Jonah Goldberg, writing about climate change and climate policy (yes, there really is a difference between the two) in National Review, hit the nail on the head when he said, “expertise doesn’t necessarily transfer over from one field to another.”

What he had in mind was the silliness of thinking that climate scientists, because they are (we’ll concede the point for the sake of argument) experts about climate, are therefore also experts about what to do about it (assuming anything should be done).

Goldberg, an always witty and often brilliant writer, lays out the case in a way that even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s top climate scientists should be able to understand:

… a weasel crawls up your tailpipe …. It then gets caught in the doohickey connecting the thing to thing that goes mmmm-chicka. And now your car is busted. The mechanic says it will cost $5,000 to de-weasel your diesel engine.

But you don’t have five grand lying around. So what do you do?

Obviously, you ask the mechanic how to raise $5,000. I mean, he’s an expert on how to fix your car, he must also be an expert on how to pay for it. Right?

Of course not. …

Goldberg goes on to specify the ill consequences of illicitly transferring meteorological and climatological expertise to policy expertise (which typically requires some expertise in such mundane matters as economics and politics, matters well below the pay grade of the climate scientists).

He begins with the IPCC’s (and other climate alarmists, including most politicians and the mainstream media and most of your neighbors) that if we’ve done something that’s causing climate to change, we must undo it:

Some problems cannot be undone simply by reversing the steps that led to the problem in the first place.

If someone stabs you in the chest with a metal spork (very difficult to find, by the way), you don’t necessarily want to pull it out immediately. That could cause you to bleed out. You can’t un-spill milk or un-spork your victim.

And for the third point (every good sermon has three points, after all), he adds, “Just because someone can identify a problem — a weasel in the tailpipe, a spork in the chest, whatever — doesn’t mean they know the best way to fix it.”

But Goldberg isn’t finished. He adds a fourth point: “Some enormous problems have no immediate solution, which means that committing massive amounts of energy and resources to fixing them now is a waste.” (He follows that up with a delightfully fun, and funny, illustration, but if I added that quote here I’d be bordering on copyright violation, because I’m about to quote him at even more length.)

With those four points as introduction, Goldberg then takes on a few of the common assumptions in the first-grade cafeteria food fights that some people mistake for debates about climate change and climate policy.

First, is all the conflict of interest on the side of those nasty fossil fuel companies, those “merchants of doubt” who pretend to embrace skepticism (which really is the hallmark of science) only to protect their profits—a view held by his erstwhile friend the ex-conservative Max Boot, a convert to climate alarmism? No, says Goldberg:

… while Boot’s depiction of Big Oil might be music to the ears of the green Left that still thinks the world looks like a Thomas Nast cartoon — with titans of industry portrayed as pigs at a trough or fat cats in fancy suits — that’s not the reality. Max wants a carbon tax. That’s an intellectually defensible position. But you know who else favors a carbon tax? ExxonMobil. You know what else ExxonMobil does? They spend huge amounts of money on low-carbon R&D. They just closed on the biggest wind and solar deal in the industry.

He later expands on the point this way: “There is a profound irony at work when people such as Boot insist that his opponents are driven by self-interest when they disagree with him. Is it inconceivable that, say, Al Gore — who has made hundreds of millions as a climate-change Jeremiah — has a vested interest in climate change?”

Next he confronts the common assumption, now embraced by Boot, that all scientists agree that human action is causing global warming that could well become catastrophic unless we spend trillions of dollars trying to avert it.

There are scads of people who are vastly more well-versed in the science than either of us who reach an array of different conclusions other than those of the chicken-little caucus. That doesn’t mean they’re all right — they can’t all be right because they have meaningfully different points of view — but it also doesn’t mean they’re all luddite ideologues. Roger Pielke, John Horgan, Judith Curry, Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, Ronald Bailey, Steve Hayward, and many others are serious people, many of whom concede the reality that man is changing the environment and climate in undesirable ways, but they get demonized by the climate-change industrial complex for poking holes in, or dissenting from, the groupthink.

Goldberg could have added to his list—with the caveat that they don’t embrace, or at least significantly reduce, the prediction of “undesirable” consequences of manmade climate change—some of the climate scientists associated with the Cornwall Alliance along with Hayward (an advisory board member and adjunct scholar), like Roy Spencer, David Legates, Neil Frank, Charles Clough, G. Cornelis van Kooten, Anthony Lupo, James Wanliss, Anthony Sadar, and William Balgord, as well as plenty of other climate scientists (one wonders why he left one of the most accomplished, Richard Lindzen, off his list). And of course he could have listed some of America’s premier climate scientists of the last half century or more, like S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Will Happer, and Freeman Dyson. But one gets the impression that Goldberg—normally boldly courageous in his opposition to political correctness—wants to preserve some semblance of respectability in the eyes of the climate establishment. That’s very uncharacteristic.

He follows this with an insightful paragraph (only partially quoted here) explaining his own view:

My own view of the climate change issue is that it is real. I do not think it is a hoax, though I do think there are plenty of people, institutions, and interests that use the tactics of hoaxers to hype the problem. I assume that the vast majority of them are what you might call “hoaxers in good faith”: They think the problem is grave enough that it is worth exaggerating the claims, hyping the threat, and hiding contrary evidence in an effort to rally public opinion. Others suffer from confirmation bias, immediately believing the worst-case scenarios from wildly complex — and historically unreliable — computer models without checking the math.

(And then he gives some examples of major, serious, incontrovertible errors by the climate-science experts.)

His next point is one that skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (like us) should really take to heart and implement consciously in our messaging:

There are really two kinds of skepticism at work here. The first is the skepticism about the science itself, the other is skepticism towards the vast array of interests that benefit from climate hysteria, psychologically, politically, or economically. Both forms of skepticism are utterly defensible. But they shouldn’t be lumped together.

Science is skepticism. Science is questioning, testing, replicating, and re-verifying. Yes, there are some things that are “settled science” — the decay time of some isotope, the existence of gravity, the superiority of New York pizza — but what science is primarily about is unsettling settled science. All — all — of the great scientists in human history were, to one extent or another, great because they shattered or transformed the scientific consensus of their time.

The second skepticism isn’t about science, but about scientism — the effort to use the language, techniques, constructs, and imagined mindset of science to do things science cannot do. “Scientism,” writes the philosopher Edward Feser, “is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge — that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science.” I would go slightly farther and say that scientism is a form of religious thinking that thinks it is unreligious because it rejects traditional notions of religion. Back when engineering was considered the cure-all to our problems, “social engineers” (once a positive term) argued that they should be empowered to guide human affairs because science was the only legitimate source of truth.

In this way, scientism is a kind of priestcraft — a term coined by the writer James Harington to describe the way clergy would use their divine authority (back when everyone saw God as the ultimate source of truth) to serve their own interests. Or as Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, “Back off man, I’m a scientist.” Neil deGrasse Tyson is a leading practitioner of this secular priestcraft, arguing that we should pick up where the Jacobins left off and organize society around the rule of scientific reason as determined by people, well, like him.

Points that follow are all well worth reading (though we dissent from his embrace of a carbon tax), but I’ll skip to his conclusion, which has been one of our main points for years:

… climate change is crowding out concern for, and resources from, all sorts of other problems that have far more immediate effects. I worry far more about eroding biodiversity, over-fishing, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, and the like than I do about climate change. Climate change contributes to some of these problems, particularly ocean acidification, but these are far more fixable right now. Elephants aren’t being wiped out by climate change. And a Green New Deal won’t save them.

Right. And our concern is more for the world’s poor, whose greatest challenges are gaining access to pure drinking water, sewage sanitation, residential and workplace electrification, infectious disease control, medical care, and other mundane matters that we in the industrialized world have taken for granted for over half a century. The $70 to $140 TRILLION it would take to implement the Paris climate agreement between 2030 and 2100 won’t be available to address those problems. But they are of far greater consequence for humanity—especially the poor—than anything related to climate.