A Little Learning. . . Climate Change Denial and Crank Science

Yesterday, I heard repeated for the umpteenth time the fact that, on average, Climate Change deniers know more science than believers. (I haven’t seen the polls, but this news came on NPR so I’m inclined to believe it.)

It’s really not so surprising. The history of science is littered with wacky contrarian claims—such as, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is wrong. (Let’s be clear: modifications of Einstein’s theory are in the works by many researchers, but the core of the theory is undisputed by the vast majority of physicists.)  By and large these claims are made by people who are highly science-literate, but who grasp at straws of evidence that are either misleading, misinterpreted, or outright bogus. Their partial knowledge seduces them to believe in their competence to chop away at the basic foundations of modern science.  For variations on the attack on General Relativity, see http://www.crank.net/

There’s a word for these people among mainstream scientists: cranks. They work in isolation from the scientific community, free from challenges from authorities, and not given all the facts that are shared within the community. True science in the modern era requires validation from other experts in the relevant field—a check against cranks.

Could the contrarians be right? Non-Euclidean geometries—essential to Einstein’s General Theory—were discovered and elaborated upon in the 19th Century. Did they invalidate Euclid? Did the lack of explanation of the precession of Mercury’s orbit before Einstein shatter Newton’s laws of motion? Did the General Theory invalidate Newton?  No, they were extensions of existing theories or beliefs that were fundamentally sound. They did not contradict, they extended.

So it is with Climate Change due to Anthropogenic Global Warming. It is still not quite a “theory” but an extremely strong conjunction of hypotheses bolstered by masses of evidence, strong enough to be believed by upwards of 97% of physical scientists—a percentage which rises year after year. There are still some true “skeptical” climate scientists with plausible but shaky explanations for what’s going on (few of those dispute that the climate is changing, rather they dispute the contribution of carbon emissions).

But the great majority of Deniers consists not of real scientists, but those with partial and usually superficial knowledge of the facts, which they cherry-pick to support their biases. Among those are many with sufficient science education to give them confidence in hypotheses which belong in the realm of crankdom.

There are plenty of things about climate and weather that are not fully explained with today’s prevailing climate models, but there’s not much doubt that, while these may require tweaking of the models, they will not require an overthrow.

The pertinent advice on this score was codified by Alexander Pope in the  dictum “A little learning is a dangerous thing,/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring/There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain. . . .”