Earth Deserves Better Than TV Coverage of Climate Change

As I write this, a day after Earth Day 2017, the memory of hundreds of "Marches for Science" and in particular, a CNN report on climate change makes me wonder whether the medium of television is more harmful than helpful in bringing the attention of the general public to complex issues of public interest.  These thoughts are stimulated by an online article and video clip of the report, which featured an exchange between famed popularizer of science Bill Nye the Science Guy, and a man I have seen in person and exchanged emails with, one William Happer, a longtime Princeton physicist who thinks concerns about climate change are, to put it mildly, overblown.

An otherwise uninformed observer of the exchange saw two older men, Nye wearing a bright-red bow tie and Happer dressed in muted grays, in two panels of a four-screen split that included CNN anchors and a representative of an environmental group.  Nye was clearly upset at Happer's mild-toned assertions that carbon dioxide is something each of us produces two pounds of a day just by breathing, and to treat it as a pollutant is going too far.  What really got Nye going was when Happer compared the Paris climate accords recently signed by the Obama administration to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler's Germany prior to World War II.  This one stunned even the anchors, who asked Happer to repeat himself, and he explained that the parallel was that neither agreement was going to achieve its stated aim.  Chamberlain failed to stop Germany from grabbing more territory in moves that led directly to World War II, and according to Happer, the Paris accords won't do anything significant to slow down climate change.

What media experts call the "visuals" were all in favor of Nye, a practiced TV performer who brought the right amount of passion to be convincing without yelling or seeming to lose his cool.  But if you look at the academic qualifications of these two parties, you might begin to change your mind.  Mr. Nye's highest formal degree is a B. S. in mechanical engineering, after which he started doing amateur comedy routines and developed the on-air personality for which he is now famous.  William Happer holds a Ph. D. in atomic physics from Princeton and is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at that institution.

As encouraging as the Paris agreement was to many who believe that the only moral thing to do with regard to climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels yesterday and undertake a massive retooling to renewable energy, hardly any of its terms are binding on the parties involved.  Like many other such agreements, it consists of hopeful statements of intentions, but if history is any guide, the only countries that will fulfill their obligations under the agreement are ones that were headed in that direction anyway. 

As University of Oxford professor of energy policy Dieter Helm points out in his book The Carbon Crunch, looking to international agreements as an effective means of lowering carbon emissions is probably a fool's errand.  Many European countries are currently outsourcing carbon-intensive industries such as steelmaking and heavy manufacturing to places like India and China, and so Europe can show a net reduction in carbon footprints that is happening not only because of high-minded dedication to the environment, but because of changes in the makeup of their economies toward services and high-tech businesses that simply don't need as much energy. 

As for China and India, the future growth of their economies depends vitally on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.  They are not about to put the economic brakes on developments that have led millions of their people out of rural subsistence-farming poverty to improved lives in manufacturing-intensive towns and cities.  The Paris agreement may look good on paper, but according to Helm, the chances of any significant dent being made in the world's carbon production by such an agreement roughly equal a snowball's chances in Hades (my metaphor, not his).

Since Helm has made his professional career out of taking global warming seriously, and  spends the rest of the book describing real-world near-term solutions to the problem of fossil-fuel emissions, I think we can count him as a credible witness.  And his conclusion is, leaving Hitler aside, that Happer's opinion on the effects of the Paris agreement is probably closer to the mark than Nye's.

When I sat down to write this blog, I was all set to denounce the politicization of science, and then I thought of another book I read recently:  The Pope of Science, a biography of the famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.  Fermi was a scientist's scientist, in that he lived, breathed, and slept science, taking little or no interest in politics and dealing with it only when it directly affected his livelihood (as when he and his partly-Jewish wife decided to flee Fascist Italy as it turned toward Hitler's Germany in its anti-Semitism), or when politics made it necessary to pursue a particular line of inquiry so that the Germans wouldn't make a nuclear weapon before the Allies did and take over the world.  For that reason, Fermi willingly led a team funded by the U. S. government to build the world's first nuclear reactor in 1942, which was a necessary step in the development of nuclear weapons.  But once the war was over, he was glad to get back to basic physics, for the most part.

The fact is, science has always been political to some degree, going all the way back to Francis Bacon, who took what passed for science in the 1500s and put it to work for the betterment of mankind.  Some scientists who worked on the nuclear bomb opposed its use in war, and some scientists today, such as Happer, criticize the plans for gigantic economic disruptions that would take place if the Bill Nyes of the world became dictators of our industrial and economic policies.  At least today, the debates are carried out in the open on widely accessible media.  It's hard to believe, but the entire nuclear-weapon development program in World War II was carried out in near-total secrecy, in a fashion that would get witheringly criticized in view of today's standards of open debate about major publicly-funded projects.  And the outcome, namely nuclear weaponry, has posed a moral quandary ever since. 

But the Nye-Happer confrontation is a reminder that visuals can be deceptive, and there is always more to be learned about a technical subject than you see on TV.

Sources:  The CNN report and video of the Nye-Happer exchange can be viewed at http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/04/22/watch_bill_nye_blast_cnn_on_air_for_pitting_him_against_climate_change_skeptic.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Bill Nye, William Happer, and Enrico Fermi.  Dieter Helm's The Carbon Crunch:  How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong—and How To Fix It was published in 2012 by Yale University Press.  The Pope of Physics by Gino Segré and Bettina Hoerlin was published in 2016 by Henry Holt & Co.  I blogged on my encounter with William Happer and the dissing of his talk by a gathering of otherwise well-behaved scientists on Oct. 7, 2013 in "When Scientists Aren't Scientists."

When Scientists Aren't Scientists

I recently attended a scientific conference in the Northeast U. S. (I will be purposely vague about the exact venue for reasons that will shortly become clear), and on the plane I read an article by the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield that pointed out an ironic fact about science:  in order to do good science, scientists must act at least some of the time like non-scientists.  Right after that, I got to see a good example of what he was talking about.

One of the main things that attract certain personalities to science and engineering is the supposed objectivity and emotion-free quality of science.  Mr. Spock, the famously non-emotional Vulcan of the Star Trek TV series, supposedly had a temperament ideally suited for science, because emotion was never supposed to influence his judgment.  Many scientific journals insist that papers submitted to them be written in the passive voice (not "We found that. . . " but "It was found that. . . "), thus removing any trace of the author's personality from the paper and making it sound more objective.  But Mansfield pointed out that thumos (a Greek word meaning "spiritedness" or "passion") often takes over when scientists perceive a threat to something they hold dear, even if the threat comes with scientific credentials.  And many scientists who discover something that goes against the current consensus of scientific opinion have to defend their new ideas passionately against equally vigorous and emotional opposition.  In getting emotional, scientists end up acting like ordinary non-scientists, but most good scientists tend to have a certain amount of thumos that motivates them to do the hard work and defending of their ideas that are needed to get a hearing in the competitive world of research.

The night after I arrived at the conference, the sponsoring organization held a banquet which included a buffet dinner, awards, and a three-piece classical music group that could barely be heard above the conversational din in the large hall.  During dessert, the chairman got up at the raised podium and announced the name of the after-dinner speaker:  William Happer, a well-known physicist.  I had heard his name before, and as he began his talk, I remembered where:  as author of an article entitled "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases."

By now, the most famous (but by no means the only) greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  The conventional wisdom among most scientists, policymakers in many countries, and the general public is that (a) humanity is playing Russian roulette with the world's climate by burning so much fossil fuel, which (b) invariably makes CO₂, which (c) traps heat and raises average global temperatures, which will (d) lead to all kinds of disasters, from dying polar bears to flooded South Sea islands and perhaps even an epidemic of kidney stones.  Therefore, all right-thinking citizens should be aware of their carbon footprints and do everything humanly possible to minimize them, or else go around feeling guilty for not doing so.

Prof. Happer's specialty is the way atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation, and in the technically sophisticated and convincing talk he gave, he showed that the correlation between rising CO₂ levels and global average temperature is more alleged than real.  He also showed that the role of CO­₂ in the global heat balance has been greatly exaggerated, and that there are serious flaws in the way current models treat the details of how the gas absorbs radiation to affect climate.  He closed with a quotation from playwright Henrik Ibsen: "I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right."

The audience reaction was interesting.  They were quiet at first, but when it became clear that Happer was arguing against the main claims of global warming, most people except for a small circle near the speaker resumed talking as though nothing special was going on.  There was scattered applause at the end, and then Happer asked for questions. 

The first two or three were queries about technical details.  Then a tall, rather formidable-looking man rose and mounted the podium.  I can't recall all his words, but I know he began by saying his father was one of the founders of the field of cloud physics.  He charged Happer with at least two faults: cowardice, for not being willing to attend mainstream climate-change meetings to present his arguments; and ill will, for insulting the intelligence of the climate-change community.  In response, Happer pointed at one of the charts in his presentation and said, "The facts are there."  His accuser said something else in a tone of voice that I would characterize as non-scientific, and for a moment there I wondered if the after-dinner entertainment was going to be an amateur prizefight.  Then the chairman hastily grabbed the microphone and asked the musical trio to start playing.  The audience laughed that nervous kind of laugh that means people are relieved that something really awful isn't going to happen after all, and that was the end of that.

Only it wasn't, really.  What if Happer is right, and the vast majority of climate scientists, government leaders, and the public (which is not qualified to judge) has turned a molehill of a problem into a mountain that threatens whole economies and spreads fear and misplaced priorities worldwide?  A lot of people will end up looking pretty foolish, for one thing, which is why Son of Cloud Physicist got up and said what he said.  Of course, one should not make the opposite error of thinking that every crank and holder of a fringe opinion who comes along must be right and the mainstream is always wrong.  But Happer's evidence is not the only reason to suspect that the conventional climate-change picture at least has serious flaws.  Others such as David Rutledge at Caltech have questioned the conventional wisdom as well, but for different reasons. 

Climate change happens so slowly compared to the potential progress of science that I suspect the story will be gradually rewritten as time goes on to prove the dominant powers right whatever actually happens, and it will take a clever historian to tell the real story a century or two hence.  In the meantime, those of us who have more important things to worry about than how many centimeters per year the ocean is rising can take some comfort in the chance that William Happer's voice may be heard, and scientists will act a little more like scientists in the matter of examining the technical evidence for global warming.

Sources:  Prof. Happer's excellent article "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," written for a non-technical audience, appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 33-38.  On Jan. 3, 2010, I blogged on Prof. David Rutledge's contention that we are not going ever going to burn enough fossil fuels to make much of a difference in the climate one way or another. 

Harvey Mansfield's article "Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education" appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 22-37.