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.
we had in the 1970s about the coming ice age
Who is the we here? Apparently the you, that claims the we, was not willing to read all the science of the 70s, yet advocates that that is what is important to you. There was ample evidence being discussed about the prospects of what was then called thermal pollution and the impact humans were having on the warming of the geographical regions where they were concentrated. That led to the Global 2000 report to the President, that clearly outlines, in 1970s terms the ongoing prospects for global climate change, and a whole host of other issues. I suggest you resist the collective “we” in the future.
Really, I say f*ck the Saudis. They can have all the oil they want; we shouldn’t be propping up a theocracy.
Although then again there are petroleum products that we need.
The Saudis aren’t the only oil-owning state in the world.
If you read Olson’s piece, you’ll see that it was not so much Al Gore’s politics as his approach to debate that really did it. Normally in national policy, the requirement is to have a debate in which you have to make a convincing and persuasive case. Gore sought to do an end run around that requirement by declaring the debate to already be over, the conclusion certain, the only acceptable policy clear, and to marginalise anyone who disagreed or doubted as anti-science cranks who should under no circumstances be listened to.
And even if he was completely right about the science, that’s simply not how Americans who are big on democracy and freedom do things.
Of course, Gore was not the only one to do so. But his film being so influential, it makes a good example. The problem was that the advocates didn’t try to persuade people they were right, they simply stated that they were right, and that gets up people’s noses – particularly if they don’t like what you’re proposing to do about it.
It also sets the science up for a fall. Modern climatology is a very young science, as sciences go, in a difficult area, and there’s a lot we still don’t know, and there are without doubt many things we think we know that we’re actually wrong about. That’s normal and to be expected in science. But having declared AGW to be as firmly founded as the existence of gravity or the sun rising in the East each morning, it meant that every time some error or counter-evidence was discovered, (or some tiny little exaggeration exposed,) the declarations of certainty started to look deceptive and dishonest. Indeed, as more people started to look, and to ask questions, and dig into data and papers, the more they found. Again, that’s not unexpected in a young science, but it’s distinctly out of character for a firmly established one.
And then, instead of taking a step back and reconsidering the strategy, the community decided to double down on asserting Scientific Authority. But that can only work for so long. And then finally, Climategate completely blew the lid off things.
(And they screwed even the response to that up by trying to say there was nothing to see instead of taking it seriously, sitting down, and answering the questions.)
And thus the community finds itself in desperate need of a persuasive case to make, and finds itself woefully unprepared. The general public do not have the background in the science to understand from such a standing start, and most of the advocates for action don’t have the knowledge or skills to give it to them. They’re starting with the credibility handicap of all the recent scandals, and the sceptics are already in their stride and accelerating, well used to having to persuade. And the general public can only sustain alarm for so long before they become acclimatised to it and get bored.
Basically, any hope of action on climate (that we haven’t got legislated already) is thoroughly screwed. The only hope for it now is to get another twenty years of rising temperatures.
The Republicans as a party are not especially inclined towards AGW-scepticism (their former position was more that of the Byrd-Hagel resolution), but like any politicians they are sensitive to which way the wind is blowing, and are hurriedly positioning themselves to take advantage as the public mood swings. The Democrats as a party are stuck with their past platform and can’t move without blowing their credibility, but I suspect they would really like to. The trick is, of course, to do nothing and be able to blame the lack of movement on the Republicans. That would at least limit the damage.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how all this plays out. There are interesting times ahead.
And even if he was completely right about the science, that’s simply not how Americans who are big on democracy and freedom do things.
Certainly, it’s how Americans who are not big on brains and rationality and realizing someone may know more about some things than they do do it.
It’s disturbing how you’re putting democracy and freedom in some sort of opposition to listening and learning from those who actually study it and giving them consideration. You’re making a very anti-intellectual sort of juxtaposition. (‘But but but argument from authority!’, you may reply, but here’s the thing: that argument can also be abused mightily when an authority figure is actually doing the right thing and you either do not get it or you do not want to do it.)
I’m sold on the idea of AGW, but I’m not entirely convinced that the effects will be all bad or even mostly bad. Russia, Canada and the northern USA will see huge agricultural productivity gains. The Northwest Passage will open up to shipping. Much fewer winter deaths will occur. And now some scientists think there will be significantly increased moisture over the Sahara leading to a vast greening of that great desert. Of course these effects might be outweighed by the negative consequences of warming. Perhaps greatly outweighed. We’ll see.
Yes, we’ll see, because the major powers aren’t going to do much about it until it’s too late. And then assuming the effects are mostly bad, we’ll go into crisis mode. I suspect some major geoengineering projects will ensue. My favourite proposal is powdering the equatorial regions with ground-up olivine. Here is a recent paper describing that idea. Sounds like fun.
If anyone is actually interested in AGW science itself: http://sites.google.com/site/agucop15journalists/
You do need to ask intelligent, non-political, interesting questions.
After post #27, I’m not sure why I’m replying to #23, but here goes (i liked throwing rocks at hornet nests when I was a kid):
“Most actual climatologists think we’re past the tipping point”
The data does not support that, the average global temperature has not risen in a few years. It’s right on the CRU home page! http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
The temperature is irrelevant; what matters is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even if we stopped adding to it right this very minute, there’s going to be significant warming, and it would take thousands of years for it to return to pre-industrial levels and not affect the climate any more.
“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? ”
Thank you. One more reason to dislike J Leno.
“Something that perhaps is more relevant to this site is the question of why there is such rampant AGW-denialism in the physics community”
In general, I do not find this to be the case (?)
@33 – But to say we are “Past the tipping point” means we’ve entered the “feedback loop” thus temperatures would have to continue rising. Unless there were factors like a weak el nino, but in fact, it’s been the opposite. To the point that some state we’ve actually been cooling a bit.
I wasn’t trying to say that trowing carbon into the atmosphere willy nilly was a good idea, just stating that it’s difficult to assert we are “past the tipping point” given the recent data.
There really is a need to have a better understanding of the psychology behind AGW denialism. There seems to be many underlying factors involved so coming up with a single explanation (e.g Al Gore) is doomed to failure.
The religious component, as was pointed out in #13, is certainly one factor and, given that the Republican party was strategically co-opted by the religious right, adequately explains why denialism is a Republican position but not why denialism is as widespread as it is.
The economic factors are also certainly at play: dealing with AGW would entail significant economic upheaval. There is also the Economic/Game theory factor that underlies all ‘tragedies of the commons’ : individual self-interest vs the well-fare of the group.
There is also the moral component: accepting the fact of AGW demands that we accept moral responsibility for the harm that will follow. We, collectively, have done a bad selfish thing that other people are going to pay for. Accepting that but not trying to correct it makes us evil and since no one can accept the idea that they are evil and no one wants to commit to correcting the problem, then AGW must not be accepted as true.
#29,
“Certainly, it’s how Americans who are not big on brains and rationality and realizing someone may know more about some things than they do do it.”
That’s the problem. It’s not that they’re stupid or irrational – our host points out that “the phenomenon is especially strong among those with college degrees” – it’s that they’re looking at the question from a different point of view.
“It’s disturbing how you’re putting democracy and freedom in some sort of opposition to listening and learning from those who actually study it and giving them consideration.”
No, I was saying precisely the opposite. The problem was that people were not being invited to listen and learn, they were being told to believe. There is no debate. There is no discussion. You can’t legitimately ask questions, or argue, or disagree. This is the answer.
Their attitude to people asking to see how they got the answer they did was along the lines of “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Isn’t that how science works? But when the aim is not to help people to learn or to persuade them that you’re right but to make them believe, you don’t want people peeking behind the curtain.
An authority figure doing the right thing also has to do it in the right way.
Sean,
Do you think Gore is wrong when he argues that solving climate change will require political action? If you think that climate change cannot be addressed by individual action but only by corporate action, backed by governmental policies, then the issue is *inevitably* going to be political.
Bottom line, the issue has been politicized, which is really the point. With that being said, I’ll offer this:
If you believe every single thing you hear/read/see that supports your side of the AGW argument, no matter if you are a “denier” or an “alarmists”, you need to do the following for the good of all:
Get a firm grip on the back of your head and pull down sharply. The sound you hear will be your head popping out of your ***
This is not the first time in the short history of environmentalism that alarmist prognoses about the future have backfired. Remember the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” (1972)? The projections were shaky and under-scrutinized. For me this marks the start of environmentalists all being sub-consciously branded as alarmist tree-huggers in the collective consciousness.
As for the association of social causes with political allegiances I have only this to say:
Environmetalism is a conservative cause, Christianity is a socialist teaching and Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
The way that elites manipulate humans is to tell them that they must do something or some awful thing will happen to them. Telling them that they’re going to destroy the earth and all of their children will die is effective for only a short while. Eventually that sort of argument will attract attention. Then you have the inevitable scandal. It started with the climategate email releases now it’s continuing with paper after peer-reviewed paper questioning the alarmist claims.
The problem is that when you’re trying to scare humans into doing something idiotic over a long term, you need to use threats that are hard to quantify. I suggest telling them that if they misbehave they will roast forever in an imaginary place (not original, somebody else came up with this).
The whole technique works better when you only need a short term response. For instance, you can tell them that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That got a positive response from the public that was higher than the peak positive response due to the global warming scare. But over the long run, it’s difficult to maintain the necessary fear.
@37. Nullius in Verba,
Yours is one of the few explanations I’ve heard that makes sense of the right’s position. Beyond, that is, extreme polarization and the false dicotomy that your political opponent is your enemy and everything they say is wrong.
@4. A,
Regarding “…no one denies that climate is changing”.
I gotta say that’s a major fail there. Have you read what is circulating these days? I feel confident that I can find opinion, and lots of it, that says exactly that. And not just me can find it–anyone can, with about 5 minutes work. Probably less.
It started with the climategate email releases
None of which showed any wrongdoing, as confirmed by a British parliamentary investigation and multiple university investigative commissions.
now it’s continuing with paper after peer-reviewed paper questioning the alarmist claims.
This is simply false.
It’s amazing how many of you are living in a fantasy world in which thousands of scientists would conspire to agree to publish the same misleading results. If climate change were not happening due to human activity, and any scientist could convincingly show it, they would be famous and extravagantly successful.
Regarding the issue of climate “skepticism” being “rampant” among physicists: there certainly seems a higher density among physicists than among other scientists, but rampant is a huge overstatement. Of course the skeptics are in evidence here; in fact, some of you may not know that one of the co-bloggers is among them…
The response to climate change science was politicized long before An Inconvenient Truth. This has everything to do with economic interests and political philosophy – fossil fuel industries are a powerful lobby, and Republicans are anti-regulation by default. It had nothing to do with Al Gore. If you followed climate science from about 1988 to 200x there was a lot of politics in the response to people like James Hansen, and none of it was about Al Gore.
Al Gore is now just a convenient lightning rod for criticism. A lot of today’s climate-change and AGW skeptics (on the Internet, I mean, not the minority of scientists who argue against it and knew about it before the movie) invoke him as representative of the field, as if he had invented it or something. One could blame Al Gore for getting it popularized enough to draw the attention of skeptics that weren’t thinking about AGW beforehand, but that is very roundabout.
Actually the science behind climate forcing (the greenhouse effect of CO2) is relatively well understood. See for example Spencer Weart’s history at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm What is less well understood is what will happen in the future, because that requires modeling the effects. I don’t think there is a *lot* of climate change skepticism in the physics community, but there is a bit, and even that bit is not well founded in my opinion.
It especially irritates me how the denialists bang on and on about emails that were already resolved.
Of course, they think if they repeat it enough it’ll be true.
That’s the problem. It’s not that they’re stupid or irrational – our host points out that “the phenomenon is especially strong among those with college degrees”
And more Republicans have college degrees than Democrats, which is because Republicans are on average better off. It might be telling to look at the proportion that has graduate degrees; having a graduate degree and being a Democrat are linked.
What about which field their degree is in?
In addition, I wonder what proportions among Democrats think global warming is occurring.
No, I was saying precisely the opposite. The problem was that people were not being invited to listen and learn, they were being told to believe. There is no debate. There is no discussion. You can’t legitimately ask questions, or argue, or disagree. This is the answer.
Their attitude to people asking to see how they got the answer they did was along the lines of “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Isn’t that how science works? But when the aim is not to help people to learn or to persuade them that you’re right but to make them believe, you don’t want people peeking behind the curtain.
I don’t think that was the case. All the data has been freely available, as far as I’m aware. If you do a little digging around Science, Nature, etc. you can dig it up.
The economic factors are also certainly at play: dealing with AGW would entail significant economic upheaval. There is also the Economic/Game theory factor that underlies all ‘tragedies of the commons’ : individual self-interest vs the well-fare of the group.
Not only that, but there are people who have built their entire livelihoods on the very thing that’s screwing up the environment. Perhaps it would be useful if we offered them a good out.
There is also the moral component: accepting the fact of AGW demands that we accept moral responsibility for the harm that will follow. We, collectively, have done a bad selfish thing that other people are going to pay for. Accepting that but not trying to correct it makes us evil and since no one can accept the idea that they are evil and no one wants to commit to correcting the problem, then AGW must not be accepted as true.
Somehow I guess I can’t figure out why this is so hard for a lot of humanity to deal with. You screw up, you fix it, and just wishing something existed or didn’t exist doesn’t make it exist or not exist. Is most of humanity just infantile, emotionally?
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@13 Jacques Distler (and others) have it more correct here than Sean: The Republicans would be just as science denying without Al Gore as with him. Gore, as he has on so many other issues, just makes an easy to ridicule whipping boy. The much LARGER problem is the fact that the American Right thinks it’s ok to disagree with experts on ANY subject, as long as it reinforces their political beliefs. I’ve seen Republican airline pilots disagree with experts on global warming, astrophysics, you name it, they ARE SMARTER than the experts, so why should they bother to listen to them? I pick on airline pilots because you would think they’d see the irony; the Republican ones DO NOT, so I expect to see a person picked at random to fly one their routes some day. It’s just part and parcel of the over-wheening arrogance of American Right Wingers in general. As Sean did correctly point out, you rarely see this PARTICULAR type of arrogance among other conservative parties in industrialized democracies (Russia surely doesn’t count in that list, or the former U.S.S.R with their cosmonauts needing to consult with their astrologers while on orbit).
This is a wildly disappointing post, Sean. You say that Gore’s not to blame for demonization of climate science in the country, but you’re still adopting Olson’s battered wife syndrome framing (exactly the thing that made me switch off his evolution wars doc before I ground my teeth to their nubs).
Let’s not blame the people who’re distorting the science, ad hom’ing the people trying to educate the public and willfully spreading misinformation (plenty of evidence of that in the comments above). No, instead, let’s pretend that if we’re nice enough and gentle enough and try not to put things in a way that makes people think that any of their current ideas are wrong or that their worldview or habits might have to change, then none of the bad people will say anything bad about us. Heck, I’m sure that if we run our next climatology, evolution and cosmology results by the Koch brothers, Ken Ham and Glenn Beck, then I’m sure they’ll be right on board.
That’s nonsense and, as a scientist, you should know better.
I’ve just one thing to add…. LOCK BOX