9. THINKING FOR YOURSELF
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
- Adrienne Rich
With no sense of irony considering I just told you that climate change is happening, a cautionary tale about people who will do your thinking for you.
In my first year at military college, barely out of the Recruit Orientation Program which had indoctrinated me into the armed forces, one of my fellow cadets broke curfew and snuck into town. After a night in the bars, he stumbled back to barracks, pausing to piss on the Memorial Arch that stood guard over the old entrance to the college grounds.
Now, for six weeks, the importance of the Memorial Arch had been impressed upon all of us new recruits. Built in 1924 to commemorate Royal Military College graduates who’d died in service to their country, cadets saluted the memorial every time they walked past and would only ever walk beneath the arch twice; the first on entering the college, the last on graduation. We’d even memorized the inscriptions and been forced to recite them on order.
Blow out you bugles over the rich Dead,
There’s none of these so lowly or poor of old,
But dying has made us rarer gifts than gold.
Word got around about what this cadet had done. Shortly after, during lunch one day in the mess, I sat beside several other first-year cadets talking about how our drunk classmate had dishonored the college and needed to be taught a lesson. What they said made sense. After all, it’d been drilled into us over the preceding weeks that the Memorial Arch was the most sacred structure on college grounds. Were we not disloyal ourselves somehow if we did nothing?
But what was I agreeing with? That we needed to take disciplining another student into our own hands? I mean, I wish I could say I’d had the presence of mind to think things through, but in the moment, conditioned from Basic Training and Recruit Orientation to follow what people told me, I found myself nodding up and down while not even being fully sure what we were talking about. Thankfully, before the conversation got beyond an unfocused ‘we should do something!’ a third-year cadet who’d been listening told us we were idiots and to shut the conversation down.
I still look back at that experience as a lesson in how easy it is to blindly follow what others say. To accept, without question, suspect arguments, which is unfortunate because there is legitimate room to question climate change findings and predictions. For example, scientists don’t have the same data for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in 1850 as they do for 2021 since the technology to measure this indicator didn’t exist back then. In theory then, there could be a gap. In practice, however, scientists find ways to work around these gaps, in this case by analyzing measurements from ice core samples1.
Still, there remains room for people to be skeptics and this is where scientific hedges come in, because they create legitimate openings which in practice are good science. The scientific method is based on skepticism, after all.
At the same time, people’s reasoning, or their skepticism, isn’t always based on the facts, and instead is sometimes influenced by cognitive and perceptual biases, or other motivations that affect their reasoning, such as their sense of identity. One such bias is the fundamental attribution error, which happens when we misunderstand relationships of cause and effect in human behavior by giving too much weight to internal factors, like the person, and too little weight to external factors, like the situation.
It works like this:
One day, my infantry company went to the desert outside Kandahar Airfield to train with short-range anti-armor weapons. We were firing ‘bazookas’ in other words, blowing stuff up, which can be a hell of a lot of fun. Problem was, all our teams kept missing the targets, their High Explosive rounds dropping short. When we got back to camp, the grizzled, old Sergeant-Major chalked all those misses up to the sad-and-sorry state of our soldiers. That type of weak shooting was obviously never something to worry about back when the Sergeant-Major had been about a thousand years younger, yet still somehow older than me.
“What if…” I remember asking, “the high elevation and hot temperatures means the air is less dense than we’re used to? That would reduce lift for the rounds, which would mean the troops would have to aim high to compensate.”
I might as well have spoken in Atropian. The Sergeant-Major grunted and then went up one side of me and down the other on the abject state of gunnery in our company. When I began explaining he was making a fundamental attribution error, giving too much weight to the person, our soldiers, and not enough weight to the situation, the thin air, his face went red and smoke came out of his ears and so I walked away.
When applied to climate change and whether humans are responsible, it is definitely a possibility that as some skeptics say, climate change is a natural phenomenon and not caused by humans. The earth’s climate has indeed changed in the past, driven by such forces as solar cycles and volcanic activity2. So, the idea that these factors are once again changing global temperature and climate is at least plausible. Because of that, proving humans are responsible for climate change means considering – and discounting – both this explanation, as well as others. In this specific case, for instance, energy from the sun has been decreasing since the 1970s, which should correspond to a global cooling trend, whereas geologic sources like volcanoes only account for around 1% of annual carbon dioxide emissions compared to human activities3.
More broadly, when considering the role of humans in climate change, it helps to consider the opposite of the fundamental attribution error, which is what’s called an error of self-attribution. This mistake is when we explain our own behavior by giving too much weight to the situation, and not enough to ourselves. On a species level, that’s what’s happening when people argue that humans are not responsible for climate change, because there really isn’t any scientific doubt that humans have caused widespread warming and changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and cryosphere4.
There’s a really simple logic flow to make the case that humans are responsible for climate change. First, levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide – what are called greenhouses gases – are currently at higher levels in the atmosphere than at any time in at least the last 800,000 years5. Although solar cycles and volcanic activity are taking place, the biggest cause of global temperature change are these greenhouse gases6.
At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions are at the highest levels ever. The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions is humans, and the biggest increases in emissions have occurred over the last 40 years7, in line with human economic and population growth. Therefore, human activity is either a major driver of climate change, or it’s one of the biggest coincidences in scientific history, which again is the conclusion nearly the entire scientific community accepts in the statement that, “observed warming is driven by emissions from human activities8.”
Despite that, there are people who still disagree that climate change is happening, or that humans are at least partly responsible, and they’ll say that their skepticism is a good thing, which again, scientifically speaking, it is. The reason, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explains, is that facts can actually backfire when a person’s motivated reasoning causes them to interpret those facts as attacks on their person9. In fact, when combined with information overload and the use of argumentative tactics such as fear, guilt and shaming, it’s no wonder there are skeptics, lots of them.
In some cases, skepticism leads people to think that the science has been completely doctored. These skeptics claim scientists have faked the whole thing so they can get more research money10, or, they suggest it’s an engineered hoax used by governing elites to take more control over peoples’ lives11. Either way, this argument tells us that we shouldn’t be too quick to accept climate change is real just because a bunch of scientists say so, unequivocally or not.
But as a hypothesis in and of itself, does the ‘climate change conspiracy’ theory make any sense? After all, as far as hypotheses go, conspiracy theories have a better than zero chance of being true12 because while they often sound farfetched, they do sometimes happen.
Maybe. Maybe not. It does remind me of a story, however.
In 2006, I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan on the eve of Operation MEDUSA, a major NATO combat mission into the Taliban stronghold of Panjwaii. This wasn’t some hit-and-run battle with a few poorly equipped insurgents in sandals, it was a full-fledged offensive against hardened Taliban defensive positions, complete with days’ worth of artillery bombardment to soften up the enemy. Operational security was intense and soldiers were forbidden to talk about plans in communal spaces, particularly on Kandahar Airfield, where hundreds of local Afghans were employed. Still, that didn’t stop an infantry private I’d never met from telling me most of what he seemed to know about the attack a few nights before it was supposed to begin while we sat at the same table in the mess. I wasn’t even in uniform, I was unshaven and wearing civilian clothes and could easily have been a contractor with no security clearance, and certainly no ‘need-to-know.’
So, color me skeptical about conspiracy theories, but from my own experience, any plan that involves more than a handful of people is going to get leaked because it’s just too difficult for everyone to keep their damn mouths shut. In fact, many actual conspiracies fail because doing all the work needed to pull them off invariably means people outside the group find out13. So, while it’s theoretically conceivable a tiny cabal of people could carry out a decades-long global conspiracy involving tens of thousands of co-conspirators, including scientists of all nationality and academic background, in practice it’s not too likely.
Plus, if there was a group who had their shit together this much, then maybe, just maybe, those would be the people who should actually be in charge, because from everything I’ve learned serving in a big organization like the military, these people would be grossly more competent than virtually everybody else on the planet.
If this all sounds like a lot of information to take in, it is, and the availability of all this knowledge is one reason it’s so easy for misinformation to spread. Regardless, the least you need to know is this: the chapters that follow will build off the crisis of climate change by exploring different aspects of the problem, and describing how living a life of service to others can contribute to any solution.
Do not take my word for it. Instead, ask questions. Think for yourself. Use the scientific method to test ideas and make your own decisions because the ability to think critically is a fundamental part of grasping the nature of the problem itself, as well as understanding how our personal service can make a difference in our communities.
Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, One Signal Publishers, New York: 2021.
Jeff Turrentine and Melissa Denchak, “What Is Climate Change?,” NRDC.org, September 1, 2021, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-climate-change-what-you-need-know, accessed March 3, 2020.
Hayhoe, Saving Us, 43-44.
IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3−32, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.001.
IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, p. 44.
IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3−32, doi:10.1017/9781009157896.001
Hayhoe, Saving Us, 56.
Joseph Uscinski, Karen Douglas, and Stephan Lewandowsky. (2017). Climate change conspiracy theories. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford University Press.
Charles Kadlec, “The Goal Is Power: The Global Warming Conspiracy,” Forbes.com, Jul 25, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/charleskadlec/2011/07/25/the-goal-is-power-the-global-warming-conspiracy/#153dd31e7c08, accessed 1 Jun 2023.
Uscinski, Douglas, and Lewandowsky. (2017). Climate change conspiracy theories.
Dai, Y., & Handley-Schachler, M. (2015). A fundamental weakness in auditing: The need for a conspiracy theory.” Procedia Economics and Finance, 28, 1–6.
Did the Sgt Maj ever admit that you were right about the rounds after all? I know in the Air Force it’s a point driven home and certainly affects lift, and aircraft performance.