by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n President Obama came to California. He saw a drought. He announced the cause to be global warming and left. How accurate was the president\u2019s diagnosis of harmful, man-made climate change in stopping rain and snow? First, a bit of a reminder about what the president has called \u201csettled science.\u201d<\/p>\n Until 1982 \u201csettled science\u201d decreed\u00a0that stomach ulcers were a\u00a0result\u00a0of bad diet, too much gastric acid, or undue stress. Then Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren shocked the medical community with an unlikely thesis: The real culprit for peptic ulcers more often was infection by the Gram-negative bacterium\u00a0H. pylori<\/em>, a common but sometimes\u00a0dangerous\u00a0agent in the gut that could be treated with\u00a0antibiotics.\u00a0The practice of gastroenterology was turned upside down.<\/p>\n Settled science insisted that annual mammograms were necessary to reduce the morbidity from\u00a0breast cancer, on the logical hypothesis that only early detection could allow successful treatment of a disease whose contours were so poorly understood. Now, a new comprehensive Canadian study finds that there is no statistical evidence that a breast scan every year is any more efficacious in preventing morbidity than more sporadic testing.<\/p>\n In other words, nothing scientific is ever quite settled. Scientists debate the proper protocols through still more study and investigation in the arena of empirical give-and-take.<\/p>\n In similar fashion, the vast majority of the 19th-century medical community insisted that postoperative infections were due to bad air. Surgeons once prided\u00a0themselves\u00a0on their filthy bloody gowns as proof of their industriousness, convinced that airing out\u00a0hospital miasmas\u00a0would alone stop gangrene and other wound-related diseases. Then the surgeon Joseph Lister proved that Louis Pasteur\u2019s theories of micro-organisms causing disease also applied to wounds \u2014 and that the use of antiseptics amid\u00a0sterile conditions in the operating room and in hospitals generally could vastly curtail postoperative deaths. Soon hospital whites, bleaches, and chronic washing became the new orthodox protocols, and Lister became canonized whereas he had formerly been dismissed as eccentric.<\/p>\n There is a long tradition dating back to Galileo \u2014 and beyond, to Democritus \u2014 of scientific heresy suddenly becoming orthodoxy, as \u201csettled\u201d doctrines cannot stand the light of free discussion, critique, and investigation.<\/p>\n Despite the Western inductive method and freedom of expression, however, human nature remains tribal. Scientists, like everyone else, find comfort in what is familiar, orthodox, and shared by their peers. Often they have invested lives and careers in ensuring that status-quo theories become unquestioned. They can be deeply suspicious of what is not institutionalized, and on occasion wildly intolerant of the nonconventional.<\/p>\n Such homogeneity also becomes wrapped up in religion, government, and culture. Skeptics like Galileo or Lister are often hounded, censored, and ridiculed. Plato so disliked the unorthodox, but prescient, atomic theory of Democritus that he dreamed of having his written work burned.<\/p>\n Just as, in the distant past, the dissident scientist was often dubbed atheistic or subversive, today the skeptic of man-caused global warming is dismissed as fundamentalist, illiberal, or anti-democratic. For many elite critics of Western culture and society, global warming has become central to a larger critique about the frenzied pace of capitalistic production, wealth creation, and consumption. Or rather, global-warming orthodoxy has become a partisan tool to stop things deemed bad, like fracking, horizontal drilling, or the Keystone Pipeline.<\/p>\n Often there is the flavor of elitism, as those with capital, secure jobs, and good salaries are less likely to suffer from the very real consequences of their own ideologies. A tenured climatologist, a Hollywood star, or a government bureaucrat, for example, is certainly not so immediately vulnerable to radical shifts away from a carbon-based economy as are truckers, well drillers, or construction workers. In the case of the now-billionaire Secretary of State John Kerry, who has a propensity for collecting carbon-spewing recreational vehicles and luxury boats, his lecturing poor Indonesians on limiting carbon use seems especially galling.<\/p>\n I do not know whether there is such a thing as deleterious man-made global warming, but I do know that it has become the new orthodoxy to such a degree that its\u00a0adherents are now trying to silence their critics and would make the grand inquisitors of the past proud. Recent examples include a campaign to\u00a0censor\u00a0aWashington Post<\/em>\u00a0column by Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00a0<\/em>protocol of not publishing letters skeptical of global warming, and a lawsuit to discredit the brilliant satirist Mark Steyn, who, as humorists are wont to do, mocked a\u00a0pompous proponent of global warming.<\/p>\n But, as in the heterodox examples of\u00a0H. pylori<\/em>\u00a0and antiseptics, critics of the theory of man-caused global warming point to a number of inconsistencies with the new climate-change orthodoxy. Some question the basic assertion that the planet itself has been recently warming up. They cite the incongruity of record-high carbon emissions over the last 17 years, accompanied by no evidence of increased global temperatures. And they point out that accurate weather record keeping is such a relatively recent phenomenon that there are not enough precise data to monitor long-term trends. Indeed, just four decades ago, the consensus of climatology was fears of a new little Ice Age, not of melting polar ice caps.<\/p>\n Other skeptics accept global warming but are not convinced that it is necessarily man-caused. In theory, it could be attributed to natural phenomena, such as changing solar conditions, that are beyond human agency \u2014 and that are consonant with the cycles of global warming and cooling throughout the planet\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Still other doubters argue that, even if man-made global warming is a fact, the ensuing increases in temperatures appear to be relatively modest, with bad and good consequences balancing out, and in any case are not necessarily as dangerous to the human condition as are the massive remedies proposed by global-warming adherents, which will fall inordinately upon the poor.<\/p>\n All three groups of skeptics also are worried about the changes in nomenclature and in the logic of the debate. Global warming has lost currency to \u201cclimate change\u201d and, on occasion, to \u201cclimate catastrophe\u201d \u2014 the reasoning being that increased carbon emissions not only heat up the planet, but also cause violent changes in the weather. The problem is not that such a hypothesis is necessarily flawed, but that the new vocabulary replaces empiricism with theory: If much of the U.S. is experiencing near-record cold with unusually heavy snow, then carbon emissions are to blame. But if it were experiencing the exact opposite \u2014 near-record heat without any snow at all \u2014 carbon emissions would still be to blame.<\/p>\n The result is that normally variable weather \u2014 occasionally too few or too many storms \u2014 is always seen as permanently aberrant, and becomes a de facto argument for man-induced global warming under the new rubric of climate change. One cannot refute such a circular hypothesis.<\/p>\n Examine again California, which has been facing a near-record drought (I say \u201cnear-record,\u201d because accurate data for our weather are not much more than a century and a half old) that is wreaking havoc with the state\u2019s economy. Despite the president\u2019s diagnosis, there is no scientific evidence that global warming is necessarily the culprit. From what we know of past severe droughts, barriers of high pressure occasionally become entrenched in the Pacific Northwest, deflecting storms to the north and east \u2014 as was true, for example, in 1976\u201377.<\/p>\n Moreover, in recent memory, these are not necessarily decade-long, much less permanent, conditions, but seem to be ephemeral. Atmospheric pressures change, and often quite suddenly. In contrast, there is some scientific evidence from tree rings and stumps that well before the wide-scale use of carbon fuel, a mostly uninhabited California once experienced variable conditions of drought that went on for years.<\/p>\n And suddenly, California is enjoying some rare and much-needed rain. A few storms have broken through the high-pressure ridges and have made their way south into the state\u2019s interior. If such wet weather were to continue, however, would the president then declare the threat of global warming to be over? Or would he return to the state and declare that the rain was also a result of global warming? And if it poured through all of March, would that become further proof of climate change?<\/p>\n There are additional paradoxes. Citing carbon emissions as the sole cause of California\u2019s drought excuses much more scientifically likely factors from culpability and reinforces the idea of the politicization of empirical inquiry. The reason why the 2013\u201314 drought is much more dangerous than its predecessor of 1976\u201377 is threefold and has\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0to do with carbon releases into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n At nearly 40 million people, California now has almost twice the number of residents that it did 38 years ago. Yet, despite the efforts of some Los Angeles\u2013area municipal districts, there has not been a major new dam constructed in the Sierra Nevada in three decades. Double the population, while the amount of winter runoff the state can store remains fixed, is a prescription for disaster.<\/p>\n And it gets worse. Several million acre-feet of stored fresh water have been diverted from municipalities and farms, and released from mountain reservoirs to the sea \u2014 largely on scientifically unproven claims that a three-inch Delta smelt suffers from an inadequate flow of fresh river water (as opposed to too heavy Bay Area releases of treated sewage water) or that in the old days salmon always were able to swim up California\u2019s inland rivers to the Sierras.<\/p>\n In sum, if the president were truly devoted to science, he woud have cited the need for California to increase its storage capacity, factor in its growing population in all questions of water use, and accept that public policy must give food production priority over returning the natural landscape to conditions that obtained when just a few million people inhabited the state. Instead, he abides by faith-based theories, in deductive fashion.<\/p>\n Just as the Church became invested in refuting Galileo for obvious reasons \u2014 a cosmos not revolving around a human-inhabited earth might lessen the majesty of our own creator and, by extension, the Church hierarchy \u2014 so too global warming is caught up in political orthodoxy. And it involves billions of dollars in research moneys, careers in academia and government, and lucrative advocacy of the sort engaged in by Al Gore, who has had an unfortunate tendency first to alarm us about global warming and then to step in to offer his profit-making remedies to avert it.<\/p>\n There is a great deal of irony in these recent debates over science. Barack Obama came into office blasting faith-based thinking and promising to restore the primacy of scientific inquiry. But he and the other supporters of global warming do not welcome vigorous debate, and they cite as proven fact theories that have a disturbing tendency to advance both political agendas and lucrative careers.<\/p>\n In sum, the exalted end of reducing the human imprint on the planet requires any means necessary to achieve it.<\/p>\n NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the\u00a0Hoover Institution<\/a>\u00a0and the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/em>The Savior Generals<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Too hot? Too cold? Regardless, it must be global warming. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online\u00a0 President Obama came to California. He saw a drought. He announced the cause to be global warming and left. How accurate was the president\u2019s diagnosis of harmful, man-made climate change in stopping rain and snow? First, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[603,354],"tags":[12,1014,289,547,291,479,1073],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Q4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7090,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-anti-empirical-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":0},"title":"The Anti-Empirical Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Science is ignored when it doesn't support politically correct policy. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics, and reason is being waged on behalf of politically\u00a0correct politics. After the Sandy Hook tragedy,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/599px-Aristotelesarp-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9299,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-myth-of-progress\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":1},"title":"The Myth Of Progress","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas President Obama is fond of using the phrase \u201cthe arc of the moral universe,\u201d a line derived from Martin Luther King Jr\u2019s longer quote, \u201cThe arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.\u201d King, in fact, lifted the often-used\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Defining Ideas"","block_context":{"text":"Defining Ideas","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/defining-ideas\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7203,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-inquisition\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":2},"title":"The New Inquisition","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Content Agency\u00a0 What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs? Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity? Or, if\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Second Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"Second Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/second-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4113,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/anatomy-of-a-media-bias-nothings-more-closed-than-a-colonized-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":3},"title":"Anatomy of a Media Bias: Nothing’s More Closed Than a Colonized Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com One of the pleasures of reading the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0is spotting the myriad ways liberal ideology shapes stories and presents as fact what is a debatable supposition. Global warming, for example, is a \u201ccrisis\u201d about which the\u00a0Timeshas already made up its mind. Rather than a contested\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5999,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/flat-earth-democrats\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":4},"title":"Flat-Earth Democrats","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The victims of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma had not even been counted when Democrat politicians made fools of themselves by trying to link the disaster to global warming and Republicans. California Senator Barbara Boxer said, \u201cThis is climate change. We were warned\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9235,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-politicization-of-the-english-language\/","url_meta":{"origin":7072,"position":5},"title":"The Politicization of the English Language","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services Last week, French President Francois Hollande met President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels, Paris and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7074,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7072\/revisions\/7074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}