Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s recently-confirmed Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” the following: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” [NYT, 3/9/17]
At least he doesn’t deny the existence of global warming. That’s a start.
What about this “tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” of human activity, namely, the release of heat-trapping pollutants into the atmosphere that has been on the increase since the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America and accelerating with the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin and, since 1945, of China and India? As the Times report noted, “The basic science showing that carbon dioxide traps heat at the Earth’s surface dates to the 19th century, and has been confirmed in many thousands of experiments and observations since.”
What is this “tremendous disagreement”? Well, it’s not among climate scientists, whose job it is to acquire knowledge of the reality of Nature and who reached consensus on this question decades ago. So then it’s among members of the political class, those people whose job is to deliberate on public matters and to propose appropriate action to secure the common welfare. Of course members of the political class are likely to disagree on what is in the best interests of the people who elected them, and even if there is general agreement on ends, the means are debatable. Eventually, through the political process of debate and compromise, general agreement is achieved and a plan of action is undertaken through the legislative branch and implemented by the executive branch. That is how the democratic system works.
But now we are faced with an executive branch that has decided that it’s not only in the business of action but also in the business of knowledge. Mr. Pruitt’s reference to a “tremendous disagreement” implies that the broad consensus of climate scientists is simply one source of opinion, and that other sources of opinion are equally valid. His position, then, amounts to a rejection of the very notion of authority.
I suspect that, if pressed, Mr. Pruitt would qualify his claim that human activity is not “a primary contributor to the global warming that we see” by his reference to “measuring with precision.” There is no scientific consensus concerning the precise degree to which human activity has contributed to global warming, but merely that human activity is not only “a primary contributor” but the primary contributor to the acceleration of a natural process that has occurred cyclically over the eons. So Mr. Pruitt’s mitigating term “precision” is a weasel word that clouds the fundamental question.
An apologist for Mr. Pruitt’s position on global warming is the CNN pundit Jeffrey Lord, who boasts that he was an early supporter of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. When questioned by Bill Maher on his TV show “Real Time” (3/3/17), Lord claimed that the word “consensus” in the phrase “the consensus of climate scientists” (long identified as 97%) is not a “scientific” term but a “political” term. Here is a confusion not only lexicological but of the difference between scientific opinion and political opinion. First, “consensus” refers to general agreement or a “harmony” of opinion. It is not necessarily the opinion of a majority (which could mean a mere 51%), but rather, as the Quakers say, “the sense of the meeting.” Slight disagreements there may be, but a consensus agreement means that all, or nearly all, of a particular group agree in the essentials of a question. “Precision” is another matter. A simple example is the consensus agreement among all American citizens concerning “the rule of law” as opposed to autocratic rule. The extent or limits of executive power may be debated, but no one questions that all political power is constrained by law.
In matters of knowledge, then, the scientific community is authoritative. Scientists acquire this authority by long training and approval by a body of peers, whose institutional authority is firmly rooted in long tradition. In matters of political action, members of the political community acquire their authority through the election process established by law and instituted over generations of practice. The authority of science in matters of knowledge and the authority of politicians and their appointees in matters of deliberation and action in the service of the public maintain their validity only if their separate realms are distinguished from one another.
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