Climate Change and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Two prominent minority beliefs are:

  • that climate change is not substantially due to human activity, and
  • that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were an inside job by agents of the US state.

Differences

There are few people who hold both of these beliefs. This is hardly surprising, given the political leanings of those who typically hold each belief:

  • climate change deniers tend to be sympathetic to established authority, whereas
  • 9/11 conspiracy theorists tend to be critical of established authority.

There is another difference:

  • a sizeable proportion of authoritarian reactionaries are climate change deniers, but
  • only a tiny minority of anti–authoritarians are paranoid 9/11 conspiracy theorists (i.e., those who believe that the attacks were the result of an inside job rather than an external conspiracy).

Similarities

There is one element which ties the two beliefs: their rejection of expert opinion.

The central claim of the majority of paranoid 9/11 conspiracy theorists is that the World Trade Center buildings collapsed in a way that could not have happened without sabotage. Experts in building science, or at least those who bother to deal with the conspiracy theories, are overwhelmingly of the opinion that the collapse of the towers can indeed be explained without requiring sabotage.

The more paranoid September 11 conspiracy theories and theorists are probably considered unimportant by most building scientists. Climate change deniers, however, are dealing with the central aspect of the relevant experts’ work. All of these experts have an opinion on the matter, and they are overwhelmingly opposed to the deniers’ claims.

What Should You Do If You Are Not An Expert?

The only rational approach to any question on which you are not an expert is to reflect the balance of the experts’ opinion, while recognising that this balance may change depending on new evidence and analysis.

To do otherwise is to guess at an answer. You may as well toss a coin. For any objective question about how the world is, answers arrived at by guessing are worthless, even if they turn out to be correct.

On some topics, expert opinion may be equally divided. This does not mean that you, as a non–expert, are justified in picking one expert opinion over another. That would be to guess; in such a context, guessing is irrational. A rational response would be to say that, for example, there is a 50% chance that this explanation is correct, and a 50% chance that that explanation is correct.

In other cases, such as the climate change question, expert opinion is very strongly with one side rather than another. It may turn out that the current majority opinion becomes unreasonable in light of new evidence. This does happen, but only in a minority of instances. In that case, it would be irrational not to change your non–expert opinion to reflect the new distribution of expert opinion.