Once again, there’s been an overwhelming deluge of responses to one of my posts on climate change.  I apologize if we weren’t able to review and post all the comments as quickly as I would have liked.  I was away from the GHQ yesterday giving some talks up at West Point yesterday.  This is one of America’s great educational institutions and it is always an honor and a pleasure to be invited up there to spend time with the cadets and the faculty.  At a time when many Americans are feeling pretty downbeat about our country and its institutions, it’s worth looking at the extraordinary institution that our military is.  Not only are we blessed with capable professionals willing to put their lives on the line for their country, our armed forces are filled with intensely thoughtful and reflective people who learn from mistakes, respond to new challenges and are constantly rethinking their approaches in the light of new information.  The transition from a peacetime military to a wartime military has among other things brought a new sense of urgency to both the cadets and the faculty at West Point.  These are young people debating Plato’s Republic while preparing for deployment to Afghanistan; it was a privilege to spend some time with them. Many of the younger faculty are now returning from tours of combat duty overseas; it was fascinating and, for an English major and history buff like me, inspiring to hear these veterans talk about the importance of stimulating the creativity and intellectual engagement of the cadets by engaging them in the study of literary, historical and philosophical classics.

One of our country’s great accomplishments, which most of us take too much for granted, is the development of a strong, professional military that is deeply committed to civilian rule.  I’ve been to many countries where the military sees itself as a kind of state within a state, a guardian of the national interest against corrupt and shortsighted civilian politicians.  For these soldiers, the willingness to stage a coup is part of their conception of what a soldier’s honor entails.  In our country, military honor centers on carrying out missions defined by civilian leaders.  As thinking individuals and American citizens, our military have strong ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of our politicians.  But they have chosen to serve rather than command, and the rest of us owe much of what we love and value about our lives to the choices they make.

Some of the cadets have organized a journal that includes an on-line component.  I taped a video interview with them; once they get a chance to transcribe it and put the video on the site, I’ll put up a link.  In the meantime I know readers will join me in wishing these extraordinary young people all the best and thanking them for their willingness to serve at a difficult time. One thing I wish is that more readers of this blog and Americans generally had a chance to meet the cadets and officers at places like West Point.  It would give you more confidence in our country’s ability to rise to the many challenges we face.

In any case, once I returned from upstate to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, I found the place was in an uproar over the comments to my post about climate science on trial.  We are traditionalists here at the manor; I prefer to work with paper and good old fashioned fountain pens rather than these newfangled plug-in devices people talk about.  (I remember they used to make a fuss years ago about something called a “Wang”; I always wanted to see one but you don’t hear so much about them anymore.)  The staff ‘print out’ the comments on good rag paper and bring them in to the blogging room next to the conservatory; this morning I could hardly see the silver tray under the stack of comments and they were piled so high that it blocked my view of the east rose garden.

“‘Sanctimonious windbag‘?” I said to Sarah.  “What on earth does ‘Jack’ mean by that?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t worry, sir,” she answered.  “I’m sure he didn’t understand what you intended.  Not everyone is as well read as you, sir.”

A thoughtful girl, Sarah.  I shall have to remember to tell Mrs. Beaton to give her a Prayer Book on her birthday. Not the leather bound edition just yet, I think; it’s only her second year at the manor.  A cloth bound copy signed by the suffragan would be best.

But as I worked my way through the comments, I did see a pattern.  There are a good number of readers out there, many who have studied the question far more thoroughly than I have, who are convinced that the case for climate change is so scientifically weak that only ideology or greed can explain why so many well known and well positioned people support it.  There are lost socialists who, ever since the collapse of Marxist ideology have been looking for some way to justify a state takeover of the private economy.  There are ‘entrepreneurs’ who stand to make huge amounts of money if governments require the adoption of renewable energy or trading in carbon permits.  And there are corrupted scientists whose research institutes and consulting businesses prosper on the basis of the climate scare.

Readers who analyze the controversy in this way dislike my post (and in some cases, me) for several reasons.  First, I don’t share their entrenched skepticism about the case for anthropogenic global warming.  Second, by taking the claims and arguments of the pro-AGW scientists and activists at their face value, I ignore what many readers see as clear evidence of bad faith by the organized AGW lobby and by ignoring the real motives for their activities I am participating in a cover up.  Third, some readers (understandably angry after in some cases many years of being dismissed as nutters and flat-earthers by pompous AGW proponents) read my post as putting AGW skeptics in the same basket as vaccination skeptics.

On the ‘nutter’ issue, I tried to avoid giving the impression that I was dismissing people by including examples where critics of the scientific establishment were right as well as when they were wrong.  I’m sorry if some readers felt I didn’t make that as clear as it should be, but I didn’t mean to give offense .

On the other points, I don’t expect everyone to agree on an issue this complicated, important and contentious, but let me try to explain myself to readers like Jack (and thanks, by the way, to those who read me more charitably!).  As a generalist and as an Anglican I come at many questions from an angle that is a bit different from the usual one.  I’d be the last to claim that this eccentric angle of approach makes me infallible, but I do think this perspective can sometimes allow people to see things that they might otherwise miss.

As a generalist, I’m always haunted by the reality that there is too much information out there for me to ever master it all.  I will never know as much about Cuba, the rain forests, international trade, finance, the American Congress, or any one of a billion other subjects as well as the specialists do.  I think there’s a real value to the generalist perspective — trying to think about the connections between subjects and the architecture of politics and life as a whole rather than diving deeply into a narrow subject — but it’s clear that there are limits as well.  Once I wrote that a generalist is superficially wrong about many subjects while a specialist is profoundly wrong about a few; society needs a mix between the two, and it needs generalists who respect what specialists know and specialists who respect what generalists understand.

This means that I’m going to approach global warming the way I approach a host of other subjects.  I’m looking for where I can add value to the discussion.  That added value won’t come from my analysis of, say, the raw temperature data.  Nor is the world impatiently waiting for my lucubrations on the relationship between water vapor and CO2 when it comes to the heat-absorbing properties of the atmosphere.  What I can do, perhaps better than those who are immersed in the field, is to see how the state of play with respect to global warming interacts with other political and cultural trends in the US and abroad.  I don’t need to be able to pronounce on whether the case for AGW is well-established or not to be able to say with some confidence that whatever the scientific facts turn out to be, both the political will and the social consensus for the kind of measures AGW-campaigners seek don’t exist.  That is true whether or not global warming is happening, and whether or not human beings are causing it.

The knowledge base I bring to the discussion comes from my observations and reflections on political processes in the United States and abroad, my reading of history, my sense from personal experience, travel and literature of human nature, and a lifetime of observing controversies that have points of similarity with this one.  Others may well disagree with my conclusions; I state them for what they are worth.

A lot of readers were thrown, I think, by the seemingly casual approach in my posts to the question of whether anthropogenic global warming is ‘really happening’.  It seems perverse that someone would write about the topic without making this the central question.  I agree that in the long run the question of whether AGW is in fact happening is pretty central — but I can and indeed must do my job and make my contribution without making my conclusions dependent on the truth of global warming.  I am trying to say something that is useful to everyone in this debate: to clarify where we stand now, regardless of which side turns out to be right in the end.  ‘Global warmists’ need to understand that their quest for the rapid adoption of a binding global treaty to adopt measures that would, in their estimation, hold the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius has hit a brick wall.  Global and American political processes are not going to yield that result at this time.  ‘Climate change deniers’ also need to understand this.  The debate will be going into a new phase.

If I wrote in such a way as to try to prove that one side or the other was scientifically correct, I’d write a piece that wouldn’t convince anybody of anything and wouldn’t add anything useful or new to the general discussion.  My opinions about the science of global warming are, frankly, trivial and conventional.  I have views, of course — I have views about a lot of things.  Early in my life as a pundit I learned that opinions are like love — the more you give away, the more you have.  And I have plenty.  But I don’t claim that my views about the science are particularly interesting or convincing.

That may look to some readers like cowardice or shallow thinking.  To me, it feels like the intellectual discipline and self-awareness that I need to fulfill the role of a generalist (or public intellectual, though I don’t much like the term) in public debate.

Besides being a generalist, I’m an Anglican (aka Episcopalian).  That is a rare condition in the United States; there are more Mormons, Jews and Muslims in America than there are Anglicans.  As a church, we’ve never really recovered from the Revolution;  while George Washington was an Anglican, a lot of colonial Anglicans stuck with the King and fled to Canada after the war.  Since then, we’ve mostly sat around on our rear ends mixing martinis while the other denominations have gone out there and reached out to the heathen and the unchurched.  (One famous exception: Endicott Peabody, who before becoming headmaster of Groton served as a mission priest in Tombstone, Arizona.)

Anyway, Anglicans have some peculiar mental habits.  One is that we are used to a lot of ideological diversity.  Within the ever-shrinking world of the American branch of the Anglican Communion, you will find people who claim at least to be more Catholic than the Pope — and there are others who claim to be as evangelical as Rick Warren.  You’ve got near-fundamentalists and you’ve got Christians so liberal that they think of the Ten Commandments as the Ten Suggestions.  My brother’s godfather Jack Spong managed to get himself formally accused of heresy while serving as Bishop of Newark and got quoted in the New York Times backing church blessing of gay unions by pointing out that since the Episcopal Church had a prayer for blessing the hounds at a fox hunt we ought to be able to find some prayers to say over two people who loved each other and wanted to live together.  My niece’s husband is serving in one of the Episcopal dioceses that is so angry over the church’s tolerance of gay bishops and marriage that it has seceded from the national church.  (As a native South Carolinian, I’m reminded of the state’s informal motto: If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.)

The ordination of gay bishops may split the Episcopal church or, worse, cut off the main body of American Episcopalians from the worldwide Anglican Communion, but my point is this: Anglicans live with a lot of cognitive dissonance.  We worship side by side with people who disagree with us on virtually every conceivable theological and political issue.  I’m sure we’ve got climate deniers and climate activists in my tiny local congregation.  (Our most vicious fights lately have been over the composting policy of the Garden Committee.)  The point is that we all live together pretty well, most of the time.  We are tolerant, perhaps to a fault.  I’ve come to assume and even believe that people who disagree with me are doing it on the basis of honest intellectual conviction or for the sake of serious moral values rather than because of bad morals or self interest.  I’ve come to understand that I’m not always right myself — or that even when I’m right there are other points of view that may be equally valid in their own way.

The older I get the more I believe that it’s generally best to deal with people on the basis of respect for different points of view.  Climate deniers (or AGW proponents) may be wrong, but attacking their motives is usually not the best way to carry on the debate.  No doubt there are dishonest people on both sides of the debate; no doubt there are some stupid opinionated louts on both sides.  But it’s very hard to prove bad motives; it’s generally more useful to deal with bad arguments.  You will have a much harder time proving that I am a dishonest liar than proving that I am factually wrong about something.

So I approach the global warming issue the way I approach a lot of others.  I don’t conceal my opinions about the science — but I don’t push them forward or make them the center of my contribution to the debate.  I try to be slow to attribute bad motives to people who see things differently than I do and when I can, I try to figure out what it is that they see that I don’t.

Maybe this is just a longwinded way of admitting that Jack is right and that I’m a sanctimonious windbag.  It’s true that on my first day in Pundit School the Sorting Hat assigned me to Ditherin.

But Sarah doesn’t think so, and she’s a very good judge of character — according to James.  And if half of what Mrs. Beaton tells me about James and Sarah is true, he is in a very good position to know.