Among the many depressing aspects of our current political discourse is the proudly anti-science stance adopted by one of our major political parties. When it comes to climate change, in particular, Republicans are increasingly united against the scientific consensus. What’s interesting is that this is not simply an example of a conservative/liberal split; elsewhere in the world, conservatives are not so willing to ignore the findings of scientists.
Republicans are alone among major parties in Western democracies in denying the reality of climate change, a phenomenon that even puzzles many American conservatives. Denialism is growing among the rank and file, and the phenomenon is especially strong among those with college degrees. So it doesn’t seem to be a matter of lack of information, so much as active disinformation. Republican politicians are going along willingly, as they increasingly promote anti-scientific views on the environment. After the recent elections, GOP leaders are disbanding the House Select Committee on Global Warming.
What makes American conservatives different from other right-wing parties around the world? Note that it wasn’t always this way — there was a time when Republicans wouldn’t have attacked science so openly. I have a theory: it’s Al Gore’s fault.
Actually it’s not my theory, it comes from Randy Olson. For a while now Randy has been vocally skeptical about An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s critically-acclaimed documentary about global warming. I was initially unconvinced. Surely the positive effects of informing so many people about the dangers of climate change outweigh the political damage of annoying some conservatives? But Randy’s point, which I’m coming around to, was that for all the good the movie did at spreading information about climate change, it did equal or greater harm by politicizing it.
By most measures, Al Gore has had a pretty successful career. Vice-President during an administration characterized by peace and prosperity, winner of the popular vote total during his Presidential run, co-founder of Current TV, winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Nobel Prize. But to Republicans, he’s a punchline. It’s an inevitable outcome of the current system: Al Gore was the Democratic nominee for President; therefore, he must be demonized. It’s not enough that their candidate is preferable; the other candidate must be humiliated, made into a laughingstock. (Ask John Kerry, whose service in Vietnam was somehow used as evidence of his cowardice.) The conclusion is inevitable: if Al Gore becomes attached to some cause, that cause must be fought against.
Here is some evidence. You may think of Jay Leno as a completely vanilla and inoffensive late-night talk-show host. But he’s a savvy guy, and he knows his audience. Which is mostly older, white, suburban middle-class folks. Which political party does that sound like? Between January and September of 2010, Jay Leno made more jokes about Al Gore than about Sarah Palin. You read that right. This is while Palin was promoting books, making TV specials, stumping for candidates, and basically in the news every day, while Gore was — doing what exactly?
Once Al Gore became the unofficial spokesperson for concern about climate change, it was increasingly inevitable that Republicans would deny it on principle. This isn’t the only reason, not by a long shot (there’s something in there about vested interests willing to pour money into resisting energy policies that are unfriendly to fossil fuels), but it’s a big part. Too many Republicans have reached a point where devotion to “the truth” takes a distant back seat to a devotion to “pissing off liberals.” With often nasty implications.
What the United States does about climate change will be very important to the world. And what the U.S. does will be heavily affected by what Republicans permit. And Republicans’ views on climate change are largely colored by its association with Al Gore. As much as I hate to admit it, the net real impact of An Inconvenient Truth could turn out to be very negative.
Gore himself doesn’t deserve blame here. Using one’s celebrity to bring attention to an issue of pressing concern, and running for office in order to implement good policies, are two legitimate ways a person can help try to make the world a better place. In a healthy culture of discussion, they shouldn’t necessarily interfere; if any issue qualifies as “bipartisan,” saving the planet should be it. But in our current climate, no discussion of political import can take place without first passing through the lens of partisan advantage. Too bad for us.
I was under the impression that republicans had been denying climate change before the movie.
The more successful the GOP is at attacking climate change, the more money they can raise from fossil-fuel companies. And the more money they raise, the more extreme and louder their denialistic rhetoric.
Is it going to take the U.S. being displaced as a world leader to make people realize that the GOP is not promoting good policies? Or will being displaced as a world leader just reinforce their xenophobic “them vs. us” mentality, and further stoke their cognitive dissonance?
Pingback: Tweets that mention Is Al Gore Responsible for Destroying the Planet? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine -- Topsy.com
Well, Gore is certainly one of the biggest hypocrites behind the AGW movement (it’s “anthropogenic global warming” not “climate change” BTW, no one denies that climate is changing) so he is surely damaging to the cause.
But scientific consensus means very little if there is no solid evidence to support it’s position. Of course if there was solid evidence no one would have to resort to such appeals to authority.
IMO the reason so many people are skeptical is simply this lack of solid evidence. Assuming AGW is true to some extent there is currently no reliable way to predict how much of the recent warming is due to man-made emissions and how much is natural. There is also no way to predict how much warming we will see in the future. This will only change once we have reliable climate models, which at the very least means passing the most obvious sanity check one can think of – correctly reconstructing the global temperature record of the past century. No current climate model can accomplish this feat and if they cannot predict past temperatures how can anyone believe they can predict future ones?
Add to this the fact that the cost of proposed solutions is astronomical while their effectiveness is questionable at best.
And finally there is China and other countries who won’t limit their emissions.
There is simply no rational basis for any climate legislation right now.
This is more a statement of the current political environment than about the GOP. Liberals/Democrats are every bit as vehement at demonizing leading Republicans — more so, in my opinion. Two years after getting elected Obama still blames Bush for virtually every ill the country faces. No other president has continued such practices for as long.
Regarding Gore — maybe the fact that the film has a number of glaring inaccuracies might have something to do with this situation as well. Not to mention his obvious hypocrasie. There have been reports that he’s made $100M on promoting global warming. He flies around the world in a private jet and uses as much electricity in his mansion as an entire neighborhood –meanwhile tells us to “change our ways”.
Hard for me to take him seriously.
Yes, Gore did everyone a great disservice by politicizing climate change. After that the GOP which has traditionally reveled in politicizing such topics was only too happy to gleefully grab the opportunity to push denial. In my opinion he also did damage by sharply dividing the issue along scientific as well as moral lines, which implied that anyone who disagreed with global warming from then on was both unscientific and immoral. Thus these days you routinely find genuine climate change skeptics being tossed in with the politically motivated right-wing deniers. Climate change extremists like Joe Romm only fan the flames with their complete intolerance and condescension even toward critics with no political axe to grind. It’s a sad state of affairs and has only harmed the cause of climate change.
Certainly on more than one issue Gore has been ridiculed for his good works. Gore sponsored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which greatly accelerated the transition of the then obscure internet (outside of academic settings) to the tremendous beast that it is today. All involved in the internet’s early development agree that Gore’s interest and passion was critical. In the 2000 presidential race he was derided and mocked for the claim that he invented the internet, which he never made. Al Gore is not a scientist, but he has paid a heavy price for being our pointman.
Hi Sean,
Just as an anecdote, my own tendencies towards “denial” (I’ll use the standard word; whatever) were in fact initiated by Al Gore’s movie. I was watching it with a few other grad students several years ago, and the claims just seemed so outrageous–how could we possibly know as much about the future of such an incredibly complicated nonlinear system? How could the data be so drop-dead convincing, when I had never heard any of it before? Then I started to inform myself about the actual state of the science (pretty good but nowhere near what Gore was claiming), and came to the conclusion that he was basically purposefully misrepresenting the facts in order to make an overwhelming case.
After his discussion of the ice core data, I remember very vividly pausing and staring at the screen with the other students to try to figure out by how many years the c02 increase preceded the temperature increase, in order to get a handle on the timescale of this apparent observed c02-caused global warming. Gore had said something like “the relationship between the c02 and the temperature is complicated, but one thing is clear: when the c02 goes up, the temperature goes up”. So, we all quite naturally assumed that the c02 goes up first, when anyone with the first acquaintance with the data knows it’s the opposite, as we soon found out from other sources. Of course, there are explanations consistent with the global warming hypothesis, but Gore doesn’t want to let us in on those; instead, he wants to choose his words so that he’s barely not lying and causing everybody watching to come to a false conclusion about the data, which supports his thesis better than the truth does. This is one of many examples in the movie where this type of strategy is employed.
Al Gore is an extreme example of this sort of “ends justify the means misrepresentation”, but (as I began to observe after watching the movie catalyzed me) it happens in smaller does in many media reports. This is my basic problem with the global warming debate.
-Sam
I feel like you fell in to the trap: “consensus equals fact”. I bet I could find way more Ph.D’s that will say God exists than I can find Ph’D’s that say Global warming is real. Does God actually exist? Does Global Warming actually exist?
Sad to see that people are labeled “anti-science” when they deny any sort of funding to any type of research for any reason. It’s the same as calling congressmen “anti-american” when voting against security related issues.
Tell me about poisoned rivers and I’ll listen; tell me about about rising asthma due to polluted air and I’ll lend an ear; tell me about mercury, benzene, and other chemicals leaching into soil and rivers and I’ll support measures for change.
But tell me that the world is getting warmer and so I have to give up my car and electricity and pay more in taxes, while China and India continue to pollute and you continue to get rich off your scare mongering, and I won’t believe you.
Gore has a credibility gap.
The world has grown warmer and colder in the past without humans, and no matter what we do it will go through the same cycles in the future. Perhaps we are accelerating a warming trend – I’m not convinced of it – but the world would get warmer on its own anyway. The net increase in biomass will be an improvement, and AGW proponents are already back-pedaling on the rising ocean hypothesis, so maybe things won’t be all bad.
Fact is, the cost to implement a worldwide industrial shutdown is too high. It’s far cheaper to abandon desertified areas if need be, or build more desalination plants for reclamation. Is it prudent and responsible to clean up ecological damage and stop pollution? I say yes. But global warming is a booger bear of unknown consequences with an immeasurable price tag (both in civil liberties and economically) that is a thin facade for a power grab.
It was so obvious the the movie was a ploy for his own personal and political gain it made many, including me, assume it was all bunk. My favorite bit was most of Florida (the state that cost him the election, and an ongoing battleground state) being underwater. When, in actuality, only the most alarmist of scientist think the oceans will rise enough to even come close to his “prediction”.
After more research, I’ve found that there is merit to much of what he was talking about, and have changed my stance from denying that there is any problem at all to now believing carbon emission are harmful to some extent. If anyone tells you they know exactly what that extent is, guess what, they are giving a political argument because nobody knows. Scientist only have theories, not proof.
The politicization now goes beyond Republicans. Most staunch Democrats will believe anything from the pro-AGW side these days. I’m sure this is largely due to backlash towards the Republican stance, but in the end, a “you did it first” attitude won’t help anyone.
So, yes, it is Al Gore’s fault for politicizing it. However, equal blame must be put on any person that thinks the “other side” of the argument is completely wrong. As with any political argument, you will find that the truth (convenient or not) will be somewhere in between.
One other thing, the winning of Nobel Prize was obviously due to European anti-Bush sentiment. As with the Emmy and Grammy being due to the entertainment industry’s hatred of Bush and bad taste from the prior presidential election….
The politicization of the global warming ‘debate’ was inevitable, with or without Al Gore.
Gore serves as a convenient target for conservative ire (not exclusively a US phenomenon — look at Australia, for instance). But global warming denialism would be the default ‘conservative’ position, right now, even had Gore never made his movie.
In the US, global warming denialism is bound-up with a deeper problem of a wholesale rejection of science in evangelical circles. If you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible (evolution is a leftist plot, the earth is 6000 years old, …), you are not going to be much-impressed by the alleged evidence for AGW.
When the 2008 GOP Presidential Primary debates featured moments like this and this, you know you have a problem …
It’s always pained me to see scientists give up their credibility as scientists to politicize things. This seems even worse than the Al Gore thing – Gore is political by definition, but scientists have (had) some credibility as impartial information suppliers and analysts.
Now you’ve (royal You here) got all the evidence you need of climate change, but nobody cares because you squandered all your credibility on stupid catastrophic predictions that turned out to be repeatedly wrong while it was speculative. Or transparently using it to push your other personal agendas. The ends don’t justify any means – if only because your chosen means often come back and bite you in the ass and leave you worse than you started.
The ‘but… but… Republicans!1’ comments miss the point. Monkeys will do what monkeys will do, so don’t give them matches and dynamite then say they shouldn’t have lit them.
Eh, its not like housing for poor people became hugely contraversial after Jimmy Carter signed up with Habitat for Humanity. Global Warming has become controversial because its beomce obvious that action to mitigate it would entail a lot of things that large rich business groups don’t like. They’ve seized on Gore as a handy target for their base, but if he hadn’t been there, it would’ve been someone else.
This is the worst “correlation is by default causation” blather I could imagine. BTW Adolf Hitler believed that the universe was expanding from a big bang. And that Jews caused it. So there.
Something that perhaps is more relevant to this site is the question of why there is such rampant AGW-denialism in the physics community. A lot of otherwise sensible people seem very badly informed on this topic. If we can’t convince educated people who seem well equipped to understand the primary literature, why do we think we have a chance with the crazies? (My theory is that they remember when global warming was an issue mainly championed by the anti-science left, and their remaining disdain for this group prejudices them against climate science as a whole. That this aligns them with the modern anti-science right does not seem to bother them, but I’m not sure why.)
I find it hard to blame Al Gore. The Republicans are doing the same thing with this issue that they did with the cigarette smoke–cancer connection, with acid rain, with CFCs affecting the ozone layer, and all sorts of other issues where science provided news that was troubling for business interests. I highly recommend the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes & Conway, which chronicles these anti-science campaigns and how the same think tanks (and a few scientists like Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer) were behind them all. But it doesn’t stop there, of course; now we’re seeing denial of basic economic truths as well, on both sides of the political aisle. Facts take a back seat to politics in our society.
It’s also deeply depressing that a lot of good physicists exhibit varying degrees of denialism, ranging from outright rejection of the idea that humans cause climate change to a baffling faith that geoengineering will miraculously solve the problem and thus we need not worry about it. I’ve been running into these attitudes more and more lately, even from some people who I had previously respected as among the smartest and most reasonable people I know.
(Just look at this thread — on a blog about science, only something like 1 in 3 comments on this topic are reasonable. Granted, blog comment threads are rarely full of well-informed and rational commentary. But still….)
All becomes moot because the earth will do what it will do and it is obvious it is warming up. I’m personally thrilled there will be as many ignorant denialists who will be drowned by the rising waters or killed by weather changes. I’ve never witnessed such a stupid or more materialistic younger generation in my life! Do what you’re going to do. You’ll age and die like everyone else and hopefully the earth will extinguish you all sooner than later!
One of the reasons I am skeptical of global warming claims is the concern we had in the 1970s about the coming ice age. That claim was supported by science, and by government. Why did we think that claim was true? Where did the science supporting that claim go wrong? Are we sure we’re not making the same mistake again?
Like today, the dire warnings of a coming ice age concluded that we could be saved only if we conserved energy. Now we are to conserve energy to keep the planet from warming. We have different conclusions charging us with the same solution: conserve energy to avoid an ice age and conserve energy to avoid warming. Why is conserving energy the same solution for different goals?
Lastly, like the example above, I continue to hear dire warnings from science and government only to find they never (or rarely) produce the dire affects promised. I am thinking of SARS, the recent swine flu, Y2K, and a myriad of claims about food.
I understand the evolution of science and scientific claims. There is always something more to be learned. There was evidence of some claim that turned out to be unrelated after all. Scientific discovery always comes with uncertainty and contention. So, why do some scientists and most government officials make science sound absolutely certain, lacking any contention?
-Something that perhaps is more relevant to this site is the question of why there is such rampant AGW-denialism in the physics community.
Perhaps it’s because physicists are well-aware of the difficulties inherent in predicting the behavior of complex systems. We are trying to predict temperature changes in a multifactorial system as complex as the global climate accurately to 1 or 2 degrees here. How could that possibly be easy if we still have trouble predicting the behavior of much simpler systems?
Max wrote:
One of the reasons I am skeptical of global warming claims is the concern we had in the 1970s about the coming ice age. That claim was supported by science, and by government.
No, it wasn’t. There were a handful of papers on the topic, which was never a widely accepted idea.
Oh good FSM, the denialists appear to be non-cognizant of dendrochronological and species data that we’ve got in addition to the other stuff (ever heard of Humboldt squid?). Not to mention the fact that ocean acidity and methane release is happening in ways that have verifiably never happened before – seriously, in terms of the cyclical nature of Earth’s climate and life this is an aberration. How many of you numbnutses are biologists or climatologists?
I’m gonna go bang my head against a wall.
The best thing we as humans can do about global warming is go carbon-neutral (I bet even you denialists can get behind that, or are you solidly pro-oil? You should see how miserable Saudi Arabia is these days – it’s tried to insinuate itself into all the climate agreements purely because its economy is completely dependent on oil. It’s not sustainable in the long-term, really, and anyone who actually studies this can tell you that as opposed to the moronic economists and businessmen and others who’ve stepped outside the bounds of their expertise who’ve gotten a megalomaniacal itch to pontificate – especially the businessmen and economists, attached more to money than anything else and ways to make it. I trust nobody who makes their career primarily about money, and neither should you) and adapt (this is more likely to piss off other people who know it happens because most people want to think there’s a way to solve it).
Most actual climatologists think we’re past the tipping point and we’re going to be screwed for about 100,000 years (well, more accurately, certain species we depend on will be screwed; we’re more likely to survive it, but a whole lot of people are going to starve to death and lose their homes, but goodness knows you libertarian/conservative types are okay with that) before the environment recovers. There is actually a record of this same sort of warming happening as a result of volcanic eruption about 55 million years ago and it took 100,000 years to ameliorate.
No, the environment’s not going to be destroyed, really. It’ll be changed and a lot of species are going to be extinct and a lot of people will be dead as a result of our actions – things that we can control. But it won’t be destroyed. That’s about the only good thing I can say about it.
Well said Peter.
Curious Wavefunction, I’m more inclined to think it’s because physicists may be a wee bit more reductionist on average and considerably less aware of the emergent properties more inherent in climatology, ecology, and biology.
Plus it really does take a good understanding of some basic principles of biology, ecology, and climatology to really comprehend this, and the picture is more illuminating when you look at not only the climatological, but the ecological data.