Some blog-context: How is a layperson to assess climate change? and Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps) and the intellectual bankruptcy tag
But I'm gonna try my best to write this without a bunch of expletives - I've been told it puts off potential readers, as though they couldn't handle expletives, or they look for whatever piss-poor excuse not to read well-argued points, or whatever, I just about don't gaf at this point; the fact that the intellectually-bankrupt twitter gets tons of attention while philosophy blogs in general (irrespective of expletive-to-reasoning ratios) do not, speaks plenty of volumes already (about the intellectual bankruptcy about which I will be speaking here).
I'm gonna try to write this without expletives even though the topic of intellectual bankruptcy generally makes me hopping mad. And I use the image of the current President because the very fact that he ever became president is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy. The Framers of the country weren't intellectually bankrupt, but their legacy has been squandered. If the country weren't so intellectually bankrupt (and as a dialectician/context-keeper one has to imagine the not just the implications of this conditional but also the presuppositions, which I'll get to as well), we'd have had good enough elected leaders (actual leaders, not the fake kind) that no one would feel the need to turn to a Donald Trump in desperation.
Despite a recent about-face (of the Trump kind, which we have every reason to discount), Trump has a long, exhaustively documented history of intellectually-reckless climate change denial.
The number of man-hours of time and attention wasted on shit garbage like "it's cold here in January, so much for climate change" is probably so off-the-charts as to disgust any decent person. (Meanwhile, it's summertime in the southern hemisphere/Australia.)
Or how about: "the climate has always been changing, how is this any different?" Just about as low as it gets by any respectable standards of belief-formation.
Anyone with belief-formation processes so screwed-up as to produce the gobs of Trumpian climate-denial tweets, cannot be trusted to form any credible beliefs (outside of their area of expertise, that is; I'm sure Trump had to have some pretty decent belief-formation processes when it comes to which real estate deal is worthwhile, although even there I "somehow" manage to have some doubt).
Here's a big, probably the biggest part of the problem: climate change being an unavoidably political subject, people from all over the political spectrum have every good reason to distrust the belief-formation processes of those they disagree with. Political discussion is especially intellectually-bankrupt given that it involves decisions about how to coerce other people (irrespective of or against their considered independent judgment, etc.). So naturally that's going to encourage a lot of bad-faith arguments for one's policy preferences (a nice euphemism for coercion).
One should probably expect about as much intellectual bankruptcy in a politics-related discussion as just about anything else, save perhaps for religion-related discussions where the canons of logic and evidence espoused by philosophers and/or scientists are routinely flouted.
(People tend to seek meaning in a silent universe, see - and that gives rise to an excrement-ton of wishful thinking. You'd probably have to consult the philosophy of religion literature for the least-toxic treatments of the subject, and there you are likely to find a whole lot of uncertainty at best, a lot of maybe-not-successful attempts at conceptual clarification, a lot of speculation, etc. In my personal context the most advanced treatment is the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, where my pretty-reliable ring-of-truth heuristics have told me that it ultimately most likely comes down to a matter of faith that a trio-omni god would create a world like this one containing an excrement-ton of morally-pointless animal suffering in addition to this or that facet of what is now being termed the human predicament [about which I'll have more to say in another post], all of which a trio-omni god would have sufficient reason for creating but which reasons are mysterious and inaccessible to us. I thought the treatment of the problem of suffering in the Oxford Handbook was close to deplorable, BTW, particularly in its taking seriously the notion that human corruption would be a reason even for animal suffering. But you should read it for yourself to see if I'm off-base.)
Getting back to the main problem: many people have good reasons to distrust the values and epistemic practices of a great many of their political (and/or religious) Others.
And the main cause for people having such good reasons is that all too few people habitually internalize the canons of reason and evidence espoused by philosophers and scientists.
I've written about all the deplorable practices (leading, not surprisingly, to a wide range of deplorable beliefs) of political leftists who squander whatever credibility they might have had on climate change and other issues with their approach to the subject of capitalism. (If you want my hunch about this, it has basically to do with rationalization for envy of those with superior talents; when capitalism led to a ballooning both of population and of living standards across the board, what really ticked off the enemies of capitalism is that all the abundance wasn't "shared" more equally. Nozick also offers pointers in the direction of a psychologically-based diagnosis of anticapitalist pathology.) The worst offenders in this anticapitalism bunch would be the Rand-bashers, those who willfully refuse to have a fair dialogue about Rand's philosophy. (See the excremental "scholarship" of Scumbag Duggan for the "state of the art" in this loser genre.)
So when you have rabidly, dishonestly anti-capitalist folks crying wolf about (how capitalism is causing) climate change, many others have abundant reason to discount or ignore their latest wolf-crying. And as the crying-wolf fable shows, it's kind of a goddamn shame that the boy is ignored when a real wolf is around.
As for the Climate Change Issue, it's one I've followed as a layperson for close to 30 years now; it became something of considerable interest when Rush Limbaugh in his early books would say how it's, well, a hoax, along with the ozone hole (now not really an issue - once governments implemented policies opposed by Rush & Co.). I still listen to Rush semi-frequently, and he's still pushing the it's-a-hoax line, mixed in (unfortunately and toxically) with other useful insights he has about the bias and corruption of the "drive-by media" to name a major example of what he actually does build his credibility profile upon. (See, as one glaringly obvious instance of the bias/corruption, the context-erasing "fine people on both sides" hoax that CNN et al peddled to its audience and for which CNN has refused to demonstrate any accountability. Or how about the New York Times' ill-fated 1619 Project. Or how these peddlers of fake news twisted Trump's criticism of fake news into a criticism of a free press. And people are now supposed to trust these media sources when it comes to climate change or anything else?)
(Also, Rush has built what credibility he has upon his championing of the American (and capitalist) values such as "rugged individualism," family values, limited government, etc., that the left, with its march through the institutions, is making every effort to pervert or destroy. As with pretty much anything political, media figures such as Rush get a lot more mileage out of the values they espouse than about what factual or scientific claims they make.)
The left is selective about which experts to consult on which topics. Like clockwork they'll cite the "97 percent of climate scientists agree" line, but then (also like clockwork) when it comes to minimum wages or rent control they ignore or discount the expert reasoning of economists, also often along with smears of free-market advocates along values-lines. (If a libertarian says that it really isn't the business of the state to coerce people in their economic decisions, or that there is a principle of subsidiarity that directs people toward non-state remedies to social ills before turning to the force-wielding state only as a very last resort, the left translates that as being heartless, sociopathic - probably an admirer of Ayn Rand's fictional heroes.)
Now, as I've said, I've followed the climate-change issue as much as a layperson could, for nearly 3 decades, or pretty much the time that it's been a big political topic. And I've heard every which argumentative fallacy coming from what for simplicity's sake I'll term the Right. (After hearing Rush and consulting 'Conservative Book Club'-type recommended books on climate change and ozone depletion, it wasn't long before I figured out that unless I were to make these subjects a full-time study requiring PhD-level learning in the relevant science(s), this stuff was going to be well above my pay grade. Cue STEM-lord chest-beating....) For a great long while the main tactic of the political Right was to be "skeptical" about the climate prediction models. Another tactic, after time went on, was to highlight the overreaching and alarmism of those who were saying that the polar ice caps could melt by the year 2000. Another tactic was to be "skeptical" that humans are the primary contributors to present-day climate change. ("The climate's always been changing....") Then the tactic was to say that it wasn't warming as much as the 'scientific consensus' (really, a range of opinion widely accepted by the experts) was saying. Then there was the so-called warming pause that lasted for all of maybe 2 decades (but which had a precedent some half a century earlier, amid an overall warming trend). Then the tactic was the smear the "hockey stick" authors in what was termed the Climategate controversy.
The worst of this bunch of right-wingers might be the religious fundamentalists who deny that the tri-omni god would facilitate humans making the planet uninhabitable. (They also have a cognitive bias about a wished-for afterlife, or even an End of Days, that would lead them to discount the importance of planet habitability.) There is also an unequivocally terrible epistemic practice on the Right when it comes to the science of evolution, to the extent that some 2 out of 5 rightists will affirm that humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years. (Actually, it's roughly 2 in 5 Americans. The numbers on the Right/GOP are even worse.) The politicians of the Right enable and coddle this blatant epistemic malpractice, sometimes by directly engaging in it themselves.
So the way I'd put it is that there are plenty of huge trust and credibility deficits in politics to go around. After all the lies and smears promoted by those on the left, why should those on the right believe them when it comes to climate change? And after the lies and smears peddled by the Right (an obvious recent one being Obama-birtherism - also peddled by one Donald Trump in the early 2010s), what reason do leftists have for believing them on climate change or anything else?
I've already pointed out the solution to this whole trust-problem, which is philosophical education (i.e., education in the canons of logic and evidence traditionally espoused by philosophers, particularly standards of dialectic exemplified by the likes of the Rapoport/Dennett Rules, ffs already). It doesn't mean the leftist take on doing philosophy, such as smearing Rand by claiming she's not taken seriously by the community of philosophers. (The relevant criterion here would be what those who are actually experts in Rand's thought have to contribute to the philosophical discussion going forward, seeing as how Rand isn't around to speak for herself. Anyway, the case of Hospers just on its own gives lie to the standard leftist smear, even before we take a look at the philosophy professors involved with the Ayn Rand Society.) It doesn't mean a toxic take on philosophy and science that is widespread on the Right, which is to discount academics and experts in these fields. (I do share their opinion when it comes to the systemic/structural dishonesty of the academic left, but it's a mistake to regard that crowd of losers as defining the academy as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against] - just as it is a mistake to regard the epistemic criminals of the Right as defining the Right as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against].)
Is it possible for the public comprised mostly of laypersons to gave a serious, honest, informed, high-signal-to-noise-ratio discussion of climate change? Perhaps it is - it would be greatly enhanced by the aforementioned suggested program of philosophical education (along with minimal scientific, historical and economic literacy) - but here's something that might really (ahem) light a fire under everyone's asses as it hits home more and more:
The concern, of course, is that the point at which these infernos hit closer and closer to more and more people's homes, it will be too late to do anything about it. (If there's anything in your episteme that suggests that the billions of animals perishing horribly in these infernos is Divine Providence, chances are you are a culpable contributor to the problem.) As the ignored-by-Trump-&-Co. scientists have been saying, some amount of future climate change is already locked in by the rising atmospheric CO2 levels, so chances are the infernos will get worse before we find any ways to make it better. (And that warming pause that the deniers were touting? The scientists have an explanation for that: the oceans as heat sinks - and the oceans can only absorb so much, and even if they do, the effects on ocean life are probably not good.) Just how patient shall we be about AI and/or alternative energy sources for mitigating this problem?
A lot (but far from all) of the disagreements about climate change and other issues is attributable to human fallibility and uncertainty. See for instance the comments section of that "Trump about-face" link at the top of this post. (Here it is again.) Aside from the standard deplorable and gutter-level stuff you might expect to find in a typical politically-charged comments section, you have "advocates" and "skeptics" alike pointing to sites with domain names like realclimatescience.org and realclimatechangescience.org, domain names which are of no use when they take opposite positions on the topic, whatever abundance of links and data appear at either. Again, how is a layperson to sift through all that, to be able to distinguish the real science from the junk? So many people on both sides are not only not equipped to deal with the subjects at the pay-grade level required, but they come to the discussion with their usual left- or right- biases that have them treating their own experts as definitive and the opposing ones as discount-able.
One of the few things an epistemically virtuous layperson can do, is to look at metadata about the state of the discussion or debate. I take it that there is real debate among real experts about climate change, but that this debate bears little if any resemblance to the public/political "debates" (represented by the now-twice-linked comment thread, the basic form of which you probably have seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, so you may not really need the refresher since there really isn't anything to learn or observe in the comment thread other than about human cognitive behavior/biases). From my experience, your typical leftist uses shitty lousy argumentation tactics because the ideas/positions they're defending are typically lousy, but that may not be an infallible heuristic. (There are plenty of folks offering lousy arguments for libertarianism, capitalism, Objectivism/Randism, all of which I take seriously. [Are there lousy arguments for a basically Aristotelian episteme or dialectic? I'm not used to seeing such things, and not even clear on what they would look like. The first thing that pops to mind is arguments by Thomists employing - well, probably abusing - Aristotelian concepts to rationalize dubious sexuality-related positions in Christianity. Tossing off is contrary to your telos, you see.])
[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters. In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist). I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell. (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before. This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty. It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.) So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters). This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests.... I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]
[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters. In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist). I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell. (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before. This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty. It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.) So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters). This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests.... I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]
"The climate's always been changing" is either a mechanism for shutting down honest inquiry in someone's mind, or a good-faith invitation in someone's mind to inquire into how it might be different this time. (While you can't rule out the latter, usually it's the former. After all, any reputable climate scientist already accepts that the climate's always been changing, so that can't be what's in contention. The rate of change is actually relevant.) That the warming theory adopted by the IPCC is probably the best explanation for a vast web of data should probably be taken by a layperson as the default position departures from which require a really good argument that takes into account all the data (i.e., not evading the whole of the context) as well any actual and anticipated objections/counter-arguments.
As I pointed out in my Jan. '19 blog post ("How is a layperson..."), it would really be nice if there were a highly-publicized debate between (say) Michael Mann and (say) Richard Lindzen, for the benefit of laypeople and policymakers. Why hasn't this happened? If the debate on its merits really is over - if the IPCC report is pretty much the most definitive context-keeping picture we have right now of the climate situation - then how hard could it possibly be to get the uncoerced agreement of advocates and "skeptics" alike? While I've personally experienced on many occasions dishonest leftists closing off the possibility of fair debate about Rand or capitalism, how pray tell does this dynamic play out when it comes to climate discussions, exactly? The Right/"skeptics" accuse the Left/warmers of using various tactics to shut down debate, but my ring-of-truth heuristics tell me that this doesn't ring true about the climate debate because the central claims being made aren't made by those in the social sciences and humanities - people who can be expected to be promoting a political agenda - but by those in the STEM disciplines (which are then seized upon and amplified by the leftists in their usual dishonest ways in order to promote the anti-capitalism policy framework/mentality they were dishonestly promoting already). Fine, don't pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore - he's a messenger one might have any number of reasons to shoot - but how about a Michael Mann? Is there something the "skeptics" have to employ against him other than dishonest/ context-disregarding smears?
So, to wrap up: Yawning trust deficits. Intellectual bankruptcy. Philosophical literacy.
