Many outlets are reporting, Scientists Reveal There Are 3 Trillion Trees in the World in Latest Count. This is important because it is over seven times higher than the last global count (or estimate). It’s interesting and it is an indication of just how hard it is to study and understand the entire Earth. My PhD dissertation was focused on a really complicated model of the atmosphere that was 2.5 dimensions. It had height and latitude, but longitudinally, it just had land or ocean — that was the half-dimension. But what I’m interested in here is how the news was reported.

I was listening to NPR — the show The World. They are partly a production of the BBC, and so they get their news updates from the BBC. The little 30 second story said (more or less — I can’t find the transcript online), “This doesn’t affect global warming, but it does give policy makers more information.” I was impressed because it simply presented global warming as a fact. And I wondered how it would be presented in the mainstream American media. Some outlets, like The Los Angeles Times have taken a stand on the issue. But for most, it is still just a “matter of opinion.” Pretty much the entire scientific community thinks one thing and some oil companies with billions of dollars of profits on the line say another. Who can determine which side is right?!

I expect that mainstream American media outlets would have reported this story differently, “This new estimate will cause those on both sides of the global warming debate to claim that they are right.” Note the total equivalence there. If the two sides were equally valid, that would absolutely show no bias either way. It would also be a vacuous statement, because it isn’t really true. But the main point is that it would be presented in a way that highlighted the two sides as somehow equal.

The conservative press will look at it differently, I suspect. It will claim that it shows that scientists don’t really know what is going on in the world. “They can’t even count trees, how can they know that the Earth is getting hotter?!” Of course, determining the number of trees is actually a hell of a lot harder than measuring the temperature all over the world. Temperature is a contiguous distribution. Trees and treed areas are discrete. So you can look at two temperatures separated a mile apart and have a very good idea of what the temperature is at every spot between them. That’s not at all true of trees.

But this isn’t about science. And it isn’t really about what the global warming deniers say. The issue is that our media — with notable exceptions — treats the global warming deniers as if they were just one side of the debate. The BBC story showed that it doesn’t need to be that way. The truth is that fewer people accept global warming now than when I was activity studying it 20 years ago. And the reason for that is that the oil companies and other moneyed interests got together and produced a bunch of science-like nonsense that we see constantly coming out of The Heartland Institute. But they could have done that forever and no one would have cared, if the media had treated their “propaganda as science” with the derision that it deserved. But they didn’t.

On one hand, it is cheering to know that coverage of global warming in other countries is more reasonable. But on the other hand, it is depressing to know that if the power elite can twist the truth into knots here, it can do it anywhere. And most concerning of all: it can do it wherever it is most important to do it.

Sometimes, really smart people get lost in their own brilliance. Luckily, there are lesser thinkers like me around to show them the error of their ways. Our example today comes from Noah Smith, Did Elon Musk Build That? In it, Smith argues against a common fallacy of assigning proportional blame to complementary causes. So he claims that we can’t say, as conservatives do, that innovation is all about “great men.” But he also claims that we can’t say, as liberals do, that innovation is all about social structure.

I accept this in a certain way: you need both the people and the structure. My problem comes with the idea of the “great men.” Great is a relative concept. And no one ever defines it. What it means in practice is powerful men. The best that an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs or even an Albert Einstein brings us is a couple of years. For every Wright Brothers, there is always one or more Glenn Curtisses on their heals — or even in front of them. Intelligence and creativity are not cliffs; they are continuums.

Every time I hear someone talking about this or that famous innovator, it makes me start to twitch. But it isn’t because they didn’t do this or that thing. (Although in many cases, it is, in fact, because they didn’t do anything — like Jobs.) It is the idea that doing this or that was a major accomplishment. This is taken to high comedy when talking about Mark Zuckerberg. That was clearly a case where they were doing stuff just like dozens of other groups and happened to have just the right combination of funding and luck. There is no question but that the world would be exactly the same if Karen Kempner had had an abortion 32 years ago.

The fundamental misunderstanding of conservatives — and this goes way back in history — is their idea that the rich are somehow better. It is built into their entire worldview. In order to claim that the status quo is good, you must believe that there is a reason that things are the way they are. Liberals believe that it is stochastic with a broad trend that depends not at all on the specific individuals that take part. Yes, if Einstein had not been around, the world would not have been introduced to general relativity in 1915. The theory would have been developed soon enough. What’s more, the intellectual breathing room his absence accorded might have led to faster progress in other areas.

There is no reason to think that we would be in a markedly different place (Not to mention a worse place!) if all the “great men” had never been born. If we had missed out on them, there would have been others (for good and for bad) to take their places. And that means that the “great men” just fold into the larger narrative about social change. And that should not come as a surprise. The “great man” theory really only serves one purpose: to justify things being the way they are.

So yes, Noah Smith is right that we need the “great men.” But they could be pretty much any men. And that means that the conservative claim is wrong. It is all about the broader society. We don’t need Elon Musk.