An email exchange with Rabbi Shafran

Advisory: sarcasm. I resisted as well as I could.
 

This week a column popped up in my Google Reader entitled “Global Worrying.” The author is Rabbi Avi Shafran, the Director of Public Affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

It opens:

I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem.

Hey, me too! I actually have a whole list of things: the fact that global warming is, with high likelihood, already responsible for many tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction; the fact that atmospheric CO2 is above 390 ppm and rising and the world doesn’t seem ready to do anything about it; the fact that one of America’s two major political parties is firmly in the grasp of a denial machine, where “global warming is a hoax” is typical but “I trust scientists” is political suicide. All those make me pretty uncomfortable.

Well, had Rabbi Shafran gone with any of those, I wouldn’t have written this note, so obviously he didn’t. After reading this article in the New York Times, Rabbi Shafran goes with something else:

Predictably, despite his unassailable credentials and the scientific community’s ostensible commitment to objectively consider all hypotheses, Dr. Lindzen has been excoriated by many of his colleagues…

Richard Lindzen is one of the only serious climatologists in the world who rejects predictions of man-made global warming.

Rabbi Shafran also points out a recent scandal involving EPA official Al Armendariz. He then states his own evaluation of the global warming threat:

Of course, neither the hasty dismissal of rational speculations like Dr. Lindzen’s nor the over-enthusiasm of some environmentalists like Mr. Armendariz means that climate change isn’t real or that we have no responsibility to try to deal with it. We simply don’t know. The climate alarm-raisers may turn out to have been modern-day Chicken Littles squawking that the sky is warming. But they may turn out to have been environmental prophets. To be sure, most of the scientific community believes the latter. But in something as complex and long-term as climate change, even a scientific consensus—“groupthink,” Dr. Lindzen calls it—is only a contender for truth, not its arbiter.

Actually, almost all of that is eminently reasonable. Except for his claim that “we simply don’t know.” With all due respect to the rabbi (in other words, here comes a cheap shot), a state of simply not knowing is easily solved by something called reading. Mountains of literature have been published on climate change in just the past few years. We know plenty.

Rabbi Shafran quotes Michael Crichton for a while about ideological environmentalism, and then concludes his column with an ounce of his own ideology:

Once again: the climate may in fact be in crisis. What discomforts me, though, is the stance of those who insist that they know with absolute surety—which they can’t—that it is. And that by lambasting any who dare dissent from their pronouncement, they show unwillingness to even consider the possibility that the world G-d created for us humans may not need our help to stay inhabitable—that, in His wisdom, He may have imbued not only our skin with the ability to heal its wounds, but the earth’s to do the same.

OK then. Here’s a prominent rabbi voicing a reasonably agnostic stance about global warming. I could let it go, especially considering that it’s finals week.

Nah. Time to suit up.





My email to him:

Dear Rabbi Shafran,
As a YU physics student who follows both Cross-Currents and climate science, I read with interest your column today on global warming. I appreciate that alarmism discomforts you, and wish to express to you why this discomfort aggravates me.

Of course humility is important in all fields of knowledge, and particularly in science. But we shouldn’t confuse humility with ignorance. The evidence that we face a looming climate crisis is overwhelming: vanishing ice caps, ice sheets, and glaciers; spreading deserts and intensifying droughts; acidifying oceans; rising sea levels; shifting ecosystems; more frequent and severe weather disasters. Remaining open-minded to the possibility that mainstream climate scientists have misread this evidence does not preclude our responsibility to sound alarm.

What particularly raises my ire is the intense human suffering that is already here as a result of climate change.

Just some examples: The 2010 heat wave in Russia that killed over 55,000 people and the 2011–2012 southern US drought that’s already cost about $8 billion in damage have both been linked to man-made climate change. 2011 was a record-shattering year for catastrophic floods that killed thousands and displaced millions in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, Brazil, Columbia, El Salvador, and the US. One million children have been starving in the Horn of Africa due to a drought over the last year, and, beginning in the last few months, so are another million children in the Sahel. The link between these later disasters and global warming is not yet clear, but it likely will be within a few years.

All this suffering follows less than one degree Celsius of warming in about a century. We project with high likelihood about two more degrees of warming in the next few decades if we continue our current course. Skepticism in the face of such suffering strikes me as morally insensitive to say the least.

As for the outspoken scientists who have crossed the line into “absolute surety,” in my opinion they receive hugely disproportionate criticism compared with the influential politicians who mock global warming as altogether a hoax.

Thank you for drawing attention to this issue and for your clear effort to keep an open mind. I am sure future historians will be interested by how this generation responded to this threat.

Best wishes,

Rafi Miller

Those are basically the same ideas that I wrote when the Wall Street Journal editorial board got me upset a couple months ago, just phrased in a way that I could address them to a prominent rabbi.

Rabbi Shafran sent me a gracious 200-word response the next day. I don’t think it would be fair to share the whole thing without his permission. He reiterated that all he's trying to say is that we should be open-minded. But he included a paragraph where he criticized me, which I'll quote in part:

I must say, though, that your linking the disasters you cite to a one degree change in the earth’s temperature is a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc (confusing correlation with causation).  And even the existence of a correlation itself is far from clear.

Well, again with due respect, resolving empirical questions that are “far from clear” is the whole point of science.

My reply:

Indeed, attribution is a difficult problem and a focus now among climate scientists. Here is an example of a recent article on the topic:

www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1452.html
From the conclusion:

“Many lines of evidence—statistical analysis of observed data, climate modelling and physical reasoning—strongly indicate that some types of extreme event, most notably heatwaves and precipitation extremes, will greatly increase in a warming climate and have already done so. … Attribution is not a ‘yes or no’ issue as the media might prefer, it is an issue of probability. It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming. … The evidence is strong that anthropogenic, unprecedented heat and rainfall extremes are here—and are causing intense human suffering.”

I should also emphasize that I don’t find your discomfort unreasonable. I just feel strong indignation in a very different direction.

He has not replied since. Either he has more important things to do than engage college students in extended debates about climate science, or I checkmated him. I obviously had fun. I hope I wasn’t too rude.

Till next time.