“Experts” Don’t Know How Ignorant They Are

Ever since I was young, I have enjoyed reading science fiction. Some of its attraction is the escapism it offers, but also the artistry of those who can envision a world where some things are very different but which seem to make enough internal sense to suspend disbelief and care about the characters. It also sometimes connects to or echoes recent “real world” circumstances (see my “The Road Back from Interstellar Serfdom,” for example). Another example involves the novel Variable Star (2006) by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson.

After previous enjoyment of Robert Heinlein’s work, another work—compiled after Heinlein was dead—caught my attention. It had come from incomplete notes for a book that were found in Heinlein’s papers, which his estate commissioned Spider Robinson to complete and turn into a book. A certain passage (pp. 194-195) seems to describe a good deal of the green movement in recent years. And, just as in the situation in the book, it can lead to results far better to avoid than to experience:

The characteristic flaw…[was] the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed… Over and over…they developed the imbecilic idea that they understood nearly everything.

[Unfortunately] the explanations kept falling apart at the first hard-data-push…yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.

They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data.

That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model…something as inconceivable complex as…a national economy, a weather system.

They made solemn announcements…on the basis of computer models which they had produced…[but] they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. (emphasis added)

Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge and couldn’t deliver. The disaster those errors led to in the book reminded me of the importance of correcting such missteps before disasters strike. It also reminded me of the extensive work The Heartland Institute has done in rebutting many fallacies, flaws, and misinterpretations that have been visited on the public by those promoting the green agenda.

Heartland’s contributions to straightening out the many things that have been twisted in environmental discussions are far beyond the scope of this short article, but one can get a very good idea of their extent from merely scanning the titles of their Climate Change Weekly (CCW) articles. It is worth reading the articles because, as in Variable Star, being wrong in this area can have very severe consequences. To avoid such harms, we must remember the well-worn adage that in making policy, “good intentions do not guarantee good results,” because false premises and faulty logic can often undermine—and even override—desired results.

Consider just the following titles from some CCW articles from roughly a year. It is far from complete, but it strongly reflects Variable Star’s conclusion that “they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were”:

River Action Muddies CO2 Attribution Claims (6/26/25)Polar Ice Is Not Following the Climate Crisis Narrative (6/20/25)New Proof That Urban Heat Islands Bias Surface Temperature Measurements (6/5/25)IPCC Climate Models Aren’t Useful for Forecasting (5/30/25)New Volcano Discoveries Upend IPCC’s Human-Caused Climate-Change Narrative (5/30/25)Current Climate Conditions Aren’t Historically Extreme or Unusual, New Research Shows (5/8/25)United Nations IPCC Hid the Medieval Warm Period (5/2/25)Climate Change Wildfire Role: Not Statistically Significant (4/11/25)Crops Doing Fine, Increase in Social Cost of Carbon Calculation Was Unwarranted (3/7/25)Global Greening Due to CO2 Enrichment Reconfirmed (1/17/25)Bad Estimates of Solar Activity and Temperatures Undermine Climate Change Projections (12/19/24)Oceans Remove More Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Believed (12/19/24)Climategate Revisited: 15th Anniversary of Climate Hoax Exposure (12/5/24)Plants Are Using Much More CO2 Than Climate Models Assume (11/7/24)CO2 Saturation Refutes Temperature Forcing Fears (11/7/24)Climate Models Are Wrong: No Warming Surge Since the 1970s (10/24/24)Aging Equipment Is Biasing Surface Station Temperatures Upward (10/24/24)Claims of Increasing Climate Change Disasters Are False (9/27/24)Twenty-First Century Warming Driven by Cloud Decline, More Sun—Not Carbon Dioxide (9/12/24)Hunga Tonga Eruption Behind “Record” Warming (8/23/24)Temperature Changes Drive CO2, Not the Other Way Around (8/1/24)Carbon Dioxide Levels and Warming Aren’t a Problem, New Study Says (7/11/24)International Climate Conference Debunks Science and Policy Consensus Claims (6/28/24)

These and other Heartland efforts have done a much better job of “following the science” than those who constantly hectored us to do so, while frequently torturing science until they could reach their desired conclusions. Given the great deal of opposition from such groups that has generated, Heartland’s authors frequently qualify as brave in our cancel-culture world as well.

The above list left out my favorite example, which arose somewhat earlier. It is highlighted in my article “An Infrared Picture is Worth a Thousand Words,” about inappropriately-located weather monitoring stations. It is my favorite because it shows how unserious people are about their premises when they rely on wildly inaccurate data as if it was true in a very creative way that lets you actually see the biases via infrared pictures.

While this article concerns the hubris of this “characteristic flaw” of assuming “vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed” in environmental areas, and applauding the Heartland Institute’s efforts to bring real science to those issues, such hubris also applies more generally to government policies. It is, in fact, the “fatal conceit” that Friedrich Hayek found throughout central planning in society. The better we recognize the flaws of central planning in one area, the better we can recognize its flaws elsewhere. As surrounded as we are with a cornucopia of government intrusions, it helps to remember Hayek’s insight from The Road to Serfdom that “the more [and more and more] the state ‘plans’, the more [and more and more] difficult planning becomes for the individual.”