The Ignorance of Experts

Trump's Dept. of Energy, a hostile climate for debate and summer in Space City...

(Daikin Park baseball stadium, home of the Houston Astros, lights it up on a Friday night.)

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

~ Richard Feynman, Nobel-winning physicist

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Houston, Texas...

It’s 90°F here in Space City today, or about 32°C for our international readers. That’s a little below average for this time of year, but it’s still summer in the Lone Star State: Hot ‘n’ Humid in roughly equal parts.

Not that you’d know... so well have our fellow humans learned to survive and thrive among their hostile natural surroundings.

Along the city’s spaghetti beltways, local Texans drive their enormous, climate controlled vehicles from one air conditioned venue to another. From their colossal (by European standards) homes to office towers in the sky... from giant malls to their favorite steakhouses... the world’s largest medical center to the downtown aquarium... from the science museum to the Friday night ballgame...

...then home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Indeed, Houstonians have adapted so well to the swampy local climate, even the high-end, 3 million square foot Galleria Mall, destination for wealthy South American tourists looking to drop some “phat stacks” on designer totes and the ugliest fashion money can buy, features a full-sized ice rink, skateable year round.

Downtown, the Daikin Park baseball stadium – with retractable roof and capacity for 41,000 diehard Astros fans – is air conditioned to a mild 73°F (~23°C) throughout the summer, even as temperatures outside soar to well over 100°F. (Though on message boards, some fans “complain” that temps inside the stadium occasionally reach a massively non-alarming 80°F on particularly sizzling summer evenings. Cry babies.)

And every Friday night home game, fans are treated to a massive fireworks display, estimated to cost around $50,000 a pop... happily provided by event sponsors, local energy giant, ConocoPhillips.

As Tom Hanks might say, when it comes to handling the climate here in H-Town, “Houston, we do not have a problem.”

Homo Centrism

Ah, but how can this be? Isn’t this hurricane season? Don’t we only have “[fill in bogus number here] years to save the planet”? Is this not, in the most apocalyptic sense, the End of the World?

Recall the unambiguous doom-mongering from António Guterres, the panting Secretary-General of the United Nations, who famously declared in 2023:

“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

And yet, here we are... at the very height of a Texan summer, enjoying an iced-tea on the porch, and scarcely even parboiled.

Might it be that experts didn’t know all they claimed to know after all... that the climate is a complex phenomena largely beyond our comprehension, full of shifting dynamics, cascading interrelationships and natural feedback loops... and that maybe, just maybe, human beings are not the center of the universe we (ever so humbly) presumed we were?

A new report by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) certainly appears to suggest as much. Titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” the report was authored by a group of highly credentialed scientists, including, to the chagrin of those who seek to politicize everything up to and including the weather, the former Chief Scientific Officer of the Obama Energy Department.

By way of an overview, The Wall Street Journal listed “a few noncontroversial findings from the report – based on peer-reviewed literature from recent years – that might surprise [New York] Times readers.” Herewith...

Global warming has risks, but also benefits, including greater agricultural productivity. We still don’t know the extent to which human activity plays a role in warming, given natural variability, data limitations, uncertain models and fluctuations in solar activity. Models predicting what is to come remain all over the map. U.S. historical data doesn’t support claims of increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather. Climate change is likely to have little effect on economic growth. U.S. climate policies, even drastic ones, will have negligible effect on global temperatures.

Ad Hominem

Naturally, the mainstream media responded by calmly addressing the specific points raised in the report itself, refraining from childish ad hominem attacks and baseless fear-mongering.

Just joking. Here, a few “triggered” headlines, from all the usual suspects...

Donald Trump’s War On Climate Science Has Staggering Implications
~ The Economist

Trump Is Making Climate Change Denialism Federal Policy
~ Foreign Policy

Energy Dept. Attacks Climate Science in Contentious Report
~ The New York Times

And our own personal favorite, also from the Old Gray Lady, which appears to suggest that science exists in service of Consensus, rather than Truth...

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change
~ The New York Times

The Age of Doubt

Hmm…

Doubt... skepticism... rigorous debate and open, adult dialogue? “Not now,” cries the expert class (which happens to have been wrong about practically everything there was to have been right about in recent years), “not in this, the Age of Certainty.”

And who are these “science deniers” anyway? These lunatic hacks? These fringe-dwelling weirdos? Are they as hostile to “consensus” as was, say, Galileo… or Copernicus... or Darwin?

How about John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences at UAH, with a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from University of Illinois?

Or Judith Curry, Former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech (now Professor Emerita), who earned her Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago?

Or Steven E. Koonin, Professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech for 30 years, the Founding director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU and President Obama’s Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, with his Ph.D. from that noted bastion of far right science denialism... MIT?

Not that “credentialism” is any substitute for truth, but are these lifetime academics really the best “deniers,” “anti-scientists,” and (what one shrill alarmist on X called) “useful idiots” among us?

Or is it the case that, having stifled open debate for so long, having “flooded the zone” with their own unquestionable, and unquestionably well-funded opinions, “the consensus” (whatever that even means) is doing what it always does when presented with inconvenient findings: besmirching reputations, deflecting to polarizing “Trump bad” talking points, and generally protesting too much?

One only hopes a certain president doesn’t issue an executive order recognizing that 2+2=4... or that gravity is not just a “theory” in the non-scientific sense of the term... or that there really are only two sexes in the human species after all...

...lest mathematics, physics and biology departments across the nation be thrust into fits of convulsive “denialism,” whereby they spend the next three years in search of 3s and 5s, levitating apples and intersexual, gender-fluid, multi-spirit humans.

Meanwhile, regular male and female human beings continue to enjoy life on planet earth as though it gets better and better every year, mostly because… it does.

More on all that in future Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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