Most of the work was statistically weak, he found, conducted on small samples of a few hundred people. Benjamin calculated that scientists could legitimately conclude almost nothing from those studies. It was a black mark on a charged discipline, one that invariably brings up the hoary nature-nurture debate and past associations with eugenics.

Benjamin wanted to do more, however, than just criticize the field—though he did that well, especially in a joint review paper published last year. That’s why he and several other researchers began, two years ago, the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, a group dedicated to pooling data in search of genoeconomic insight. To find any legitimate links, they decided, they had to increase their study size to at least 100,000 people.

Building such a sample is difficult, at least for now; given the amount of genetic sequencing under way, that could change in a couple of years. Across 42 data sets, however, the group did find one variable that was consistently collected in genetic-sampling studies around the world. It was a variable that had existing methods for translating national differences. And it was one likely to have at least some small link to your genes.

It was how far you had made it in school.

The consortium—also led by David Cesarini, an assistant professor at New York University’s Center for Experimental Social Science, and Philipp Koellinger, an associate professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam—has now released the first major paper from its work, published on Thursday by Science. The researchers screened 126,559 people for the study, finding three robust regions in the human genome that connected, in a microscopic way, to educational attainment.

How small? For perspective, the largest link they found could account for only 0.022 percent of the variation in the subjects’ educational advancement, drastically smaller than the largest genetic influences found for, say, height, where one gene might explain up to 0.4 percent of the variation. Over all, the genome variants the researchers surveyed could explain, combined, 2 percent of their subjects’ educational success.

The group’s work is both a negative and a positive finding, in a way. It supports the researchers’ assertion that work finding large genetic ties to human behavior is likely to be flawed, while still compiling the hard statistics needed to justify their field’s existence. In effect, it argues that genoeconomists are ready to play at a higher level, and everyone should start listening.

There’s much to take from the group’s work, and I encourage you to read the study and, more important, a series of questions and answers written by Benjamin and his colleagues. But perhaps the most important lesson for the public is this: There will never be a “gene for educational success” or a “gene for entrepreneurship,” just as there will never be a “gene for intelligence” or a “gene for personality.”

“You just shouldn’t believe anything that says it’s the ‘gene for education,’” Benjamin says. That’s true for pretty much any human trait, down to height and weight, but it applies doubly so for socioeconomic outcomes. “The effect for any gene is going to be vanishingly small.”

This is old news for genetics researchers, who have been wrestling with that reality for the better part of a decade. Genes are great at predicting what proteins the body will make, but they are far, far removed from human behavior, and every step along the way, their influence is weakened by a host of environmental factors. There is no linear chain that runs from, say, genes to personality to educational success; when such connections exist, they form, at best, a dense web.

Even the parts of educational success that can be tied to genetics—given a larger sample of one million people, Benjamin expects the number could rise from 2 percent to 12 percent or so—can still be deeply influenced by the environment. Take the example of phenylketonuria, a metabolic disorder, caused by a single mutation, that makes it impossible for the body to use an amino acid, leading to mental retardation. It’s a disease mediated by the environment; early detection and strict dietary guidelines ultimately allow its victims to lead healthy, normal lives.

What would be a somewhat analogous scenario for educational success? This is purely hypothetical, Benjamin stresses, but say there’s a gene variant that increases the likelihood to read books, and it is the reading, in turn, that helps determine scholastic futures. (I said it was hypothetical.) We could still encourage kids who don’t have the variant to read, raising their chances of educational success. Nothing would be predetermined.

Benjamin hopes the new study will also help with a sort of reverse engineering, pointing back to areas in the genome connected with traits closer to biology than whether you graduated from high school. Indeed, the researchers found the same genetic regions, in a pool of Swedish soldiers, explained 3 percent of the variation in their skill on intelligence tests—more than it did to explain their educational path. That finding seems to support the notion that cognitive abilities are one strand in the long web between genes and graduation. That distance could also help explain why the individual effect sizes for educational success are so tiny; each step away from genes reduces their influence. But that’s far from proved.

So what use is the work? It would be incredibly helpful in designing studies of social interventions, like providing universal preschool or offering prenatal care to poor women. Those social experiments are so expensive that studies of them are often small in number, but if you could remove the genetic effects, that could provide a huge boost to their statistical power. That’s what gets Benjamin truly excited about the work.

Beyond that, members of the group are quite explicit about what lessons public-policy experts should take from their work: none at all. Given the limited genetic influence, even if Benjamin and company do tick it up to 12 percent, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to predict people’s educational future with their genome sequence. Don’t expect to see such a genetic test appearing on college-admission exams. (Sorry, Gattaca fans.)

There’s another hypothetical Benjamin uses as our phone call wraps up, about how the environment can influence genetic connections. Imagine if you ran a genetics study of college-completion rates 100 years ago.

“You’d find a very strong effect,” he says, “of the number of X chromosomes you have on whether you’ve completed college.”

There was the half-day session on “Building a Better Psychological Science,” which featured several scientists who have raised alarms about the field in the past two years, including Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. And for the truly self-flagellating, Scott Lilienfeld, of Emory University, had the talk for you: “Why Many Laypersons and Politicians Don’t View Our Field as Scientific,” its subtitle went.

Perhaps it was because of this doubtful swirl, or because of the holiday weekend, and knowing those crisp flags would be snapping over Arlington Cemetery, across the river, but I was drawn to another talk. Col. Paul Bliese, a leading U.S. Army psychologist, was speaking in a small side room on what the military has done for the mental health of the more than two million veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I wasn’t the only one drawn to the session. The walls were lined with people, many of them young. The director of the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Bliese had short-cropped hair and spoke in a staccato beat. He warned the crowd that his talk had an ulterior motive: the importance of “small acts of randomization.” He seemed bemused at the attention, and apologized for not having a mic.

First, it’s no surprise that the wars, punctuated by the explosions of roadside bombs, have had a steep cost for the mental health of veterans and service members. As early studies have found, before deploying, about 6 percent of soldiers had mental-health problems; after deployment, that increased to 20 percent, Bliese said. Many have suffered from posttraumatic-stress disorder, or PTSD, itself a wily, variable disease.

In the wars’ early days, the treatment for soldiers returning home was a bare-bones debriefing, or perhaps a cathartic sharing of trauma stories. “The norm had been: Here’s behavioral health, here are the symptoms of PTSD,” Bliese said. “We thought we could do better.” He and other scientists at the Walter Reed center could reframe the regular world, encouraging soldiers to “use the skills they’ve got in a way that would help them make this transition better.”

This gave rise to what the Army called, until recently, the “battlemind” debriefing, for small and large groups. Looking past the ominous name, the training emphasizes adapting military skills to civilian life. For example, soldiers are accustomed to strict accountability for even slight infractions; at home, the training advises, accountability is now to your family, and minor mistakes—someone touching your things?—must be tolerated.

Bliese was adamant that, before the Army adopted the training, it had to be tested. “As research psychologists, we’ve been very consistent about talking to the Army about the need to establish efficacy,” he said. “Pretty much anybody can cook up a resilience training in their basement with PowerPoint, but until they actually get out there and do a study and show they have any efficacy, we shouldn’t as an organization buy it.”

They ran a randomized trial on 1,060 veterans, testing their debriefing versus controls on returning platoons. After four months, they found that veterans who underwent their training had lower rates of sleep disorder, depression, and posttraumatic-stress disorder; the largest benefits went to those who had seen the most combat.

Researchers at the Army center have replicated the work, Bliese added, as have researchers in Britain. The latter study did not find a lower rate of PTSD, but given the already-low rates for British soldiers, there was not necessarily much room for improvement.

Last year a psychologist at Harvard University, Richard J. McNally, cited the battlemind program as one reason rates of PTSD among veterans of the wars, while still high—4.3 percent of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have had the disorder diagnosed—are far less than initial fears, and memories of Vietnam, suggested they would be. McNally provocatively titled his paper, published in Science, “Are We Winning the War Against Posttraumatic Stress Disorder?”

Unfortunately, not every psychological program adopted by the Army has been held to the same randomized rigor. An audience member asked Bliese about the service’s controversial Comprehensive Soldier Fitness effort, or CSF, which pulls on aspects of positive psychology in training soldiers to build “resilience” before they deploy. (My colleague Tom Bartlett covered the controversy over CSF in 2011.) Since the military’s leadership instituted the program everywhere without any testing, it will be difficult to show if it has had any helpful, or harmful, influence, he said.

There have been other failures in rigor, too, Bliese said. The Army has sent teams of psychologists to Iraq and Afghanistan 12 times to study mental-health problems. But until 2007, that effort consisted of “convenient samples,” surveys of soldiers they could easily reach. Their work had become so high profile, though—Gregg Zoroya, a reporter at USA Today, knows to hassle Bliese each year for their reports—that the studies needed to be designed with more rigor. The researchers at Bliese’s center rebuilt the sampling effort, and then found, for example, that soldiers with difficulty in reaching mental-health professionals was not 16.4 percent, as they said in 2007, but 31.9 percent.

A longtime associate editor at the Journal of Applied Psychology, Bliese called on his fellow researchers, civilian and military, to build more chances for randomization into their organizations. Too many papers he reads are purely descriptive, he said. The researchers can do better.

The science demands it. And the veterans deserve it.

David Ferguson and his colleague Sebastian Watt (above) learned a lot from Chilean road cuts, some striated with layers of basaltic scoria.

If there’s a lesson David Ferguson has learned in his early years as a volcanologist, it’s this: Always carry a big hammer.

“You just have to pound away, smash as much rock as you can,” said Ferguson, a postdoc at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “There’s nothing more frustrating than having gone all that way and then you discover your hammer isn’t big enough.”

He will need that persistence as he taps away at one of the most vexing problems in volcanology: Does the rock hold evidence that climate changes have, over time, caused a surge of volcanic eruptions?

The idea does sound implausible, Ferguson acknowledged during a visit I made to his office, crowded with boxed basalt and pumice. Open plastic bags of ash wafted a dusty patina onto his desk. He was dressed in tortoise-rim glasses, a thick, multicolored sweater, and jeans. His monitor was propped up on a thick black hardback titled Volcanism in Hawaii.

“Climate causes volcanoes to erupt. What? It kind of blows your mind,” he said in his Scottish brogue. “It’s fascinating to think that the atmosphere can change what’s happening in the earth.”

Fascinating, and not new. Geologists have speculated for decades that past periods of warming, through the melting of glaciers, might have spurred a newly eruptive era. This is a simplification, but it can be understood as a matter of pressure relief: Taking that icy load off the land may make it easier for magma to surge out. In some situations, it might even cause even more melting.

“If you remove a large ice sheet, then the amount of work required to crack that rock suddenly becomes a lot less,” said Ferguson. “Maybe it’s already got the energy to do it.”

Problem is, eruption records get spotty as you move back in time. “Unless you have Pliny the Younger watching or something, you’re never going to know it happened,” said Ferguson, who studied geology at the University of Oxford. By 20,000 years ago, it’s likely that only 1 percent of actual eruptions are captured in the scientific record.

Nonetheless, a pair of geologists at Harvard University published an influential paper, in 2009, charting a rise in volcanic activity two to six times above background levels, beginning 12,000 years ago. Eruptions, they argued, track the wax and wane of the ice ages.

It was a provocative hypothesis, and it might be true, Ferguson said. But it lacked much empirical evidence that the melting of an ice sheet had caused more eruptions in most of the world’s volcanoes.

Such evidence does exist in one spot: Iceland. There’s a solid chemical and stratigraphic record showing that the island experienced a volcanic surge after its ice sheet retreated. But Iceland is a geological freak, its volcanism driven by a hot spot and the rifting of tectonic plates. (It even has a word for the flash floods caused by ice-covered eruptions—jökulhlaup.) Ninety percent of the world’s volcanoes do not resemble those of Iceland; they are instead found at subduction zones, where one plate slides under another.

“If there is a good link, that’s where we need to find it,” Ferguson said.

That’s why, this January, he hauled his hammer, previously applied at Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano and Ethiopia’s rift valleys, on a three-week trip along the northwest coast of Patagonia, near the far tip of South America, accompanied by Sebastian Watt, a geology postdoc at the University of Southampton, in England.

Once smothered by a mile-thick ice sheet, Chile’s volcanic rim runs along a north-south axis of shifting climes, making it a natural experimental test bed. It’s also a good example of volcanism driven by subduction, as the Nazca and Antarctic plates slide under South America. (Subduction causes flux melting, the dynamic driving most of the world’s volcanoes.) Geologists had tried to find evidence of a climatic influence on its eruptions, but no one has nailed the problem.

There have been two ways of measuring a region’s volcanic history. One involves coring the sediment beneath lakes to pull out layers of volcanic ash, called tephra. But there’s no guarantee that a lake will catch every eruption. Winds shift, and plumes can travel vast distances. “They love that in Chile,” Ferguson said. “They love to tell you that if there’s an eruption, the Argentinians will get it.”

The other method “involves studying a volcano to death,” mapping the volume of each lava flow, he said. Such a study can take five years, if not longer, under good conditions—and, well, Ferguson is a postdoc. His financing runs on a year-to-year basis. On a less pragmatic note, glaciers are naturally erosive. How much lava did they scour away into the Pacific? Hard to say.

Kayaking through Patagonia’s fjords, Ferguson chose a third option: the cinder cones. Stratovolcanoes are often flanked by small hills, miniature volcanoes, really, formed by short bursts of magma, often active for only a decade or so. The cones tend to be made of primitive magma, frozen mineral slurry that closely resembles what’s found down in the mantle. It’s heavy, uniform—Ferguson hoisted a slab in his office—and boring. He counts on that dullness to make it easier to date.

Cones aren’t easy to find. Take two identical hills, cover them in dense forest, and it’s nearly impossible for the layperson to tell which one was created through eruption. Ferguson won’t pretend he has found them all. “Probably there are loads more that we just didn’t spot,” he said.

There were moments of serendipity. The region’s main road was being paved, plowing a series of road cuts through the rock. Geologists love road cuts. “A proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth,” John McPhee wrote. Ferguson and Watt clung to the roadside, chipping out bits of basaltic scoria. “It’s not the most pleasant place to do fieldwork—but the exposure, you can’t beat it,” Ferguson said. In a few years, those sites will be overgrown, essentially lost to science.

It’s too early to say if Ferguson will succeed. He has rocks and will scan them, sorting their ages by measuring potassium’s radioactive decay into argon. “The best case would be a proof of concept that there’s a good link between glacially driven decompression and volcanic eruption,” he said. “That would be the best-case scenario.”

There’s a broader scenario, too. That 2009 study laid out a hypothesis that volcanoes are important for helping the earth escape its ice ages. Primarily, ice ages are controlled by small wobbles in the planet’s rotation, known as Milankovitch cycles. But it’s possible that an increase in volcanic activity, and the carbon dioxide that volcanoes belch, hastened the arrival of our current interglacial period. A study late last year, published in Geology, found some support for that idea in the ash record of the Ring of Fire, the volcanic activity that rims the Pacific. Some of the best paleocarbon modelers, in Switzerland, have also found it plausible.

Then there’s the question that naturally follows this work: Human beings are causing global warming right now. The glaciers are sulking back from the valleys. Does that mean human-caused warming will result in a noticeable surge in volcanic eruptions?

Don’t believe anyone who tells you they have an answer. It’s possible, to some small degree, but as one study from 2010 concluded, no one can really say. To find out, researchers need expeditions like Ferguson’s. “There may be some interesting links to climate change,” he said, “but mostly what we’re doing is understanding earth in the long run.”

“Volcanoes are the way you build material from inside the earth to the exterior,” he said. “They are why the earth is like it is—why we have a mantle and lithosphere. Because the only way to move material from inside the earth to outside is to melt it.”

Finding a global control on volcanism, Ferguson said, “is an important part of understanding the dynamic history of the earth and why the earth is like what it is.”

Which seems enough.

[Photo courtesy of David Ferguson]

In April of last year, Bard College devoted a three-day* conference to the role of metaphysics in science and religion, prompted by the “reflections flowing” from Birnbaum’s books, according to a program e-mailed to participants from prestigious institutions including Dartmouth, Grinnell, and Oxford. “We are especially pleased to announce that David Birnbaum will be present during discussion,” the program enthused.

Left unmentioned was that Birnbaum helped finance the conference, that he has no academic affiliation, and that his works are published by an entity that he himself runs, called “Harvard Matrix” or “Harvard Yard Press” or, as sometimes printed on the spines of its books, simply “Harvard.”

So who is David Birnbaum?

Well, he is a man with many Web sites, including Womb1000.com, Philosophy1000.com, and Potential1000.com. He is a very successful private jeweler to Hollywood stars who deals in diamonds worth millions, according to this clip from a 2004 television show. And he is a man who, while not a philosopher by training (he has an M.B.A. from Harvard, the university for which he named his publishing operation), is very much interested in answering life’s big questions and “cracking the cosmic code.”

I skimmed the two volumes of Summa, as Birnbaum usually calls it, and dipped into his other books, including God’s 120 Guardian Angels and Cosmic Womb of Potential. Here is a representative excerpt from Volume II of Summa:

DIVINE POTENTIAL ignites the “journey” from
“POSSIBILITY”
through
“the METAPHYSICAL”
onward through
“REALITY”
and onward through ever-ascending levels of
“CONSCIOUSNESS”
and presumably toward
INFINITE DIVINE EXTRAORDINARIATION

While it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how that unites religion and science, the author does not suffer from a lack of energy or confidence. Curious assertions and koanlike queries abound. The approach to capitalization is idiosyncratic, and the line breaks are seemingly random or, if you like, poetic.

I learned about Birnbaum after following up on an odd post on a philosophy blog, Leiter Reports. It seems that a letter announcing a book of essays on the work of David Birnbaum was mailed to roughly 2,000 philosophers around the world. That letter stated that Garry Hagberg, a professor of philosophy at Bard, was a co-editor of the book.

This was news to Hagberg, who issued a statement explaining that this was not the case. He had never agreed, he said, to help edit a book on Birnbaum’s writing. Hagberg had agreed, mostly as a favor to a colleague, Bruce Chilton, to serve as co-chair of the conference last April—the one prompted by “reflections flowing” from Birnbaum—but Birnbaum’s metaphysics didn’t strike Hagberg as terribly metaphysical. “His work so far as I can see does not (this is description, not criticism) intersect at any point with what the discipline of philosophy considers to be within the field of historical or contemporary metaphysics,” he wrote in an e-mail to me.

Birnbaum has since promised to stop using Hagberg’s name in conjunction with the book project, though in an e-mail sent to The Chronicle it sounded more like Birnbaum was graciously releasing Hagberg from a commitment, something the professor said is not true. Hagberg called the idea that he would endorse Birnbaum’s writing by co-editing a scholarly volume on it “a kind of defamation by implication.”

A virtual program posted on David Birnbaum’s Web site bard1000.com

So maybe there was a misunderstanding. There are worse things than a mix-up over who is editing a book.

But it does seem hard to fathom why Bard College would play host to a multiday conference prompted by the self-published work of an amateur philosopher. Chilton, a professor of religion at Bard and executive director of the college’s Institute of Advanced Theology, organized the conference after a chance meeting with Birnbaum. When I asked what he thought of Birnbaum’s work, he replied: “I would refer to his work as being, at the very least, interesting.” Would Birnbaum’s work have merited a conference if he hadn’t helped pay for it? Chilton said yes. He declined to say how much Birnbaum had donated, noting that it was college policy not to release such information.

I spoke to several of the conference’s participants, including Tammy Nyden, an associate professor of philosophy at Grinnell College, who called the conference “so bizarre.” She felt hesitant about the invitation to begin with, but because it was taking place at a venerable institution like Bard, she decided to go. The conference covered expenses, and it sounded intriguing. But she thought it strange that almost no one attended the presentations, and she was surprised to come across a pile of T-shirts with Summa Metaphysica, the title of Birnbaum’s two-volume work, printed on them. Her brief interactions with Birnbaum did not put her at ease. “It was a very weird experience,” she said. “He keeps saying he has this unifying principle, and it’s ‘potentiality,’ and that’s the most sense I can make out of anything he’s said.”

Nyden’s presentation, on theology and physics in the 17th century, did not touch on Birnbaum’s work, and she said she found talking with fellow presenters “delightful.” Her impression of Birnbaum’s involvement was less favorable: “Here’s someone with a lot of money, and they’re buying a lot of legitimacy.”

Like Nyden, Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, found the experience unusual, calling it “definitely, absolutely the strangest conference I ever attended.” Also like Nyden, Gleiser gave a talk that had nothing to do with Birnbaum’s books, which he only briefly scanned. “I looked at the book and said, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’” Gleiser recalled. He said he and other invitees had developed a theory about the conference. “What the conference was about was trying to give credibility to this person’s book,” he said. “We were appalled by it because, frankly, it was a lot of nonsense. He was a very wealthy fellow, and we had no idea what he was talking about.”

For his part, Birnbaum believes such criticism to be evidence of academics circling the wagons against an outsider with threatening ideas. In an e-mail he employed the prose-poetry approach of his books:

The story is about
‘the club’
militantly
resolutely intent on quashing
any/all intellectual overtures
not coming from ‘the club’

I asked him if calling his operation Harvard Matrix (or “Harvard Yard Press,” as he called it last year) might cause confusion with the actual Harvard University. Birnbaum pointed out to me that he is a graduate of Harvard University’s business school and that he includes disclaimers in his books. One volume, for instance, says the publisher “operates independently of Harvard University.”

“There is no possibility for any reasonable person who has opened up a Harvard Matrix book or site to believe that Harvard Matrix is Harvard University-sponsored,” Birnbaum wrote.

Harvard University seems to disagree. I sent a spokesman for the university a link to the site and received the following response: “We are aware of this infringement of the Harvard trademark and are evaluating appropriate steps to address it.”

Bard now also seems to have concerns about how Birnbaum has portrayed his connection to the college and used Bard’s trademark. After a site called Bard1000.com was brought to the college’s attention, Mark Primoff, the university’s spokesman, said Bard would contact Birnbaum and ask him to remove it and other similar material. The university issued the following statement: “It was never the college’s intention for this conference to serve as platform for any particular person to promote their own work. In no way does the fact that we held this event mean that the college endorses the work of any individual, or supports any efforts on their part to use our name and good reputation for personal or commercial purposes.”

During the conference’s final panel, which you can see on YouTube, Birnbaum held forth on what he said was the importance of his books. He acknowledged that he was not a “famous academic” and that he had not “proven every last iota of my theory.” But he said he believed he knew why organizers at Bard would hold a conference prompted by his work. “They did not go out on a limb here with their credibility or Bard’s credibility because I wrote a paper,” he said. “They went out on a limb here for only one reason: that I might be right.”

UPDATE: Garry Hagberg points out that the conference was not actually “weeklong” as Birnbaum describes it in the virtual brochure above (and as I originally wrote) but actually lasted from a Monday evening to a Wednesday evening.

Students gather and read in the courtyard of the mosque at Al-Azhar U., in Cairo, where the country’s top clerics teach the next generation of religious leaders. (Thomas Brown)

Muslim clerics hold a lot of power. As interpreters of the Koran, they issue religious rulings, or fatwas, that can sway millions of people. Yet in the study of religious extremism, remarkably little work has been done to determine why some clerics become radical and others do not.

Rich Nielsen, a doctoral student at Harvard University, aims to change that. His dissertation, Clerics of the Jihad, explores that question by poring over the scholarly works and biographies of high-profile clerics. His conclusion: It’s all about career opportunities. Those with poor networks are much more likely to preach extremism.

“Jihadi ideology is often perceived to be the result of immutable, irreconcilable conflicts between fundamentalist Islamism and Western society,” he writes. “But my findings suggest that this interpretation, while rhetorically convenient for actors on both sides, is mostly false.”

His research is getting a lot of notice among political scientists. If clerics are indeed swayed by professional incentives, that could have significant implications for policy makers. For example, Arab governments might find employment opportunities more effective than prison in their efforts to tamp down radical clergy.

Terrorism experts have their doubts about Nielsen’s conclusions, but they say his methodology could be groundbreaking.

Nielsen, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in government, says he came to the question after running into a genre of Web sites known as fatwa banks. Fatwas are nonbinding legal rulings issued by clerics on all aspects of Muslim life, private and public. The online repositories are vibrant and growing sources of guidance for millions of Muslims who, he notes, aren’t averse to shopping around for rulings that appeal to them.

Nielsen, who studied Arabic as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, had an interest in Islamic radicalization, and these writings called out for analysis. Unlike many academics who study religious extremism, he is “a numbers guy,” he says, with a master’s in statistics. So he designed a method to mine thousands of texts for jihadist ideology.

He focuses on a group of about 100 Arab clerics who, through fatwas, articles, and books, have a significant online presence. He looked particularly at Salafi clerics, conservative Islamists who follow a strict interpretation of the Koran.

Rich Nielsen, a doctoral student at Harvard U., proposes that Muslim clerics with poor job prospects are more likely to preach violence. (Scott Brauer for The Chronicle)

He collected their writings—nearly 30,000 documents in all—and ran them through his text analysis, searching for words commonly found in a separate collection of jihadi texts known as the “Mujahid’s bookbag.” They include words like “apostasy,” “jihad,” “infidel,” and “killing.” Each cleric then received a score that indicated how extreme, or not, his writing was. Nielsen checked the scores against a list of known jihadi clerics to determine the accuracy of his rating system.

From there he built out a biography for each cleric. Again the Internet proved useful. Clerics typically publish brief biographies, describing their training, their teachers, and their appointments.

Supplementary information came from online bulletin boards where people looking for information about a cleric might ask others about his background. With those materials, Nielsen was able to map the clerics’ educational and professional networks.

He added other potentially explanatory variables to his model, such as how well versed they were religiously, how much exposure they had had to the West, whether they came from clerical families, and a measure of their poverty.

But when he ran the numbers, he found that the best predictor of whether clerics became radical or not was what he called their “network centrality.” The more educational and professional connections a cleric had, the less likely he was to preach violent jihad.

Why is this? Nielsen notes that in Arab countries, religious institutions are largely state-run. Anyone who wants to make a career within those networks would be committing professional suicide by preaching violence. And the incentives to work within the system are considerable: a steady job, reputation, and other perks.

That hit home during two monthlong stints in Cairo, where he spent most days inside the mosque at Al-Azhar University, one of the most esteemed Islamic institutions in the world, listening to top clerics teach and talking to students.

“Being in Ali Gomaa’s crew is really the way to move up right now,” one student told him. “That’s how you get appointed to teach, how you get a position” in the Egyptian fatwa ministry, “which gets you a nice car.”

Jihadi clerics, Nielsen theorizes, may become radicalized because their weak connections force them to work outside the system. Unable to get government jobs, they must build a following. And the most available source of new followers are Salafi Muslims, who dislike mainstream Islam. The more one is seen as theologically independent, the more one gains credibility, the theory goes.

Nielsen’s model finds that someone with a good network and an insider job is only 5 to 7 percent likely to preach jihad. That likelihood increases to 50 percent for someone who has no academic network to speak of and works completely outside the system.

Nielsen says his model probably overestimates the likelihood that someone who works outside the system will turn to jihad. Plenty of clerics toil in obscurity, their work mainstream but not publicly available.

“The ideal thing would be to trace cohorts of entering students and see what happens to them,” he says. “But that’s very difficult.”

While far from conclusive, Nielsen says, his research knocks down some stereotypes: for one, that clerics who preach violent jihad are ignorant.

“A lot of non-jihadists will say, ‘Look, these guys are hacks, they don’t know what they are saying. They’re just kind of losers.’” But when he looked at their abilities and educational records, he didn’t find any differences. “So I don’t think this is about ability.”

“I can’t go anywhere and meet an American political scientists without anybody asking me what I think” about Nielsen’s paper, says Thomas Hegghammer, a leading expert in terrorism and political violence. He is a fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Hegghammer thinks the appeal of Mr. Nielsen’s research is that it’s counterintuitive, although he himself doesn’t buy the conclusions. “In the particular paper I’ve seen, I don’t think he proves the argument he’s making,” says Hegg­hammer, who is also a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

“There are alternative hypotheses that he doesn’t consider and for which we don’t have good data, such as economic situations, geographic origin, tribal origin, level of education in the family—all of the normal things that determine what students study,” Mr. Hegghammer says.

But he applauds Nielsen for his methodological rigor. “My concern at this stage is that the data he feeds into the methodology isn’t good enough. It doesn’t mean that the methods themselves aren’t worth developing. This is a classic case of an opportunity for collaboration between a method specialist, like Rich, and a qualitative researcher who knows more of the empirics. It’s really hard to do both.”

William McCants, an expert on Al Qaeda, terrorism, and Middle Eastern politics with CNA, a nonprofit research organization, also has mixed feelings. On the one hand, he doesn’t think Nielsen’s analysis reflects what is known about jihadist ideology. (McCants produced the “Militant Ideology Atlas,” which Nielsen used to check his own work.)

“Just the very utilitarian nature of picking up the ideology doesn’t make sense,” McCants says, adding that it could be quite likely that the causality is backwards: “Were they on the outs because they developed extreme views, or did they develop extreme views because they were on the outs?”

Still, he says, “the nice thing about Rich’s paper is that at least it puts down a marker. He’s not throwing out more untestable hypotheses.”

Nielsen acknowledges in his dissertation that his research couldn’t capture every factor, and he sees it as a work in progress. “I hope there’s an army of graduate students who say, ‘Wow, this is terribly flawed. I can do better.’” he says, with a laugh. “And I salute them.”

Correction (5/23/2013, 10:45 a.m.): This post originally included a misworded description of a stereotype about clerics that Nielsen says his research knocks down. The stereotype is that they are ignorant, not that they are not ignorant. The text has been corrected.

My friend’s 8-year-old son had an interesting day at school recently. During science class, the teacher—who, it should be noted, was a substitute—asked the third graders to name the habitat of an animal of their choice: the sea for sharks, trees for squirrels, etc. My friend’s son picked a house because, as he explained to the teacher, human beings are animals too. The teacher corrected him. Humans, she said, are not animals. “Yeah, they are,” the boy replied. “No, they’re not,” she told him, as he recalled later in an interview. “I go by the Bible.”

I don’t think the Bible is clear on this classification, but that’s beside the point. The boy did not back down, continuing to insist that humans are, in fact, animals, a fact he learned years ago from his parents, who told him about evolution. Not content with dispensing inaccurate information, the teacher referred to him as “the professor” for the rest of the day. Because there’s nothing like a supposed educator mocking a third grader for being smart.

It goes without saying that all of us are part of the kingdom Animalia, even grievously misinformed and mildly obnoxious substitute teachers. We’ve also learned in recent years how much we have in common with our fellow animals. For instance, mice make humanlike faces when they’re in pain. We share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors too. We carry smartphones and are better at foosball, but that’s about it.

By arguing that human beings are not animals, the teacher may have been inadvertently revealing something about herself other than her ignorance. In a 2010 study, Kimberly Costello and Gordon Hodson, researchers at Canada’s Brock University, had subjects read short articles about humans and (other) animals. One group read an article that emphasized differences (“due to their cognitive superiority over animals, humans are able to inhibit their basic instincts …”), and another group read an article that emphasized commonalities (“like humans, other animals possess the capacity to make choices, create their own destinies, and understand abstract concepts including cause-and-effect relationships”).

So the researchers were trying to find out whether the second article made people more sympathetic toward animals, right? Actually, they had a more intriguing idea. They wondered if reading about human-animal similarities might make the subjects more sympathetic toward fellow humans. And, as it turns out, it did. After reading the articles, all subjects completed a survey to determine their attitudes toward immigrants, agreeing or disagreeing with assertions like “immigrants are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights.” Those who read the article emphasizing that humans are like other animals were less prejudiced, as measured by this test, toward immigrants. From the paper: “As anticipated, outgroup dehumanization appears rooted in the perception that humans are different from and superior to animals.”

Realizing that humans are animals may make us more tolerant and, in a sense, more human. Plus it just happens to be true, as a certain plucky 8-year-old will gladly inform you.

Above all else, Charles D. Keeling was fastidious with his data.

A couple of years ago, I found myself on assignment at Mauna Loa Observatory, the U.S. weather station perched just below the summit of a Hawaiian volcano. Spurred by Keeling, a longtime climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this lab—still not much more than a bunch of prefab white containers sited below lava breaks—has measured the accretion of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 55 years. When Keeling began, those concentrations sat at 315 parts per million. That’s an idyllic level by today’s standards.

Indeed, as you may have heard, the CO₂ monitors at Mauna Loa will soon reach—if temporarily—400 parts per million. They’ve already touched 400 ppm for at least an hour, and it’s likely that a daily average will top that level as well this month. (Stations in the Arctic touched 400 ppm last year.)

Thanks largely to human burning of fossil fuels, the planet is wrapped in greenhouse-gas levels it hasn’t experienced in the past four million years or so. Keeling’s chart has risen and risen, showing no sign of stopping; its annual average was up 2.66 ppm in 2012. Each year is a new milestone.

But as I’ve watched the incipient coverage of 400 ppm, I’ve also found myself wondering: Would Keeling, who died in 2005, be promoting this figure just yet if he were still alive? Are we all just a bit premature in this?

During my visit to Mauna Loa, woozy from the altitude, I shadowed John Barnes, the lab’s station chief, as he gave a tour to 13 Quebecois students. Whipped by the Big Island’s winds and harsh sun, we huddled in the shade of solar telescopes. With little water vapor or particles in the air, the peak of Haleakalā, Maui’s eastern volcano, was clearly visible 87 miles away. “Just the fact that you can see it tells you something about how clear the air is,” Barnes said.

We stepped into the lab’s original building, erected in 1956. Back then it took five hours to reach the lab by jeep, climbing 11,000 feet up the volcano’s pocked moonscape. (It still takes a couple of hours and a sturdy suspension.) It was a worthwhile ascent. When the sun sets, the black rocks chill and the air subsides, carrying a bit of the central Pacific atmosphere through sampling pipes and, eventually, into the lab.

As it is at nearly every remote station, space was at a premium, and we walked through a narrow hallway cluttered with abandoned equipment. Halfway down, Barnes stopped, pointing at Keeling’s wall-mounted CO₂ chart, known today as the Keeling Curve.

“It’s really an amazing data set,” Barnes told the students, “because it was showing, here we are out in the middle of the Pacific, 4,000 kilometers from cities, and we’re seeing the atmosphere being affected by fossil fuels.”

Most impressive about Keeling’s work was how quickly he made his case, Barnes continued. Almost immediately, Keeling showed that global CO₂ levels wane and wax each year as trees and plants in the Northern Hemisphere take in carbon to build out their leaves and stems. As that biomass decomposes, the subsequent exhalation peaks in May, making that month the CO₂ record’s leading indicator.

Within five years, Keeling had definitively shown that the CO₂ level was going up. It was a testament not only to how quickly human beings were dumping the gas into the atmosphere, but also to his experimental skill. (Modern scientists marvel at Keeling’s dedication, sharing his detailed instructions on, say, taking CO₂ field samples in Antarctica.)

Still in the hallway, Barnes looked down at a nondescript box, packed with vacuum tubes and metal cylinders. “This is his instrument down here,” he said.

At all times, Keeling had a cylinder filled with pure nitrogen and a precisely measured amount of CO₂ available, Barnes said. Every half-hour, his sampling tool would switch tasks, sniffing this reference tank, allowing a quick gauge of whether the device, which measured CO₂ by how much infrared light it blocked, was drifting. The lab used the same measuring system, vacuum tubes and all, for decades, until it was well outdated, to ensure continuity in the record.

“He really got very good data,” Barnes said.

There was more on the tour: a room where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Barnes’s employer and the lab’s owner, measures a variety of air components—CO₂, methane, CFCs, even oxygen. (In parallel to CO₂‘s rise, the atmosphere has had a slight drop in oxygen; not enough to worry about, though.) Barnes’s laser, which he shot into the stratosphere to probe particles. And a newer building that holds a second set of gauges, run by Scripps and by Keeling’s son, Ralph. These dueling CO₂ records have corroborated one another for decades, although “ours is better,” Barnes said.

Soon enough these records will pass 400 ppm over an extended average: a week, a month, and then a year, the latter the Keeling Curve’s more standard unit of measure, given the planet’s annual exhalations. Until then it’s worth remembering: Politics and news work on the verge, but science lies in the median. I’ve kept in touch with Barnes, and, according to his best recent estimate, CO₂ levels will very likely first reach a monthly average of 400 ppm in May 2014. The annual average at Mauna Loa will not hit 400 ppm until October 2015, give or take a couple of months, with the global CO₂ average arriving a bit later.

Between chats this April and the last, though, Barnes has had to make one fix in those estimates. He had previously projected Mauna Loa’s annual CO₂ record to hit 400 ppm in January 2016. But human CO₂ emissions came too fast, as they often do, and his initial projection sagged.

In the end, he had to move the estimate up by three months.

[Graph courtesy of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.]

A Congolese girl carried a box of food aid last December at a refugee camp in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images)

About one in 10 children in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 5 is starving, and nearly 40 percent are physically stunted because of chronic malnutrition. The situation in South Asia is even more dire. Yet global shipments of food aid have declined steadily since the late 1990s. In short, there’s not enough food to go around.

So if you ran a relief agency, how would you use your limited resources to save the most lives?

A Stanford researcher may have an answer, though it’s one that at first blush might sound cruel: Deliver food only to the children most likely to benefit from it. His conclusion led The Atlantic to run an article with the headline “The Case Against Feeding Every Hungry Child.”

But it’s more complicated than that. Lawrence M. Wein, a professor of management science at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, applied mathematical modeling and statistical regressions to a humanitarian issue and found that, in short, aid groups may be looking at the wrong factors when determining who benefits most from food aid. He attaches several caveats to his work, which we’ll get to in a minute, but first the conclusions.

Most important, says Mr. Wein, stunting—which measures a child’s height relative to his age—has been underappreciated as a risk factor for death and severe disability. Aid groups tend to give out food based on a child’s weight relative to his height on the premise that starvation, or “wasting” as it’s commonly called, is a more urgent problem than stunting.

But Mr. Wein encourages aid groups to start using both measures when determining who gets food and how much. How did he arrive at that finding? By crunching the numbers on two sets of data. One, owned by one of his co-authors, Jan Van den Broeck of Norway’s University of Bergen, tracked the weight and height of more than 5,600 young children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Zaire, over a period of 17 months. The other study looked at the effect of food aid given to children in six villages in Niger, and compared that to six similar villages that received no aid.

Through a series of advanced statistical regressions and other methods no doubt unfamiliar to the average aid worker, he found a strong connection between stunting and mortality risks, particularly if the child was also severely underweight.

“The kids who are stunted are really vulnerable to dying,” he says.

‘All or Nothing’ or ‘Blanketing’

His models also concluded that aid groups may be more effective by taking what he calls an “all or nothing” approach to food distribution. The more common practice is to spread food out to as many children as possible—the “blanketing” approach.

His analysis shows that the all-or-nothing approach, combined with measurements of health that include both stunting and wasting, could reduce death and severe disabilities by 9 percent, compared with the approaches aid agencies take now.

Mr. Wein’s study looks specifically at the effects of ready-to-use, high-protein pastes that deliver critical vitamins and other nutrients. The pastes, which are in wide use today, are remarkably effective at bringing children back from the brink of starvation. His study shows that giving full doses of those foods to the sickest children would save more lives than giving, say, a half-dose to a broader group of children.

“Partial dose does a little,” he says. “But when the dust settles, it’s really the most vulnerable kids who are at the highest risk.”

Now, the caveats. For one, usable data for a study like this are extremely limited. The two studies he used are basically the only two he could work with, he says. For obvious reasons, aid groups are not going to run randomized controlled studies in which they give one set of children food and the others nothing.

Moreover, data collection is not something aid workers are trained to do well or consistently. So while he used rigorous analysis that leave him confident of his findings, Mr. Wein says that in no way is he making policy recommendations.

And there are many good reasons aid agencies might want to take a blanketing approach to aid. For one, it’s a great way to get all the children in a village into a clinic to be examined and inoculated. Politically and culturally, a more selective policy might also be tough to pull off. Finally, aid groups consider a whole host of factors when figuring out food distribution, including how much money they have and how else they can help sick children.

“Even if one buys into the math and existing data,” says Mr. Wein, “it doesn’t necessarily imply that you want to switch from blanket to all-or-nothing.”

Stunting and Starvation

So what do other scholars think of his findings? A couple of economists with expertise in food systems in the developing world say the all-or-nothing argument is not actually the paper’s main contribution.

William A. Masters, chairman of the department of food and nutrition policy at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, calls the argument “an obvious mechanical consequence” of having a model tell you which child is the most needy. That is, it’s always true that it is most cost-effective to focus on the most at risk. The problem with executing the concept is a practical one: Relief workers “don’t have X-ray eyes to detect the most needy in front of them.”

For example, in countries where recordkeeping is poor, age is less certain and less easily verifiable than weight. And, as Mr. Wein notes in his paper, if a parent knows that age-to-height ratios determine who gets fed, they have an incentive to lie about how old their child is. Relief workers blanket, Mr. Masters says, “because they don’t have that true model” of need.

Mr. Masters believes the finding on the effects of stunting is the paper’s most significant contribution. It reveals that malnourishment and other chronic health deficits can compromise children’s immune systems and leave them vulnerable to life-threatening illnesses. That’s noteworthy, he says, because stunting is now a much greater problem than starvation.

The United Nation Children’s Fund reports that in South Asia, for example, nearly half of all children under 5 are stunted, compared with 19 percent who are in a state of wasting. The decline in starvation has come through improvements in standards of living and therapeutic interventions, such as the high-nutrition pastes. Stunting, by contrast, has deeper and more complex causes, such as disease and chronic poverty.

Mr. Masters praises Mr. Wein for tackling an understudied issue in a sophisticated way. He notes that the Obama administration is trying to improve food-aid policies, making them more efficient and effective. “Getting the intellectual horsepower of someone like Wein is extremely helpful” to this debate, he says. “I hope it attracts interest in these problems by researchers in business schools and other settings that have not focused on agriculture.”

Thin Data

Christopher B. Barrett, a professor of applied economics and management and an international professor of agriculture at Cornell University, applauds Mr. Wein’s rigorous work while acknowledging the limit of the available data for research like this.

“We have an extremely thin and fragile foundation of data on which to base analysis,” he says.

That doesn’t take away from Mr. Wein’s contribution, says Mr. Barrett. Rather, aid agencies and others should be encouraged to collect and disseminate data on the children they are caring for so that further studies can be done. Whether it’s the U.S. Agency for International Development or Catholic Relief Services, “they really do pay attention to the best science” and modify their policies accordingly.

As for Mr. Wein, provocative ideas are his trade. He made a name for himself after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when he turned his expertise in operations management to issues of national security. In 2003 he was a co-author of a journal article showing how a release of airborne anthrax could kill 100,000 people in a short time, and argued that “there is no publicly available government population-response plan for anthrax.”

In a 2005 journal article he showed how terrorists could kill tens of thousands of people by placing a few grams of botulinum toxin into milk supplies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called the paper “a road map for terrorists” and tried to get publication blocked.

Mr. Wein’s point in both cases was to use mathematical modeling to show how serious a risk such attacks pose to national security, and how a few key changes by federal authorities could cut such risks. In both cases, he says, those changes were made.

These days his interests run to concerns like maximizing the benefits of blood transfusions and biometric data collection.

“I’ve kind of run out of scary stuff,” he says, “so now I’m back into public health.”

Erica Chenoweth, U. of Denver

San Francisco — If you’re looking for a conversation starter, calling your next book “Why Democracy Encourages Terrorism” would probably work. The idea behind the provocative title goes like this: Democracy allows interest groups and political parties to flourish, which then leads to competition. Among those groups that feel most marginalized in the ensuing din, some take extreme measures in the pursuit of attention.

In other words, the conventional wisdom that democracy is the antidote to terrorism—because it provides outlets for people’s grievances—is completely wrong.

I sat down with Erica Chenoweth, author of the forthcoming book and an assistant professor at the University of Denver, at the International Studies Association conference here, to find out how she had reached that conclusion. Her work, under contract with Columbia University Press, is expected to be released next year.

Ms. Chenoweth has made a name for herself for her work on terrorism, political violence, and civil resistance. Her last book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolence Conflict, written with Maria J. Stephan, led to a Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Ms. Chenoweth said the connection between democracy and terrorism came as a surprise. She was trying to find a link between weak or failed states and terrorist activity, studying attacks from 1970 to 2007. Yet there was one clear correlation she found after mapping and analyzing the data: Terrorism is, as she put it, “an overwhelmingly democratic phenomenon.” It occurs twice as often in democracies as in authoritarian regimes.

“I thought that was really weird,” she said of her initial reaction to her findings. “And totally counterintuitive.”

Having talked to other scholars, policy makers, and activists, Ms. Chenoweth sets about, in her book, to dismantle some of the arguments used to explain why terrorism exists in democracies. One is that democracies are more permissive of terrorism than authoritarian governments are. Not true, she says. Democratic nations are often quite willing to pursue repressive tactics in the pursuit of domestic terrorists.

Another idea is that press freedom encourages terrorist acts because terrorists thrive under media attention. Also not true, she says: A number of countries with free presses have little or no terrorist activity.

Instead, she argues, terrorism should be placed within the broader context of political activism. The open atmosphere of democracies can become crowded with competing interest groups. Some of those groups may be small or weak, and feel that the only way they can draw attention to their cause—or to strike fear in their opponents—is to act violently. The United States, for example, is home to any number of domestic terrorists, Ms. Chenoweth says: neo-Nazis, abortion-clinic bombers, anti-gay hate groups, environmental extremists. (Ninety percent of terrorism worldwide, she notes, is domestic.)

So what are the policy implications of Ms. Chenoweth’s work? Not, she hopes, that people conclude we should champion authoritarianism at home and abandon promoting democracy abroad. Rather, that in setting foreign policy we become more realistic about how democracy and domestic terrorism are naturally linked, and to expect the latter with the emergence of new democracies around the world.

“There’s a bit of a trade-off,” she said. “If you say that democracy promotion is part of U.S. foreign policy, you have to anticipate there’s not going to be less terrorism. There’s probably going to be more terrorism in that country. Some of it also might be directed at your country if you’re going to use military intervention for regime change.”

Iraq comes to mind. By one journalist’s account, she said, about 150 interest groups sprang up after the fall of Saddam Hussein, all vying for a piece of the developing power structure. “The vast majority of violence in Iraq was Iraqis targeting other Iraqis,” she said. “There was now something to fight over. And the stakes were so high.”

Yet a number of democracies have thrived with little or no domestic terrorism, including New Zealand, Japan, and Denmark. Some might say that’s because their populations are fairly homogenous, Ms. Chenoweth said. But she cited research by another scholar, B.M. (Brian) Burgoon, of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam, who found that the more governments spend on social welfare, the less their societies experience terrorism. Does this mean that as European governments begin dismantling their social safety nets, terrorism will increase? “Absolutely,” she said.

Ms. Chenoweth hopes other scholars will come away from her study looking at terrorism as part of the spectrum of political advocacy. “Terrorism is not an isolated phenomenon unrelated to legitimate grievances people have,” she said. “For people who study terrorism and only terrorism—and don’t look at any other types of political mobilization—this is a strong argument for really taking a wider view. … The terrorist-group sector is not somehow independent from the political life of a country.”

Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)

Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and Conway, based in Pasadena, Calif., imagine a bleak, and not always plausible, future. Let’s just say they wouldn’t qualify for Neal Stephenson’s quest for more positive science fiction.

In their future historian’s account, when things go wrong, they go wrong with a bang. Natural gas from shale deposits wholly undermines renewable power, and then politicians–beholden to fossil-fuel interests–enact laws banning solar and wind power. Laws then follow that lead “to the conviction and imprisonment of more than three hundred scientists for ‘endangering the safety and well-being of the general public with unduly alarming threats.’”

By 2041 (under a scenario in which warming happens faster than most scientists today expect), a heat wave cripples the world’s harvest, causing famine and disease. The United States and Canada form the United States of North America to ensure “northward population relocation.”

In a twist, those disasters prompt the world to begin geoengineering, pumping reflective particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays. But that attempt shuts down the Indian monsoon and falls apart in acrimony. The scenario deteriorates quickly from there. All the summer Arctic ice is gone; the permafrost thaws. Then, in the ultimate blow, the West Antarctic ice sheet dissolves into the ocean, causing a spike in sea-level rise and the displacement of 1.5 billion people, followed by a “Second Black Death.” Some 70 percent of the human population is eventually wiped out.

The imagined historian is not reluctant to cast blame, faulting people living in active and passive denial of the ties between warming and extreme weather, and then faulting scientists for becoming “entangled in arcane arguments about the ‘attribution’ of singular [weather] events.”

The failure of the United Nations’ 2009 climate summit, in Copenhagen, is blamed entirely on the leak of e-mails stolen from climate scientists; there’s no mention, say, of Congress’s inability to pass climate legislation or of the worldwide recession then deflating GDP and carbon emissions.

The scholar returns to criticizing scientists, going on a long digression about how they are beholden to “Fisherian statistics” while comparing them to monks:

We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists’ desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity. Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food–in essence, practices of physical self-denial–so, too, did natural scientists of the twentieth century attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through intellectual self-denial.

At the root of society’s failures, though, are two ideological villains: positivism and market fundamentalism. The historian saves much ire for the latter, going on about neoliberalism at length and citing the many market failures exposed by environmental problems.

The precautionary principle (the idea that, when in doubt, it’s better to err on the side of doing no harm), a system not without its own conceptual problems, is floated as a lost counter to neoliberalism. And at the end, Oreskes and Conway reveal their final twist: Their historian is writing from the “Second People’s Republic of China,” where the centralized government acted to move its people off the coasts. A last laugh for socialism.

Over all, the paper is an odd, digressive exercise, carrying with it hefty doses of its own ideology, and little sense that humanity would ever do much of anything to counter global warming–or, indeed, that society could ever do better. Which is strange, given Oreskes and Conway’s own work on smoking. It took a long time, longer than it should have, and many people stood in the way, but look at where cigarette smoking stands today in the United States. Would people have imagined that 30 years ago?

The evidence for global warming—even when not stretched by Oreskes and Conway for their purposes—is overwhelming, but this paper, which I encourage you to read in full, calls to mind warnings and aphorisms about trying to predict the future.

Let’s just say, it’s not easy.