George Will on Climate Change

A friend writes:

Back on July 31, 2015 you posted about “Even the Elites Can’t Escape the Global Community, Living As It Does on One Small Planet.” You mentioned going to your next college reunion in June 2017.

Well that’s come and gone, and you probably have forgotten any discussion with George Will.  Yet I wonder how it went. Has he opened his mind any further? Did you ask him if he owns a Tesla yet? What were his thoughts about the electrification of transportation? Planes, boats (even the US Navy is on board!), semi’s, beyond just cars and light duty trucks.  Some people simply say “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts!” I frequently encounter such people and wonder how to approach them. I’m always curious how others deal with such souls.

Unfortunately, George Will couldn’t attend, so I can’t answer your excellent question with personal experience.

He does, however, continue to write op-eds in the Washington Post that are syndicated worldwide and backed up by his television appearances, continuing to promote his position of climate denial.

My personal take on this strange phenomenon is that accepting the reality of human-caused climate change means accepting the legitimacy of government, as that’s the only conceivable way to deal with the threat. That’s what get Will involved; accepting that government plays an important role in our lives is a non-starter for him.

I listened to a fabulous interview the other day with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, best known for his seminal work in behavioral economics. The essence of his thinking is that the reasons we use to support our beliefs have very little to do with logic and rationality. Our core beliefs are more or less fixed, as they are forged out of experiences in life, where the modes with which we justify them are transient and relatively unimportant.

Until I understood this, George Will’s mere involvement in the subject of climate change mystified me. I used to mock him, with words like, “The world is very lucky to have a guy who majored in religion to guide us through the complexities of physics and geology. It’s hard to know what we’d do with a newspaper columnist with no scientific training to show us where tens of thousands of climate scientists are all made such grievous mistakes.”

My best guess is that world’s coastal cities will all be underwater before George Will puts science before his ideology.