April snow warms up letters debate
Ah, spring! It’s a time when Inland Northwest hearts turn to the outdoors, away from computers and writing desks. With legislative sessions concluded and a pause before primary elections return in earnest, letters to the editor aren’t top priority in anybody’s thoughts but my own.
During the recent relative lull in letters received, April snows drove a small drift of global warming letters into the Roundtable. Then, when it rained, letters poured into the inbox and onto the page. Evidently either Spokane County Commissioners Mark Richard and Todd Mielke are forward-thinking visionaries who by purchasing a racetrack have just secured Spokane County’s prosperity and safety for the future, or they have squandered taxpayer dollars into a money sump which pre-empts any thought of paying county employees adequately or properly allocating funding for other county projects.
But I digress. Let’s get back to the global warming letters.
I don’t want to debate the issue itself, though saying that, of course, will provoke responses: “What’s there to debate? The answer is clearly X.” But with a little pseudo-science of my own I want to look at this group of letters in which at least one variable – the topic discussed – has been made constant. That way we can focus on the mechanism of the arguments themselves.
Appeal to authority, though a logical fallacy, is still a common and effective rhetorical strategy – probably the most common one in letters about climate change. To some, the only reputable scientists say climate change is human-caused; according to others, the honest scientific global warming skeptics, like Galileo vs. the pre-Enlightenment Church, have been labeled as heretics, disregarded and silenced.
Either way, if we are going to talk about global warming/climate change, we non-scientists need these scientists to provide the information we use to decide what we think about it. We don’t have the equipment or the know-how to collect the mountains of consistent and reliable data necessary to make a judgment. And we don’t have time to dig through the data to make a responsible interpretation of it.
One writer expressed the opinion that for the S-R “to print obvious unresearched untruths should involve a severe penalty of some kind. … Our planet is at risk. Scientists and all intelligent humans agree on this.” To which another replied that we appeal to authority “because we are inherently lazy, preferring to align ourselves with those who share our political inclinations, especially when they have impressive credentials to imply significant credibility. It’s just easier.”
He’s right. It is easier to rely on those with credentials, perhaps because it is possible while doing otherwise is not. So before we go too far in agreeing with this writer that you should “do your own research” and “figure things out for yourselves,” we must acknowledge that in an advanced civilization with extensive specialization of labor we cannot even function without relying on authorities in the areas in which we are not specialists, let alone decide a question that involves forces and trends far grander than our individual powers or life span.
Most writers recognize the weaknesses in an appeal to authority, at least as it relates to those of the opposite opinion. One pointed out the fallacy of attacking Al Gore’s authority: “Global warming isn’t true because Al Gore says so; it’s true because there is a huge body of science indicating that it is true.” While this statement defuses attacks against Gore’s personal credibility, it does little to answer the charge that agendas besides saving humankind from climate disaster have shaped the conclusions of the “huge body of science.”
Even for the rare specialist who writes to us about this topic, space limitations for letters don’t allow a fair presentation of even a small part of the raw data upon which he or she relies, so appeal to authority (albeit one’s own) must be done. If we eliminate letters which appeal to the “wrong” authorities or question the conclusions of the “right” ones, we introduce a level of editorial interference with which I, for one, would not be comfortable.
President Bush’s detractors are fond of equating him to Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor with no clothes – but the same story could argue in favor of printing letters from skeptics. Without entertaining and answering questions from the layman who sees snow outside his window in April while reading an article on global warming, specialists could easily sink into fruitless debate over details and lose focus on solving the problems they’ve identified. Even my brief experience in a different wing of academic research convinced me that alert diligence was necessary to keep our research relevant and useful to human society as a whole.
But don’t take it from me – or I suppose you could.