OPINION: Tools for Winning the Climate Debate, Part Three

By Tom Harris

Read Part One

The climate change movement has managed to closely associate themselves with the left of the political spectrum, producing a huge boost for their campaigns. After all, the majority of mainstream media are left of center, resulting in climate alarmists having a massive unpaid communications arm supporting their crusade.

But most “progressives” fail to realize that following climate alarmists’ agenda results in outcomes that violate causes leftists say they hold dear. This would include support for social justice and environmental protection, issues I dealt with in Parts One and Two of this series. And, by pointing this out in public forums, we are employing Saul Alinsky’s rule #4 from Rules for Radicals – A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, which states:

Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Two other ideas the left have historically championed and would be loath to admit they no longer support are:

  • Rejection of absolutism (truth) and authority (consensus)
  • Tolerance of alternative lifestyles & opinions

Demonstrating publicly that following the climate alarmist agenda works against both of these ideals would be an effective application of Alinsky’s rule #4 as it will also help sway well-intentioned leftists to distance themselves from the climate scare.

Historically, liberals have tended to reject absolute authority and often ridiculed conservatives for being inflexible about morals, politics and even science. For example, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was supported by the German left, while those on the right opposed it, believing it threatened their cultural worldview (which, ultimately, it did). In fact, the assertion that science discovers truths about nature, not merely opinions based on empirical evidence that is always subject to interpretation, led to the ‘science wars’ of the late 20th century. In that conflict the intellectual left were the sceptics of the idea that we could have absolute knowledge in science.

But this expected approach — relativism and scepticism from liberals and absolutism from conservatives — has been turned upside down in the climate debate. While right-wingers call for open debate about the causes of climate change, the left generally consider such discussion intolerable and behave as if we know the future of climate decades in advance, a position that is indefensible, scientifically and philosophically.

So, climate campaigners try to shut down debate about the causes of climate change, regarding it as a Pandora’s Box they want to keep firmly shut. If the public regularly heard about the vast uncertainty in climate change science, their patience for the $1.27 trillion devoted in 2022/2023 to climate finance would quickly evaporate. So, instead, most of the left ignore the thousands of well-qualified experts who do not support the scare (for example, see ‘World Climate Declaration: There is no climate emergency’) and enthusiastically support the nonsensical climate change forecasts of people like Al Gore with his “Inconvenient Truth.”

We must regularly call them on this, pointing out that it violates one of the left’s fundamental axioms.

We need to bring up in public sessions the fact that unquestioning acceptance of ‘truth’ in science — in the sense of fulfilling Plato’s definition that truth is universal, necessary and certain, characteristics impossible in science — has impeded human progress throughout history. For example, when the Greco-Egyptian writer Claudius Ptolemy proposed his Earth-centered system, he did not say it was physical astronomy, a true description of how the universe worked. He promoted it as mathematical astronomy, a model that worked well for astronomical observations, astrology and creating calendars.

It was the Catholic Church that, relying on a literal interpretation of the Bible, specifically Joshua 10:12-14, promoted the Ptolemaic system as truth to be questioned at one’s peril. Here is that Biblical passage:

Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: Sun, stand still over Gibeon; and Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies… And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the Lord heeded a voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.

It is important to understand that Joshua’s army had marched all night to battle their enemies, had prevailed in the battle and his enemies were in retreat. But Joshua did not want them to be able to get back to their fortified cities to regroup. More daylight was needed for Joshua’s troops to finish them off. To prevent their return, he asked God to lengthen the day…

So the Church wanted the public to believe that the Sun moved, not Earth. According to many writers, this was why Nicolaus Copernicus, a Church Canon, waited until his death bed before he allowed his revolutionary book showing the Sun to be the center of the universe to be published, even though the text was completed 30 years earlier.

This is also why Galileo ran into so much trouble when he claimed that the Church was wrong and that Copernicanism was the truth, a position that Galileo could not really know with certainty either.

Similarly, the assumed truth of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation eventually acted to slow the advancement of science until Albert Einstein showed them to be incomplete.

We need to remind leftists that when authorities preach truth about science, progress stops. They should welcome, not condemn, questioning the status quo. Science advances through fearless investigation, not frightened acquiescence to fashionable thinking.

I did this a few years ago in an Ontario Government public meeting set up to identify obstacles to progress on “climate action.” After several members of the public were roundly booed and harassed for voicing doubt about the science being relied on by the government, I went to the microphone and said:

“We have just seen a demonstration of what I think is the greatest obstacle to progress on this file — it is the intolerance of alternative points of view about this complex science. We should welcome and discuss skeptical inquiries, not try to silence them!”

The reaction? Dead silence. You could hear a pin drop. The government representative had nothing to say and the audience recognized that the activists had violated what is supposed to be a fundamental tenant of progressivism, namely keeping an open mind to different perspectives.

And, of course, the reliance on consensus to determine what is truth in science is simply a “bandwagon logical fallacy” when we base the validity of our argument on how many people believe it. A show of hands does not decide the validity of scientific hypotheses. When Einstein was told about A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, a book published in 1931, he replied, “Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

American author and filmmaker Michael Crichton also put it well in his January 17, 2003 lecture presented at California Institute of Technology:

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world… The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

The left took over many of our institutions by effectively applying Saul Alinsky’s rules. It’s about time conservatives read his Rules for Radicals – A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, and then got out and raised Cain at public events. Our children will never forgive us if we do not.

Tom Harris is a Canadian mechanical engineer, executive director of the climate contrarian International Climate Science Coalition and former executive director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project.

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