The Norm Chronicles (16 page)

Is that status deserved? If we think so, we need to say why, without saying that it is because drugs are more harmful, since harm alone doesn’t bear the weight of opinion. Quantifiable risk is not the answer.

The final warning comes from Dr Watson as he witnesses his friend Sherlock Holmes indulging in a (then perfectly legal) drug, in
The Sign of Four
:

‘But consider!’ I said, earnestly. ‘Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?’

10
BIG RISKS

K
ELVIN PEELED AWAY DOWN
a steep path, marched to the door, scuffed to a stop, and knocked. Norm scampered after. He had a low opinion of people who disagreed with him. Dodgy motives the lot. Climate change was an excuse for wacko eco-zealots to tell you what to do. Activists were control freaks, and Greenpeace gave him Tourette’s. As for all that stuff about polar bears … blackmail with a furry animal.

‘And whales should be used up,’ Kelvin said. ‘Why not? We need soap.’

A woman in a wide skirt, hazy through frosted glass, swayed down the hall, the latch clicked, the door half-opened, and through the gap came a cautious smile with a grey bob, somewhere in her late sixties.

He and Norm were in one of those bad first jobs that people do who are desperate for a first job, trudging door to door, hating suburbia, failing to drum up business and putting the world to rights instead.

Norm had dared to suggest that majority opinion accepted the case for anthropogenic climate change and Kelvin should consider the balance of probabilities, but Kelvin said that only showed people were f… wits, and to prove it…

‘Good afternoon, my name is Mr Poe,’ said Kelvin, offering his hand through the gap. ‘And this is my associate, Mr Edgar.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘From London Zoo.’

‘Oh?’

‘You’ll have seen the programme – on the television last night.’

‘Which one was that?’ ‘About the zoo. The penguins.’

‘I watch the BBC. For
EastEnders
.’

‘Of course. But you’ll know, you’ll have heard about the penguins.’

‘Well, I don’t know. What about the penguins?’

‘Being closed.’

‘Closed?’

‘That’s why we’re here. Closed down. Climate. Habitat. It’s an absolute urban heat sink in Regent’s Park, you know.’

‘Oh. What will they do?’

‘Quite. That’s why we hope you can help. That’s what the appeal is about.’

‘An appeal, I see.’

‘You’re most understanding,’ said Kelvin, who advanced like a vicar to the needy and took her hands. ‘And you do have a nice bit of garden at the back there, high up, flood-free.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, letting go of his hand.

‘There you are then. Just right isn’t it, the garden?’

‘Well, I like it.’

‘Excellent. I’ll put you down for two.’

‘Two?’

‘In the morning.’ ‘I’m sorry, I’m not buying …’

‘No, no, they’re free, completely free, though in the circumstances you’re the generous one.’

‘Well I, I don’t …’

‘No need to worry, full instructions with every penguin. About eight o’clock all right?’

‘Well, no …’

‘Two penguins to number 17, Mr Edgar.’

‘What?’

‘Penguins, Mr Edgar.’

‘There’s been a misunderstanding. I’m sorry …’

‘Plenty of shade,’ said Kelvin turning away. ‘And they like muesli.’

‘But I eat corn flakes.’

‘Cornflakes will do. But not too much or they get fat. Come, Mr Edgar, sixty-four to go.’

With a nod: ‘You’re so kind. The penguins will be most happy here.’

He marched.

‘No, you can’t …’

Up the path, Norm trotting after.

‘Really. This can’t … excuse me …’

Brisk, ‘You!’ … and ‘You!’ … gone.

At 08.39 GMT the following morning Richard Kowalski of the Catalina Sky Survey made observations using the Mount Lemmon 1.5-metre aperture telescope near Tucson, Arizona.

He was puzzled. The potential near-Earth object SO43 didn’t seem to be quite where he expected. An error, probably. He emailed the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to let them know they might like to check the data.

WHAT DOES SUCKERING
an old lady about penguins have to do with big risks like climate change?
*
Plenty. But to see it, we have to step outside our own beliefs about these risks. So, just for a moment, forget whatever you think is the truth about climate change and accept that, as risks go, opinion touches the extremes – from nothing much to worry about, to the end of life as we know it. Is global warming a hoax, as Kelvin thinks? Or are we going to fry? People disagree.
†

One side say the great majority of scientists who study climate change think the planet is genuinely warming, that people are responsible for it, and it’s serious. The sceptics on the other side are wrong, conspiracy theorists, nutters in the pay of … etc.

Sceptics like Kelvin appeal to science too, and return the abuse. The great majority of proper, competent, honest scientists think human-made climate change is hot air, they say. The rest are conspiracy theorists, nutters, in the pay of … etc.

They say this about even the most basic question of the lot: is the world getting hotter? Forget whether people are responsible for it, or what to do about it, just that simple, measurable detail: is the world getting hotter? Still people disagree. Still they think the science – the real science – is on their side.

Which is not to argue that climate change is all a matter of opinion. But it does show how opinion about danger can work wonders with much the same evidence. So what drives the views people take about what ought to be – in an argument where everyone says evidence is paramount – basic scientific facts?

We could say the answer is trivial and obvious: that everyone is biased. People see what they want to see, scientific facts included. But the beginning of a more interesting answer is that the facts as we see them about big risks like climate often depend less on the facts than on who we are. Kelvin’s politics, love of freedom, irritation with government, tendency to risk-taking and impulsiveness, even his loathing of the conformist wasteland of suburbia, are not coincidentally linked to his beliefs about the facts of climate change. They directly contribute to it. They also feed his scorn for people who can be taken in by the ‘lies’ of the other side. That is, our views of the facts about big risks are often prompted by our politics and behaviour, even as we insist that the rock on which we build our beliefs is scientific and objective, not the least bit personal, even as we swear we believe what we believe because it’s true, why else? At least, that’s the story we tell ourselves. It’s everyone else who is swayed by personal and political baggage, and the story we tell of them is about their stupidity and corruption.

But it is not just the evidence offered by the other side that we dislike
or disagree with; it’s what those facts seem to tell us about the other side’s whole political make-up. That’s why Kelvin feels free to be rude to an old lady: if she’s willing to believe all this penguin shite, she’s probably a socialist.

We have already said, in the chapter on drugs, that values can drive people’s sense of risk. Climate is in some ways similar, but a tougher case to prove, since few people are willing to admit that their views on the risks of climate change, or even the basic fact about whether the world is getting hotter, arise from their political make-up. But that is the argument we will consider in the chapter.

A quick word of caution: if you think climate change is proof that cherry-picking scientific evidence is typical only of the political right, hold fire. Those who study these habits say all sides have them, depending on the risk at issue.

A common belief among scientists is that people who seem to them to hold views inconsistent with the evidence simply need enlightening with the facts. But, if the argument in this chapter is right, their attempt will fail and probably backfire.

Here’s how the process works. Because the climate is a huge, complicated system, it is impossible to be certain what it’s up to. Persuaded, yes; certain, no. And the smallest doubt creates room for disagreement. This is where values creep in. To see how, let’s take a quick digression via engineering at the micro scale known as nanotechnology – ‘grey goo’ to its critics. What do you know about nanotechnology? If the answer is anything like as much as MB and DS, not much: a bit of rumour, a bit of mystique, a lot of syllables.

Next question: how do you
feel
about nanotechnology? Again, if you’re like most people studied on this question, despite an absence of facts you will probably have a view: ‘excited’ maybe, or ‘anxious’. You may even have a few speculative reasons for the way you feel. Go ahead, be our guest, sound off, ignorance is no bar. Most of us do to some extent. We form our initial opinions about danger with the haziest grasp of the known facts.

Dan Kahan, at Yale University, leads what he calls the Cultural Cognition Project, studying how people form opinions about risk
²
Kahan
tells the story of the reaction in 2006 of the city authorities in Berkeley, California, to a proposal by the university for a nanotechnology research facility:

Having never heard of nanotechnology before … the city’s hazardous waste director immediately commenced an inquiry … ‘We sent them a bunch of questions starting with: “What the heck is a nanoparticle?”’ Regulators were quickly able to learn that, but not much more: ‘The human health impacts of nanoparticles’, the city’s Environmental Advisory Commission reported, ‘are very complex and are only beginning to be understood.’ Nevertheless, citing concerns that nanoparticles might ‘penetrate skin and lung tissue’ and possibly ‘block or interfere with essential reactions’ inside human cells, officials concluded that a precautionary stance was in order.
³

Knowing next to nothing, the city regulator still formed a view about the risks. He could decide, as he did – as can any of us – that things are risky until there’s a hint otherwise. Or he could have decided that things are safe until there’s reasonable evidence otherwise. So what made him jump one way rather than the other? Not the evidence, says Kahan, there wasn’t much, either to suggest that nanoparticles were dangerous, or that they were safe. The deciding factor was his cultural disposition.

Funnily enough, whatever people’s first instinct about risks like this, more information only seems to confirm it. Kahan and his associates went on to question another 1,800 Americans about nanotechnology, discovering that it was their visceral, emotional response, pro or con, that determined how risky they thought it and that these views generally only hardened the more they learned, suggesting that when we claim to take a provisional view it is often a pretence to others and maybe to ourselves that we’re open-minded when our opinion is already a closing door, swung not by facts but a set of prior cultural attitudes.

Kahan’s work suggests that people tend to assimilate new knowledge ‘in a manner that confirms their emotional and cultural predispositions’. In other words, they filter the facts to suit their beliefs and instincts
from the first. Belief doesn’t simply follow fact, belief decides what the facts are. So, is nanotechnology dangerous? Ask instead: ‘How do you feel?’

Sometimes people say that they just don’t know what to think, it’s all too complicated. So we turn to the experts. But still we decide – who’d have thought it? – that most experts give answers consistent with the way of life and politics we happen to like, and we do this by picking and choosing who qualifies as an expert. If you’re a hippie with a wild beard and I’m a suit with a short hair-cut, I’m less likely to rate your qualifications, whatever they are. We judge the experts’ expertise according to whether they seem to be people like us, people who share our cultural outlook. Again, Kahan’s experiments seem to confirm this. He shows people pictures of made-up experts – including one with a wild beard and another with a suit and short hair-cut – all with impeccable academic credentials, to see what it is that people recognise as expertise. They choose carefully. Social psychologists call this biased assimilation. Being the serious sort of person who reads books like this, you’re above all that, of course. Except that Kahan finds that, the more scientifically literate people are, the more they do it.

He argues that we can all be placed on a spectrum of attitudes and beliefs,
⁴
*
and once he knows how you feel about nanotechnology, he has
a good idea how you will feel about the risks of climate change, nuclear power, gun control and so on. What’s more, he says, you will believe, wherever you stand, that the true scientific consensus – not the nutters and conspiracy theorists – is with you. This is what Kahan means when he talks of cultural cognition.

One way of classifying people is to put them on a line that runs from ‘individualist’ to ‘communitarian’. Individualists tend to dismiss claims of environmental risk, ‘because acceptance of such claims implies the need to regulate markets, commerce, and other outlets for individual strivings,’ says Kahan, just as Kelvin doesn’t believe the Green movement because he thinks that every time it sees a crisis it starts telling people what not to do.

Communitarians, on the other hand, resent commerce and industry as ‘forms of noxious self-seeking productive of unjust disparity, and thus readily accept that such activities are dangerous and worthy of regulation’, says Kahan.

None of this is unfailingly accurate, of course; there are plenty of exceptions. We are not arguing that climate-change sceptics have a monopoly on rudeness. But part of Kelvin’s reason for rejecting climate change is that he doesn’t like the political colour of the solutions, which tend to mean more government, more regulation, more criticism of private enterprise. And if that means more control, it can’t be true. Those on the other side, Kahan would say, believe what they do about climate change not necessarily because they’re more scientific, but also because this gives them a chance to kick private enterprise.