The Thought Experiment That First Made Me A Climate Skeptic
Please check out my Forbes post today. Here is how it begins:
Last night, the accumulated years of being called an evil-Koch-funded-anti-science-tobacco-lawyer-Holocaust-Denier finally caught up with me. I wrote something like 3000 words of indignation about climate alarmists corrupting the very definition of science by declaring their work “settled”, answering difficult scientific questions with the equivalent of voting, and telling everyone the way to be pro-science is to listen to self-designated authorities and shut up. I looked at the draft this morning and while I agreed with everything written, I decided not to publish a whiny ode of victimization. There are plenty of those floating around already.
And then, out of the blue, I received an email from a stranger. Last year I had helped to sponsor a proposal to legalize gay marriage in Arizona. I was doing some outreach to folks in the libertarian community who had no problem with gay marriage (after all, they are libertarians) but were concerned that marriage licensing should not be a government activity at all and were therefore lukewarm about our proposition. I suppose I could have called them bigots, or homophobic, or in the pay of Big Hetero — but instead I gathered and presented data on the number of different laws, such as inheritance, where rights and privileges were tied to marriage. I argued that the government was already deeply involved with marriage, and fairness therefore demanded that more people have access to these rights and privileges. Just yesterday I had a reader send me an email that said, simply, “you changed my mind on gay marriage.” It made my day. If only climate discussion could work this way.
So I decided the right way to drive change in the climate debate is not to rant about it but instead to continue to model what I consider good behavior — fact-based discussion and a recognition that reasonable people can disagree without that disagreement implying one or the other has evil intentions or is mean-spirited.
This analysis was originally published about 8 years ago, and there is no longer an online version. So for fun, I thought I would reproduce my original thought experiment on climate models that led me to the climate dark side.
I have been flattered over time that folks like Matt Ridley have picked up on bits and pieces of this analysis. See it all here.
