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Changing My Mind, With Naomi Oreskes

I’m not sure when I watched the video in Bryan Cross’s giant climate change thread. It’s on YouTube as, “The American Denial Of Global Warming”. I’m not sure why I watched the whole thing. I was a contrarian and conservative, if anyone was. But I noted right away that Dr. Oreskes had no desire to be sensationalist or provocative. Just the facts, take it or leave it.

It’s a rough overview of the consensus view of climate change.

I knew I had plenty of reasons to deny it, if I wanted to be lazy, or to stick it to “the Left.” Then, this thought: These geeky scientists don’t care about my beefs with Democrats and communists. This is generations of their life’s work. They are experts, and I am not.

 To summarize the data, it’s been known that our consumption of fossil fuels was a major cause of climate change since the middle of the ‘60s. The IPCC was created as a clearinghouse for the data and studies. The government studied the data and issued a report in 1979, recommending urgent action. I was not yet born. Little has been done.

I’m sympathetic to the main denialists, and their motivations. Communism is evil. Total state management of economics is total management of people, which ends in tyranny. Oreskes named this fear, and did not dismiss it out of hand. That was a great act of friendship. She took me seriously as a listener. She seemed to anticipate the strongest impediments to being heard.

The other exercise of intellect was for me to realize that the mere existence of dissent from the consensus doesn’t falsify the consensus. What authority and expertise the doubters have is a crucial question. As a non-expert, I should follow the expert opinion, if indeed there are no strong reasons to believe it’s wrong.

Conversely, if doubting scientists are engaged in motivated reasoning, it seriously damages the skeptics’ case, and the weight I should give to that case.

I still have the liberty to choose among many options for combatting the problem of climate change, provided they confront the problem with sufficient urgency.

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