in red, but students of the literary bent will always wager, usually correctly, that poor logic can be concealed by style.

A headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where straight-A English students go after they graduate,caught my attention for its evoking of the Bible’s apocalyptic descriptions. It read, “Global warming, drought, and war.” The subtitle: “A new study that focuses on events in Syria contends there is a connection.”

Very alarming. Has “global warming” finally gotten Syria? Are we seeing before our eyes the four horsemen bringing scarcity, hunger, and war (Revelation 6), and the partial ecological destructions of vegetation, the oceans, and the heavens (Revelation 8)? And does it turn out that the dreaded Day has been brought about, at least in part, by capitalist overconsumption and expulsion of CO2?

Let us read the article with a red pen.

Paragraph 1: Evidently there has been drought in Syria. (Fact). We are told in the opening sentence that this is “a record drought worsened by global warning.” (Conjecture). Perhaps the red-eyed reader skimming the news over his coffee will not notice the smooth conflating of fact and supposition based on some new study.

Paragraph 2: “In what scientists say is one of the most detailed and strongest connections between violence and human-caused climate change. …” See what has happened here: Now climate change is assumed, and its human cause is assumed—and the whole of it is connected to, not drought, but violence. Moreover, it is a “strong” connection.

By a leap of logic you didn’t notice in your morning funk, “human-caused climate change” is not only responsible for drought but for violence—never mind that this breathtaking charge involves a string of unproved claims: (1) that there is such a thing as climate change at all; (2) that climate change (if it exists) is cause by humans; (3) that climate change (if it exists and if it is caused by humans) produces drought; (4) that climate change (and therefore human scientific culpability) produces violence.

Paragraph 3 admits, “There are various things going on,” and that alleged climate change is only “a contributing factor.” And paragraph 4 walks the sensationalist claim back even more, saying, “The study’s authors do not claim climate change caused Syria’s civil war.” (To assert otherwise would have seemed too crazy even for a climate-change apostle.)

But the pendulum swings back again in paragraph 5 with the bold contention that “this is the ‘single clearest case’ ever presented by scientists of climate change playing a part in conflict because ‘you can really draw a blow-by-blow account with the numbers.’” We are assured in paragraph 7 (you have to take their word for it) that “statistical and computer simulation analysis” is able “to connect global warming to the multi-year drought,” and that “such dry spells are two to three times more likely because of human-caused heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than under natural conditions.”

What you must not pay attention to in the Inquirer article is that their throwaway phrase “scientists say” is misleading in suggesting that all scientists agree with these contentions. What you must not notice is the absence of opinion by other scientists who think man-made climate change is a scam. If I were their professor with my red pen, I would jot a note at the end of the submitted article, suggesting consideration of the rebuttals of man-made climate change dissenters like Tim Ball’s The Deliberate Corrupting of Climate Science. Otherwise, the paper gets a “D” for logic.