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.
First, can you tell me why you didn’t ask for a citation for the original claim?
Because I hadn’t read the original claim and didn’t care to. You asserted something very confidently, and I wasn’t so sure about it. If you know you’re right, what does it matter? Just give the link.
I find your remark about the adaptation of humans to differing climates to be quite remarkable. Yes, it’s true that Homo Sapiens split off from other Homo species ~250,000 years ago. But one of the most outstanding features of Homo Sapiens is that it has spread to inhabit every climate, from the Eskimo to the desert nomads.
Right. But:
a) they didn’t adapt to the climates we’re talking about, which existed 10^6 years ago but not 2.5 * 10^5 years ago (which again, is the whole point),
b) they did so very slowly and gradually. Desert nomads didn’t just run off to Alaska, desert nomads became plains hunter gatherers, then arboreal hunter gatherers, then tundra hunter gatherers, and then we get inuits from those. Meanwhile, enough time elapsed to allow inuits to be obviously genetically adapted to their climate, not to mention all the technological developments that allowed homo sapiens to generalize so spectacularly.
c) While this incredibly slow, gradual process happened, homo sapiens existed at much lower population densities. Low population densities put less stress on ecosystems, and thus allow adaptation to marginal terrain. Also, life was probably pretty brutal, which means the sorts of genetic and cultural adaptations mentioned in (b) would have occurred relatively quickly. For us, not so much.
So by ignoring those complications, you’re essentially claiming that an arbitrary number of humans can adapt to an arbitrary change of climate over an arbitrarily short period of time. That’s absurd.
For example, during the Eemian interglacial about 120,000 years ago, there were forests in Finland and the North Cape in Norway, and hippopotamus swam in the Rhine and the Thames.
There are forests in Finland and the North Cape in Norway NOW. And I’m obviously supposed to infer that there’s never been any such thing as a cold-adapted hippopotamus despite the fact that there were cold-adapted elephants and rhinocerouses before the megafauna extinctions a few ten thousands of years ago. These are not good indicators of temperature, but even if they were, they speak only to local conditions. I’m worried about the total energy of the entire atmosphere going up, not about warm winters in the Rhineland.
There are many things about our modern world that we never evolved for. But not only are we sufficiently adaptable to survive them, we often seek out such changes, to our great benefit.
I’ve never seen a black swan. Therefore, all swans are white. Can’t fault that logic.
@100:
The government allocated billions of dollars towards going to the moon. In what possible world is that not an economic incentive? What if the government allocated a proportionally identical amount of money to alternative energy research. You don’t think we’d make more progress than we have?
Yes, when fossil fuels get scarce enough, that will constitute an economic incentive. Do you think it’s a good idea to wait for that to happen?
@100:
I don’t think that fission is any kind of solution. It’s no good as a short term solution since it takes on the order of decades to get a nuclear power plant ramped up, and it’s no good long term for some very obvious reasons. And if you rush the plants to make it look better short term, you get serious environmental and worker safety issues. Actually, you get those anyway because those are convenient places for nuclear power plants to cut costs — at least historically — and they’re profit-motivated businesses.
Please don’t act as if there aren’t any sensible objections to nuclear power.
@102: The US govm’t is currently spending $7 billion on research into wind energy production alone (having difficulty finding a valid source for actual “green energy” investments, but I’m sure it’s well in the billions). Even Bush said “We must get off oil”. The, pardon the pun, winds are changing…
@103: There are certainly sensible objections, just not any good examples to back then up. My recollection is that there has never been a life lost due to a nuclear incident in this country. Any serious incidents have been relegated to developing nations and a failing Russia. Modern reactors also mitigate much of the risk. see here: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/05-the-big-promise-of-micro-nukes/?searchterm=oregon%20nuclear
This is also to my point, what is worse, a local nuclear indecent or the catastrophic effects of global warming that you are inferring are imminent? To the point that we should risk our already fragile economy to fix?
Well knock me down with a feather.. it seems that NASA have decided that even if CO2 doubles, the temp rise will be 1.64 C. That should spoil the Carbon Cults parties 😀
See, this kind of thing is why no one who understands anything about science should take the skeptic/denialist camp seriously. You ignore decades of literature estimating climate sensitivity, but as soon as one low estimate is published, you seize on it as the absolute truth. Is the climate sensitivity as low as they say, due to vegetation feedbacks? I don’t know. I hope so! We could all breathe a little easier. But notice they say a -0.6 C change in temperatures over land; this only gives a 1.64 C change for doubled CO2 if you start at the low end of existing sensitivity estimates. One of the first questions you should ask is the range of predicted sensitivities; any particular number (especially when you quote three significant figures!) is suspect. A -0.6 C change in sensitivity from a previously not-well-understood feedback mechanism would be good news, but it wouldn’t end all of our worries. At any rate, celebrating because one particular just-released paper happens to support your preconceptions is not a sign that you take science seriously.
@104:
There are certainly sensible objections, just not any good examples to back then up. My recollection is that there has never been a life lost due to a nuclear incident in this country. Any serious incidents have been relegated to developing nations and a failing Russia. Modern reactors also mitigate much of the risk.
I never claimed “nuclear incidents” were the problem. The bigger problem is in situ storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear power plants are not just dangerous during “nuclear incidents” — they are always dangerous. They pump incredibly toxic, very weaponizable waste and there is no way around that.
There are no examples of deaths due to nuclear power plants the same way there are no examples of people dying due to global warming. The effects are way downstream and very easy to externalize. As long as there’s no meltdowns, the worst that’s going to happen is much higher incidents of cancer in any communities sharing an aquifer with the reactor. To a nuclear power company, that’s not such a big problem (providing it’s not legally actionable). As a human being, I disagree.
#101,
“Because I hadn’t read the original claim and didn’t care to. You asserted something very confidently, and I wasn’t so sure about it. If you know you’re right, what does it matter?”
Since I quoted the original claim at the top of the comment you questioned, how is it possible that you didn’t read it?
It matters because it whether or not CO2 was once 20 times higher is a lot less important than how the debate works. Is it a case of people simply not having heard one half of the story, in which case it may be worth some effort, or is it a case of one side facing a different standard of evidence to the other, and still being ignored even if all the citations are provided?
But as it happens my comment was based on GEOCARB III.
a) They adapted to the climates we’re talking about. Which was my point.
b) How do you know? And are you saying that humans can adapt, or that they can’t?
c) What makes you think low population densities put less strain on ecosystems? Perhaps the population density is low because that is as much as the ecosystem can bear? I’m a bit surprised that you think cultural adaptation was faster in the stone age than the internet age, too.
The North Cape areas that were once forested are now frozen tundra.
The cold-adapted hippopotamus is a most interesting idea. There’s other evidence for warmer climate, but it’s interesting to see how hard people can work to repair a favoured hypothesis.
And why are you worried about the total energy of the atmosphere going up? You only live in one place at a time.
I’m not entirely sure what your point was about swans. That wasn’t the logic I was using. I was simply arguing with your claim that there are no white swans.
But I’m not sure why you would object to such an argument anyway, since when you used it yourself with your statement: “So far, we haven’t found any other sources of plastics”, the logic appears to be exactly the same. Clearly, you haven’t heard of the Fischer-Tropsch process.
#102,
“Yes, when fossil fuels get scarce enough, that will constitute an economic incentive. Do you think it’s a good idea to wait for that to happen?”
Yes.
#103,
It takes about 5 years to build a nuclear plant. All the rest is getting planning permission and playing politics.
#106,
“Nuclear power plants are not just dangerous during “nuclear incidents” — they are always dangerous. They pump incredibly toxic, very weaponizable waste and there is no way around that.”
Actually, yes there are ways around that. There are designs for plants that produce no weaponizable waste, and don’t melt down. More black swans?
@104:
From wikipedia article on Apollo Program:
In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion.
So we’re spending less than half of one percent of the cost of the Apollo program on subsidies for wind programs (not mentioning that Apollo bootstrapped off the Mercury program, expensive in its own right). I suppose 0.005 is a proportion, but it’s not exactly what I meant by “proportional”.
Dan L, It’s interesting that your AGW and nuclear power arguments are both supported soley by hypothetical future results, the extent of which cannot be proven. I will offer, however, that both hypotheses have firm foundations.
Your’s is a world I do not understand, but I very much appreciate the civilized banter so that I can understand it better…
@Nullius:
Since I quoted the original claim at the top of the comment you questioned, how is it possible that you didn’t read it?
Well, why should I ask that person for the citation for a non-fact when I can ask you for the citation for the fact? Are you insulted by the fact that I decided to take you more seriously than your interlocutor? A decision that I am really starting to regret by the way…
a) They adapted to the climates we’re talking about. Which was my point.
No, you’re talking about climates from > 1 million years ago, which humans did not adapt to. Clearly.
b) How do you know? And are you saying that humans can adapt, or that they can’t?
I’m saying that you’re ignoring the details of HOW humans adapted to arrive at the conclusion that they can adapt under any circumstances. “Adaptable” isn’t a boolean valued property. I’m saying your arguments are not sufficiently sophisticated to deal with the complexity of the problem at hand.
What makes you think low population densities put less strain on ecosystems?
Common sense. The average energy consumption of the animal times fewer animals equals a smaller usage of energy. Our ancestors did not need to extract nearly as much energy from their environments as we do. This is just obvious.
I’m a bit surprised that you think cultural adaptation was faster in the stone age than the internet age, too.
Do you not know what “relatively” means?
The North Cape areas that were once forested are now frozen tundra.
But you’re backing off the Finland claim. I guess we call it a draw?
The cold-adapted hippopotamus is a most interesting idea. There’s other evidence for warmer climate, but it’s interesting to see how hard people can work to repair a favoured hypothesis.
I didn’t have to work very hard for that one. Cold adapted elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, camels — all these things exist or have existed. What makes cold adapted hippopotami so difficult for you?
And why are you worried about the total energy of the atmosphere going up? You only live in one place at a time.
I just wanted to make to repeat this to make clear how sophisticated your reasoning is.
Clearly, you haven’t heard of the Fischer-Tropsch process.
You mean the process that turns coal or natural gas into plastic? I have heard of it. Unfortunately, coal and natural gas are fossil fuels.
Your white swan reasoning is advertising itself quite clearly in 107, I don’t think I have to belabor it.
I just wanted to make to repeat this to make clear how sophisticated your reasoning is.
For the win.
I’m glad you’re willing to systematically argue this, Dan L; my “someone is wrong in the Internet!” feelings quickly give way to exhaustion in threads like this.
#110,
Interesting discussion, but this will have to be my last comment for a bit.
“Are you insulted by the fact that I decided to take you more seriously than your interlocutor?”
Good one!
“No, you’re talking about climates from > 1 million years ago, which humans did not adapt to.”
Nobody has mentioned climates from more than a million years ago. Can you point to where you got this?
“I’m saying that you’re ignoring the details of HOW humans adapted to arrive at the conclusion that they can adapt under any circumstances.”
I haven’t said that humans can adapt under any circumstances. I just said they were very adaptable, and had already adapted to climates ranging from the polar ice to the deserts, and that technology and cheap energy made them even more adaptable than that. Not the same thing.
“Our ancestors did not need to extract nearly as much energy from their environments as we do.”
That’s a true statement, but it doesn’t imply that they didn’t put more strain on eco-systems. Your logic doesn’t follow.
“Do you not know what “relatively” means?”
Yes, it means in comparison to something else, which since you was comparing their brutal life to us, was clear enough.
“But you’re backing off the Finland claim. I guess we call it a draw?”
Yes. I should have said that hardwood forests grew in Finland, but edited it out again because I couldn’t get it to flow well. But you’re right that it’s essential to the point and I should have left it in.
“What makes cold adapted hippopotami so difficult for you?”
The thermodynamics. But as it happens there is no need for them, because the climate was warm enough for perfectly normal hippos. It was just an illustration.
“You mean the process that turns coal or natural gas into plastic?”
Actually, you can use it to turn carbon dioxide into plastic. It does cost energy to do so, though.
@109:
I gave you the very short version. To be more specific about that objection, any profit-motivated entity that is responsible for the cost of disposing of its own waste will, over time, do whatever it can to externalize those costs. I don’t TRUST business to do nuclear power safely. I don’t trust government to do it safely either. It’s not that it’s impossible that it can be done safely, it’s that it’s vanishingly unlikely.
The other big problem is that political solutions have half-lives on the scale of a decade while nuclear waste has a much longer half-life. Just because we want nuclear power to be the short term solution doesn’t mean that’s how it will play out. We need solutions that are idiot-resistant (idiot-proof is probably impossible). Or, more to the point, politician-resistant.
Thanks likewise for the civilized exchange of views.
Nobody has mentioned climates from more than a million years ago. Can you point to where you got this?
You:
“You used the number 650,000 years because you knew that CO2 had been higher than at present prior to that – up to 20 times higher – and that when considered over longer intervals the current CO2 level is unusually low. Had you used a term like “pre-industrial level” I might have thought that you didn’t know about the geological history of CO2. But the use of the number indicates that you (or whoever you got the factoid from) picked it deliberately, and deliberately chose not to mention the more normal state of affairs over most of the Earth’s history.”
I used “> 1 million” as short hand for “> 650 thousand.” I should have guessed you might have trouble with that.
That’s a true statement, but it doesn’t imply that they didn’t put more strain on eco-systems. Your logic doesn’t follow.
Not if you interpret “strain” any which way you want. I thought it was obvious that I meant it in terms of the ecosystem’s energy budget. Again, maybe I should have guessed you’d have trouble with making these sorts of inferences.
Yes, it means in comparison to something else, which since you was comparing their brutal life to us, was clear enough.
You also have to take population size and genetic diversity into account.
The thermodynamics. But as it happens there is no need for them, because the climate was warm enough for perfectly normal hippos. It was just an illustration.
Once again, I just wanted to make abundantly clear how sophisticated your arguments are.
Sean: I have been saying this for years now. To European eyes it is very clear that the film politicized the issue. What surprises me is that no-one in the U.S. saw this coming (as far as I know).
Of course, Al Gore is entitled to speak out – but I wonder if anyone pointed out the possible counterproductive effects to him
Cormac
@105
See, this kind of thing is why no one who understands anything about science should take the skeptic/denialist camp seriously.
And if you don’t like the message, shoot the messenger.
Dan L.,
just a hint: it is often useful to check wikipedia or google a certain factoid (e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process) before engaging on an argument about it with someone who obviously knows better.
Look, the whole argument over how nature will adapt is kind of pointless. Nature has adapted to, and in fact evolution has depended on, extinction events, and nature will do just fine long after this anthropogenic extinction event is over.
What is of deeper, and greater concern, is how the choices of one group of humans will affect the well being of other humans. This is a very difficult form of extrapolation. For example, do any of us know how eating just one more Big Mac will affect the national health budget? Yet the cumulative effect of those dietary choices is enormous. The same is true for our use of the natural resources, there is a large cumulative effect, but figuring out what that effect will be on other people is a source of divisive scientific and political debate.
One thing is certain, we cannot afford to put our heads in the sand and claim our choices have a negligible influence on other people.
@17 X, who asks, “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 …”
Perhaps because the physics community has looked for actual evidence for CO2-driven AGW and has found exactly none, which is how much there is in the only relevant chapter of the IPCC’s AR4, WG I, Ch. 9 on detection and attribution? Would that explain it? I mean, after two decades and countless billions in research funding, the climate pscientists have come up with zero. That might indicate that it’s not Gore, it’s not odd psychology, it’s simply the complete failure of climate pscience to come up with any actual, measurable confirmation for their (implausible) hypothesis. After all this time we are left with what Prof. Jones told the BBC — “Well, if it’s not carbon dioxide, I can’t think what else it could be” — which is exactly what Hansen told the US Senate in 1988.
Such progress.
@104 — “… much higher incidents of cancer in any communities sharing an aquifer with the reactor …”
Do you have any actual clue about the workings of a nuclear power plant? Why on earth should this be true, either in a BWR or PWR? And nukes are typically built near huge water supplies — Lake Michigan, the Missouri River — but I haven’t heard of any wild outbreaks of cancer in Chicago or St. Louis.
Where do you get this nonsense? No water from any aquifer gets anywhere near the reactor.
Warming Denial-ism would be perfectly acceptable if it wasn’t being used to justify the status quo. Unfortunately, it is being used to justify increasing the current rates of exploitation of natural resources, which will have repercussions on human communities, even if we cannot name those repercussions precisely. Similar tactics were used by the tobacco industry, when they tried to cast epidemiological evidence as not credible, by stating that it was statistical and not specifically mechanistic.
But how do we know there will be consequences if we maintain the status quo? I think we can all agree there is a fixed amount of carbon in the mantle and atmosphere combined; this isn’t a radically proposal, just arguing that there aren’t substantial extraterrestrial sources of carbon. All that carbon is cycled, some fraction in the rapid respiratory-photosynthesis cycle (days to months), another fraction in the longer oceanic-solution cycle (years-centuries), and yet another fraction in geologic cycles (millions of years). I think we can also agree that fossil fuels are part of the geological cycling of carbon (along with volcanoes). So the obvious conclusion is that by releasing a major fraction of fossil fuel reserves we are short cutting a cycle that took millions of years to sequester that carbon through biological sedimentation. So while it is reasonable to argue over what and how much affect humans are having, it is not reasonable to argue that we have a negligible affect.
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I think there are 2 important factors here that sets the US apart from Europe:
1) Bad secondary education system. Unless you have studied at a university, you don’t have a good background to have some immunity to being misled by propaganda.
2) Polarized media. People don’t trust news reports unless it comes from those particular sources they trust. Combined with 1), this makes people an easy target for indoctrination.
3. Laziness, it’s easier the take someone elses word for it than to do the research and find out was is fact and what is theory being reported as fact.
Bobito wrote (#104): “My recollection is that there has never been a life lost due to a nuclear incident in this country.”
I assume you mean “nuclear reactor incident.” Three lives were lost in a reactor at the Idaho Engineering Lab. But that was not a commercial reactor. For commercial reactors, your recollection is accurate.
And I agree that fission has an important part to play in the future carbon-free energy supply. It still has problems, but I think those will yield to more development — if we ever fund it to completion.