I wrote to Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively about the period of scientific research in oceanography and meteorography that my own father was involved with. Reading the book was like reading the scientific history of his career.
How is this related to Centrism? The Center, as I have written, is not about coming together in the middle. It's not about both sides having their say or getting listened to. Both sides are not necessarily true. Truth means rising above, climbing up to where the view is unobstructed, to see how the known facts fit together into a view of reality.
Naomi and Erik do this with Merchants, distilling out of this mass of data what are the real issues. How did scientists researching the same interest area at the same time and in the same institutions end up with opposite points of view? This is not a question of both sides being right. It's a question of allowing values to distort the facts. Seeing the data through a skewed lense yields skewed results.
When market fundamentalism, unfettered capitalism, fear of Communism take the place of objectivity, conclusions from the same set of facts will differ from a less biased view.
The last thing we need is more demonization of sides in a struggle for truth. Many sincerely believe Capitalism is essential to the world order we thrive in. Many are unable to contemplate any shade of Socialism.
The thing is, we benefit from honesty as to what powers our opinions. Knowing what our real fears are can help us find objectivity around them.
February 26, 2023
Dear Naomi Oreskes,
I am just eking out a few more days with Merchants of Doubt before returning it once more to the library. I’d discovered it listed in an article as one of the most authoritative books on climate change/global warming some months back, when the family email discussion revolved around this topic.
Like so many families, we are divided down the middle on the topic, and my sister had demanded some “real” proof for the position we believers have taken. I did recommend this book, and have repeatedly done so, with no takers that I know of yet.
For me your presentation has gotten to the bottom of the question and clarified the central issue at hand: that this is not a real question of proof, but of values--market vs. government regulation.
That said, the book has held a real fascination for me, because most of my family members are involved with science. Both of my parents were chemists to begin with. One brother is a retired physicist; one retired as a bio-chemist. My sister majored in math. I was the black sheep, who went into the liberal arts and majored in French, but I have always had a love for science. The fifth sibling, the peace-maker, teaches surveying.
My dad, Robert Paquette, who taught chemistry at Annapolis during WWII, returned to work at the University of Washington afterwards, joining the fledgling oceanography department as a research assistant under the leadership of Richard Fleming, previously of Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
I grew up in the aura of Dad’s work—visiting the oceanography building on the shore of Lake Union, writing him letters on his many summer cruises in the Arctic, watching the ensuing slide show (or movies by his colleague John Lincoln) of Dad lowering water bottles from the Brown Bear research vessel. Sometimes it was shots of an ice-breaker north of what was then Point Barrow.
Scripps was often in the dinner-table conversation. When I was ten, we took a trip to La Jolla, where he was attending an important oceanographic meeting, while we enjoyed the pool at Rancho Santa Fe.
We moved to Santa Barbara, where Dad worked for General Motors for about ten years designing underwater vehicles, and then he took a position at the newly forming oceanography department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
I had left home by that time, and so caught little of ongoing discussions of what was happening in oceanography, except for a few conversations on El Niño. Roger Revelle came up occasionally, and not always in a positive light. One brother remembers Dad’s feeling that he was, possibly, too much of a “showman.”
My own inclination was to see research on climate change as totally credible. I saw no reason to doubt evidence coming out on the various environmental crises, starting with smoking, which I hated with a passion. I had ended up directing religious education in a small rural Catholic parish in Colorado and being a pastoral musician, and sometimes riling certain parishioners with my environmental views.
When I moved back home to be with my dad after Mom passed in 1998, he was still, at age 84, going in to his old office at NPS to work on RAFOS data being transmitted by satellite. Then I got to make up for lost time in finding out more about his views—to some extent.
The one closed door was global warming. He would say little about what the RAFOS was all about. As far as I can tell, the new Argo system was already in place, with similar floats, but aiming at much broader goals. He never mentioned it, even though the companion institute involved with it, Fleet Numerical, was right down the coast.
I couldn’t mention the word “climate” without his refusal to discuss further.
The irony here is that he had to have known most of the various players you mention in Merchants. Undoubtedly he accompanied some of them on various trips and met with them. Yet, having associated with some of the pioneers in climate research, he ended up in total opposition to the idea of global warming, unwilling even to discuss it (and he was not one to avoid a discussion).
This book has uncovered for me at least part of the answer to that question. He never mentioned Nierenberg, that I recall, but he would have sided with him against Revelle, I am sure. His arguments would have been that the evidence was not strong enough to justify the means needed to make the needed changes.
You have identified the real issue here. Dad supported the market over government regulation. He and Mom were Regan conservatives, but even after the War, when I first became cognizant of politics, he was dead set against Truman, to the point that Mom told me not to mention “the president” in Dad’s presence. I’m sure the New Deal was similarly abhorrent to him.
As a Catholic high school student taught by surprisingly liberal nuns, I came home with thoughts that did not fly at our dinner table. Once, in a table conversation that sent my mom away in tears, Dad called me a “danged Communist.” That was the Cold War era, and my parents were as paranoid against creeping Communism as anyone. You point out that it is still the fear of socialism that motivates many of the fears of government regulation.
I will always honor my parents. My dad was a pioneer in oceanography in a real sense. His life bridged the eras from the days of manual collection and measurement of oceanic data to the present day of automated floats and satellite transmission. He was directly involved with all of that. Even as his work undoubtedly contributed to the present research leading to understanding of global warming, he himself was unable to embrace its conclusions. I hope he is in a place where that knowledge is accessible to him on a new plane.
In any case, I will continue to sing the praises of Merchants of Doubt and hope to write more about it in my blog. No matter which side of this issue one lands on, it is important to understand what the real issue is and to own that.
I would like to see in its message a bridge even to the late Pope Benedict, and plan to reread Laudato Si in this light as well.
Thanks for your great research and eye-opening writing!
Sincerely,
Frances Rossi
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