There was quite a response to my snow-day musings on climate scientist Judah Cohen’s idea that global warming could be causing increased snow fall.
Cohen set up the idea in a New York Times Op-Ed, which also apparently caught the eye of Tucker Carlson, who was sitting in for Sean Hannity over at Fox News. He had a segment on his show last night featuring an environmentalist, Betsy Rosenberg, and Chris Horner, the author of a book about climate change called Red Hot Lies.
What’s striking about Carlson’s segment is how little we hear of Cohen’s argument: that melting arctic ice was freeing up extra moisture that is causing increased snowfall. Carlson briefly sets up this idea, but then goes directly into an attack on people who believe in global warming, comparing them to religious fanatics and accusing them of changing the theory to fit the facts. In response, the token environmentalist on the panel refuses to give in to any of Carlson’s arguments even when, as when he mentions that there have been some pretty big climate changes in the past – those arguments hold a grain of truth. The shouting match obliterates the topic being discussed.
Nuance alert! There’s a more complicated second part to Cohen’s hypothesis, that the increased snow fall in Siberia is changing the jet stream and bringing more cold to the U.S. On TV, that complexity obscures the simpler idea – more moisture, more snow. Seriously, watch the clip.
This is what tends to happen to science in political debates, and it is what I suspect has happened to what most people hear about ideas relating to global warming, which I’m only just starting to think about deeply. As I said yesterday, I saw this happen in the debate about embryonic stem cells,which I reported on extensively starting in 2000. There are profound moral arguments for and against embryonic stem cell research, but I’m going to ignore them here to focus on two facts: Embryonic stem cells can do things no other technology can, but it’s not clear they will ever themselves be treatments for disease.
What we were treated to for the better part of a decade was an argument where some opponents to using embryonic stem cells repeated at high volume that adult stem cells would be just as good, and some proponents acted as if embryonic stem cells were going to cure the blind, make paralyzed people walk, and end Alzheimer’s. What has actually happened? Drug companies such as Roche and AstraZeneca have explored using the cells to detect toxic side effects. But using embryonic stem cells to treat illness has been slow going. The lead company developing the cells as treatments, Geron, just recently started the very first trial of embryonic stem cells in humans, to treat spinal cord injury. Personally, I still think embryonic stem cell-based treatments are a decade or more away, but the cells are invaluable in other ways right now.
My point is that the political argument gave you the wrong idea about where the science was – and Tucker Carlson’s shouting match does exactly the same thing. Cohen’s idea – an interesting notion put forth by a single climate researcher in the New York Times, not a scientific journal – becomes in Carlson’s hands evidence that scientists are just making stuff up. Horner calls this proof that climate change is in a “say anything phase that every doomsday cult encounters when the spaceship fails to come as promised.”
This is an argument I heard in my inbox, too. The global warming believers are changing the rules! They’re making up things as they go along! It’s not true, and that’s easy to prove. In 2004 – two year’s before Al Gore’s documentary on climate change – there was a big Hollywood disaster movie called The Day After Tomorrow, in which a climate scientist played by Dennis Quaid warned that global warming was going to set off a new ice age. Lest you think Hollywood was smart enough to come up with this idea on its own, here’s the Guardian’s coverage of the actual science behind the movie from 2003. From the beginning, researchers who have argued the earth is getting hotter because of fossil fuels have said the results on climate will be unpredictable. And there’s no reason that the planet as a whole couldn’t get warmer as some parts get colder – there’s simply no inherent contradiction there.
What’s actually happening is that different scientists who believe the buildup of man-made greenhouse gasses is making the climate hotter hold differing views on what happens next. It’s easy to quote these people against each other and make it seem as if nobody agrees about anything – as a science reporter, I’m uncomfortably aware of that. But there is a consensus that the earth is getting warmer, that levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere are going up, and that the latter is at least a cause, and is probably the cause, of the former.
No, that doesn’t mean that skeptics should be dismissed. Nor does that mean there can’t be debate about the measurements behind climate change theory. Nor does it necessarily dictate the result of the theory on political policy. Horner makes the argument that one problem with limiting fossil fuels is that it might make us less able to deal with the results of a changing climate, even if the fossil fuels aren’t the cause. The argument gets more nihilistic if fossil fuels are causing global warming – but it might still be true. Maybe we should send Exxon and BP into overdrive so that we’ll be more ready for droughts, massive snowstorms and hurricanes if they arrive.
But it would be nice if, in the New Year, we could actually include some science in political arguments. And be reasonable about them. I know there’s probably some great psychology experiment explaining why this could never happen, but I’m going to keep dreaming at least until New Year’s Day.
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