While as a society we continue to grapple with issues related to the environment and more particularly issues related to the climate, we are told that there is a consensus among scientists on such matters and that questioning the orthodoxy of the left makes one a "science denier". I admit to being a skeptic, and it seems to me that science is fundamentally skeptical, always questioning, always demanding proof for any hypothesis.

I recently read two articles that made an impression. The first was published just days ago for the June issue of The Atlantic magazine, and while I generally discount that publication, this article titled "The Peculiar Blindness of Experts" was intriguing. The article recounts the debate in the late 1960s between biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon about the future of the human race, sparked by a book written by Ehrlich in 1968 called "The Population Bomb". According to Ehrlich, by 1968 it was already too late to avert a global apocalypse caused by human overpopulation. According to Ehrlich, it was a mathematic certainty that the food supply could not keep pace with the exponential growth of the human population and that the resulting wars, famine, and disease would extinguish the human race. According to Ehrlich's book: "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Ehrlich advocated extreme "population control" measures. His predictions were questioned by economist Julian Simon, and the two experts famously made a bet of $1000 as to whether Ehrlich's doomsday prediction would prevail over Simon's assessment that technology and more people with more good ideas would win out by the year 1990. As noted in The Atlantic article, "Ehrlich got smoked". Whereas in the 1960s, the death rate from starvation on a global basis was 50 out of 100,000, by the 1990s that percentage had declined to 2.6 out of 100,000. After looking at the track record of other experts in other areas such as science, economics, and politics, the takeaway from The Atlantic article is that such experts are routinely "wildly wrong in their predictions". Despite his failed predictions, Ehrlich is still very well regarded as a scientist.

The second article I read recently was in LiveScience and was about Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier. Until recently, scientists studying global-warming pointed to the shrinking Jakobshavn glacier as an unarguable example of the consequences of climate change caused by human activity. Recently, however, scientists realized that instead of shrinking, the glacier is actually growing. According to the LiveScience article, the finding took the scientists completely by surprise. "At first, we didn't believe it," lead researcher Ala Khazendar, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years." Now, scientists speculate that the glacier is likely growing due to colder ocean currents, but there is no way to know with certainty. It seems reasonable to acknowledge that there are factors that influence the climate that is not fully understood, even by people who make the study of such matters their profession.

The point of both articles cited above is that the opinions of "experts" are often wrong. Policies predicated on expert opinions and assumptions deserve to be viewed with great skepticism, particularly where those policies (think the so-called "Green New Deal") use the façade of science to require citizens to sacrifice more and more personal freedom and individual liberty, and consign our fate to unelected bureaucrats and "experts" who write regulations.