Dr. Scott Rodin, chairman of the board of the Evangelical Environmental Network and a blogger at The Steward’s Journey, posted a piece May 19, 2015, titled, “As a Conservative, Evangelical Republican, Why Climate Change Can’t be True (Even Though It Is).” It has some very interesting reasoning and deserves careful consideration. In this and several future blog posts, I’m going to interact with it.

He began, “Imagine a mathematician basing his or her entire life’s work on the premise that 1+1 = 3. Absurd, right? Yet a few years ago I came to the conclusion that I had done exactly that when it came to my views on climate change.”

This introduction is an interesting version of the informal logical fallacy and rhetorical trick of “poisoning the well.” It pre-conditions the reader to assume that, yes, whatever it is Rodin’s about to tell him he used to think, and others with whom he now disagrees still think, is just as absurd.

But it’s not an argument, it’s a psychological/rhetorical trick. It preconditions the reader to think that anyone who questions what Rodin has come to think about climate change is as stupid and ignorant as someone who thinks 1+1=3. But it doesn’t actually give any reason to judge so.

Will the reasons follow? Let’s work our way through a bit more of his post.

Three paragraphs down he wrote:

What is the conclusion that I drew from the combination of my passion for stewardship plus a basic trust in science? I was an adamant climate change denier. Yup, 1+1 = 3. Global warming was a hoax. Environmentalism was a word you said with a sneer on your lips. I cared for God’s creation and held science in the highest regard, all while sitting at home watching Whale Wars and rooting for the Japanese whaling ships (seriously). For some unknown reason I lived comfortably with this irreconcilable internal contradiction.

I’ll interact specifically with that in a moment, but first compare it with his second paragraph:

I had spent nearly ten years of my life writing, speaking and teaching on biblical stewardship. As an evangelical theologian, I was (and am) passionate about helping Christians understand the full meaning of what it means to be a faithful steward in every area of their life. That included care for God’s creation.

What’s interesting about juxtaposing those paragraphs is that the two really aren’t mutually consistent. Obviously he didn’t say environmentalism with a sneer on his lips. It seems to me he’s setting up a straw man here—another logical fallacy, and in this instance another psychological trick. It’s meant to precondition (intentional word choice there—see what he says about conditioning farther along, which I’ll discuss in an ensuing post) the reader to embrace what he’s going to say—but again, it gives no reason to do so.

Now let’s go back and think through the first of those two quoted paragraphs (actually the fourth in his post).

Its first two sentences are really quite strange: “What is the conclusion that I drew from the combination of my passion for stewardship plus a basic trust in science? I was an adamant climate change denier.” He offers us no inferential path by which he derived his climate change denial (whatever that means—did he really deny that climate changes?) from his trust in science, his assumption that consensus was to be trusted, etc. He just asserts it.

The next sentence, “Yup, 1+1 = 3,” is a repeat of his earlier rhetorical trick. He’s still offered no evidence that those who disagree with him are as silly as to think this, but that’s what he’s preconditioning his readers to think.

The next, “Global warming was a hoax,” is worth a little pondering.

If this is supposed to describe the view of the vast majority, or even a plurality, or even a small but significant minority of those who deny catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), it’s a straw man. Saying something’s a hoax entails that those who promote it know it’s false but promote it anyway. I personally know scores and have read many more CAGW skeptics—climate scientists, other scientists, environmental and developmental and energy economists, philosophers, and others—and I can’t think of any who think that’s true of any but perhaps a very small handful of CAGW true believers, and they would think this only of people like (non-scientist) Al Gore, or perhaps Michael Mann (whose failures in the famed “hockey stick” controversy are so egregious as to raise serious questions about honesty), not of most of the scientists involved in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But, you see, this again preconditions the reader to think a certain way, not because he’s been persuaded of it by facts and logical inferences but because he’s been psychologically tricked.

The last two sentences of that paragraph are genuinely interesting psychobiography: “I cared for God’s creation and held science in the highest regard, all while sitting at home watching Whale Wars and rooting for the Japanese whaling ships (seriously). For some unknown reason I lived comfortably with this irreconcilable internal contradiction.” What Rodin admits here is that his past attitude was highly irrational and even morally blameworthy. And if indeed this self-description is accurate, then I agree.

But this raises an interesting question: Is his conversion to belief in CAGW a result of rational conviction based on careful analysis of lots of good data and logical analysis of the inferences others make from it? Or is it perhaps instead largely psychological, driven by guilt over his own past irresponsibility?

Precisely that is what I detected when I heard Jonathan Merritt, author of the ill-titled “Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative” (which didn’t speak for Southern Baptists, though the title implied it did, and mainstream media gleefully portrayed it as such) give his testimony at the first conference hosted by Flourish back around 2008 or so in Atlanta. He confessed that as a Liberty University student he used to flaunt his anti-environmentalism by driving down the road tossing his fast-food trash out the window. He never gave sound reasons for his conversion in that testimony, but subjective guilt over his past irresponsible behavior is a very likely explanation. Perhaps that’s the real explanation of Rodin’s conversion—not logical inference from true propositions, but guilt-driven reparation for his past sins.

Now let’s back up to his third paragraph, and I’ll wrap up this blog entry with some comments on it:

… I’m a product of the 60’s when we believed that science was trustworthy on most things. I have no reason to doubt conclusions that come from a broad consensus of scientists. I am no conspiracy theorist, and I have a basic trust in the veracity of scientific data, especially when it is confirmed on a broad scale.

First, this is another instance—indeed, a double instance—of poisoning the well. On the one hand, the reader has now been preconditioned to think anyone who disagrees with what Rodin is going to identify as the consensus is a conspiracy theorist. But one needn’t attribute belief in CAGW to conspiracy in order to disagree with it. One may do so, as is the case with every skeptic I know, because he’s convinced the observational data refute it. On the other hand, the reader has been preconditioned to think anybody who disagrees with Rodin distrusts “scientific data.” But all the skeptics I know reject CAGW precisely because they trust data more than models.

Second, the closing clause, “especially when it is confirmed on a broad scale,” is an exercise in petitio principii (begging the question): assuming the point he needs to prove. Do the scientific data (none of which he has offered so far—and none of which does he go on to offer in the remainder of the post) really confirm the view he attributes to “consensus”?

No. Not the data. The computer models on which the IPCC relies, maybe, yes, but not the data. And in real science, data trumps models. Indeed, in real science, models don’t confirm anything. Their output is not data but hypothesis, and as such it is to be confirmed or negated by data.

So, how do the models do when compared with the data? Here are a few depictions:

The IPCC projects (yellow band for the range) a mean warming rate of 2.78 degrees C per century (bold red line, mean of the models); real-world observations (erratic bold blue line) yield 1.37 degrees C per century (bold blue line, mean of the observations), just one-half as much.

Model simulations (gray bars) project much more warming over the periods 1993–2012 (left graph) and 1998–2012 (right graph) than real-world observations (red striped bar).

Paradoxically, IPCC’s asserted confidence that human activity is the primary driver of global warming rises while the divergence between model simulations and real-world observations grows. It should do the opposite.

None of the models simulated this, but it’s true nonetheless: there’s been no global warming for the last 18 years and 5 months.

Models—95% of them—simulate far more warming than observed since 1983. Their errors are getting bigger all the time. And the errors are almost 100% in the same direction, namely, high. That suggests the reason isn’t random error but bias.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in The Character of Physical Law (1965):

In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

In light of that, what do the graphs above indicate? That the models are wrong.

They therefore provide no rational basis for predicting future temperatures, and no rational basis for any climate policy.

So Rodin is mistaken. The scientific data don’t support his conversion from “climate change denial” to climate change alarmism.

Watch this space for further analysis of Rodin’s fascinating post.