When belief tops science, truth at stake
Asked this week about a government scientific report warning that climate change will have devastating results, President Trump had a curious response: “I don’t believe it,” he said.
Maybe he misheard the question. Nobody had asked the president what he believes. The topic was climate change, which is about reality, not belief.
What a person believes is rather nebulous and, ultimately, personal. For all I know, the president may believe in the tooth fairy — his ability to recognize what’s true seems a bit slippery, don’t you think? — but it becomes truly worrisome if a guy in his position views scientific data as something that can be discarded as easily as a childhood fantasy.
The question facing the president was about the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a thousand-plus page report, almost three years in the making, summarizing the work of more than 300 scientists from more than a dozen federal agencies. It focuses on matters of scidevoutly ence, not opinion or conjecture or mindset, and certainly not belief.
That’s not to denigrate belief. It’s just not what’s at stake here. Belief arises, typically, from our trust in an authority — in the way that a religious belief, for example, can derive from a text we consider sacred. Or belief may come from experience: I believe my mother loved me because she always showed it.
But belief isn’t a word you hear from scientists, and you won’t find it in the National Climate Assessment. In fact, beliefs can be lethal to a scientist’s cleareyed work. That’s because the scientific method requires attempting to disprove what a scientist believes to be true, which is called a theory. In examining a theory, a scientist cares about what data and physical evidence reveal, not what prejudices or presuppositions hang out in the back of the scientist’s mind. This, by the way, is why it’s not true that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. They’re in different realms, as many religious scienyou. tists will tell Without discomfort, you may believe that God created the world and also embrace scientists’ conclusion that life as we know it has been evolving for about 3.5 billion years.
But let’s be very clear: The realm of the climate change study is science, and it reveals terrifying truths about the damage we are doing to our planet. Research laid out in the new report, rigorously peer reviewed, has concluded that climate change now threatens our health, our food supply, our water sources and our economy.
“Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities,” the report says. “Climate-related risks will continue to grow without additional action.”
Take this finding, for example: By the end of this century, sea levels will rise by at least a foot, and perhaps by as much as eight feet. Try to imagine the impact of an eight-foot rise in sea level in the lifetime of an infant born today. Do we just want to leave the disaster for the baby to handle?
The extreme climate-related disasters of recent years — heat waves, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires — will become the norm, the scientists say. Crop yields will drop in the Farm Belt. Chronic, long-duration drought will plague the West. Ocean acidification will kill sea life.
The report’s dire warning includes a price tag: economic losses of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The human toll is even more dire: Thousands of people will die prematurely each year due to extreme temperatures and the increase in food borne and waterborne diseases.
To be clear, the predictions of disaster are the scientists’ estimates, but the current effects of climate change are measurable and observable. The “dominant cause,” the report says, is human activity. “There is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence,” it notes.
Donald Trump has long insisted that climate change isn’t real, even claiming that the idea is a plot hatched by the Chinese government. It’s too easy, though, for critics to see his view as a calculated one, a bid to please those whose financial interests are served by not limiting the carbon emissions that cause so much of the problem.
I’d suggest we may instead consider Trump an exemplar of what psychologists call cognitive immunization, a process in which beliefs become impervious to facts. His mind may actually be neutralizing information that clashes with beliefs he has come to accept.
Yet somehow kids give up believing in the Easter bunny, so maybe there’s even hope for a president who doesn’t believe in science. Just now, though, it’s hard to say which is worse: an unwillingness to recognize facts, or an inability to do so.
Saying you don’t believe what scientists conclude misses the point. The new climate report focuses on science, not opinion or conjecture or mindset, and certainly not belief. It’s not belief that’s at stake here.