People have asked us why we’re so skeptical about man-made climate change and certain other issues that many conservationists embrace wholeheartedly—particularly when scientific research, they say, overwhelmingly supports the doomsday prognostications.
Maybe it’s because such skepticism is at the heart of good journalism—or should be—although few reporters these days seem to display any parallel suspicion. or even a healthy curiosity. Some ecological claims just don’t ring true to us when the claimants appear to so completely disregard the truth in many of the statements they make.
A good share of these modern-day prophets—especially Democrat politicians and left-leaning environmentalists—seem to be masters at creating false crises that are aimed primarily at increasing their own power, or enriching themselves and their allies. They routinely whip their fellow citizens into an irrational frenzy, then insist we adopt dubious schemes that allow them to squander public and private resources on programs that never quite solve the problems at hand.
Given this, why should anyone believe what they say about anything?
Our skepticism might well be traced to one of Aesop’s Fables—”The Boy Who Cried Wolf”—which we first encountered as children. In this fable, a shepherd boy repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, however, and the boy calls for help, the villagers do not come. They think it’s just another false alarm, so the sheep get eaten.
Fear mongering—whether justified or not—can create a sense of paralysis and actually block social action.
We’ve long recognized the dangers of groupthink, where collections of like-minded people believe they are correct just because they agree on something and have become blind to all other ideas.
And don’t forget that just over 14 years ago the experts were telling us that the turn of the new century was sure to bring calamity on us all—due to a supposed glitch in computer system designs that would cause chip-driven machines to malfunction after midnight on December 31, 1999. We were warned that our cars would not start, the nation’s electric grid would shut down, financial records would be in jeopardy, businesses would be unable to operate and all manner of other problems would occur.
None of this happened. Yet the science and technology wizards weren’t prescient—or honest—enough to figure that out and let us know that life as we knew it would continue apace. Instead, an apparently unnecessary industry sprang up to “protect” us from the inevitable and billions of dollars were needlessly spent the world over in preparation of what was known as Y2K.
We could be wrong in our cynicism, of course. We freely admit that the absolute truth—if it exists—escapes us in many areas. But we need to call these things as we see them. Anything less would be a shirking of our duty.
We apologize if this offends the true believers out there. But we’d probably all be better off if there were more skeptics and fewer people willing to blindly follow the latest Pied Pipers down the road to perdition—at least until we know whether they’re telling the truth.
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