“We can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts.”
–Naomi Oreskes
“There is a tendency among public intellectuals who are entirely reasonable in some areas to descend into the promotion of pseudoscience in others.”
–Debunking Denialism, on Oreskes
Climate change scientists and journalists are boiling over Naomi Oreskes’ denialism accusation. In December, in the wake of the global Paris summit, the Harvard University historian wrote an article chastising four eminent researchers, including former NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, one of the greatest proponents of global warming, for being “climate denialists.”
Why?
Because, she said, they drew public attention to the consensus science view on nuclear power — that it could play a key role as a green alternative to fossil fuels because of the still limited potential of alternative energy — a perspective heretical to old school environmentalists.
“There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs,” she wrote.
It was a catalyzing moment, for it drew a unique line in the sand, dramatizing a critical divide in the climate change movement and a sharp split in the environmental community on a host of issues.
“It’s like liberals attacking Bernie Sanders for not being liberal enough,” noted scientist James Conca, writing for Forbes.
On one side are what are often being called the ecomodernists — liberal scientists and activists like Hansen and philanthropist Bill Gates who put pragmatism and cost-benefit analysis ahead of ideology. Pushing back are environmentalists, like Naomi Oreskes, Jim Green, Alan Jeffery and Paul Ehrlich, among others, who are deeply suspicious of the role for modern technology in addressing environmental challenges such as climate change; new energy extraction techniques such as fracking; or global food security–the GMO debate.
Oreskes is the current supernova of the 1970s environmentalist school. She is the co-author of the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which likened climate skepticism to past efforts challenging the science consensus on cigarette dangers, ozone threats and acid rain.
“Her courage and persistence in communicating climate science to the wider public have made her a living legend among her colleagues,” wrote two enthusiastic backers, Benjamin Santer and John Abraham, in a prize-nomination letter that led to her winning the 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year award.
Others, on the left and right, are not so enamored. She was criticized for what many considered a harsh personal attack on renowned scientist William A. Nierenberg. One target of her criticism, physicist S. Fred Singer, filed complaints, never upheld, challenging the quality of her research when she was at the University of California, San Diego. And her recent embrace of alternative energy sources as an exclusive solution to address climate change has been greeted with a combination of bemusement and derision by scientists and engineers actually knowledgeable in the field.
Is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and ardent chronicler of the politics of the science of climate debate, a visionary as her supporters claim? Or, as a growing number of critics maintain, is she a populist Luddite, the intellectual Rottweiler of in-your-face, environmentalism, unduly wary of modern technology, whose activist policies are crippling environmental reforms?
What is a ‘Scientific Consensus’?
Those are important questions in science, journalism and policy circles. Oreskes and Merchants of Doubt co-author Erik Conway recently wrote a philosophical sequel to her bestseller, The Collapse of Western Civilization, in which they analyzed the world through the prism of environmentalist resource scarcity believers, such as the Club of Rome, Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb made the Malthusian case that technology was hastening the imminent collapse of society. Of course, Ehrlich, a butterfly researcher turned apostle of environmental doom, was wrong, humiliatingly so, losing a widely publicized bet to techno-optimist Julian Simon that the cost of five major raw materials would go down rather than up as Ehrlich had infamously predicted.
Oreskes enthusiastically took up the mantle of Sour Environmentalist. In some ways, like Ehrlich, she’s inspirational. What Oreskes is most known for is what we can all support, at least in big picture terms: the importance of resolving high profile science and policy disputes by relying on top flight science experts–the subject of her well-received 2014 Ted talk on ‘science consensus’:
If scientists don’t use a single method, then how do they decide what’s right and what’s wrong? And who judges? And the answer is, scientists judge, and they judge by judging evidence.
That is to say, the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim. And in this sense, science is intrinsically conservative. It’s quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say, “Yes, we know something, this is true.”
So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts. We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury, except it’s a very special kind of jury. It’s not a jury of your peers, it’s a jury of geeks. It’s a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s, and unlike a conventional jury, which has only two choices, guilty or not guilty, the scientific jury actually has a number of choices.
Oreskes makes it clear that she is not ‘appealing to authority’, which rests on the logical fallacy of assuming an individual is correct on an issue merely because she has a degree or a position of power; rather, Oreskes says, this is putting policy in the hands of “collective wisdom”–a PhD geek squad of sorts.
On communicating about the science behind climate change, Oreskes walks her talk. A 2015 PEW survey of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science found 87% of scientists who responded embraced the evidence that global warming is being driven, at least in part, by human activity. But what happens when the views of the geekers and the mainstream liberal environmental community diverge? When that happened with Ehrlich, he abandoned the hard science and instead embraced political activism, empirical evidence be damned, and we know how that turned out.
As for Oreskes, let’s assess her views on two issues beyond the climate change debate in which there are clear examples of a scientific consensus: agricultural biotechnology–the debate over so-called GMOs; and nuclear energy.
Some 65% of AAAS scientists favor building more nuclear power plants–a clear though not overwhelming consilience. Why? Because nuclear power generates green energy and does not rely on fossil fuels. A group of scientists, journalists and policy wonks calling themselves eco-modernists have laid out a green case for nuclear energy in numerous forums. “Nuclear fission today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy,” the group declared in what has come to be known as “An Ecomodernist Manifesto“.
Ecomodernists–liberal thinkers who embrace, within limits, the positive role of technology in solving intractable environmental challenges–are the intellectual antagonists of Oreskes, who carries into the modern culture wars the 1960s and ’70s environmental movement’s suspicion of science, and technologically-based solutions.
Unwrapping Oreskes on food, farming and GMOs
The consensus view on GMOs is even stronger than on global warming: 88% say GMO foods are no less safe than conventionally bred or organically grown varieties–a position endorsed by some 270 organizations around the world, from the National Academy of Sciences to the Union of German Academics of Sciences and Humanities to Food Standards Australia and New Zealand.
Now that’s a PhD geek squad.
Interestingly, many of these independent science agencies (including the German Academy) are on record stating the GM crops are more sustainable than conventional or organic alternatives. The Genetic Literacy Project has posted an infographic assembled by Dan Ryder of the University of British Columbia with side-by-side statements by many high profile science groups on climate change (‘human induced’) and GMOs (‘safe’).