Why Do You Believe That?
As far as I can tell, most Russian scientists do not believe in global warming. This was a shock to me. It’s one of those things that is obvious when you’re on the ground in a country, yet surprisingly little known elsewhere.
I discovered this during an after-dinner discussion with my Russian host. I don’t even remember how the topic came up, except that I half-jokingly proposed a tour of all the great beaches of the world before rising sea levels swallowed them up.
“The sea level will not rise,” said Dmitri.
“But, um, the polar ice is melting,” I protested. “We can see that on satellite images.”
“The ice is floating, yes? When it melts, will the water rise?”
“Yes.”
“No. It is already displacing its weight. This is Archimedes.” (You have to imagine the Russian accent.) At this point I argued vigorously against this idea, pointing out that icebergs have a portion above water; when the ice melts, that portion is effectively submerged.
“Anyway, the warming is not man made,” he continued.
“Um. I think it is. I think that’s clear now.”
“No, look. Wait,” and he went off for a moment, returning with a book in Russian. I was impressed: it was a volume of papers on global warming. I couldn’t read them of course, but he showed me the graphs. “The Earth has natural warm and cool cycles,” he told me, pointing at a 400,000 year temperature graph derived from ice cores. “And look where we are now: near the top of a cycle.”
“Yeah, but we still have all those CO2 emissions, and we know from models that they have a real effect. Look.” At this point I sat down at the computer and pulled up my own graph, of the mean Earth surface temperature in the 20th century.
“There was hot period before,” he protested. “Look. And here, we see sun radiation.” He pointed to a graph of reconstructed solar output from another paper. “So it is the sun that makes the Earth warm and cool.”
“The people working on this problem are very smart, Dmitri. I’m sure the effect of natural solar output variation has been accounted for.”
“The warming is natural.”
And so it went. Every argument I had was countered in some way. There was no warming, or there was warming but it was natural. The sea level wouldn’t rise because the Earth had been this warm before and wasn’t flooded; or it would rise but all of our major coastal cities were ancient anyway, and weren’t flooded way back when. There wasn’t enough greenhouse gas being added to the atmosphere, or the outcome was dependent on the models used. A single large volcanic eruption will cause massive cooling (from atmospheric dust) and since we haven’t had any in the 20th century, we’re overdue and we’ll have one before the oceans flood us. And anyway, global warming would actually be good for global crop production.
Now, Dmitri is not a stupid man. He works at an internet startup, builds his own electronic gadgets, and his grasp of basic physics seems solid. True, he has a mullet, but this is a common condition for Russian men and I see no reason why that should affect his reasoning. In fact, his individual arguments were quite cogent, and I really had to work to counter some of them. Yet his main point kept sliding about as I raised my objections. To me, this is one of the dead giveaways of essentially faulty logic. Those who have a poor grasp of the fundamentals of a subject often attempt to make up for it with dogma – or is it the other way around?
Still, he was good and thorough enough that as I went to bed that night, I had to ask myself why I believed that there was global warming, and that it was indeed caused by humans.
I mean, that’s the question we always want the other person to ask, isn’t it? We want to plant that seed of doubt. If we’re paid negotiators, or religious, or otherwise have a lot on the line personally (whether we admit it or not), then we are not open to doubt. But if we are committed to continually refining our understanding of “truth” in whatever complex way we conceive it, then we are required to leave that little space open. We have to ask ourselves the question, why do I believe this? And when Dmitri pressed me, it turned out I didn’t really know why I believed in global warming. I had nothing immediately to hand with which to substantiate that belief.
So I hit the books the next morning. Meaning, of course, the internet. I admit that the first place I went is Wikipedia, which rapidly referred me to something called the IPCC: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is an international body – over 130 countries now – which publishes a big report on climate change every few years. The first report was in 1993 and the most recent was published in August of this year. That document, known as the “IPCC Fourth Assessment Report”, states that
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
And several other equally strong statements. So there you have it, and this massive report is considered to be more or less definitive and authoritative. But why?
Basically, I believe the conclusions of the IPCC because I believe in the capacity of certain types of social processes to generate “truth” to some good approximation. (in this context, I’m going to say “truth” means “consistent with reality.”) So let’s review how the IPCC report came to be. Briefly, 6000 scientists from all over the world reviewed the existing published research material related to climate change, its potential consequences, and possible mitigation strategies. This work was then edited by a core team of 450 or so of these same people, and then it was reviewed by the Academy of Science or equivalent organization from every single one of the 130 governments involved.
There is a huge international bureaucracy at work here, but one that works according to very definite rules. In fact, there are hundreds of pages of processes: governing principles, process for reports preparation, financial policies (including donor disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules), and the processes by which contributors and editors are selected. All of this is available online and you could read it right this second if you wanted to. To be sure, these processes are not perfect — probably they cannot be perfect — but at least, from reading them, we get some idea of the possible biases. Even better, the report is so public that there is extensive criticism by others after publication.
So the IPCC 4th Assessment Report is now the source of my belief. In my arguments with Dmitri, it became clear that his major source was a particular book of Russian papers. Not only that, but he knows personally one of the authors, a Doctor Vladimir Klimenko at the Moscow Energy Institute, whose autograph appears inside the front cover of Dmitri’s copy.
I do not immediately object to this. Really, this is a perfectly reasonably way to form an opinion: you listen to what an expert friend tells you. Of course, it can be hard to evaluate that one friend in context: what is the spectrum of possible opinions, and where does your friend sit in it? Global warming is such a high-profile issue that it is an exception. It is very well studied and the consensus conclusions are painstakingly documented. For many other technical points — say, a question in economics — our expert friends are as good a resource as we’re ever likely to run across in everyday life. At least they’re trained in their field. There is simply so much information in the world, and it’s so complex, that we must rely on our moderators. In this light, Dmitri’s point of view was well founded. He even understood the science well enough to interpret the graphs.
Dmitri’s error was not the way in which he formed his beliefs, but his reluctance to examine that way.
Oh, and that floating ice? It turns out that Dmitri was right: melting ice will not, in general, raise the level of the water it is floating in. But melting icebergs will, according to a recent paper submitted to the Geophysical Journal International, because there is a difference in salinity between the ice and the ocean water, which translates into a difference in density. In this particular kitchen-table argument, Dmitri and I were both certain and both wrong.
