Should we believe the experts? (Part III)
Many people are suspicious of experts. People in power generally don't have the best track record when they insist on a certain course of action. There's something innately distasteful about a person who insists on telling others what to do because "he knows better."
This is true, and for good reason -- it sets off alarm bells that we're being treated like idiots. It feels like we're being bossed around by an egotist who has no interest in our concerns or beliefs about how things should be done. We've seen too many cases where both experts and their advice are wrong: tobacco executives claiming that smoking was harmless, billionaire venture capitalists insisting that the Great Recession was over... and of course the current political system in the US, where politicos are telling us that we have to choose between two candidates that a majority of their citizens have labelled "unfavorable."
Expertise is not a reliable method for determining truth. But it is reliable as a method for determining things like who should be in charge. The fact that experts disagree on scientific matters tells us that expertise--no matter how credible it might be on other issues--is unreliable when it comes to science.
Here we come to the underlying problem: many people are suspicious of experts... but they are also suspicious (or even downright contemptuous) of the average citizen, who tends to be ignorant and untrustworthy. It's an obvious double standard.
The truth is that experts do not know everything and some of them are wrong most of the time, just like any other group. True science is a rigorous process that we can trust to arrive at the right answer in most cases. But there's no magic bullet. We have to work at it.
There is a powerful temptation to rely on expertise rather than doing that work ourselves, but we should resist it, because of the way in which it promotes tribalism -- people arguing that they're right and you're wrong because someone who claims to know more than you told them so.
At the end of the day, there are experts in most fields and they deserve some respect for their expertise. But there is no perfect source of knowledge, and we must learn to be skeptical about all authorities.
When the experts make a mistake, we have to remember that they are human and may simply be wrong, just like everyone else.
The key point is this: if someone is telling you what to do because they know better than you do, it means that they want to use you. If authority and expertise are invoked for ideological purposes, then the abuse of power will be more likely to follow. And that's something we all should have a profound distrust of.
Indeed, in some ways many of the world's most prominent problems can be traced back to leaders who place trust in their own authority rather than in doing their own research and thinking for themselves. This includes: overpopulation, global warming, peak oil, financial crises... and more. [1]
So let's be skeptical of the "experts," but also skeptical of those who claim to have all and know all about any topic. We must learn to think for ourselves and work together to solve the world's problems rather than follow the opinion of some authority figure.
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This is the third part in a series on "Should we believe experts?" -- an examination of some of the most popular examples regarding global warming. This essay was written shortly after this blog was posted on Hans Binswanger's website Zeitkritik.de , which contains a good number of related articles (including one by me).
The first two parts are (please scroll down to find them):
Part I: The Warren Report: Experts Make Mistakes?
Part II: "Climategate": Experts make sad little monkeys?
This third part discusses the latest example of alleged expert error in climate change -- the Koch brothers statement that "global warming is a myth" and that climate models are unreliable. Some people even allege that the Koch brothers paid for the so-called "Climategate" e-mail scandal. [2] My thoughts on this subject are clearly different from their own, so I'll explain in detail why I think they're wrong but can't seem to accomplish much with their case.
The facts are that the Koch brothers were made aware of the dangers of global warming by other experts, including their own scientists before the Clinton administration. Then over a period of years... George W. Bush's EPA changed climate model assumptions without informing experts and without having any evidence that did so was necessary. Meanwhile, climate modelers were becoming increasingly convinced that their models were predicting the wrong result -- namely, warming and not cooling.
This was especially true as to models put forward by NASA's Hansen and published in 2006. [3] They warned that the greenhouse effect must be taken into account to properly analyze the human-induced warming we're now experiencing thanks to carbon dioxide emissions (aka "global warming").
The Koch brothers are not in the business of climate science, but they do have scientists, economists and other experts on staff. It's probably safe to assume that these people were aware of the information and conclusions put forth by Hansen (and others) about global warming.
These scientists may not have been prominent in the scientific community -- indeed, I find it very difficult to imagine how someone like Hansen could have any credibility at all in climate science given his very public behavior -- but none of them seemed to see anything wrong with his 2006 paper or with the concept that greenhouse gases must be taken into account when making estimates of future climate.
However, these scientists also seemed to have been aware of the EPA's claims about climate models -- namely, that they're inaccurate and impractical for use in policymaking. Therefore, if the Koch brothers did their own research on the topic... it's not clear if they would have come to different conclusions about global warming than the ones they did.
Their position is that climate models are unreliable and untrustworthy (a claim which will be examined shortly). The inconvenient truth is that Hansen's statements (and those of other climate scientists) do not necessarily contradict this view. In fact, some of what Hansen said is consistent with it:
1) "It's pretty clear we can't predict temperature a decade ahead. But we can with reasonable certainty predict [longer-term] trends."
2) "The warming will be far larger than most people have assumed. The consequences of that global warming are catastrophic and hard to imagine. We're talking about a change as big as the end of the ice age."
3) "We might get 4 or 5 degrees of warming, which would be pretty devastating. I don't think it's helpful to go beyond that and say it's going to be really cool, or really warm, or whatever."
4) "[T]here is something we can do about it [global temperature changes]. In fact, almost everything we do makes things worse.
Conclusion: The Koch brothers may not have been scammed or defrauded into supporting climate change denial, but they still seem to be wrong about it scientifically. Why? Because they didn't think that 4-5 degrees of warming -- which is what their own experts are predicting -- would be "pretty devastating."
Instead, the Koch brothers seem to have relied only on the results from climate models. It's possible that they're completely wrong in this estimate, but it's also possible that they're right to a certain extent as will be explained later.
The "arguments" for the Koch brothers position on global warming are easy to summarize: 1) Climate models don't work and can't be trusted.