I have been reading a very
interesting article tonight, in the Atlantic: The
Nastiest Feud in Science. It is a
feud that I have been interested in for decades. The issue concerns what killed off the
dinosaurs, and it has divided scientists concerned with this question into two
hostile factions.
The majority faction holds that
the dinosaurs went extinct due to a sudden event: an asteroid, “larger than
Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion
atomic bombs.” This is the “bad weekend”
thesis. By Monday, the dinosaurs were
history.
The minority faction holds that
the major extinction event that included the dinosaurs but also almost all the
rest of the creatures on earth was a much more gradual process. The culprit here was a series of eruptions in
East Central India, the Deccan Traps, that went on for 350,000 years.
Both sides have strong evidence
to bring to the table. Deposits of
iridium are found all over the world that seem to have been deposited at the
same time as the mass extinction and that must have come from the asteroid collision. On the other hand, “at the same time” is
ambiguous in geological terms. The big
boom may have come 200,000 years before the mass extinction. That’s a long weekend.
What is clear is that the two
sides do not merely disagree. They
despise one another and have long been at war with one another. They accuse each other of any number of scientific
sins in the most bitter of terms. The
asteroidsheviks have gone to great lengths to torpedo the careers of any
scholar who dares challenge their thesis.
I am a student of Plato and so I
know very well that philosophical and scientific quarrels almost always become
political quarrels. Socrates relentlessly
embarrassed the sophists and orators of ancient Athens and they responded by
using the machinery of the Athenian court to kill him. This conflict became political in a more
direct sense because Socrates’ enemies included politically powerful men. See The
Enemies of Socrates.
The quarrel between the
worshipers of asteroid and those of the volcanoes is much the same. A key to the larger political question
implicated by this quarrel about ancient geological history lies in this
passage in Bianca Bosker’s Atlantic piece.
Understanding the cause of the mass extinction is not an
esoteric academic endeavor. Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic
megafauna”: sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes pretty much
anyone with a pulse. The nature of their downfall, after 135 million years of
good living, might offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay, our
own end.
When someone who is not an idiot writes
a passage like that, you can be sure that there is something else going
on. Let’s consider: if the one side is
right, all we have to do is figure out how to shoot down asteroids. If the other side is right, all we have to do
is figure out how to plug volcanoes.
Allow me to humbly suggest that neither can “offer clues for how we can
prevent, or at least delay, our own end.”
I suspect, though, that the tide
may soon turn in favor of the volcano side.
Greenhouse gasses produced by human industry look a lot more like
volcanoes than like asteroids. Of
course, this is only a metaphor. Comparing
the human activity over the last century to a range of volcanoes pumping out
clouds of gases for hundreds of thousands of years is like comparing a Florida
sink hole to the Grand Canyon. The
volcano thesis tells us nothing useful about the climate change question. In politics, however, that is not what
matters. What matters is the emotional
impact.
I am a climate lukewarmer. I don’t doubt that the world warmed
significantly over the last century and I think the evidence supports the claim
that human activity had something to do with this. I am not at all certain that this bodes ill
for human beings and most other creatures.
I am certain that we are not going to do anything significant in the
short run to control global emissions. I
am very certain that the dinosaurs aren’t going to teach us what to do.
The Bosker piece is, I suspect,
largely intended to support the alarmist agenda on climate change. Read reasonably, it does the opposite. The same politics that infects the dinosaur
controversy infects the climate change controversies. Anyone who doubts the alarmist agenda is
vilified. Bosker’s piece suggests that
we should be suspicious of everyone on both sides of such questions.
Science is the best guide we have
to the nature of the world. Scientists,
however, are just as human as anyone else.
Man, as Aristotle boldly claimed, is the
political animal.
