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.
Perhaps the most astonishing myth the climate change denialists have bought into is this Vast Conspiracy nonsense. If these people had ANY understanding of real world at all, they would know that scientists are constitutionally incapable of the political organization required to perpetuate such a coverup. Successfully herding a warehouse full rabid cats jacked-up on meth into a school bus is more plausible to me than getting hundreds of climatologists to keep such a racket going for more than three hours. Aside from the strongest avarice-driven desire to cling to this lunatic fantasy, even if regions of their brain must literally melt from the heavy beat of cognitive dissonance, I can’t fathom how conservatives can possibly maintain such a unified front of so-called skepticism.
I believe that the GOP is in the hands of big business, Wall Street, Koch brothers etc. You see this clearly how they fought against health reform and for the tax break for the rich. Since accepting that man may be responsible for climate change could lead one to suggest laws which would alleviate the problem. But this would cut into the profits of Wall St. You can not convince somebody when it is not in his interest. What is suprising how many people accept this stuff when it is not in their best interest.
Is Anerica in a dance of death:
. spending too much on the military and the rich too little on education, roads and the poor, increasing debt which it can not afford
. legislative and judicial branches which are more interested in ideology and the
interest of the rich than to tackel the urgend problems
. watching “news” which is propaganda
. intellectuals preaching only to the choir
. abandonibg many of their basic princeples after 9/11
. believing strange things
following the US political debate from outside i find myself wondering more and more. Obama has had 2 years (and he actually still has a few weeks) to do whatever he wants: president (with a huge electoral win), senate and house all firmly democratic. and what was the outcome: a measly half-baked health reform, continuation of war, more troops even, money pumped like crazy into economy and no tax increase for the rich.
and if i follow democrats like the blogginghead here, who is to blame: the republicans.
come on, give me a break. democrats had all the power and still have a large share. truth is they don’t want to do a thing either. at least the gop is straight about their (often obscure and stupid) goals.
“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.”
They are in Australia, and we don’t have Al Gore here.
The only common media-cultural denominator is Rupert Murdoch.
Where are the people of character on the right in America who will say: “Enough is enough; we must solve some very important problems instead of only wanting to win the next election”. Why are they always saying: “What is good for Wall St. is good for America”.
whoever thinks the right is in wall streets hands should look at the cv of the current treasury secretary. or at Obamas campaign contribution breakup.
@25. Katharine
“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?”
I’m no denialist unless economics is now a scientific matter. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere will warm things up some unless the system has a net negative response, which there isn’t support for. I do think many people have overstated the threats (see Al Gore’s movie for many examples) and made conclusions which aren’t greatly supported by the data in an effort to scare people into their preferred policy measures. It’s a typical political ploy and is being countered by some on the right calling it all a lie.
I can’t get behind us going completely carbon neutral though. Our entire economy. Almost every single thing we use daily to get through life relies on the cheap energy fossil fuels provide. Eventually, we must find alternative energy sources that are competitive. You don’t do that by all of the sudden making all energy expensive. That will simply lead to less productivity, jobs, and eventually innovation while the rest of the world that doesn’t pay your tax will enjoy much cheaper energy from fossil fuels that will last longer because we aren’t consuming so much. And before someone mentions fossil fuel subsidies, please remove them. Fossil fuels will still be much cheaper than any “renewable” energy source out there.
What we need to do is take some money from other areas (the military would be a great start) and devote them into labs that will work with private industry to find long term solutions. I don’t know enough to know exactly where that should be, but fusion energy seems like the only truly long term answer. This is nothing new. The government is already devoting some, relatively small, amounts of money to research. If we’re not willing to go for the very long term answer then we should devote money, along with other countries, to find a way to change our entire static power grid to some form of fission power.
I am not buying it. Republicans, in their current incarnation, demonize people. Big deal.
Health Care, find me another conservative party among the industrialized world that opposes
universal health care. There are not any. Blame Hillary — Blame Moore.
Evolution, find me another conservative party in the industrialized world that opposes teaching
science in science classes. There are not any. Blame Dawkins — Blame Carrol (Sean).
Global Warming, find me another conservative party … well you get the idea….
It seems whenever a global warming post goes up you get responses from three camps. Alarmists, deniers, and skeptics. So we end up with skeptics and deniers arguing with alarmists. The ideological breakdown of these groups is always the same:
Deniers and skeptics are conservatives of different flavors (flavours for you in the UK).
Alarmists are liberals.
Why do we never seem to find a skeptical liberal? Which party is it that tends to tote the “party line” more than the other?
The problem is that genuine skeptics are often drowned out by the din created by the rank deniers. There are plenty of liberal skeptics who are skeptics for the right reasons, but they are usually denounced as belonging to the right-wing denier camp by alarmist liberals. That is one of the big problems with the climate change debate. People are constantly being mislabeled and then ignored and this is causing a lack of consensus even among people in the same camp. Not to mention that it’s destroying any chances for reasonable debate. Moderation is a lost virtue these days.
Makes sense I suppose. After all, Atheist are destroying science literacy by alienating Christians. Greenpeace is discrediting environmentalism. Stupid Rachel Carson, politicizing DDT. And really, if he Jews weren’t such easy targets, the Nazi’s never would have bothered with them.
Perhaps we should reformulate the old saw. “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to try and resist it.” Stupid bastards politicizing everything. Who do they think they are?
#61: That is a good point, I may actually be showing my conservative bias by assuming all skeptics are conservatives.
On “Moderation is a lost virtue these days” I couldn’t agree more. The blame here is primarily the media in this country. There are no longer any moderate news outlets. All news agencies lean one way or the others (some more than others).
I again may be showing my conservative bias, but it seems foxnews gets daemonized regularly (rightly so in many cases). But there are MANY liberal leaning news networks (some would say all but foxnews are) and liberals aren’t willing to admit that.
I always here alarmists saying “you are just spouting out what foxnews tells you”. Whelp, guess what, many alarmists are just spouting out what Rachel Madow, Bill Maher, and Keither Olberman are telling them.
Global warming is a nebulous subject, much of the science is unsettled, so there is a lot of room for conflicting “facts” when reporting. One must look at both sides of the argument, do their own research, and figure out what is spin and what is not.
right here, you’ve made your title of the article worthless. It’s not Gore’s fault at all. We can see whose it is though…
“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”
@64: So the Iraq war is not Bush’s fault? He is certainly a “punchline”…
re #19 by “this generation” do you mean 70 year olds?
because that what the Koch brothers are and thats
what Murdoch is
@66: and so is George Soros…
Sorry to keep bombing this post, I’m just sick of people thinking the other party is the problem. Both parties are the problem, we need a powerful centrist party to keep both sides in check. This is supposed to be the media’s job, see #63…
I’m no denialist unless economics is now a scientific matter. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere will warm things up some unless the system has a net negative response, which there isn’t support for. I do think many people have overstated the threats (see Al Gore’s movie for many examples) and made conclusions which aren’t greatly supported by the data in an effort to scare people into their preferred policy measures. It’s a typical political ploy and is being countered by some on the right calling it all a lie.
I can’t get behind us going completely carbon neutral though. Our entire economy. Almost every single thing we use daily to get through life relies on the cheap energy fossil fuels provide. Eventually, we must find alternative energy sources that are competitive. You don’t do that by all of the sudden making all energy expensive. That will simply lead to less productivity, jobs, and eventually innovation while the rest of the world that doesn’t pay your tax will enjoy much cheaper energy from fossil fuels that will last longer because we aren’t consuming so much. And before someone mentions fossil fuel subsidies, please remove them. Fossil fuels will still be much cheaper than any “renewable” energy source out there.
See, now you’re banging on about money. The profitability of one method versus the other doesn’t change the impact of one or the other on the environment.
It’s an issue of short-term big profits but environmental hurt versus long-term smaller profits but environmental health which sustains the civilization that, well, produces these profits. If you’re of the sort that cares about, well, profit. (I’m not in a field that cares much about profit, see; science, unless you’re a biotech company, mostly only cares about money insofar as it comes through grants for research. Not that there are some who don’t totally go hyperbolic to get publicity and money; see the current clusterf*ck about the arsenic-users.)
Fossil fuels, granted, do provide us petroleum products other than what we burn. The chemical industry uses petroleum products to produce important reagents. This doesn’t mean the oil industry can’t make money off oil; it’ll just make substantially less money, and there won’t be oil being burnt for energy – it’ll be used on a smaller scale.
What we need to do is take some money from other areas (the military would be a great start) and devote them into labs that will work with private industry to find long term solutions. I don’t know enough to know exactly where that should be, but fusion energy seems like the only truly long term answer. This is nothing new. The government is already devoting some, relatively small, amounts of money to research. If we’re not willing to go for the very long term answer then we should devote money, along with other countries, to find a way to change our entire static power grid to some form of fission power.
Honestly I’m kind of wondering why we all haven’t made solar power economical. There’s this big ball of energy an AU away and we’re not using that stuff? It’s going to belch out energy for the next 50 billion years and after that it’s going to cook Earth into a crisp, so we can use the crud out of it before we bail on this planet and it’s not going to hurt the environment nearly as much as fossil fuels. Put solar panels all over your house, I say.
I again may be showing my conservative bias, but it seems foxnews gets daemonized regularly (rightly so in many cases). But there are MANY liberal leaning news networks (some would say all but foxnews are) and liberals aren’t willing to admit that.
I always here alarmists saying “you are just spouting out what foxnews tells you”. Whelp, guess what, many alarmists are just spouting out what Rachel Madow, Bill Maher, and Keither Olberman are telling them.
Global warming is a nebulous subject, much of the science is unsettled, so there is a lot of room for conflicting “facts” when reporting. One must look at both sides of the argument, do their own research, and figure out what is spin and what is not.
Oh yes, you’re showing your conservative bias.
I’m a liberal. I don’t watch Maddow or Maher (Maher is an unscientific twit the same as you denialists most of the time – he’s an antivaxxer) or Olbermann. I don’t actually hear much from the nonscientists among those of us who know global warming happens and is humanity’s fault. I agree; the nonscientists among us are kind of being stupid about how they’re communicating it and they need to leave it to us who actually know what we’re talking about.
No, I get my information from folks such as Jeremy Jackson, who actually did work on this stuff. The science is very much settled, it’s just that people who haven’t really delved into all of it – not just the climatological information but the ecological information – think it isn’t. (If you say the East Anglia emails proved that it’s a fraud, I will tear you a new arsehole verbally in my next post. They were proven to be perfectly fine.)
He’s a little more apocalyptic-sounding, granted – I’m on the side of those who think we’re all well and truly screwed even more than Al Gore thinks, and as I said before, the last time the planet warmed up 55 million years ago due to a volcanic eruption, it didn’t destroy the biosphere the way the Permian or Cretaceous extinctions did, but it sure made a lot of animals go extinct, and the earth didn’t recover for 100000 years. Al Gore actually thinks we can geoengineer or green-energy the earth into being all happy again, and the truth is that we’re past the tipping point.
As I said, the best thing humans in general can do is push for carbon neutrality – be as carbon-neutral as possible, preferably completely carbon-neutral – and adapt.
Katherine @46 wrote:
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?
That is exactly your problem.
Humans are short-sighted. We have a strong survival instinct which elevates our needs for food, clothing, and shelter beyond those of any single species of fuzzy caterpillars in the amazon rainforest. Therefore, it is perfectly rational for humans to choose current access to cheap energy over a possible environmental catastrophy decades or centuries away. Democtratically elected governments are comprised of similarly short-sighted humans who need the support of masses of other short-sighted humans to remain in power.
You may, of course, wish for some Benign Omniscient Dictator who will order us to do the right thing in spite of our strong contrary instincts. This BOD does not exist and has never existed. Except when you were seven years old. You called him “Daddy.”
“Daddy” cannot save ourselves from ourselves. Nature has conspired to give us a wonderfully dense fuel and we have created a grand infrastructure to exploit it at minimum costs. Until we invent or find a similarly cheap and energy dense fuel, we will continue to prefer carbon based fuels. Until carbon based fuels become scarce and/or expensive, we will continue to consume them at obscene levels.
We all may wish it were not so, but humans will continue to prefer commuting to work, heating their homes, and affording food to starving and freezing to death. While I too, would like to blame that on Al Gore, I’m afraid I just can’t rationalize it.
@69 “same as you denialists most of the time”
I’m not a denialist. I agree that burning fossil fuels is bad for the planet. But thank you for underscoring the point that this issue has become politicized and any attempt at rational conversation about it quickly turns to assumptions and name calling.
Somebody very wise once said: “If your mouth is open, your ears are closed.” Try to open your ears a bit more, your open mouth is not helping the cause.
It becomes impossible to have a meaningful discussion of climate change science on the Internet because it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion of anything politically controversial on the Internet, especially in a typical comments forum.
At the point that you frame the discussion by calling people who support a mainstream scientific consensus (that anthropogenic global warming is significant) “alarmists,” you can no longer expect to have a calm, unbiased scientific debate.
Ben@72 wrote:
… it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion of anything politically controversial on the Internet, especially in a typical comments forum.
Bring it on. I’m always game for a good depoliticized discussion. Betcha we can invoke Godwin’s law in less than 10 posts.
Bobito@60 wrote:
It seems whenever a global warming post goes up you get responses from three camps. Alarmists, deniers, and skeptics.
There’s a fourth camp: realists. We acknowledge that AGW might be true, understand that the earth is a very complex non-linear system that will likely resist any of our attempts to do anything, understand that economics is a very complex non-linear system that will likely resist any of our attempts to do anything, understand that politics is a very simple system made up of very simple people who will likely resist any of our attempts to do anything and drink 16 year-old scotch. Not necessarily in that order.
@72: Yes, blogs have proven to be a horrible place to have a meaningful conversation, but one can dream. In actuality, blogs are more part of the problem than the solution.
@73: Your definition of realist is my definition of skeptic. As in, you are a realist if you are skeptical of deniers and alarmists. And you are certainly a realist if you are skeptical of politicians!
#46,
“It especially irritates me how the denialists bang on and on about emails that were already resolved.”
That’s because they weren’t resolved. Anybody who has read the things and followed the background to them knows that, but there are plenty of people who haven’t and who will blindly believe what they’re told about them. It doesn’t matter how often it’s repeated, though, because the denialists already know what they say.
(In case you genuinely haven’t read them, I suggest you start with the Harry_read_me file, which is an entertaining log of a computer programmer’s attempts to replicate one of the major data products CRU has published in the peer-reviewed literature. Ian ‘Harry’ Harris is not a sceptic, but an insider – an employee of CRU. Nobody that I know of has answered the questions that it raises.)
“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.”
That’s the trouble. Most people aren’t aware. They just assume. And when they’re told what some scientists have been doing, their minds seem to just reject the information. They find it simply incomprehensible that scientists really would or could do that, or that the rest of the scientific community would let them get away with it. But they did and they have.
It’s not a straightforward situation though. A lot of data has been published, certainly, and some scientists (including some of the most criticised) have been very good about it. (Often it is not the data but the methods that are missing, or some parts of the data are included but not others.) But there are many important results based on data that has never been published, or which was not published initially but only after a long struggle on the part of critics to get hold of it. And quite often, when it was eventually published, sometimes decades after the original work, shortcomings and errors were discovered that would never have passed peer-review had anyone seen the data at the time.
But really, I’m a bit surprised that you didn’t recognise the quote. You say “I don’t think that was the case”, which makes it seem like you were unaware that it was an actual quote from an email sent by a climatologist to an enquirer asking for the data backing up an important publication. It is moderately famous, which is why I didn’t think attribution was necessary.
All of this only goes to show, though, that both sides have their blind spots when it comes to science. The problem with blind spots though is that you can’t see them in yourself. The brain fills in the gap and tells you that everything is normal, and it’s virtually impossible to persuade it otherwise.