It’s my guess that Shulevitz doesn’t realize that she’s conflating two very different arguments: 1) human activities are causing climate change (based on “fact”); and 2) failure to institute massive increases in the real cost of energy, unavoidably reducing global economic growth by trillions of dollars and ensuring that billions of people will not enjoy a decent standard of living, will reduce the entire earth to ecological ruin (based on computer models that attempt to predict the weather two centuries from now). For Shulevitz, 1 implies 2 as a simple matter of logical deduction.
Shulevitz, of course, thinks that people who deny 2 are denying 1. They’re denying science! That’s crazy! In search of answers, she checks out “a handsome, puckish law and psychology professor at Yale named Dick Kahan.” According to Dick, people pretty much love science. The problem is, “people assimilate the data and choose the experts that fit most neatly with their and their peers’ values” (again, this is Shulevitz’s language).
Shulevitz, of course, is coming out of the upper-middle-class literary milieu (“Yaley” if not actually “Yale”), which emphasizes personal charm as a virtue, which is why she tells us that Dick is both handsome and puckish, even though if his theories are “true” it wouldn’t matter if he were painfully fat, prematurely balding, and tiresomely self-important.
As a rule of thumb, the notion that we unconsciously select the data that fits our preconceptions is certainly believable. Darwin said that he had to force himself to write down the title of any article that criticized his work, along with the issue number and title of the journal in which it appeared, because otherwise the “data” would immediately evaporate from his mind. But Shulevitz presents Kahan’s qualitative speculations (and they are no more than that) as empirically verified “findings,” the most “provocative” of which, relating to risk assessment, is that “people better at ‘cognitive reflection,’ or slow, probing thought, are actually more likely to arrive at predetermined conclusions about risk, not less.”
Judith, honey, have you ever thought of looking in a mirror? Or is only other people who have problems?
Afterwords
There are at least three good reasons why 2 doesn’t follow from 1.
A) There is a great deal that we don’t know about the Earth, the atmosphere, the heavens, etc. Models that “fit” the past do not necessarily fit the present, nor can there be any assurance that they will fit the future.
B) These models include many assumptions, both conscious and unconscious. It is my unkind conviction that many scientists, and many non-scientists, wish that control of society could be taken away from the “bad” people (i.e., capitalists) and given to the good ones (unselfish types like scientists and Judith Shulevitz). Climate control is simply a device to bring that about. If it were not climate control, it would be something else, like population control, or exhaustion of natural resources.
C) Bringing the current increase in carbon in the atmosphere would be inconceivably expensive. We would be asking people to accept massive reductions in economic growth to ward off an evil that would appear, if at all, long after most of us are dead. It is not right to ask people to make such sacrifices, and it is utterly ludicrous to expect that they will agree to do so.
