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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Mooney is especially sensible in discussing the questions that arise here. It is legitimate and even necessary for scientists to challenge the consensus views held by their colleagues. Searching for flaws in widely accepted theories and flying in the face of contemporary wisdom are crucial elements in scientific progress. The germ theory of disease and the idea of continental drift (known today as plate tectonics) were viewed as looney-tunes notions when first proposed; now they are understood as among the very greatest scientific discoveries. We can't know right now which current scientific belief will look stupid in the 22nd century, but we can be pretty sure something will.
So isn't it legitimate for Michaels and the other global warming skeptics to poke holes in the dominant scientific paradigm? Of course it is. Fewer and fewer scientists believe they're right, which doesn't say much for their probability of success -- but Michaels has his own interpretation of the existing data and there's no reason to doubt his intellectual honesty. What isn't legitimate is for politicians like Inhofe to stage pseudo-scientific show trials, pitting one lonely contrarian against the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion, and then use the scintilla of doubt thereby created as a reason to do nothing about global warming.
In the words of Rep. George Brown, a California Democrat who has been a leading science watchdog on Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans with little or no scientific background seem to have convinced themselves that "scientific truth is more likely to be found at the fringes of science than at the center." This is an ideological or perhaps a theological view, but if science is to have any validity in the formation of public policy, then political leaders must understand and respect the scientific consensus.
As historian of science Naomi Oreskes tells Mooney, "Scientific knowledge is the intellectual and social consensus of affiliated experts based on the weight of available empirical evidence, and evaluated according to accepted methodologies." As noted above, scientists have the freedom and indeed the responsibility to challenge that consensus; with rare exceptions, politicians and the rest of us lack the vocabulary or authority to do so. (Inhofe's self-administered curriculum in climate science appears to have comprised only authors he already knew he agreed with.)
That's not the same thing as saying that politicians are bound to make their decisions according to scientific consensus, another point that Mooney makes clear. All we can require from political leaders is honesty. If President Bush had simply said he believed stem cell research was immoral, or Inhofe had said that the economic costs of responding to global warming were too high, those would be legitimate pillars on which to stand. (And others of course would be free to disagree.) In fact, as Mooney notes, the Clinton administration admitted that epidemiological research suggested that needle exchange programs would slow the spread of HIV, but rejected them anyway.
But while science may in some ways have fallen into disrepute, we still live in a scientific and technological age. Conservatives and liberals fly on the same aircraft and rely on the same medical advances to save the lives of their loved ones. So the right has found it necessary to cloak its decisions in ever murkier versions of science, where a more honest conservative ideology might frame them as moral or economic imperatives.
As Mooney puts it, the Bush-era right has pushed the politicization of science to the point of crisis, and not just political crisis. It's really more like an epistemological crisis; consider the legendary anecdote from Ron Suskind's October 2004 New York Times Magazine article, in which an unnamed administration official referred mockingly to "the reality-based community." Suskind writes: "I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.'"
Mooney offers an epilogue in which he suggests that a political alliance of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans horrified by their own party's "systematic willingness to misrepresent or even concoct its own 'science'" can reverse the current trend. But within his pages you won't find much reason for optimism. By turning science into an endlessly fudgeable tool of politics, and rejecting any notion of scientific consensus in favor of a landscape where all science is either liberal ("junk") or conservative ("sound"), the American right has fulfilled the darkest prognoses of postmodern philosophy. In this view, science is indeed just an artifact of culture; it has no more objectivity than astrology or dowsing or medieval Catholic theology.
From the point of view of intellectual history, this is a fascinating turn of events. Unhappily, it also has practical consequences. Harvard physicist Lewis Branscomb has written that science as an element of democratic governance, formerly "a strong source of unity in the electorate," has been fatally eroded. "Policymaking by ideology requires that reality be set aside," he goes on; "it can be maintained only by moving towards ever more authoritarian forms of government."
More concretely, and far more eerily, Mooney writes in his introduction that the Bush administration's refusal to consider mainstream scientific opinion on global warming "could cost our children dearly." He continues: "That includes children not just in low-lying New Orleans, where I myself grew up, but in low-lying Bangladesh and other nations across the globe." One imagines that the awful irony of this sentence pains Mooney more every day: At least Bangladeshi children have a government that still belongs to the reality-based community.
