Here is what scientists do. They continually update their provisional conclusions as new data comes in. The motivated-reasoning science deniers insist on misunderstanding this as somehow invalidating the scientific method. And the consensus about climate change.
NY Times, yesterday: Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade, subtitled “While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.” [gift link]
It’s rare for technical papers about climate modeling to kick off a heated public debate, or attract attention from the White House.
But that’s what happened recently after an international team of researchers published a major revision of the emissions scenarios used to study global warming.
When scientists try to model how hot Earth could get this century, they typically look at a range of possibilities for how much planet-warming pollution humans might pump into the atmosphere. These scenarios get updated every seven years or so.
The technical details are there — something about how the rate of burning coal has diminished from earlier assumptions — and climate change is still very much a problem.
Count on our simpleton president to misunderstand this.
Last weekend, President Trump weighed in, suggesting that the revision showed that global warming wasn’t a threat and that “the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!”
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Very long, nearly two hour, interview of Yuval Noah Harari, by Ezra Klein. Video and transcript at the link.
NY Times, Opinion, The Ezra Klein Show, yesterday: Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion
Klein begins by quoting Stephen Miller about how we live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
This is, as I’ve noted many times, the primitive, barbarian, standard-issue human nature, take on the world, one that humanity has gradually overcome; if we had not, the modern world would not exist. Harari says roughly the same thing.
That the whole of the history of philosophy and spirituality is an argument with exactly that point of view. That the only reality is power. The only reality is force. And from the viewpoint of a historian, it’s clear that this is not the case.
If the only human reality were brute force, we would still be living in tiny hunter-gatherer bands in the African savanna. Because the whole of human history is about how you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other, and you cannot do that only with brute force.
I haven’t listened to the video, and have only read the first half. I’ll quote the parts that speak to Harari’s worldview. Klein’s questions in bold.
You’ve talked about the global liberal order as, I think you called it: the most amazing political and maybe moral achievement of humankind.
Yes.
And today I don’t think it feels that way to people. It has been consumed in the language of budgets, in the reality of bureaucracy.
What was the story liberalism as an international force once told, and what do you think happened to it?
The basic story is about shared experiences and interests and cooperation.
In the 20th century, you had basically three big stories.
You had the fascist story, which said that history is a competition, a conflict between nations or races. It’s decided by strength. Ultimately, the strongest nation or the strongest race will defeat all the others and conquer the world. This was the fascist story.
Then you had the Communist story, which agrees. But it’s not between races or nations — it’s between classes. There is an inevitable conflict between different classes that will be violent and end with the victory of the working class, which will establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Then liberalism came and said that history does not have to be about conflict at all, not conflict between nations and not conflict between classes. It can be about cooperation. Why? Because all humans, no matter which race or nation or class they belong to, are essentially the same.
There are some small differences in how we look and in our languages and religions and so forth, but essentially, we are the same species. We all have the same biological needs. We all have roughly the same psychological needs, at least the deep ones: to be loved, to be recognized and so forth.
We have shared interests, and if we recognize these shared characteristics and interests, in many cases, it just makes more sense to cooperate than to compete and to fight. And by cooperating, we can build a world that will be better for everybody. This was the basic liberal story.
As of 2026, we can look back and say it’s failing. It hasn’t failed completely. According to many measures, we are still living in probably the best time in history. But it’s collapsing.
It’s like this amazing house in which all of humanity is living, and the systems are still sort of running — like the water, the sewage. Nobody takes care of them anymore, but they were built in such a robust way that even though we don’t maintain them, they still function. But within a year, five years, 10 years, if you live in a house and nobody maintains it, eventually it collapses, and then it’s too late.
And one more. Harari is often accused of over-simplifying things, but I think it’s useful to step back and take a very broad view, without getting bogged down in details.
Liberalism does not believe in redemption. You look at the grand historical visions of religions like Christianity or Islam or Judaism, you look at secular ideologies like fascism and Communism — they all believe in redemption. They all believe that eventually history will reach a final destination where everything will be perfect.
Liberalism does not believe it. There is no redemption, at least not on Earth. There will always be problems and tensions and conflicts, and the question is: How do we live with them?
This is also why liberalism invests a lot in building what I think is the most important thing in every large-scale human system, which is a self-correcting mechanism.
If you believe that your view of the world was given to you by God, it cannot contain any error. You do not need a self-correcting mechanism because there are no mistakes.
Liberalism starts with the assumption that it’s just human beings trying to do the best we can, and there will be mistakes, there will be errors, so we need strong self-correcting mechanisms.
The most famous mechanism is, of course, elections. Every four years or five years or whatever, the people can say: Hey, we made a mistake last time. Let’s try something else this time.
All these very complicated systems of checks and balances and independent courts and freedom of the press and all these are just a complicated way to ensure that a country has a robust self-correcting mechanism.
One self-correcting mechanism is, of course, science, as in the first item above. The interview goes on and on. One familiar theme: stories are easy, the truth is hard, and often painful.
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Items I have only time to note briefly.
- Vox, Sarah Herschander, today: This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention, subtitled “One of the worst ever Ebola outbreaks is underway. Blame foreign aid cuts.”
- Either conservatives are dimwitted, short-term thinkers, who think new disasters and pandemics will never happen and so don’t need to anticipate them, or…
- JMG, from Mediaite, today: RNC Chair: “Creep James Talafreako Is Vegan”
- JMG, today: Trump Spews More Stupid Lies bout James Talarico
- Because he’s not a vegan. (Which Trump pronounces “vaygan”.)
- LGBTANation, Alex Bollinger, today: James Talarico has the best response to GOP accusations that he’s vegan, subtitled “Apparently this is the worst thing they can say about the Democratic Senate candidate.”
- Because being vegan is the opposite of the cave-man, meat-eating, mentality of conservatives.
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“I’m an eighth-generation Texan,” Talarico said in an interview with MeidasTouch podcaster Ben Meiselas, before quipping: “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”
“If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”
- Why do conservative commentators lie about this? Because they know their base will believe them?
- Jerry Coyne, today: Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Hafiz
- This is posting from the long-running strip “Jesus and Mo,” which reminds us that other religions also think *their* holy books are literally true.
- Southern states want to permit child marriage, since it was permitted in the Bible.
- Friendly Atheist, today: “How old was Mary?”: How dozens of Oklahoma Republicans fought a bill banning child marriage
- It doesn’t matter how old Mary was then; that was then. Besides, wasn’t Mary a virgin?
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Two items from Facebook.
I’ve seen this comment before, today posted as a graphic on someone’s site. Believers are too close; they don’t see this. They don’t see that, in the grand scheme of things, all these religions are just variations on each other.
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Here’s another. What would you lose if people stopped believing in God?
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=saved&v=2276383086439442
AMV comments:
When you strip away the academic jargon, “the metaphor substrate of our ethos” simply means “the collection of old stories that we base our values on.”
Our “ethos” (our shared human values of empathy, cooperation, fairness, and justice) didn’t fall out of the sky taped to a stone tablet. It evolved naturally over millions of years because we are social primates. If our ancestors hadn’t developed an inherent moral code to cooperate and protect one another, our species would have been wiped out long before anyone ever sat down around a campfire to invent a creation myth.
Our evolved ethics created the stories, not the other way around.
To suggest that society will suddenly collapse into nihilistic chaos if we stop pretending these ancient metaphors are literal truth is a massive insult to human intelligence. We don’t lose our moral foundation when we outgrow the myth, that’s the moment where we just finally learn to take credit for our own humanity.We can appreciate the literary value of a metaphor without pretending the character in the book is watching us use the bathroom.
