Rough Beasts

I have an odd habit. I'm always watching for interesting flowers and insects, taking pictures of them, and posting them on Facebook--as if everybody thought they were just as fascinating as I do. And sometimes they do. The other day, a friend (who, unlike me, actually makes a living as a writer) suggested I write about some of the weird bugs I see. It seemed like a good suggestion. I've let myself get too preachy on this blog anyway, and besides, she's a professional and I should probably listen to her.

The only problem, though, is that if you look closely at the world of insects, what you see tends to be kind of horrifying. As Annie Dillard put it, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another."

It's true. Insect behavior can remind nature lovers like me not to romanticize the natural world too much. Nature can be achingly beautiful, but it's also for the most part amoral. It's not cruel--cruelty requires consciousness--it's just blind to things like hope, pleasure and pain. In the poem The Second Coming, Yeats talked about a "rough beast...its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." Most of the time, nature is just such a beast.

Sometimes it seems the like littler nature's beasts are, the rougher they get. For example, the other day I spotted this little drama on a blade of grass. A katydid was in the grip of Sphex nudus, the Katydid Wasp. In the picture it looks like the katydid is about the become the wasp's dinner, but actually...it's worse than that. Digger wasps like Sphex nudus sting their prey to paralyze them, and then bring them back to their nests, which are burrows in the ground. Then they deposit them in one section of the nest, lay an egg, and seal the chamber up. When the egg hatches, the larva will feed on its living larder. The wasps are parasites (parasitoids, technically, but we won't get into that).

This katydid may have escaped that fate, because the wasp got alarmed by my camera and dropped it. I like to think the katydid hadn't been stung yet, and that the wasp didn't come back. But I don't know. I also like to think katydids are absolute automatons, as incapable of conscious experiences like pain and fear as a wind-up toy robot. At least I hope that's true of the ones that run into Katydid Wasps. But I don't know that either, and I suspect it's not entirely true. And evolution doesn't care either way. If evolution is blind to pleasure and pain, then behaviors like this will evolve whether or not the victims are conscious of what's happening to them.

And evolve they do, over and over again. Among the Katydid Wasp's cousins are the similarly thread-waisted Mud Daubers. We called these Dirt Daubers where I grew up in Arkansas, and in my family they were considered the good guys of waspdom, because they almost never sting. Well, they almost never sting people. They do sting spiders, for the same reason Katydid Wasps sting katydids. Mud daubers build their little adobe nests and give each larva its own compartment, well-stocked with several paralyzed spiders for it to dine on. The Blue Mud Dauber's young mostly eat Black Widows. How's that for tough?

I discovered the "good guy" mud dauber's dark secret for myself as a kid, when my mom had me knocking old mud dauber nests off the ceiling of our porch. I broke one open out of curiousity, and dead spiders cascaded down my arm, as I did lively little dance of terror. Maybe is was the Tarantella.

Whatever their secrets, mud daubers have enemies of their own, and some of them are other wasps. I encountered one of these a couple of years ago. I heard a constant buzzing sound at my back door, and when I went outside to look, I found a mud dauber nest on the screen. On it was a little iridescent wasp, so pretty it could have been made by Carl Fabergé, busily chewing its way inside. That seemed a little odd to me, so I went back inside and looked it up. It turned out to be a Cuckoo Wasp, and like its avian namesake, it's a brood parasite--it lays its eggs in the nests of others. When the Cuckoo Wasp larva hatches it proceeds to eat the Mud Dauber larva, as well as its paralyzed guests. Naturally, the mother Mud Dauber doesn't appreciate that, and it will attack the Cuckoo Wasp if it catches it. But the Cuckoo Wasp is ready. Its jewel-like exoskeleton is armored, and it just rolls itself up into a defensive ball like an armadillo. The proprietor of the nest usually can't do much but pick it and bounce it from the nest. Whereupon it simply unrolls and tries again. The Cuckoo Wasp is a tiny little reflection of nature itself: gorgeous and amoral.

Life isn't easy, even for wasps tough enough to feed their babies paralyzed spiders. Sometimes it's downright embarrassing (or would be if wasps had the brains to be embarrassed). Like many insects, spider-hunting wasps can be fooled by an organism with no brain at all--an orchid. Most people have heard how some orchids mimic female bees or wasps. The haplessly horny males try to mate with the orchid, and end up with packets of pollen stuck to their bodies. But they don't learn from their mistake, so they deposit the pollen on the next orchid they try to get cozy with. It's probably a good thing orchid flowers aren't as big as humans, because some guys would probably pollinate them, and just imagine what those flowers would look like.

Moving on...Spider Orchids of the genus Brassia use a slightly different tactic. They really do look like spiders, at least enough to fool certain wasps. The wasps land on the flowers and start stinging them, trying to paralyze the "spider". The only result is that they get a bit of pollen attached to their heads, which they will deposit on the next "spider". The orchids get pollinated, and the wasps get nothing.

But not all plants are so hard on the parasitic wasps. The cabbage plant, for example, is their ally. The caterpillars of the Cabbage White Butterfly, as their name implies, like to eat cabbage. But the cabbage doesn't like--in an unconscious evolutionary sense--to be eaten. When it starts to get munched it releases a chemical that attracts parasitic wasps which attack the caterpillar. But they don't take it back to their nest. Instead, they lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, which goes about its business. The wasp larvae hatch and begin to grow inside it, feeding on its fluids but avoiding its vital organs. Finally, they tunnel out of the caterpillar's side and start spinning cocoons for themselves.

And then, as if this tale weren't perverse enough, things start to really get crazy. The caterpillar's brain has been altered by its ordeal, and it actually helps encase the wasp larvae in a mass cocoon, using its own silk. And then, then it becomes their guard caterpillar. The wasp larvae are vulnerable to attack by other parasitic wasps, which lay their eggs in them. The addled caterpillar lashes out at them when they try, but it's understandably weak by now, and soon dies. Many of its wasp attackers get parasitized themselves by smaller wasps. And get this--those smaller parasites may become the hosts for yet another species of parasitic wasp. This is called hyperparasitism--the parasite gets parasitized. Sometimes this can keep going, for four, five, or more levels, all the way down to bacteria that are attacked by bacteriophage virues. It's like a horror story version of Johnathon Swift's poem:

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds ad infinitum."

Ah, the web of life..it's not all peace and harmony. In fact, it can be pretty dreadful. After all, that famously disturbing scene in the movie Alien was inspired by parasitic wasps. Of the living things that can't make their own food, like plants do, parasites may be the most abundant.

But maybe things aren't as bad as they seem. Maybe none of the players in these little dramas are actually conscious, and they only appear to feel things like pain, fear, or anger. Maybe. But we can be pretty sure that other animals, like birds and mammals, do experience those sensations, and they (and we) can do some pretty awful things to each other, too.

And the thing is, nature doesn't care. It's gorgeous and complex and awe-inspiring, but it doesn't care.

That's where we, and maybe a few other animals, part ways with the rest of nature. That's the silver lining in all this. We can realize that others--both human and animal--have sensations and preferences, and we can alter our behavior to avoid to avoid causing unnecessary pain. Unlike nature, our eyes are not blank and we don't have to be as pitiless as the sun...or a wasp.

In the movie The African Queen, a drunk Humphrey Bogart tells a prim Katherine Hepburn, "A man takes a drop too much every once in a while. It's human nature." She replies, "Nature...is what we are put in this world to rise above." I don't know what we were put in this world for, if anything, and I think she could give nature a good bit more credit. But she's still got a point. As amazing as nature is, when it comes to things like compassion and ethics, we actually can rise above it.

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Enter the Hyperparasite

National Geographic video about the White Cabbabe Butterfly being parasitized. Watch at own risk. No, seriously--it can't be unseen.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / Annie Dillard (possibly the most brilliant book I've ever read)

The Cuckoo Wasp: A Gorgeous Parasite

National Geographic Article Mentioning Spider Orchids

Science, the Roots of Nature, and the Branches of Knowledge

I'm always going on and on about how great science is. I know I do it too much, and some of my friends are probably a little mystified (and a little irritated) by this behavior. I think I might be to blame for that, because I may not have adequately explained my point of view. Or...maybe I'm just being a pain. Anyway, in this post, I'd like to explain why science is such a big deal to me, why it strikes me as so beautiful and powerful, and why I think it's harmful when it's ignored or denied.

My outlook is heavily based on science, but it's not an outlook all scientists or science buffs share. In fact, I first started thinking hard about science when I got irritated by a bunch of scientists. I was in graduate school studying animal behavior. Some of my professors were psychologists and some were biologists. Most were brilliant people, but I couldn't believe how obsessed some of them were with their own little specialty, and how little regard they had for other disciplines. The biologists looked down on psychology, and the psychologists from different perspectives (behaviorists and cognitivists, for example) looked down on each other. It seemed to me the world was big enough for all these perspectives to be true, at least partially. In fact, it seemed like combining insights from many fields would be a great way to learn more about all of them. But many of them didn't see it that way.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about fragmentation in human ideas in general. People today have a million different worldviews, ideologies, and perspectives. Such diversity can be a good thing, but it can also lead to mutual misunderstanding and contempt, as well as confusion about what's really true. What I wondered was, is there any point of view that could be seen as universal? Is there any way to find unity in all that diversity?

Well, I thought, nature is one source of unity. Whatever our ideology or nationality, we all live on the same planet and belong to the same species. We all breath the same air and look up at the same moon. We're all related—we share a common evolutionary heritage, and somewhere back there, we all share a common ancestor. We're even made of the same parts--each of us is made of the same kinds of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, and so one. In fact, if I leave out “same species”, all the commonalities I've mentioned above don't just apply to humans. They apply to every animal on earth. Many of them apply to every living thing on earth, and some of them, like “made of atoms” apply to things across the entire universe. We all live in the same natural world, and it existed long before all the ideologies we hold so dear. It's the ultimate source of common ground.

So there's that. But how do we know these things about nature? Some are obvious to anyone, but most of them were discovered by scientists. If nature is a source of unity, then science is too, because science is our best method for figuring out how nature works. That's how I see science. When I think of science, I don't think of laboratories, or computers, or space probes. Those are just tools. I see science primarily as a means of understanding nature—not just nature as in “what you see when you leave the city”, but nature in the sense of the entire universe; the grand cosmic order of things. For me, science is a way of understanding how the universe works, and how—at least in the physical, factual sense—we fit into it.

And one thing science has shown us repeatedly is that we are not what nature is about. Copernicus showed we aren't at the center of the universe, and Darwin showed we are related to all the other living things on earth. It's not that we're not special—we are in many ways—but we're still a young species among several million others on a tiny little fleck of a planet that is one of countless trillions in the universe. We shouldn't get too big for our britches.

But most people have never really taken those lessons to heart. To hear them talk, you would think the human world and the natural world were two separate spheres, with the human world by far the most important of the two, as in the image below. In this view, science is just one of many human pursuits, and it's seen as having as much to do with technology as nature. 

The reality is different, and more like the next image. We're actually just a small, odd subset of nature. We're not an exception to nature's basic laws, but an unusual elaboration on them. People talk about things being "unnatural", but we actually can't do anything truly unnatural, in the sense that it would violate fundamental natural laws and exist outside of nature. What we do might be stupid and destructive, but it can't be unnatural in the deepest sense. We aren't that powerful. Anyway, in this view, science is like a telescope looking outward from the human sphere to try to understand the wider world we are a part of, and the laws by which it operates. It's not just a way of making better gadgets.

So. We are a part of nature, and science is our best way of understanding nature. What does that tell us about the problem of intellectual fragmentation? How does this shed light on how different branches of science are related, or how other important branches of knowledge, like ethics or the arts, fit in to the landscape of ideas? 

I think the first step in understanding this is to take a bit of a detour, and think about how reality is like a layer cake, or a set of nested Russian dolls--it has many levels. The whole universe is a great hierarchy of parts and wholes. Particles combine into atoms, and atoms into molecules. All these things combine into stars, planets, and nebulae; which in turn combine to form galaxies. Even galaxies combine into clusters and superclusters. Here on Earth, there are even more layers. Atoms and molecules combine in intricate ways to form living cells, which combine to form living things, which can combine into larger social groups, like an anthill or IBM. 

As you move up and down this hierarchy, you find that each whole system has emergent properties that aren't present in any one of its parts. A brain can do things a single neuron can't, and even a water molecule can behave in ways that the oxygen atom inside it couldn't on its own. There's nothing magical about this, it's just whole systems have different structures than their parts, and that gives them different properties, which you can't see if you focus on the part alone. The image below illustrates this with simple geometric shapes.

The fact that wholes have these holistic properties is the reason each level of nature needs to be studied at its own level. If you want to understand biology, you have to know something about chemistry, because it describes the atoms living things are made of. But you also have to study processes at a higher level than atoms, such as cell division or the evolution of species. Those things are just as real as the chemical reactions they are ultimately based on.

When you look at this hierarchy of parts and wholes, there are some very interesting trends we see as we move up and down the scale of complexity.The first, obviously, is that most parts are simpler than wholes. A subatomic particle is simpler than an atom, an atom is simpler than a molecule, and a molecule is simpler than a cell. Another obvious fact is that parts are more numerous than wholes. There are more atoms than cells, and more particles than atoms. Parts also tend to be older than wholes--not necessarily the part itself, but the category it belongs to. Atoms have been around longer than molecules, which have been around longer than living cells, which have been around longer than multicellular organisms. Finally, parts tend to be more universal. Particles, atoms, and molecules can be found throughout the universe, and they obey laws that seem to hold throughout space and time. Cells, as far as we know, only exist on earth, and they follow the more complex and less universal laws of biology. Even more complex whole systems, such as human societies, follow even less universal laws.

None of these trends are absolute--you can find many exceptions--but they are clear trends. You can combine all of them and think of the hierarchy of structure in the world as a big pyramid, as in the image below.

But this image leaves out something important. Whole systems are far less numerous than parts, but they are (or have the potential to be) far more diverse.There are untold gazillions of subatomic particles in the universe, but they only come in a few types. Atoms are somewhat more diverse--there are just under 100 naturally-occurring elements. But there are millions of kinds of molecules. There are also millions of species of living things. It's like letters and sentences. There are only 26 letters in the English language, but each can be repeated over and over again. Letters aren't very diverse, but they're very numerous. If you surveyed everything ever written, you would obviously find more letters than sentences, but sentences are endlessly diverse. In other words, whole systems are fewer in number, but far greater in kind, than their parts. The pyramid above doesn't capture that. A better image would be a tree, where a few roots give way to many, may branches. Superimposing the tree image on the pyramid, we get the image below, which sums up the changes we see from the bottom to the top of nature's hierarchy.

Where did this hierarchy come from, and why the changes we see from bottom to top? The answer, I'm convinced, is that nature's hierarchies were built up gradually over time in the evolution of the universe. Scientists today are almost unanimous in thinking that everything in the entire visible universe began in one place and time, in the Big Bang. That's why there are common features across the whole universe--it all shares a common origin. At first there was just a seething sea of subatomic particles, interacting according to the most basic laws of physics. But some of those particles combined into wholes called atoms, and some of those combined into wholes called molecules. As the pyramid of complexity grew, nature got more diverse. Here on earth, nature got extremely diverse and complex, as the first living things evolved and diversified over the eons into the millions of organisms we see around us today. Whole new layers of complexity and diversity were added when humans appeared, grew big brains, and started developing complex cultures--giving rise to things like art, philosophy, technology, and politics.

And that brings us back to the issue of intellectual fragmentation. I think the idea of an evolving hierarchy of structure in the world can help us figure out how the different branches of knowledge fit together. Consider the image below.

When you think about different branches of knowledge in terms of the hierarchies of complexity in the world, this gives you a clear way of arranging many of them. Each one has its place, and can't be collapsed into another. It describes the world at a certain level, where there are emergent properties that don't exist at lower levels. You don't want to try to understand what an artist was trying to say in a painting by learning more about the chemistry of pigments. That's looking at things at the wrong level; collapsing everything into science and forgetting about emergent properties. On the other hand, you don't want to try to explain a scientific idea, like the origin of humanity, with mythology. Mythology has its place, but that's not it. The point is, there doesn't need to be any conflict between the humanities and the sciences. They simply describe the world at different levels. In fact, the humanities may not even be about describing the world at all, but about creating new ways of looking at it. Each point of view has its own strengths.

Still, as I said above, I do think the natural sciences are vital. They describe nature at its most fundamental, universal levels. Physics is the most fundamental science, because it's concerned with nature's most basic particles, forces, and laws--which exist throughout the universe. Chemistry is slightly less fundamental, because it focuses on how atoms interact to form different kinds of matter, and not everything in the universe is made of whole atoms. But chemistry and astronomy both concern processes that occur across the universe, so they are pretty universal. Biology is far less universal, because it is concerned with life, which as far as we know only exists on this little speck of a planet. But what biology lacks in universality, it makes up in complexity and diversity.

What I'm trying to say is that the natural sciences describe the roots of nature--it describes where all that diversity converges into the fundamental unity of the natural world. Science is how we understand that huge circle above labeled "Nature". It's not the only valid way of seeing the world, but it is an essential one, because the facts it uncovers about nature are the same no matter what our ideology. If the facts are well-established, and our ideology conflicts with them, then the ideology needs to be revised. That's why science could be a source of unity in human ideas. It tells us about the biggest branches in the tree of knowledge. It tells us how nature works, how we fit into it, and where we come from. EO Wilson once pointed out how economists and politicians like to talk about "the real world", but they forget that nature is "the real real world." The natural sciences allow us to understand the real real world.

But people don't often realize that; sometimes not even scientists. For one thing, science is often presented as being primarily about technology, or as a way of predicting or controlling the world, rather than simply understanding it. And science is taught piecemeal. Teachers don't talk enough about how the different sciences fit together--how biology is grounded in, but transcends, chemistry, and how chemistry is grounded, but transcends, physics. The idea of nature's hierarchy of emergent forms isn't common enough, which may be why people think things like art and physics are in competition, when in fact there's plenty of room for both.

I think a great way of explaining the basics of science, and many other branches of knowledge, and how they all fit together, is to tell the story of how the universe evolved. When you talk about the birth of the first particles and atoms in the Big Bang, you automatically talk about the basics of physics. Talking about how the most of the elements in the periodic table were forged inside exploding stars is a great way to make chemistry a little more exciting. When you talk about early living cells on earth, you automatically talk about many of the common features all living things share, such as DNA, cell membranes, and the basic types of organic molecules. Discussions of human evolution naturally lead into anthropology and archaeology, and those naturally lead into history, which touches all the other, more recent, branches of knowledge. Of course, human history, and even life on earth, have little effect on the history of the universe as a whole. What a history like I'm describing would really do is trace a particular set of branches on nature's tree of diversity--zooming inward from the universal limbs of physics and cosmology into the branches we inhabit here on earth, as in the image below, or the one at the top of the page.

Of course, writing a big cosmic history like that would be a pretty tall order. I know--I tried it once, and it quickly got bigger than I could handle (not to mention bigger than most people will read). But I still think it's a good idea. Maybe I'll try to write a shorter version someday, covering just the natural sciences. Maybe even a super-abbreviated one; one that could fit in one of my standard, overly-long blog posts. Maybe. But not today.

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My attempts:

http://www.knowledgetreeproject.org/index.html

http://www.universetimelines.com/ (More successful)

Global Warming, Public Opinion, and Other Hazards

I spend a lot of time thinking about other people's opinions. I'm always reading polls and comment threads, trying to get a sense of how others see the world. It's not that I'm intrinsically interested in John Q. Public's worldview. In fact, sometimes I find it pretty disturbing. But I feel like I have to pay attention, because opinions matter--they determine, at least in part, how people will act. And how people act will determine our future. There are 7 billion of us on this planet now (up from 6 billion just over a decade ago). If too many people believe things that are at odds with reality, we're going to have a collision with reality, and reality doesn't budge.

One of the opinions that worries me most is the idea that environmental issues like global warming or deforestation are not real problems, so we don't need to worry about them. I've gotten more tuned into this the last couple of weeks, after reading the following: "A new paper in the journal Science finds that climate change is now set to occur at a pace "orders of magnitude more rapid" than at any other time in the last 65 million years." 65 million years. If that's true, then many plants and animals may not be able to adapt fast enough to changing climate, as they have in the past. That's a scary thought. And Science is not some radical environmentalist magazine. It's arguably the most influential and respected scientific journal in the world. So that article got my attention.

Many people don't realize that there's a clear consensus among climate scientists that global warming is real and caused by human activity. That's what at least 90% of them believe, and probably more. Yet nearly half of Americans don't believe in global warming, or don't think it's caused by humans; while 59% don't think there's a scientific consensus, and 37% actually think global warming is a giant hoax. So, whether global warming is real or not, there's a huge gap between what scientists believe and what the public believes.

One of the most commons reasons for denying global warming was stated unusually plainly the other day by Rush Limbaugh: "See, in my humble opinion, folks, if you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in manmade global warming … You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something that he can’t create."

Obviously that isn't true; lots of people who believe in God can and do believe in global warming. And we clearly affect many things we didn't create. We didn't create the passenger pigeon or the dodo, but we sure did kill them off. So, Rush's statement is demonstrably wrong. But doesn't mean his views are uncommon. I suspect a lot of religious conservatives use a similar thought process: God is in charge, and He will determine the ultimate fate of the earth and humankind. Many literal-minded Christian conservatives believe the world will end as described in the book of Revelation, and perhaps soon, so worrying about other potential catastrophes is silly (many seem to look forward to it, which scares me more than anything in the whole world.) Others believe mere humans couldn't significantly alter what God created, so things like global warming can't possibly be real.

Others deny global warming for different reasons. One is just plain old wishful thinking--I don't want it to be true, therefore it isn't. Another common reason, I think, is that global warming conflicts with free market ideals. Those who believe that free markets can solve most of the worlds problems don't like to think a major global issue could arise despite free markets, or even because of them. The much-lauded Invisible Hand of the marketplace isn't supposed to turn around and slap us. I suspect that's what motivates most libertarians who deny global warming, since they don't tend to be especially religious, and they don't usually deny other well-established scientific theories. Conservatives may be motivated by both the religious and the free-market arguments. I think those are the main ideological reasons for denial in the United States, but in other places people surely deny it for other reasons. I imagine there are Marxists who deny it because it would conflict with the vision of the inevitable triumph of socialism.

In any case, the main point here is that these opinions are motivated by ideology. Why else would people oppose global warming more than other modern scientific theories, like plate tectonics or the expansion of the universe? Why single out global warming? Because it conflicts with a pre-existing ideology, that's why. Non-scientists who deny global warming rarely do so after unbiased, careful consideration of the evidence. Instead, they begin with a conclusion--global warming is not real--and then look for arguments to support that conclusion. And those arguments seem convincing, at least to people who want to believe them and don't want to look for contradictory evidence. It's confirmation bias in action--seek out arguments that support what you already believe, and disregard those that don't.

That's the opposite of how science works. Science, at least in theory, proceeds by observing the world, noticing certain patterns, and then formulating hypotheses to explain those patterns. Then the hypotheses are tested, and if they fail, they are (eventually) discarded. The ones the scientists can't knock down are the ones they keep. Of course, scientists are only human, so in the real world it's messier than that. But the process still works amazingly well--well enough to give us the know-how to land a robot car on Mars and eradicate smallpox, to give just two examples.

Science is an astoundingly powerful method for understanding the world, and the people who use it to study climate have concluded that global warming is real and caused by humans. And here's the thing: they don't believe that because of some ideology they already had. They believe it because they realized how much carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere, wondered if it might warm the planet, and then started trying to figure out if it really does. And the answer most of them have come to is, "Yes, almost certainly." A few have taken an honest look at the evidence, and remain undecided, or even skeptical. That's fine--science couldn't function without honest dissenters, because sometimes they turn out to be right. I don't have any beef with them unless they're skeptical because of some other ideology. Then they aren't really doing science.

As for myself, I also believe in global warming, but not for the same reasons most climate scientists do. I understand the theory fairly well, but I can't honestly say I've mastered it, looked at all the evidence, and drawn an honest, educated conclusion. I've done that with simpler theories, like the theory of evolution (whose fundamental ideas really are very simple). But climatology is an unbelievably complex field, with all kinds of variables interacting in complex, counter-intuitive ways. I would have to immerse myself in it for months to have a truly informed opinion. So I go with what the majority of scientists think. I have enough faith in the process of science, with its checks and balances, to think that's a good bet. And like most scientists, I don't have any ideological dog in the fight already. In fact, I would much rather believe global warming isn't happening. But I simply can't help thinking it is. What I wish were true has absolutely no bearing on what is true.

I'm not saying people should or shouldn't believe in global warming. I'm just saying they should try to step back from whatever ideology they have and take the time to actually understand the theory--and the level of support it has among scientists--before rejecting it. Is that so crazy? A whole lot of people who reject it do so without coming close to understanding it. I know that because when the subject of global warming comes up, I've seen lots of people deny it...and then start talking about holes in the ozone layer. That's a completely different issue. Anyone who confuses global warming with ozone depletion hasn't understood either issue, and has no business making pronouncements about them. Most global warming skeptics I've talked to either reject it out of hand, without doing any research, or Google it and find a few reasons to deny it, without ever really understanding what the theory says.

That's a huge problem, because there's a whole lot riding on the theory. It has enormous bearing on the future of the whole planet. It's too important for knee-jerk reactions based on wishes or ideology. And it's not the only issue like that. There are all kinds of ways we could wreck the planet, and therefore wreck human civilization. It's not just global warming. In the last 60 years or so, humans have become fully capable of devastating, and possibly even ending, life on Earth. We could do it with nuclear weapons, or uncontrolled population growth, or runaway global warming, or any number of other screw-ups we only dream about now. This isn't hyperbole. This is realism. We're numerous enough and we're powerful enough to do it. As a species, we're like a child who's just found a stick of dynamite and a box of matches. We've suddenly gained a whole lot of power, but not the wisdom to control it.

We really are living in a uniquely dangerous period in human history; one in which our potential global impact has suddenly become explosive. If you don't believe that, I invite you to take a look at the graph below, which plots the human population over the last 12,000 years. Population isn't the only thing that has suddenly gone exponential. The growth in computing speed, scientific knowledge, and potential human impacts on nature are following similar curves. We're living in an age of explosions, and if we don't learn to control them, we will blow ourselves to bits.

My main point in this post, then, is not about global warming. It's about the idea that catastrophic human impacts are impossible. That's probably the most dangerous notion I've ever heard of. It leads to apathy, overconfidence, and outright hubris in the face of very real problems. This idea--that God or the marketplace won't let us wreck the world--could wreck the world. It really could. Global catastrophes have happened before in Earth's history (just look up "mass extinctions"), and there's no reason to think they couldn't happen again. It's just that now we've become the most likely cause of the next catastrophe. As Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." We no longer have the luxury of wishful thinking and comforting ideologies. We've got to learn to pay attention to what's really true, not what we think should be true, so our opinions don't put us on a collision course with reality.

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The Climate Is Set to Change 'Orders of Magnitude' Faster Than at Any Other Time in the Past 65 Million Years - The Atlantic Monthy

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed - New Scientist (has a great list of common objections to global warming, and their rebuttals)

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_change

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus