He has also detailed, from the inside of the academy, the interlocking structures of teaching appointments and research funding that have turned climate change into an industry with a vested interest in its own preservation. This didn’t win him any popularity contests on campus. Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric research scientist at the University of Washington, told the New York Times Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science. I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”8
Projection or just an academic pissing contest? I’ll see your University of Washington and raise you an MIT. It’s easy to understand scientists being passionate about their viewpoints—although, interestingly, many of the most esteemed are more measured. It’s their field of endeavor and a few, anyway, have a sense of decorum. But the ferocity of opinion on the part of the rest of us often borders on the comical. At the first Democratic Party debate for the 2016 election, candidate Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and self-acknowledged democratic socialist, in an answer to a question on what was the greatest foreign policy threat to the United States, declared emphatically that it was “climate change.” He received a rousing ovation from the audience that seemed to agree. This was in October 2015, when the Middle East was in flames and a revived Russia was making inroads into Syria and Eastern Europe. Sanders, however, was worried about “climate change.” He didn’t specify whether, in this case, he meant global warming or cooling. Only a few months before (June 2015) the British MET office had warned of a new “ice age” with temperatures possibly the lowest they have been since the seventeenth century,9 though I’m almost certain that would have been news to Sanders. Not surprisingly, the Vermont senator had almost no background in science, unless you count a BA from the University of Chicago in political science and a few months on an Israeli kibbutz in the late sixties. (Perhaps he learned something about agriculture.) Sanders has spent virtually his entire work life in politics.
Sometimes, however, although rarely, opposing viewpoints do seep through to politicians. At one point, John Kerry acknowledged that a handful of people of intelligence might have their reasons for being skeptical about the apocalyptic danger of anthropogenic global warming, but said that the risk of not addressing warming was greater than that of ignoring it—and therefore money should be spent. Of course, the secretary of state was referring to gigantic quantities of money in an already highly stressed global financial system. But even this ambivalent acknowledgement of his adversaries proved to be temporary because Kerry, like Sanders, has since asserted the primacy of climate change as our most important national security concern.
Similarly, and more significantly, Barack Obama cemented his position as Moral Narcissist in Chief by arguing vehemently for climate change as our number one security threat during his State of the Union address in January 2015—this only days after the mass Islamic terror murders in Paris that shook the Western world and brought four million people into the streets in France. “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Obama, receiving one of his few standing ovations of the evening. He continued:
I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what—I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.
Again not surprisingly, Obama also repeated the claim that 2014 was the hottest year on record, although just the day before, that claim had been walked back by one of its key claimants—Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies—who admitted there was a margin of error in NASA’s data, making the likelihood of 2014 being the “warmest year” a far less onerous 38 percent. Moreover, records begin only in 1880, before which year there were many warm periods, some of great length, with temperatures radically in excess of the present day (and during a time there were many fewer carbon polluting humans on the planet, if any). And then there is the question of how temperatures were measured outside the modern era, when most measuring devices were in grassy fields, not on hot tarmacs as they were later.
But never mind. I am breaking my pledge and beginning to argue the science. What was important about Obama’s SOTU was that vehement standing ovation he received even from many Republicans. The warmth (excuse the expression) of this response was a manifestation of moral narcissism, not of science, just as were the pronouncements of the president himself. But wait, as they say in late-night television commercials, there’s more. And, as in those commercials, the devil is in the details of that hidden more, the unseen payments for postage and handling that often double the cost. In this case, as it is frequently, it is the use of moral narcissism as a motivator for distraction. Obama and also Kerry—not to mention the majority of progressives—seek to use climate change to keep the discussion away from other more important and, to them, uncomfortable subjects, most specifically the danger of radical Islam. Naming radical Islam or Islamism is against their—again, morally narcissistic—entrenched beliefs in political correctness and cultural relativism. (Although the cultural relativism is occasionally tempered for the public with a suddenly remembered obeisance to American Exceptionalism . . . of a carefully diminished sort.) So by invoking a general feeling that we all want to save the world above all things—that climate change is truly the greatest of all dangers—the true danger before our eyes, the danger actually killing people in the immediate sense, diminishes in comparison. Questions about Islam are not asked and don’t have to be answered. The war is not a war but just isolated crimes committed by random misunderstood extremists from impoverished backgrounds, themselves the unfortunate victims of Western imperialism. A thirteen-hundred-year-old ideology adhered to in various manners by an estimated 1.7 billion people has nothing to do with it.
Moral narcissism changes the subject. It elicits simple answers that the self-regarding want to hear and keeps them from asking, or even of thinking of, questions they should really be asking. That is its method, structurally and emotionally. And that self-regard is something to be manipulated and used by those who understand how to do it, and many do at this point, repeating the same pattern over and over. Enough about me. How do you feel about me? And by the way, if you’re unsure of your opinion of me, if you’re ambivalent in the slightest, I am absolutely certain the world is warming and it is our fault, humanity’s fault, like everything else is, and we better do something about it or we’re all going to die in a tidal wave brought on by the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, not to mention the Himalayan glaciers. And don’t give me any evidence to the contrary, because that means you’re a Republican or maybe a fascist. You agree? Good. Now I can friend you on Facebook.
Well, not quite. Not yet. The dang weather keeps getting in the way, giving the idiots in the public, even some on Facebook, pause. As I was working on this chapter in January of 2015, an almost comic example of this discontinuity occurred. New York City was predicted to have a record-breaking blizzard of the sort never seen in modern times. The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio—the kind of moral narcissist who never found a left-wing cause he didn’t believe in and saw fit to have his honeymoon on Cuba (more of him in the subsequent chapter)—urged citizens of his metropolis to batten down the hatches; the equivalent of the Battle of Britain was coming. Roads and the public transportation system were closed as never before in history. Everyone was urged to stay indoors for who knew how long, and to look in on their sick and aged neighbors who would undoubtedly be on death’s door. A panicked citizenry cleaned out grocery stores. Well, it turned out to be a routine snowstorm of the type that happens every year or two, sometimes more often. Gary Szatowski, meteorologist for the National Weather Service, tweeted out in embarrassment: “My deepest apologies to many key decision makers and so many of the general public.”10 He promised to examine their computer models. Never dealt with was why we are supposed to believe in climate change, which is also based on computer models, when the weather