Science of Blame

Previously I said:

"Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community."

It strikes that it is worth commenting on the debate around the sources of global warming. When we ask "How is this happening," what is it that we want to know? We are, one assumes, asking what the efficient cause of global warming is. The answer: increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. So we ask what the efficient causes of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations might be. Part of the answer: fossil fuel emissions. The chain of causes continues: vehicles, power plants, American industry, growing economy, etc.

The point, in short, is that the science of global warming can only tell us the efficient causes in a mechanistic chain of events. And in fact relatively quickly we reach an echelon at which science is on shaky ground for talking about efficient causes. For example, what chain of causality made man such a magnificent fossil fuel burner? And don't think that relating the story from the history books amounts to establishing causation!

That is, given that technology is what it is, science can tell us which are the offending technical agents. It cannot tell us, for example, who is to blame or when we went wrong. It cannot even tell us that global warming is a bad thing! Such questions require sound judgment. But surely a scientist, so well trained in logic and so well apprised of the facts, should be able to exercise sound judgment in the matter. Why? Thinking deductively, or at best thinking clearly, does not amount to prudence.

As I see it, we have equipped scientists to answer such questions only in technological terms. The offending agent in global warming is a piece of technology (or set of technologies), according to science, and the solution is then (straightforwardly) to design alternative technologies that are not climatically offensive.

Brilliant!

This seems to be precisely where we've arrived, culturally. The energy debates are debates about how to transition the economy to a fuel that will neither severely hamper the U.S. economy nor promise significant climatic alteration (which again, creates economic uncertainty). We applaud ourselves because we are behaving honorably, deploying the greatest epistemological apparatus (i.e., modern science) in the history of mankind onto the knotty problem of saving the planet. Bravo! Bravo!

The unacknowledged assumption is that moral questions are technological questions. The "blame" for global warming goes to those silly fossil fuel technologies (and perhaps to anyone who willfully subverts the transition to alternative fuel). Scientifically we simply can't sort out another recipient of blame, and culturally we are ill equipped. Other examples of the moral-technological link are not hard to find, I think, perhaps the most conspicuous being obesity drugs. Consider it an exercise to find examples of where we have produced solutions to questions of morality through technological contrivance.

This is to say that culturally we may be losing the ability to criticize ourselves on any plain that does not admit of description via efficient causes or technological manipulation. Science cannot tell us not to live the way we do; it can only offer us a choice of technologies for doing so. And we seem to be happy with that.

To sum up this post, our approach to global warming has not been to ask if our way of life needs revision, but whether our technologies need revision. It's a conservative question, one that hopes to preserve the status quo, and projects a confidence that the path that led us to technologies that offend the climate is not inherently a bad path, just one with a hiccup.

That is tremendous optimism.