Q&A: Humanity’s Impact on Global Warming
Humanity’s Impact on Global Warming
Question
Is the claim that humanity affects global warming a scientific one?
Recently many scientists have been talking about it as an undisputed fact that human beings affect the Earth’s climate. For example, here.
In your opinion, is this even a scientific claim? That is, scientists can determine that there is climate change on Earth, but can it be argued and proven what is influencing it?
And more broadly, how do you think that in an age of the absence of truth, this truth of humanity’s effect on global warming has come to hold such an honored place among forces in the West?
Thank you very much
Answer
Bnei, hello.
You asked an important and difficult question. Since I am not versed in the details of this topic, I can only say some general things about it.
The various sciences use different inductive methods to reach their conclusions. As is well known, induction is a rather dangerous tool and does not give us certainty. It is always possible that one could make a different generalization on the basis of the facts in our possession.
And yet, it is hard for me to see someone doubting the law of gravity, for example. Theoretically one could say that the examples we encountered were an unrepresentative sample, but it is a very large sample, and common sense says that there really is a general law of gravity.
Still, there is a hierarchy among the sciences. Physics is called an exact science. As stated, that is not an exact term (!), but it at least represents something close to exact. It has predictions that can be verified empirically, and its laws are quantitative and therefore more compelling. In contrast, psychology, in my personal opinion, is not a science at all (see columns 23–25). Not to mention political “science,” international relations, and history. All of these do not give us predictions that can stand an empirical test. These are mainly fields that investigate the past and do not give predictions about the future, and therefore this is basically more information-gathering and less science, which is supposed to generalize the information into a general theory. Still, even in these fields there is more and less common sense, and obviously there is better work and worse work. The scientific status of a field is not the sole criterion of its value. But lack of scientificity opens the door to charlatanism and to the influence of passing fashions. Academic fields like gender studies are almost nothing but agenda and fashion, no more than that (though in my impression this has improved somewhat in recent years).
Above all, it is important in all these fields to distinguish between facts and assessments and judgments. Even in physics there are outrageous mixtures of actual science with conclusions that go beyond it (such as whether or not there is a God, determinism, and so on). Scientists, and certainly laymen, treat these conclusions as if they were scientific statements about which there is professional authority (see a bit in column 25).
But in our case, we are speaking about what is called Earth sciences. That is not really a science in the disciplinary sense, since it involves a combination of quite a few different fields (physics in its branches, meteorology, hydrology, geology, cosmology, and more and more). The problem with such a combination is that in many cases people use disciplines they do not really know thoroughly and in which they are not experts (that is always my feeling regarding “Land of Israel studies.” It is a kind of tourist-guides’ field that gathers information from various scientific disciplines, but they are experts in none of them, and therefore their statements should be treated with very limited reliability).
If I summarize what emerges for our matter: I personally (and I really am not an expert, as stated) am inclined a priori to doubt the conclusions of these fields. First, because it is hard to derive from them a clear prediction about the future. They are mainly experts on the past. The predictions that are given do not always come true (and rightly so, since this is a complex and tangled field, like psychology or history, and not simple like the physics of a point particle). Not for nothing are there very fundamental disputes in these fields between different schools of thought (something that does not really exist in physics), and then fashions and agendas take over, and in the course of the battles between them people are not allowed to express different positions that deviate from the hegemonic view (see homosexuality). We all know this is also the case in evolution, even though it is part of the natural sciences. When agenda takes over the discourse, everyone is committed to the agenda of his camp, which does not allow him to be completely intellectually honest, and there is no free discussion.
On the other hand, in my layman’s impression there are already fairly systematic data regarding climatic deterioration, and something is apparently causing it. If most scientists think that we have an influence, I tend to accept that there is something to it. Even if this is not a solid scientific conclusion like the law of gravity, in my opinion there is certainly weight to the intuitions of people who work in the field, and one should be cautious. Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to take the obvious steps to minimize the damage. On the other hand, I would not take hysterical steps with heavy and irreversible costs because of these fears. That is because in my eyes this is not a scientific conclusion but more a concern based on common sense.
One more remark
You asked about the adoption of such a scientific view in an age of the absence of truth. The phenomenon of attitudes toward science in general challenges postmodernism. True, the extreme among the new critics deny even the findings of science (all the way to physics and beyond. See feminist critiques such as those appearing in Gadi Taub’s book The Limp Rebellion). But the world in general does tend to accept scientific findings. Moreover, it seems to me that there is a completely excessive attitude of respect toward scientists and their findings (see columns 23–25).
In my opinion the reason for this is postmodernism itself. People seek an anchor of certainty in our nihilistic and skeptical age. There are no rabbis and no sages and no know-it-alls and no tradition and no prophets and no right and wrong; that is quite frustrating. As someone once said, Russians cannot do without a tsar, and therefore even after the communist revolution Stalin became a tsar. So if we all need spiritual leadership and know-it-all types, and if there are smart and respected people wearing rabbinic robes and a black pointed academic cap in Hogwarts style who provide them with what the religious and mystical charlatan (the wonder-working baba, people who communicate with higher powers and aliens, astrologers, and all kinds of alternative healers) provides to the masses, why shouldn’t they take it? Thus scientists play on this feeling of vacuum (some of them, in my opinion, consciously), and just like the disreputable list of charlatans I mentioned above, they create by various means (academic ceremonies with robes, etc., academic respectability, prizes, incomprehensible Latin jargon, and more) an aura of certainty and holiness around scientific or “scientific” determinations. [It seems to me this is part of what provoked the sometimes bizarre criticism I described above.]
Moreover, ridiculous academic fields such as political science, education, gender studies, and the like, partake in that aura, through no fault of their own, since they too are in academia and they too are respected professors who receive various prizes (the devil knows why). So what is the difference between them and a physicist (aside from the fact that one can somewhat understand what they say, and therefore they are interviewed more in the media)?
Now you can see that the answer to this question is part of the background to the answer I suggested in the previous message.
This question stirred many thoughts in me. Here is one more addition.
As is well known, in evolutionary processes living creatures undergo adaptation, that is, adjustment to the circumstances around them. Thus those fit for those circumstances survive, and pass on these survival traits to their descendants in future generations. And so it continues onward and onward. The circumstances change and cause the creatures to change accordingly, and so on in a cycle.
Moreover, when a physico-theological argument for the existence of God is raised (how is it possible that living creatures of such complexity arose through a blind process and without a guiding hand), immediately the chorus of atheists replies that any set of laws would create some kind of complex creatures, and there is nothing special about the complexity of life (this is nonsense, but I will not get into it here). This is the anthropic principle and the reverse principle.
If so, what is the problem with changes in the weather? Under whatever circumstances prevail here, some living creatures will exist; it is just that their bodily structure will suit those relevant circumstances and not ours. So what are we afraid of? Evolution is continuing all the time anyway, and we are changing all the time. So weather damage will only direct the change in these directions rather than others. What difference does it make? Our descendants will be different from us, and evolution will make sure they survive very well in the new weather.
Just to sharpen the point: if our ancestors’ ancestors had been researching the ecology and meteorology of the world in their day, a few seconds after the Big Bang, then we would not be here today. They would have been concerned that conditions not change, and then the only survivor would have been that creature similar to them that suited the conditions prevailing then (and that is definitely not us). We would never have come into existence at all. So now reverse the direction of the timeline, and you will see that just as we arose from other creatures, so too we will disappear and become other creatures. What exactly is the problem with that?
At most, perhaps one could demand of us that we act to slow the process, so that the climate change will not be too rapid and will allow living species to undergo adaptation. To tell the truth, I am not sure even that is required, since a process of rapid change will create creatures that change rapidly, as part of their adaptation process.
In this evolutionary picture, the fear of global warming is nothing but sheer chauvinistic conservatism. We want to perpetuate our own species. Enough chauvinism!!!
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Dor:
Regarding the last remark, perhaps our instinct to preserve the Earth is itself an evolutionary survival instinct. Note well, and the discussion could go on forever.
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Rabbi:
And then what? Even if people are chasing you, that does not mean you are not paranoid.
Discussion on Answer
The answer expresses a rather dismissive attitude toward a field in which it is evident that you are not sufficiently knowledgeable. With all due respect. “Because it is hard to derive from them a clear prediction about the future. They are mainly experts on the past. The predictions that are given do not always come true.”
Climate research does not deal only with historical description, and it also yields predictions that can later be checked to see whether they came true or not. In the 1970s there was a dispute among three schools. One claimed that the climate was cooling, one said there was no significant change, and one said it was warming. As a result of the dispute, scientists looked for more data and more ways to examine the situation, and the school that claimed the climate (average air temperature at the surface, average temperature of the upper layer of the oceans) was warming won out.
When in science someone says in 1960, “In the year 2000 the climate will be warmer,” that is a prediction about the future. If that prediction comes true, it is counted to his credit. His theory may be completely wrong, but we have at least received one confirmation that this theory—or perhaps another theory that would yield a similar prediction—was the direction in which things should be examined. Certainly that is not counted against the theory.
The theory of man-made global warming provided not only this prediction, whose fulfillment gave support to the correctness of the theory, but also a series of other predictions—for example cooling of the upper atmosphere, faster warming of the poles compared to other parts of the Earth—which, after long debates among scientists from different fields, were decided in favor of the theory and caused support for it among scientists working in the field (climate research) to grow stronger.
The main reason scientists think the cause of the warming is human involvement is that other explanations that were proposed for such warming—for example changes in the sun—were found to be weaker. There are groups of scientists around the world competing with one another, with computerized climate models, trying to predict how variables like temperature, humidity, precipitation, and more will change. Each group tries to beat the models of rival groups and provide more accurate models—ones that succeed in predicting not only trends in those variables at the global level but also at regional levels—for example, how the climate in the Middle East region will change.
Each such model is run on historical periods in order to try to calibrate the parameters, and then they try running it against a period that is not fed into the model and compare how well the model predicted the hidden period. Of course this opens the door to various methodological problems—but this is a competitive model. If your model succeeded in giving a good explanation for the period 1990–2000, then the other groups will “be waiting around the corner” to see whether this model really gives good results for years that had not yet been measured at all—say 2000–2010.
When the human influence is removed from the models—greenhouse-gas emissions, changes in reflectivity due to deforestation, aerosol emissions, etc.—the models fail to explain the changes found in the measurements.
In the link—a (partial) summary of mine of the history of research into climate change. To the best of my understanding, one can see how far the subject is from being something like a “fashion” or something arrived at lightly. I am giving a link to a description of the history of the field because the field itself is very complex and requires years of study and reading hundreds of articles.
There are also several related entries there about climate research itself and about climate-research models. There are several dozen additional entries in the same place about various implications of climate change—for example effects on ice shelves—and all that by a layman in the field who does not even have a degree in geophysics. There is much more knowledge in the English Wikipedia entries and of course in popular science literature, and even more so in the realms of professional science.
https://ecowiki.org.il/wiki/%D7%94%D7%94%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%94_%D7%A9%D7%9C_%D7%97%D7%A7%D7%A8_%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%99%D7%99_%D7%94%D7%90%D7%A7%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9D
And one further note—climate change is only part of the changes being undergone by the planet on which we live, as a result of human activity. Climate change stems mainly from the human impact on the carbon cycle—emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Another change caused by that same disturbance is “ocean acidification”—the oceans becoming more acidic due to absorption of excess carbon from the atmosphere. Human activity, especially in the last 200 years, has caused an increasingly severe disruption of additional biogeochemical cycles such as the phosphorus cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, and other cycles. The article “Planetary Boundaries” discusses some of the implications of disrupting these cycles. In addition, human beings are causing a mass extinction of living creatures in a way that threatens many species of mammals, birds, plants, insects, and more, through a variety of destructive actions such as cutting down and burning forests, mining, hunting, fishing, and above all taking over more and more land and harnessing it for human needs—in a way that destroys entire ecological systems that currently function as a kind of “spaceship” enabling us to continue to exist here comfortably by circulating those same biogeochemical cycles and maintaining parameters of clean water, concentrations of substances, and a climate comfortable and stable enough for us to exist here. An example of how things can go badly wrong is covered in books like Collapse by Jared Diamond and in the “Biosphere 2” experiment, which tried to keep 8 people alive for 3 years in an artificial biosphere.
That is, not only must we try to repair or try to cope with climate change (some of the scenarios include severe damage to world agriculture or hundreds of millions of refugees—so it is not clear how one can cope with such changes)—we also need to understand that this is only part of the changes taking place on the planet because of human arrogance and the assumption that the Earth is some sort of dead or passive thing that will keep serving us no matter what we do to it, if only because that serves some people’s desire for power, money, honor, or simply because it is convenient for us as a human society.
“If so, what is the problem with changes in the weather? Under whatever circumstances prevail here, some living creatures will exist; it is just that their bodily structure will suit those relevant circumstances and not ours. So what are we afraid of? Evolution is continuing all the time anyway, and we are changing all the time. So weather damage will only direct the change in these directions rather than others. What difference does it make? Our descendants will be different from us, and evolution will make sure they survive very well in the new weather.”
Indeed, tardigrades and other creatures like bacteria that have survived here for billions of years will probably continue to survive no matter what changes here. Cockroaches and jellyfish (a multicellular marine creature that has survived 600 million years) and perhaps rats as well will probably manage to survive despite widespread ecological destruction and despite climate change.
“our descendants will be different from us, and evolution will make sure they survive very well” — this is a terrible mistake in your understanding of evolution. Our descendants may survive and may not. Species extinction is part of evolution; most species did not survive evolution, because it operates by those who are not sufficiently adapted becoming extinct. It will also be less pleasant if the human species survives but our descendants—the descendants of my family, or of most people living in Israel, say—do not.
Climate change is different from “the weather changes”—a few days with less rain and a few more hot or cold days—because the climate changes; climate is not weather. Climate is the average of temperatures over a long period—decades—and thereby it changes more essential things—for example, the ability to grow agricultural crops in large fields (especially corn, rice, and wheat, which make up most of the basis of human nutrition), it changes ocean water levels, the flow regime of rivers. Climate change also expresses itself in social aspects—for example, people who can no longer continue living in places that have been flooded, or people who can no longer make a living from agriculture because of prolonged drought. (Examples from the recent past—northern Syria, Bangladesh, various islands today—these are people culturally distant from us and so we care less; we will probably care more if New York, London, the Netherlands, and other cities or countries close to the waterline are flooded.)
Climate changes that are too rapid, and ecological disasters due to additional processes (for example the drying up of lakes and rivers because of increased water extraction), also mean social changes and social tension and problems in politics and economics—not only refugees but also wars over resources and tensions within and between countries because of those refugees—for example the refugees from northern Syria because of the 2008–2011 drought who helped trigger the Syrian civil war, and the refugees from Syria and Iraq who flowed to Turkey and Europe and contributed to social changes there.
Climate change that is too strong and too fast, together with other ecological problems, may not wipe out all humanity so quickly—they “only” may kill hundreds of millions of people and perhaps billions of people—depending, for example, on whether a global crisis in agriculture or other crises also cause wars and/or nuclear wars that cause further destruction and an even bigger agricultural crisis. This may be a problem, say, for the residents of a small country in the Middle East that imports most of its caloric value through the direct import of grains or grains for producing milk, eggs, and meat.
For some reason we are attached to our children, want to prevent a loss that may overshadow World War II or the Black Death, and want the continued existence of civilization, and even to preserve species like chameleons or butterflies, and are not especially eager to reach those scenarios, even if they will not bother the tardigrades very much.
In political science/international relations there is one empirical law: liberal democratic states do not fight one another.
So far the law has not been refuted.
There are also all kinds of game-theoretic claims about the effect of the electoral system on the party system and the political system, but there are quite a few unresolved questions there (interesting to those interested in these esoteric subjects).
In general, it seems to me that science should be divided into several parts:
The sciences that deal with bodies operating on the basis of Newton’s law of inertia and its statistical variations, as in quantum theory and the like—physics, chemistry, the chemical sides of biology.
The sciences that deal with bodies that have an objective function and interact with other bodies that have a similar objective function. The mathematics of these sciences is game-theoretic, and what guides them are basic phenomena that cannot be reduced to other basic phenomena. Political science—the phenomenon of power. Economics—the phenomenon of scarcity. Evolutionary biology—the replication of genes.
The sciences that deal with the formation of the objective function. Here, if I follow Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind, which argues that there is a world war between the social sciences’ claim that man is predictable (whether on the basis of social/cultural/rational structures and the like) and the humanities’ claim that man is not predictable and that the human spirit creates itself (on the basis of the views of Kant and Nietzsche). There is no doubt that these sciences are the hardest ones, and not by chance there are people who classify them as what is called nonsense sciences.
In addition, I have recently been thinking that one can define another field of sciences that deal not with man but with intelligence or its variations. To these sciences I would assign the logical side of philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.