Global Warming and Climate Change

It is widely reported that Kurt Vonnegut gave a commencement address at MIT in 1997 in which he advised the graduating class to “wear sunscreen.” But in fact it was actually a column written by Mary Schmich, published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997. It was a hypothetical commencement speech which gained fame after being misattributed to Vonnegut that wearing sunscreen was advised.

That’s another example of the phenomenon which Michael Crichton named the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect [1]. But I digress. Here’s what I wish to stress. If I were invited to give a commencement speech, an extremely unlikely event, my main advice would be to “choose your experts wisely.”

Choose very carefully whom you wish to trust. In this complex world of ours, none of us knows what is true. That’s simply because we lack the time and the talent to figure out what’s true for ourselves. Therefore we have to rely on experts. That’s what we economists call specialization.

Some people specialize in climate science, some on economics, some on AI, and so on. Because we specialize, we depend on others with their own special knowledge to tell us what is what.

You have to be careful whom you trust. If you choose as your experts activists who are committed to their agendas, you are likely to be deceived. The ax that they are grinding is meant for your wallets to start with but could end up at your neck.

The fact is that activists are generally not experts in their domain of activism.

Exhibit A: the 22-year old Swedish woman, Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg. She knows fuck-all (pardon the profanity) about anything at all, including climate science or history or economics or whatever. Yet she grabs a lot of headlines and social media attention, not to mention her World Economic Forum appearance.

But you may object and say that I should not pick on a totally uneducated and stupid target like Thunberg; pick someone your own size. How about someone who is educated and intelligent? Alright, I present to you Al Gore. He is no dummy. He is educated and politically successful enough to be the VP of the US for eight years. 

He’s no expert in anything at all. Yet he made his fortune from peddling nonsense about climate change and still jets around the world in private planes lecturing the unwashed masses about the disastrous effects of carbon emissions, global warming and climate change. I rest my case.

But I should restate my case before I rest it.

My case is that all this hysteria about climate change and global warming is a lot of hooey. I am neither a “climate change denialist” nor a “global warming denialist.” I am not persuaded by rhetoric; I want evidence and analysis.

Yes, the climate is changing. But the climate has always changed. It’s not a modern phenomenon. The earth’s climate has changed for billions and billions of years (as I like to say invoking my inner Carl Sagan.) It’s not a new-fangled fashion. Change is one of the basic features of the world, as the Buddha stressed some 2,500 years ago. Fortunately, we humans adapt to changes. That’s what’s unique about us humans.

Yes, the average global temperature is rising. The data bear witness to that. That temperature rise is not unequivocally bad; it is rising in the colder parts of the world, it is rising in the winters and not in the summers, it is rising at night and not in the day. Rising average global temperatures results in fewer deaths due to cold than to heat. Look up the evidence. 

Yes, the climate is changing. But so what? Should we all panic and hysterically run around destroying civilization to avoid a coming climate apocalypse by ignoramuses like Thunberg? If you think so, you may be stupider and more gullible than that media-attention grabbing Swedish retard.

Am I a climate scientist? No, of course not. But I had to choose whom to trust and I chose those who are far smarter than me. There are too many experts that I give credence to for me to list them all here. Therefore let me choose just two.

One of them is Freeman Dyson (1923 – 2020), the British-American theoretical physicist and mathematican  He is justifiably regarded as one of the greatest minds of the 2oth century. He is known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. You and I would have trouble even defining those fields. We are not in the same league as Freeman.

But don’t fret. We can learn from Dyson. Here’s a conversation that he had on Charlie Rose. (In the days gone by, we had to watch this on broadcast TV.) 

OK, you may say, that’s old stuff. We have learned a lot in the intervening years. Are there others who are skeptical of the climate change and global warming hysteria? Glad you asked. Listen to this interview that John Stossel did with Judith Curry.

Who is she? What does she know? Glad you asked. She’s a climate scientist, not an activist. Here she is in conversation with John Stossel:

I realize that we are all busy and cannot be expected to have the time to listen to long discussions with Dyson and Curry. The headlines are all we have the time for. However, I think it is better to spend a couple of hours listening to what the experts have to say and stop listening to activists.

If we do, we’d save ourselves a lot of anxiety and be less wrong about our world. What’s more, if we learn more about how the world works, we may be able to create a better world.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

NOTES:

[1] Michael Crichton, brilliant author (of “Jurassic Park” and other books): 

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”