Most notably, scientists, like people, are social. If they exist in a social or professional circle that believes X, it is hard to say not-X; if they have professed to believe Y, they won’t want to look silly and admit not-Y. It might even be hard to get research funded or published if it isn’t in line with what the wider group believes.

All this makes it very hard, as an outsider, to assess some scientific claims. You can ask some expert, but they will be an expert within the social and professional milieu that you’re looking at, and who will likely share the crony beliefs of that social and professional milieu. All of which often makes it hard to disentangle why scientists do and say the things they do. Especially when it comes to scientific claims that are politically charged, claims on hot-button topics like race, sex, poverty — and of course climate.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I was reading Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled. Koonin is (as it says, prominently, on the front of the book) the “former Undersecretary for Science, US Department of Energy, under the Obama administration”. The publishers are obviously very keen to stress the Obama link: “…under the Trump administration” might not have carried the same heft.

Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be. The book itself is best thought of as the extended version of that op-ed, with added graphs.

We can break down his thesis into, roughly, three areas. One, is that despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence. In particular, floods, rainfall, droughts, storms, and record high temperatures have not become more common, and although the climate is unambiguously warming and sea levels have gone up, it’s hard to confidently separate human influence from natural variability.

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 Two, he says, climate models are highly uncertain and struggle to successfully predict the past, let alone the future, so we shouldn’t trust confident claims about the climate future. And if we do accept the IPCC’s predictions, they aren’t of imminent catastrophe. Instead, they point to slow change which humanity can easily adapt to, and, broadly speaking, to humanity continuing to prosper.

And three, he continues, there is basically nothing we can do about it anyway, partly because carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for so long, but mainly because the developing world is developing fast, and using ever more carbon to do so, and actually that’s a good thing.

These are — according to Koonin — all, by and large, only what the IPCC assessment reports and other major climate analyses say. The public conversation, which he says is full of doom and apocalypse and unwarranted certainty, has become unconnected from the state of the actual science. And he blames scientists — and policymakers, the media and the public — for that disconnection.

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So is he right? Certainly he has a case when it comes to Point One: I think he is correct that the media narrative about climate change is not especially well correlated with the IPCC’s own central assessments. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that the recent floods in London, China and Germany have been held up as examples of a changing climate. But the IPCC’s most recent assessment report, 2014’s AR5, found studies showing evidence for “upward, downward or no trend in the magnitude of floods” (see p214 of the AR5 Physical Science Basis document; be warned it’s a big PDF), and concluded that they were unable to be sure whether, globally, river floods had become more or less likely. 

Similarly, I think there is a perception among many commentators and policymakers that storms, hurricanes, and droughts are all more common as a result of climate change, but the IPCC’s own report (see p.53 of AR5) has “low confidence” that those things are more common than they were 100 years ago. I know some scientists think the IPCC is overoptimistic, but it is the closest we have to consensus climate science.

That said, there is some fairness in accusing Koonin of cherrypicking. He spends a lot of time arguing about extreme daily temperatures, convincingly (to my mind) debunking a claim in the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR), the flagship US government climate science assessment, that US extreme daily temperature records have gone up. In fact, CSSR is comparing the ratio of extreme high temperatures to extreme low temperatures, and what in fact has happened is that extreme low temperatures have become less common. Which is interesting.

But the IPCC does think extreme daily temperatures have gone up globally (see p53 again). In his chapter on “Hyping the Heat”, Koonin doesn’t mention the IPCC, and the IPCC outranks the CSSR. His detective work is interesting, but he is fighting a henchman, not the end-of-level boss. Maybe the IPCC is wrong as well, but we don’t learn that here.

On Point Two, I don’t feel competent to assess the models; certainly it seems highly plausible to me that there are enormous uncertainties in predicting something as inherently chaotic as the climate, especially when to do so you first have to predict something as inherently chaotic as people. But my non-expert understanding is that broadly speaking the models have been getting it about right. 

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That said, I think he is right that, if you were to ask the average person in my social circle, you would hear that climate change will lead to catastrophe in the near future. And I think that is overstating what the IPCC reports actually say. For instance, it is true that the IPCC predicts more people will go hungry than otherwise would have: it says that almost 140 million children will be undernourished, in a world where climate change goes unmitigated, compared to 113 million in a world where there is no climate change (see p730 of this IPCC report). But that is still fewer than went hungry in 2000 – almost 150 million, out of a much smaller population. The IPCC predicts that a world with climate change will be worse than one without; but not so much worse that other things, such as economic growth and technological progress, won’t broadly keep the big things, like life expectancy and human health, improving. That does seem worth saying.

And Koonin’s Point Three is worth making too. If India were to increase its per capita emissions to those of Japan, “one of the lowest emitting of the developed countries”, he says, then that change alone would raise global emissions by 25%[1.  He’s right. Japanese people emit about nine tons per capita, and Indians about two, so if 1.3 billion Indians started emitting seven extra tons a year, that’d be about nine billion tons on top of 2019’s 38 billion or so]. Realistically, we’re not going to be able to stop India — or China, or Brazil, or Mexico, or any of the other middle-income countries — from developing, and development at the moment means carbon. 

More importantly: we don’t want them to stop developing. Richer countries have healthier, longer-lived citizens and are better able to cope with a changing climate. Even huge, swingeing cuts to Western emissions — politically unrealistic — would only go some way to offsetting the inevitable growth in the developing world. Those cuts may be worth doing, but there are limits to how much good they can do.

But even if Koonin is right about almost everything — if the best guess of the science is that we’re heading towards things merely getting better more slowly, rather than getting worse — then I think he’s missing a major point. That is, climate change models are uncertain. In fact Koonin claims they’re even more uncertain than we think. So they could easily be erring on the side of optimism.

And the one thing we should have learnt from the Covid pandemic is that it’s not enough to say “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, so let’s act as if it’ll be fine.” The correct thing to say is “the most likely outcome is that it’ll be fine, but if there’s a 10% chance that it’ll be completely awful, then we need to prepare for that 10% chance.” Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world reduces the chance of some unforeseen but plausible disaster: as a happy bonus, it makes our cities more pleasant places in which to live. It will come at some cost, but hopefully not too high, because green technology is getting so cheap and effective these days.

Reviews by climate scientists have been unimpressed. “I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist,” starts one review, which goes on to not ignore it. Another accuses him of cherry-picking his fights (not entirely unfairly, as I said). A third says the book is “distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified”. 

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But none that I’ve read really addresses the nitty-gritty of his arguments — which is hard to do in a 900-word review, of course, but still. They usually pick some line out of the first chapter or two, disagree with it, and then say the whole book is therefore rubbish. But I wanted a bit more meat to the objections. 

The third review, for instance, quotes Koonin as saying “The warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” and then asks “According to what measure?” Well, Koonin tells you the measure, at length: absolute record extreme daily temperatures. Maybe he’s wrong, but he does answer that in the book. (And your next sentence is “Highest annual global averages?” He’s talking about the US! You just quoted that bit!)

Similarly, it complains that Koonin says that the sea is only rising about a foot per century, saying “The trouble is that while seas have risen eight to nine inches since 1880, more than 30 percent of that increase has occurred during the last two decades.” But again: Koonin addresses this, for pretty much an entire chapter. His point is that most of the rest of the rise came during an (unexplained by climate models, according to him) period of rapid warming from 1910 to 1940, before human influence should have been relevant. That, he says, is good evidence that natural variation is driving the current acceleration. Is he right? I don’t know. But the reviewer is not attacking Koonin’s argument at its strongest point. 

In fact, none of them seem to: they just want to dismiss the book. They attack Koonin’s credibility and credentials, his temperament. They say he was only hired by the Obama Energy Department because of his contrarian views; they call him a “climate denier”, which seems de trop since he accepts most of the central claims of the climate consensus. The response felt more like a circling of the wagons than a serious effort to counter a serious argument. After all, it is unpleasant to hear reasons why you might be wrong about something: cognitive dissonance is painful.

I started this book confident that climate change is a serious concern, and I finished it only slightly less confident; Koonin has not persuaded me. But I’m glad Unsettled, flawed though it is, has been written. As I said at the beginning, science in a politically charged environment is very hard to assess. Scientists are as prone to groupthink and motivated reasoning as anyone else, and I know very well that there are some who feel they need to keep heterodox views quiet. The reviews, which make so little effort to engage with the substance of the arguments, do not reassure me that climate science is a uniquely groupthink-free discipline.

One thing Koonin suggests is a so-called “Red Teaming” of climate scientists: getting scientists to act as adversarial critics of the existing consensus, a method used by superforecasters, among others, to improve their accuracy by actively hunting out flaws in their reasoning. Science can only progress if assumptions are tested. Red teams in climate institutions — any institutions — seem like a good idea, and I’d support them.

Whether it’s possible or not, of course, is tricky to say. The climate debate is so highly charged, so borderline toxic, that it might be difficult for any climate scientist to take on the red-team role without making their own life more difficult. According to Koonin, one senior climate scientist told him “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.” The old “in my emails, everyone agrees with me” line is hardly a new one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a bit of truth in it.

But if the Catholic Church was able to stomach someone advocating for the Devil, then climate science should be able to stomach one doing it for the sceptics. And in the meantime, this book does an acceptable job.

I was surprised by it, not because I believed the numbers, but because I was surprised that anyone believed the numbers. A moment’s thought — simply dividing the second number by the first number, something you can do in your browser search bar in under five seconds — would have told you that this implied the UK TTI system cost 15,000 times what the Irish one cost. Surely, put like that, it is unbelievable. But two thousand people retweeted it, and six thousand pressed “like”, so presumably most of them did not check.

In case you’re wondering, the problem was that the tweet compared the cost of the Irish TTI app with the money the British Government had put aside for the entire costs of TTI, including, for instance, the wages of the contact tracers; a fairer comparison would be with the £640 million or so that the Irish government will spend in total. It’s pretty obvious that the UK TTI system has been an expensive failure, but this comparison is specious.

You see these things all the time — claims about the world which a moment’s checking would reveal not to be true, and yet which people do not bother to check. It reminded me of something I read in Tim Harford’s recent book, How to Make the World Add Up. (Which is, it pains me to say since it’s on a related topic to my own upcoming book, excellent and interesting. Do me a favour: if you buy it on the back of my recommendation, at least buy mine as well.)

Harford points out that quite often, we aren’t all that interested in being right — or, rather, in having true beliefs. “Maybe this sounds absurd,” he says. “Don’t we all want to figure out the truth?” But often, believing things that are true is of much less importance than believing things which are socially acceptable. He gives the example of climate change, and farmers in Montana. Montana is a conservative, Republican-voting state; climate change is a politically charged term. 

Montanan farmers see the impacts of climate change all the time, in failed crops and bad harvests. But expressing a belief in climate change comes at a social cost — a Republican farmer could easily be ostracised by her friends if she does it. There is essentially zero cost to saying the opposite, though, because — even if climate change is real — what can you, as one of nearly eight billion contributors to it, actually do? 

The negative consequences of socially unacceptable beliefs are large, immediate and close; the negative consequences of objectively false beliefs are often negligible. “With a handful of exceptions — say, if you’re the president of China,” says Harford, “climate change is going to take its course regardless of what you say or do. From a self-centred point of view, the practical cost of being wrong is close to zero.”

If you are — as I am — a firm believer that climate change is a real and pressing concern, then it might be easy to dismiss this as simply “the climate deniers are at it again”. But we all do it. For a significant percentage of the things we believe, we care less about whether they are true than about whether they are socially acceptable.

Kevin Simler, co-author with Robin Hanson of The Elephant in the Brain, wrote a wonderful blog post about this a few years ago, looking at what he called “crony beliefs”. 

Our brains, he says, work to establish true beliefs about the world. If there is a tiger in the bush, it is important to establish a belief that there is a tiger in the bush, in order not to get eaten by the tiger. Less dramatically, if planting crops in March gives the best harvest, then it is important to establish a belief that planting crops in March gives the best harvest. True beliefs help us to stay alive, feed ourselves, that sort of thing.

But that’s not all they do. Simler draws a comparison with employees at a company in a town called Nepotsville, where, in order to do business, everyone knows that you have to hire people who are well-connected to the city council. 

“In this environment,” says Simler, “Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political.” Pragmatically, you need to do good work and finish it on time so that people hire you to do more. So you need to hire qualified workers and fire the ones who are underperforming. You need to act as a meritocracy.

But politically, you need to keep the council sweet, so you need to engage in what Simler calls “cronyism”. You need to hire, say, the Mayor’s nephew, even though you know him to be a useless layabout, because if you don’t, the council will make life difficult for you.

Someone looking around the office, not knowing how things work, might be surprised to find — scattered among the competent, hard-working employees — several nose-picking simpletons who, for some reason, have never been fired. They are surprised because they wrongly assume that those people are there to do work, rather than to provide political cover.

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“I contend,” says Simler, “that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyse them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been ‘hired’ not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.”

So as well as meritocratic beliefs, which are about establishing true facts about the world — the best time to plant seeds, the presence or otherwise of a tiger — you have crony beliefs, which are intended to win you political or social credit. Simler quotes Steven Pinker: “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.”

Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast distinction: it’s not that all crony beliefs are false. For instance, as Harford says, while the Montanan farmers might be ostracised for professing a belief in climate change, someone in Portland, Oregon — or north London — might be ostracised for saying it’s a Chinese hoax. As it happens the north Londoner’s belief might be objectively true, but it would still be socially unacceptable not to believe it. By analogy, you might hire the Mayor’s nephew, and then it might turn out that he’s really good at his job. But he still provides you with political cover. 

Everyone has crony beliefs, on left and right; we all believe things, or at the very least profess them, because it is socially advantageous to do so. A left-wing equivalent of the climate change belief might be the claim that IQ is pseudoscience, for instance. 

That said, I suspect that people differ in the extent to which they are comfortable with them — as John Nerst points out here, the social category “nerds” is defined, partly, by “a concern for correctness over social harmony”, with a tendency to blurt out socially uncomfortable facts at inappropriate moments. By implication, then, most non-nerds are concerned with social harmony over correctness, and so will be more likely to believe things that are objectively false but which make living in society easier. (This makes sense to me. One of my own very proudest moments as a nerd was when the quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson reviewed my first book and said that it had the rare quality of trying to assess ideas on “a scale from true to false, rather than from quirky to offensive”.) Still, we all have them. 

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Spotting them is hard, and Simler makes a few suggestions: if you get angry when someone tries to correct your belief, that’s a sign that it may be a crony one. You wouldn’t get angry if you said “The Liverpool game kicks off at 7:45pm” and someone said “actually no it’s 8pm” — you actually need that information to make plans. But if you said “the 2019-2020 Liverpool team is the greatest club side in history” and someone replied “actually no it’s the Ipswich Town 2000-2001 team,” you might angrily defend Liverpool’s claim, if in fact you were using that belief to profess membership of a group — if it was acting as a crony. Similarly, if they’re vague and abstract, with few real-world consequences, that’s another warning sign.

A need to constantly proclaim your belief might be another point. You don’t need to go around telling people that you believe that your car needs petrol to move; that belief is boringly pragmatic, designed solely to help you get from A to B. But you might go around loudly comparing mask-wearers to Nazi collaborators, if the point of that belief was to demonstrate that you are a member of the Lockdown Sceptics tribe. (The reverse is also true. I might make loud public noises about masks being good, because the tribe of which I am a member is pro-mask. It feels like I genuinely believe that masks are good, and I think the evidence is very much on my side — but I imagine that’s how it feels to the Nazi-comparing chap I just mentioned. Crony beliefs can still be true, remember.)

The obvious question is what my crony beliefs are. But our brains have a whole array of tricks to keep us from noticing our own false beliefs; I don’t suppose I am going to be very good at spotting my own. My greatest concern is over things I’ve previously confidently proclaimed – for instance, that social media probably isn’t causing a wave of teen suicides and that there probably isn’t an epidemic of loneliness. If either of those turn out to be false, I’ll look silly, so it’s socially important for me that I continue to believe them. My repeated claims that the world is getting better and that we are generally becoming less bigoted as time goes on are the sort of things that could be cronyish, although – obviously – I do actually think that all of these things are true.

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To return to the Irish TTI tweet, it seems pretty obvious, to me, what was going on. The tweet wasn’t true, but it signalled something that people wanted to express — that the Conservative government is incompetent and corrupt, funnelling money to its friends rather than trying to save lives. The belief, like Montanan farmers’ professed belief that climate change isn’t real, costs nothing or next to nothing in real terms — if you are wrong about the cost of TTI, it will make no difference to any decision you have to make. But if you hang around in left-liberal social circles, then signalling that you think the Tories are bad is socially advantageous, and saying “hang on a minute, actually” will only lose you friends. (Believe me, I know.) 

Assuming you do want to believe things that are true, Harford has recommendations: one key one is observing your own feelings about some claim, and seeing whether it makes you feel angry, or happy, or vindicated, and if it does, to wonder whether you believe it because you think it’s true, or you believe it because it’s socially advantageous. Simler, meanwhile, suggests that since crony beliefs are driven by social incentives, the trick is to create social incentives for believing true things. He points to the rationalists, a group of online nerds, as one group who are obsessed with being “less wrong”, and who have created a community where you are rewarded for obeying norms of truth-seeking and debate, rather than for believing specific things.

I hope these tricks work. In a world where thousands of people can believe that the UK TTI system is 15,000 times the price of the Irish one, we need all the help we can get.