In 499 BCE the philosopher Socrates was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth of his native Athens. In The Apology of Socrates, his student Plato recounted the trial that ensued, and the logic Socrates marshaled in his defense. Much of that narrative is considered fiction, yet it represents an enduring cornerstone of philosophical reasoning.

Among other arguments, Socrates suggested that he was a “social gadfly,” an uncomfortable goad to Athenian elites who was merely striving to elevate Athenian society. Plato, using Socrates as metaphor, argued that dissent is easy to swat, but at great societal cost.

The term gadfly has been used since to describe a person who interferes with the status quo by posing difficult questions that challenge those in power, or a favored narrative.

In scientific history, gadflies are notably abundant and generally celebrated for following the precepts of the scientific method by challenging orthodoxy with countervailing evidence. Where would we be, after all, without the contributions of Copernicus, Galileo, Edward Jenner, John Snow, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Feynman?

In cultural and political arenas, gadflies often face tougher sledding. The experiences of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Narendra Dabholkar, Ai Weiwei, and Jamal Khashoggi can certainly be viewed as cautionary tales. Monocultures and authoritarian states are intolerant of dissent, no matter how well-intended.

In 2003, Harvard MD and best- selling science fiction author Michael Crichton gave a provocative speech, titled Environmentalism as Religion. It was viewed by green policy advocates as a moment that spawned climate-denier memes, and by green policy skeptics as a moment that called out important fallacies in the anti-oil crusade.

Many of Crichton’s initial objections to the premise that humans are the leading cause of global warming have been subsequently refuted. But almost 20 years later his religion analogy still describes the narrative mythology of the climate movement convincingly.

“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.”

Vaclav Smil, one of the preeminent climate scientists in the world, just published something of an insider’s manifesto, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going. Smil is a latter- day polymath with deep expertise in the study of energy, food systems, population dynamics, history and public policy. He has now authored 49 books and roughly 500 scientific papers on these topics.

How the World Really Works is aimed at lay readers. It begins by summarizing the history of global energy, food, commodity production, and trade, each a topic of more detailed analysis in his other books.

Smil is a data dogmatist with strong convictions about the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. His ironclad command of the facts fuels a withering disdain for the polemicists, activists, and journalists who don’t care to learn the scientific underpinnings of the dynamic systems they claim to represent.

Disheartening revelations emerge from that data with regularity. No country possesses sufficient rare earth metals to support its economy. The world throws out a third of its food. Human beings use an average of 34 gigajoules of energy annually. Expressed in units of human labor, that’s equivalent to 60 adults working nonstop, day and night for each person.

The barrage of facts builds to a crescendo of understanding: every core aspect of modern civilization relies overwhelmingly on fossil fuel combustion. That reality cannot be altered quickly, cheaply, or simply.

This understanding demolishes many of the unrealistic scenarios that dominate climate discourse today. The inane rhetorical battle between blithe optimism and apocalyptic pessimism attracts particular vitriol from Smil.

He scorns journalists and popular writers who “argue that a sustainable future is in our grasp” or warn that “large areas of the Earth are to become uninhabitable soon.” Instead, Smil implores us to acknowledge the limitations of our forecasting, and to position energy transition efforts as the work of lifetimes, not years or decades.

Danish statistician, economist, and author Bjorn Lomborg is another prominent gadfly buzzing about the climate tent. In his seminal first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg argued that many of the actions scientists and activists have pushed for to combat global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world’s rising temperature.

Lomborg doesn’t contest the scientific consensus surrounding human influence on climate, but instead challenges the economic and political approaches being promoted in response. Many of those approaches are costly, and Lomborg demonstrates in numerous examples how spending resources on adapting to the changing climate offers a far better return in human welfare.

Like Socrates, Lomborg has been attacked repeatedly in the media and in academic circles. A group of environmental scientists accused him of scientific dishonesty based on the citations used in The Skeptical Environmentalist, which led to an investigation by Denmark’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (the accusation was ultimately set aside).

Several books later, Lomborg leads the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a project- based think tank that collaborates with prominent economists to advance global climate policies based on the theory of welfare economics. Though his views on climate action have evolved over time, Lomborg still enjoys debunking climate myths and criticizing the cost/benefit profile of many political initiatives.

In the buildup to the COP 26 gathering last Fall, he publicly challenged seven common myths about climate change, including “Extreme weather events are killing more people”; Electric cars don’t harm the environment”; “Stop eating meat to save the planet”; and “Wildfires are getting worse.” That last one is surely a bell ringer for inquisitive mountain dwellers, so browse over to www.lomborg.com to read more about this controversial gadfly.