cb draws my attention to this stone by gary gutting, which previously i had proposed to ignore. now let me say that as far as my personal evaluation of climate change has gone (not that it matters either way in terms of actual change in the climate), "climategate" and the subsequent chastening has tempered my hostile response, and i am less sceptical than once i was. but let me make a few observations that might make one think twice on this particular issue. first off, as i've argued elaborately (there's a 20-page academic paper where that slice came from), consensus can be extremely distorting with regard to people's commitment to truth, whether among experts or non. i feel that that is particularly true in this case, in which the moral weight dropped on everyone by the non-expert community (as gutting defines 'expert') was overwhelming (e.g. by al gore). there was a phase in which even 'experts' seemed to be competing for who could issue the most dire predictions, because that was a measure of that expert's personal goodness. indeed, until they sort of realized that predicting the end of the world by 2005 would backfire in 2006, they thought they could motivate people to action by hyperbole. as in any community of inquirers there are all kinds of pressures exterior to the truth of the question, and what and who gets funded, or what and who gets published where, are clearly at stake. the experts' health insurance is at stake. now, the fact that, if true, the only rational response appeared to be a full realization of leftist political goals (e.g. whole new taxes and a world regulatory regime), and that most academics (more or less all, really) are leftists, had to make you wonder if the research was skewed by wishful thinking. on the other hand it is worth remarking that the same thing should make you sceptical of climate-change deniers of the right.
what i said in 2005 and what i'll say now is that i'm waiting (though i have other things to do) for the hysteria to ebb, and then i'll try to evaluate the evidence as best i can and try to form some kind of opinion. it's never a good idea, prof. gutting, simply to defer to expert opinion where there are things actually at stake. really, think about what that would have entailed in ancient athens, or medieval europe, or in 1820, or in 1920, etc. you've got at a minimum to focus critically on how an expert consensus is arrived at and enforced. and this is a hard and complicated case, to which myriad data are relevant (one symptom of this is that, though there is a consensus among experts that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, there is much disagreement about its pace and effects).
and i think that, as in the last x hundreds of thousands of years, we had better conceive ourselves to be adapting to a volatile environment rather than preserving a natural balance. we want the thing to hold steady, but it never did before.
i really do have the luxury of a wait-and-see attitude, because like i say, my action is not going to have any detectible effect either way. but i am slowly rounding to the climate-change consensus, i spose.
here are little slices i've written about this over the years. funny that the search doesn't seem to turn up stuff before about 2008.
