Many of you have undoubtedly seen this clip from the Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart eviscerates members of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. If you haven’t, you need to watch it; if you have seen it, you may want to watch it again, just to confirm that, yes, these really are people making policy for the world’s most powerful nation.
Either way, once you have watched members of our nation’s national legislature make complete and total fools of themselves–once you have cringed at the level of intelligence (not) displayed, and the pride and self-satisfaction with which they trumpet their embarrassing ignorance of even the most basic science–perhaps you can answer two questions that continue to confound me:
How do people like this get elected?
Why in the world are they on the Science, Space and TechnologyCommittee?
This introductory paragraph from an article from Gristreprinted in Mother Jones is incredibly depressing–not just because one of our major political parties is controlled by people unwilling to acknowledge accepted science on climate change, but because that unwillingness is symptomatic of the party’s current approach to reality generally.
It’s hard to believe, surveying the GOP field of possible presidential nominees, but back in 2008 the parties were not that far apart on climate change. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, backed cap-and-trade for carbon emissions. After joining his ticket, so did Sarah Palin. But back then, lots of Republicans and conservatives also supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance. The Republican Party of 2008 was a big enough tent to include people who admitted demonstrable problems existed and supported free-market-oriented solutions. Not anymore. The rise of the Tea Party movement and the rightward shift of the Republican base and the politicians who pander to it put an end to all that. Whoever is the Republican nominee for president in 2016, it’s a safe bet that he—and yes, it will be a he, as all the leading contenders are male—will oppose taking any action on climate change. Chances are that he won’t even admit it exists.
I don’t believe that all of these candidates are that divorced from reality. It is actually worse: those who know better are willing to ignore the threat of widespread devastation in order to pander to a frightened and uninformed “base.”
I know I sound like a broken record, but what drives me nuts about climate denial is the illogic of the “bet” being placed.
Let’s just say that the science is far less conclusive than it really is. Pretend it’s only 50-50. If policymakers decide to act on the premise that climate change is real, and prove to be wrong, there will have been some up-front costs, but the steps taken to address the problem will clean up the air and water, conserve finite resources and create new industries and jobs. If they decide to ignore the warnings, and they’re wrong, however, the earth will become less habitable. Weather disruptions and climate change will cause devastation, and mass migrations and social upheavals will follow. And that’s the best-case scenario; in the worst case, we wipe out much of humankind.
One of the most thoughtful commenters to this blog recently sent me an interesting–albeit disquieting–article from Mother Jones. The subject was climate change and the curious fact that the countries with the largest numbers of skeptics were all English-speaking: U.S., England and Australia. Canada wasn’t in the bottom cluster, but it was close.
Why would the English language correlate with climate skepticism? As the author, respected science reporter Chris Mooney, notes
There is nothing about English, in and of itself, that predisposes you to climate change denial. Words and phrases like “doubt,” “natural causes,” “climate models,” and other skeptic mots are readily available in other languages. So what’s the real cause?
Mooney quotes political scientists for (pretty unpersuasive) theories linking neoliberalism with denialism, but then he suggests a simpler–and very troubling–explanation:
The English language media in three of these four countries are linked together by a single individual: Rupert Murdoch. An apparent climate skeptic or lukewarmer, Murdoch is the chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox. (You can watch him express his climate views here.) Some of the media outlets subsumed by the two conglomerates that he heads are responsible for quite a lot of English language climate skepticism and denial.
In the US, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal lead the way; research shows that Fox watching increases distrust of climate scientists. (You can also catch Fox News in Canada.) In Australia, a recent study found that slightly under a third of climate-related articles in 10 top Australian newspapers “did not accept” the scientific consensus on climate change, and that News Corp papers—the Australian, the Herald Sun, and the Daily Telegraph—were particular hotbeds of skepticism. “The Australian represents climate science as matter of opinion or debate rather than as a field for inquiry and investigation like all scientific fields,” noted the study.
And then there’s the UK. A 2010 academic study found that while News Corp outlets in this country from 1997 to 2007 did not produce as much strident climate skepticism as did their counterparts in the US and Australia, “the Sun newspaper offered a place for scornful skeptics on its opinion pages as did The Times and Sunday Times to a lesser extent.” (There are also other outlets in the UK, such as the Daily Mail, that feature plenty of skepticism but aren’t owned by News Corp.)
I have long been a free speech purist–and I remain convinced by John Stuart Mill’s argument that only the freest expression and most robust exchange of ideas will yield Truth (note capital T). Climate skeptics are entitled to their say, and Faux News is entitled to spew demonstrable inaccuracies and falsehoods on this and all manner of other issues, no matter how maddening some of us find that and no matter how much damage their fabrications do to our ability to produce sound public policies.
Ideally, a few wealthy individuals would not be allowed to dominate the media (the right to free expression does not include the right to crowd out dissenting opinions), but in the age of the Internet, restrictions on the number of media outlets one corporation can control are arguably unnecessary, and unlikely in any event.
We’ll just have to hope that Mill and others were right–that people will examine the information they are being fed, consider the sources of that information, and come to rational conclusions. And perhaps that’s happening; Fox News has been losing market share for the last few years.
Hear no science, see no science, acknowledge no science…
“The North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission has found a solution to the political impasse posed by the conflict between science, which predicts the acceleration of sea level rise as the glaciers of western Antarctica collapse into the Southern Ocean, and Republican, money-driven politics tied to coastal development. The Coastal Commission voted to ignore long-term sea level rise.
The Commission voted, with one lone dissent, to limit the period of consideration of sea level rise to 30 years. Keeping the period to 30 years allowed the Commission to avoid considering the consequences of the collapse of west Antarctic glaciers, the speed up of the melting of Greenland’s ice cap and the slowing of the Gulf Stream. This vote will end the conflict between the Republican dominated state legislature and the Commission that happened in 2010 when the Commission’s panel of experts predicted as much as 5 feet of sea level rise by 2100. The legislature rejected that report and prohibited state and local government offices from considering the possibility that sea level rise would accelerate.”
Yesterday, I posted the text of a speech I delivered at Monday to Greenwood Rotary. Today, I’ll share the rest of the story.
Let me set the stage, however, by being fair and pointing out that (1) the subject of the speech–the importance of science and what it tells us–was the choice of the Chapter President; (2) the program chair, with whom I chatted during the (dreadful) lunch, was not only receptive, but warned me that “a lot” of the members were “really conservative–you should have heard them during the debate over HJR3!” and (3) the average age in the room made me feel young by comparison.
The very first “question”(okay, rebuttal) was from a gentleman who rather patronizingly asked me if I understood the difference between “observational” and historical science. Actually, I do–or at least, I know people who promote that misleading distinction. (One of the most prominent is a website called “Answers in Genesis.”) As one science blog has explained,
AIG is arguing that only scientific results that can be replicated in the lab are “observational science.” Or to put it another way, only those results that we can experience – that impinge on our senses – are scientific results.
By implication, only these verifiable results are “true” science that produces true, certain knowledge. Any other form of scientific reasoning is “historical science,” which is not certain and thus, by implication, crap. At least, it’s crap whenever AIG finds that it doesn’t square with their creationism.
This is weird…. After all, the claims of Christian tradition, including creationism, are not verifiable in the lab.
This “question” put me in something of a bind; I didn’t want to say what I thought, which was essentially “Oh, I see you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” so I mumbled my way through a marginally nicer response and moved on to the next questioner, who suggested that science was just as “faith-based” as religion. I begged to differ, refrained from beating my head against the podium, and again moved on.
The entire question and answer period was like that.
The final question was “Even if climate change is real, maybe it’s good. What do you think?” I’d been on my best behavior up to that point, but I sort of snapped. I told him–sweetly–that whether it was good or bad depended on what you thought about Florida being underwater; it is, after all, a state that has caused the country considerable problems. Perhaps losing it would be a good thing.
When the question and answer period was over, a couple of elderly gentlemen did come up to whisper that they agreed with me. But another cornered me, insisting that I needed to review a “fantastic” website that demonstrated clearly just how scientists had sold the “scam” of evolution.
As I was making my break for the door, I smiled weakly at the program director and said “At least I wasn’t tarred and feathered!”
He smiled back and said, “You aren’t out the door yet.”
