I’m hard on the “climate change” conversation. I’ve been asked why I am so critical, and why I can’t “accept” what the scientists say.
It’s personal.
As a boy I devoured the eco-dystopian science fiction stories of the 1970’s. I read and re-read books like “Limits to Growth” (Donna Meadows et al) and “The Population Bomb” (Paul Erlich). I asked my dad to get me cassette tapes of seminars by Erlich, Peter Gunter, and Kenneth Watt. I eagerly went to every winter camping opportunity I could with my Boy Scout troop because I read so many articles about the coming Ice Age and wanted to be prepared. I relished the Earth Day celebrations, which began in 1970. Though I wasn’t too worried about my home in rural West Virginia being targeted by a Soviet nuke, I talked with my parents about how we could survive on our 11-acre property during the subsequent nuclear winter and drew up plans for a fallout shelter to ride out the first 3 months while the radiation subsided. (In fifth grade my teacher was worried about how many sketches of fallout shelters and lists of supplies I created, and she talked with my mom about it.) I did a science project on plants that would still grow in harsh environments I believed were inevitable. I mapped out which places my family could move to that might still be livable.
I was mentally and emotionally invested. I would get worked up into a mixture of tears and anger that my parents and grandparents’ generation had “done this” to me. I had nightmares about my beloved fields and woods becoming a wasteland, and not having enough food to feed everyone I knew. I wondered if I should become a doctor so I could help all the sick and dying people.
Over a few short years from 1981-1987 I realized that none of the ecological disaster forecasts came true. Acid rain was a serious problem, but a few regulations and industry innovations eliminated it in the US. We didn’t run out of oil or natural gas or copper. There were no food riots in the US, and no mass famines in Russian, India, and China. The primary famine was in the horn of Africa, and that was caused as much by war as drought. The US had more trees instead of fewer. We had warming temperatures and milder winters instead of every winter being like 1977 and 1978. Commodity prices mostly fell rather than rising exponentially. The number of earthquakes and forest fires and hurricanes were far lower than had been predicted. Animal species were not dying off in the thousands per year, and the soils did not uniformly become less productive.
Now I was angry because I had believed all the predictions and wasted all that emotion and energy. They wrote and spoke so confidently, cleverly using some facts. They had “computer models,” which we believed must be correct because only smart people could make computer models. As I investigated more I realized they had suckered me into their narrative, and I had willing – eagerly — gone along. I also more carefully studied the history of science and found many cases where “everyone” believed something was true but it wasn’t. When was the last time you heard anyone talking about the canals someone built on Mars? Yet from the mid-1800’s to about 1975 everyone believed they existed.
This experience reinforced three things:
1. Be a skeptic about any predictions of the future. Humility, humility, humility.
2. Guard carefully against anyone and everyone trying to manipulate my emotions.
3. Sincerity is not a measure of truth.
I look at the hysterical dystopian accounts about climate change catastrophes breathlessly promulgated today and think “I’ve seen this script before.” I listen to kid’s tearfully pleading with adults to fix the climate so they won’t die, and I think “I was that kid.” I watch smart people totally sucked into “the seas will rise and storms will grow worse” narrative and think “I was smart and believed the stories, too.” I spot clear examples of data manipulation and skewed data presentation and think, “I often fell for those kinds of charts without checking how they were created.”
We have a stewardship responsibility to care for the natural world. Weather and climate are important. Many aspects of Earth Day are commendable, and certainly the US has done an enormous amount of good work to clean up our air and water. I applaud the progress. I’ve written an extensive article documenting what we should be talking about related to climate change. And I am still concerned about nuclear weapons as a threat to the planet!
