Angry in the Great White North

There are many ways to characterize people, and one way is to separate them into idealists and realists.

The words, as I use them here, mean something somewhat different from their common usage.

An idealist passes judgment on the universe.  For the idealist, the universe (or some portion of it, like his country's politics), ought to behave in a certain way.  In other words, there is an ideal state that ought to be achieved.  Of course, no two idealists will agree to what that state is, and that is why countless millions have died throughout history, caught up in the fight between competing idealists for whom being right is more important than, well, anything.  Putting that aside, idealists work on the premise that if the universe (or some portion of it) is not behaving as it should, then the universe (or some portion of it) is broken.

Though not necessarily a characteristic of every idealist, most by far, it seems, also believe that it is their job to fix the universe (or their portion of it).  The cost of fixing it is not an issue.  Trillions of dollars or millions of lives -- it doesn't matter to an idealist.  The stakes are just too high to worry about piddling issues like that.  The universe (or their portion of it) is broken, and they know how it should be, and it is their mission in life to remake things to reach that ideal.

Contrast that with the realist.  For the realist, the universe (including their portion of it) is neither right nor wrong, it just is.  It is in a state reached for any number of reasons, some apparent and some not, but whatever the route taken, it is what it is and you just have to deal with it.  There is no right answer to the question about how the universe should be, because the question of how things "should be" is itself meaningless.  It is possible to influence conditions under certain circumstances to improve a local situation, and those opportunities ought to be considered, but in the end, our ability to influence things is rather small, and the outcome of our attempts to alter a situation might not be what we expected or what we hoped.  But realists take that in stride, because, as always, there is no right answer to the question "How should the universe be?".   A realist merely asks what is the state of the universe now, accepts that, and moves on.

Liberals are invariably idealists of the worst kind.  A liberal (in the modern usage of the term) will spend countless millions on social programs, for example, because he is offended that some people don't have this benefit or that.  Taking someone else's money, and then using it to deliver that benefit to another person at no cost to that other person, is perfectly acceptable, because now the universe (or this portion of it) is closer to his ideal.  The opinion of the person paying the tax is barely considered, since the stakes are so high.  That giving something of value to certain people for free might have unintended consequences on the recipients, or on the market, is also blithely ignored, unless the liberal decides that his universe includes a fix for that too, in which case, our liberal will impose his own fix on that problem too.  Whatever the cost or consequence.

Conservatives are usually realists.  That there are inequities in life is neither acceptable nor unacceptable.  That is a moral judgment on what is merely a fact of life, or so a realist would say.  Perhaps some inequities can be addressed, but a realist is under no illusion that virtually any attempt to level out such inequities across broad swathes of the population with massive state intervention will probably create other inequities.  And that too is neither good nor bad, it just is, though a conservative will likely wonder if substituting one inequity for another is truly achieving anything, and might opt to leave things well enough alone.  Indeed, experience shows that large scale interference typically exacerbates existing problems while simultaneously creating new ones.

In any case, idealists are, by definition, arrogant.  You'd have to be to think the universe ought to be a particular way, and that you know what that way should be.  Their plan to fix things will always succeed, and if things get worse, then it means their perfect plan wasn't followed correctly.  For them, leaving well enough alone is never an option.  Efforts are redoubled, and more money and more lives are sacrificed to the plan.

So what does this have to do with scientists and climate change?  Scientists are supposed to be the purist expression of realists.  For them, it is all about the data.  The data is never right or wrong in a moral sense, it simply is.  What the data shows can't be denied.  An idealist will gladly ignore or denigrate data that conflicts with his ideal view of the universe, but a scientist does not have that luxury.

A proper scientist does not believe in man-made global warming.  It is a theory that may or may not be supported by evidence.  If not, it is rejected.  It is as simple as that.

For believers in man-made global warming, the ideal universe is one in which global warming is real, and is attributable to Western industrial activity.  From that ideal state flows the ideal solution -- massive de-industrialization of the West and a subsequent reduction of wealth and influence.  From that follows a crash in the standard of living, culminating in dramatic depopulation. 

Don't be naive.  This is what global warming idealists want to happen.

Many scientists have somehow been co-opted into this camp.  Their goal is not to describe the universe as it is, but to to achieve the goals of the global warming alarmists.  Why this has happened is hard to explain.  I think that climatology itself borders on a fake science, since it relies too much on modeling (which itself is an idealist view expressed as a computer program) instead of proper data.  And the systems being studied (world climate) is resistant to reductionism, so it cannot be simulated in a test tube where data can be collected, and theories rigorously tested.

Perhaps that's why so many global warming skeptics in the scientific community seem to come from outside the community of climatologists.  They can see the inherent problem in treating climatology as a rigorous science.  Climatology seems to have more in common with a soft science like sociology, which is to say, it is not a science at all.

Climatologists, on the other hand, have in large part abandoned their realist scientific training and swapped it for the quasi-religious fervour of the idealist.  With the revelations made these past few days from the CRU emails, we see that idealism at work:

Hackers have taken e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's Hadley Centre and posted them on the Internet.

The messages appear to reveal (and I emphasize that for now they merely appear to reveal) collusion among many of the most prominent global warming theorists to doctor the scientific evidence supporting the theory that man-made emissions are raising the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere thereby trapping too much of the sun's heat and dangerously warming the planet.

The e-mails also show them expressing glee at the death of a prominent debunker of their alarmism --the passing of Australian John L. Daly in 2004 was "cheering news" --and strategizing about how best to keep opponents of the warming theory from getting published in peer-reviewed journals or being included in the UN's five-year reports on climate science.

At least one e-mail seems to describe how best to destroy e-mails that might become subject to Access to Information requests: "Can you delete any e-mails you have with Keith...Keith will do likewise.

"Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?...We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

I am not in the least surprised that there is evidence of collusion and data manipulation and brutal attacks on those who disagree.  These are all defining behaviours of the idealist.  An idealist has a goal, and subverts everything,  including honesty, to achieving that goal.  Lying comes easily to an idealist, because the only true thing to an idealist, ironically, is the one thing that does not truly exist, and that is their ideal universe.

Scientists are not supposed to behave this way, even a little bit.  And yet these "scientists" seem to have abandoned whatever scientific training they've had.  Or more accurately, they continue to use a facsimile of scientific technique, however it is not data driven, but goal driven. 

That so many scientists, or more precisely, so many climatologists, have been corrupted this way is not really a surprise, in that their behaviour in the last few years has strongly hinted that they've stopped being scientists (inasmuch as they ever were scientists) and had become climate change purists, donning the mantle of science so that they could derive the benefits of scientific credibility while at the same time using that veneer of science to mask their conversion to zealotry.

The revelations contained in these emails strongly suggests that this is exactly what has happened, but even more disturbing, it suggests that these erstwhile scientists knew what had happened to them.  They explicitly  discuss how to fake data, how to suppress dissent, and how to justify ignoring observations that run counter to their idealist view of the world.

Perhaps naively, I thought scientific boosters of man-made global warming had somehow deluded themselves into thinking that they were still scientists and that they were still respecting the data (through some convoluted pseudo-scientific argument that justified cherry-picking the data).  But now, it seems, they knew exactly what they were doing, that it all amounted to "tricks", and that data is expected to respect a foregone conclusion, instead of the conclusion being drawn from the data.

These former scientists ought to be drummed out of the scientific community, and the body of their work expunged scientific databases, with the assumption that it is all fatally compromised by their zealousness, unless specifically shown to be honestly data-driven work, on a case-by-case basis.

Of course, that is me being an idealist, in which I define what I think the proper state of the universe ought to be, and then demand that it achieve that state.

When I revert to my natural realism, I have to admit that there is little likelihood that these zealots will suffer punishments meted out by their peers within the scientific community just because I say that's the way it should be.  The best we can hope for, says the realist, is for the truth to be revealed, as has been with the publication of these emails, and that these revelations will themselves influence others to take action.

It is sad that we have reached this state of affairs.  But the fact is that global warming zealousness is an insidious disease that rots the mind of those afflicted by it.  It is just so much more apparent when we are able to see the affects on scientists in such glaring detail.

An afterthought on religion and the threat to the West: Though anti-religion bigots are likely to jump up and declare religion as the prime example of idealism run amok, the fact is that it depends on what religion is being discussed.  Islam, for example, is imbued with an idealist worldview fixated on temporal justice, and so Islamic zealots go to the most violent extremes in their attempts to remake the world into a global caliphate.  In contrast, Catholicism is rooted in realism.  Blessed are the poor, Jesus tells us, an implicit admission that, in this world, inequities are inevitable and not in of themselves an indication of a universe out of sorts.  We are individually challenged to alleviate the suffering of the poor, not out of a sense of justice but of charity (justice, mercy, and charity being very different concepts).  Our acts of charity are not likely to rid the world of poverty, but we are directed to perform them anyways, because acts of charity can do much to repair our own personal moral failings (a benefit of charity that is lost when we make charity a State function).  It seems significant to me that these corrupted climatologists seem closer to the vengeful Islamic zealot trying to change way the world is run than to the thoughtful and philosophical Jesuit concerned with how an individual can live a better life.  The greatest threats to our way of life in the West come from two directions -- the threat of Islamic extremism and the threat of environmental zealotry  In writing this piece, I'm beginning to think that these threats, very different at first glance, both spring from the same source -- idealism cut loose of any of the moderating affects of a realistic world view.

What's the point of charity?  One more side thought, and that is on the point of charity for the poor.  I mentioned above that acts of charity will alleviate the suffering of some of the poor, but is unlikely to rid the world of poverty.  An idealist would say this a failure, and a realist would say the little else could be expected.  If you accept the realist's point of view, you could be wondering just what is the point.  Well, first of all, just because you can't help everyone is no excuse not to help someone.  But really, the explanation is rooted in a largely forgotten bit of Catholic thinking.  The body of the Church, that is, the membership, is broken up into three groups.  There is the Church Triumphant, those souls in heaven.  There is the Church Suffering, those souls suffering in the cleansing flames of purgatory, on their way to joining the Church Triumphant.  Finally, there is the Church Militant, which is us, alive, here on Earth.  The Church Militant are in a struggle with the Forces of Evil (souls belonging to he Church Suffering and the Church Triumphant are forever beyond the grasp of Evil).  That fight is ongoing and will never end through any power we can bring to bear.  Evil will only truly be vanquished at The End (and I'll spare you the tortured metaphors of eschatology).  So the Church Militant is made up of realists!  No one is under any illusion that he will sweep Evil aside and himself be responsible for creating a paradise here on Earth.   To think like that would be to suffer from the vice of pride. The Church Militant fights, with an individual doing such things as committing acts of charity to alleviate the suffering of the poor (or in particular, some very few poor people) as part of fighting that fight.  The fight is never won and will never end, at least not through any human agency.  Idealists are not proper members of the Church Militant, since they usurp the role of God in declaring that they have the knowledge for the ideal ordering of the world, and that they are able to wield the power to order the world in that way, if only that power was granted to them.  For them, there is no value in the fight, only in the results.  This has nothing to do with the climatologists as such, but in re-reading this piece, I realized I might have left some people wondering about whether realists would ever lift a hand to help the poor if they know that the poor would always be with us.  In truth, it is the realist (at least the Catholic one) who is more likely to help the poor, while the idealist does nothing except agitate for massive societal re-alignments based on some idealized view of the world.