Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.⁴⁷ In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for itself.⁴⁸ (And it’s precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.)

To be sure, there are judicious climate change skeptics, sometimes called lukewarmers, who accept the mainstream science but accentuate the positive.⁴⁹ They favor the fringe of the envelope of possibilities with the slowest temperature rise, note that the worst-case scenarios with runaway feedback are hypothetical, point out that moderately higher temperatures and CO2 have benefits in crop yields that should be traded off against their costs, and argue that if countries are allowed to get as rich as possible (without growth-sapping restrictions on fossil fuels) they will be better equipped to adapt to the climate change that does occur. But as the economist William Nordhaus points out, this is a rash gamble in what he calls the Climate Casino.⁵⁰ If the status quo presents, say, an even chance that the world will get significantly worse, and a 5 percent chance that it will pass a tipping point and face a catastrophe, it would be prudent to take preventive action even if the catastrophic outcome is not certain, just as we buy fire extinguishers and insurance for our houses and don’t keep open cans of gasoline in our garages. Since dealing with climate change will be a multidecade effort, there’s plenty of time to back off if temperature, sea level, and ocean acidity happily stop rising.

Another response to climate change, from the far left, seems designed to vindicate the conspiracy theories of the far right. According to the “climate justice” movement popularized by the journalist Naomi Klein in her 2014 bestseller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, we should not treat the threat of climate change as a challenge to prevent climate change. No, we should treat it as an opportunity to abolish free markets, restructure the global economy, and remake our political system.⁵¹ In one of the more surreal episodes in the history of environmental politics, Klein joined the infamous David and Charles Koch, the billionaire oil industrialists and bankrollers of climate change denial, in helping to defeat a 2016 Washington state ballot initiative that would have implemented the country’s first carbon tax, the policy measure which almost every analyst endorses as a prerequisite to dealing with climate change.⁵² Why? Because the measure was “right-wing friendly,” and it did not “make the polluters pay, and put their immoral profits to work repairing the damage they have knowingly created.” In a 2015 interview Klein even opposed analyzing climate change quantitatively:

We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean counters at their own game. We’re going to win this because this is an issue of values, human rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief period where we also have to have some nice stats that we can wield, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what actually moves people’s hearts are the arguments based on the value of life.⁵³

Blowing off quantitative analysis as “bean-counting” is not just anti-intellectual but works against “values, human rights, right and wrong.” Someone who values human life will favor the policies that have the greatest chance of saving people from being displaced or starved while furnishing them with the means to live healthy and fulfilled lives.⁵⁴ In a universe governed by the laws of nature rather than magic and deviltry, that requires “bean-counting.” Even when it comes to the purely rhetorical challenge of “moving people’s hearts,” efficacy matters: people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.⁵⁵

Another common sentiment about how to prevent climate change is expressed in this letter, of a kind I receive every now and again:

Dear Professor Pinker

We need to do something about global warming. Why don’t the Nobel prize winning scientists sign a petition? Why don’t they tell the blunt truth, that the politicians are pigs who don’t care how many people get killed in floods and droughts?