When should you stop doubting? For a magazine like Prospect, one tempting answer is “never.” Our purpose is to get behind the crude simplifications and shrill certainties of the headlines. The same curiosity that compels thoughtful minds to interrogate what exactly they’re sure of is a great spur in driving forward the frontiers of knowledge. But scepticism shorn of method can unravel into the sort of paranoia and delusion on display on websites devoted to Holocaust denial or the anti-vax cause.
In the run-up to COP26, the world’s great Glasgow gettogether to tackle what most scientists call a climate emergency, I’ll admit to some nerves about getting into the question of what’s truly certain about global warming. What if airing a scintilla of sincere but ultimately misplaced doubt encourages the world to continue in dangerous denial? Against that, any sense that there are uncertainties too dangerous to share with the public will itself do tremendous harm: recall the mostly unjustified hoo-hah a few years ago when hacked emails between University of East Anglia climate researchers found them privately conversing in terms that they wouldn’t have used in open forums. American knownothings like Sarah Palin were soon penning op-eds claiming that the hack had peeled away a veneer of certainty and proved there was no consensus.