Thog's Science Masterclass #17

[realthog]

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure this falls within the remit of the Science Masterclass as I've been defining it to myself. However, it's concerned with science, and it does indeed refer to scientific idiocy/illiteracy/denial, so I guess my heading's okay . . .

There's a very good article by David S. Bernstein on the Boston Phoenix site at the moment called "Generation Green". Moderately long but well worth perusing in full, it has as its subject the way the current stalwarts of the GOP are essentially driving the Republican bandwagon over the edge of a cliff by promoting anti-scientific, non-reality-based notions concerning climate change. Why? Because the very people who're going to be hardest hit by the consequences of any continuation of the criminal inactivity on this front (or, even worse, promotion of potentially genocidal junk science) of the Bush years are all too well aware of the hazards of the future that people of older generations have created for them. And those young people represent an already large and (obviously) steadily increasing slice of the US electorate.

As I say, Bernstein's piece is well worth reading in toto; nonetheless, here are some pertinent extracts:

Republicans have a lot to say about the immorality of saddling the next generation with our national debt. But when it comes to leaving them a wrecked, depleted, and rapidly warming planet, they are taking the exact opposite line.

That's especially odd when you consider how important that next generation is to the faltering GOP - and how broadly united those voters, known as Millennials, are in their concern over global warming and other energy and environment issues. [. . .]

Even the most senior Republican leaders, and the top GOP lawmakers on energy and environment committees, keep shooting themselves in the foot by spewing antiquated, anti-science nonsense. [. . .]

Global warming, more than any other issue, carries an urgency among Millennials of all backgrounds and ideologies. "That's the scary thing, if you work for the RNC [Republican National Committee]," says John della
Volpe, who studies this generation at the Harvard University Institute of Politics (IOP). "It absolutely cuts across all the demographics."

"For young people, no issue is more important," says Pat Johnson, a Suffolk University student and president of the College Democrats of Massachusetts. "We are going to have to live with the consequences of inaction."

Conventional wisdom suggests that getting bogged down over environmental legislation would distract Democrats from important issues like the economy and foreign policy. [. . .] To this generation, this fight is not only about climate change - it is about creating green jobs and increasing national security by reducing dependence on foreign oil. [. . .]

In a stance utterly bewildering to most Beltway veterans, Millennials don't necessarily view the environment as a partisan or ideological issue. To them, it's an infrastructure problem, like wanting the New Orleans levees
fixed. That's why even those Millennials otherwise open to the GOP will get turned off if the party opposes climate-change progress. [. . .]

But the loosest cannons in the GOP - and they are legion - simply cannot stick with the game plan. How can they? Surveys show that solid majorities of Republicans believe that global warming is either a myth or, at most, a wildly overblown media creation. Those warming deniers control the party, and their elected officials can only go along with it.

As a result, prominent Republicans regularly spew inanities on climate change ready-made for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And it only gets worse when you move beyond the elected Republicans. The most popular conservative talk-show hosts, publications, bloggers, and pundits are almost unanimously dismissive of global warming, from columnist George F. Will, to Fox News superstar Glenn Beck, to bloggers at redstate.com.

After the recent EPA announcement on regulating greenhouse gases, Jonah Goldberg, National Review contributor, Fox News analyst, book author, and rising star of right-wing punditry, fumed on National Review Online, without irony, that "A federal agency has decided that it has the power to regulate everything, including the air you breathe" -- as if, under the Clean Air Act, the federal government has not been doing exactly that for the past four decades.

To almost anyone under the age of 30, all of this is similar to watching cigarette executives insist that smoking isn't harmful. "Younger voters get interested when they can choose sides," says Rasky, and the Republicans are going to make that very easy. "You give them the opportunity, they'll talk about drilling for oil, and how global warming isn't really happening."

To Millennials, that rhetoric makes the GOP nothing more than obnoxious gas.

(It's perhaps a little unfair of Bernstein to cite Goldberg, who's a man of such extraordinary stupidity that any argument he supports becomes ipso facto risible -- at least, this is what I thought on first reading the relevant passage. Thereafter, though, it dawned on me that Bernstein's choice was a bit circumscribed. Had he selected just about any of the alternatives among the rightist pundits he'd have been accused of picking too-easy targets: Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter, Buchanan, Beck, Inhofe, Gingrich, Savage . . .)

My own feeling is that perhaps we're already too late to avert the onrushing climate disaster: even those politicians/political factions around the world who're trying urgently to take ameliorative steps are producing results short of what is necessary; as James Lovelock has said, by the end of this century humanity is likely to consist of at best a few million individuals living in conditions of extreme barbarism near the poles. But words like "perhaps" and "likely" leave open the smallest of cracks in the doorways ahead of us; the people who're so determined to close those cracks, slam shut those doors, are nothing short of public enemies -- as, apparently, the "Millennials" (ugly term) recognize only too well.

And, yes, I've been here before -- notably in my nonfiction Corrupted Science and my mosaic novel Leaving Fortusa, both of which have been subject to rightist vituperation. I wonder if those vituperators realize I wear their smears with pride?

Comments

[vee-ecks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we're probably not going to destroy ourselves utterly with this bullshit, in particular, but we're going to do a serious number on ourselves Real Soon Now, I assume.

The earth has been through way worse than us and can recover and any series of man-made disasters that greatly diminished our numbers would only help that process, really.

God, we're stupid. And sucks for the polar bears.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more.

And it's not just the GOP. Just after I'd posted, this came in: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8040913.stm

Obama should rid himself of scientifically illiterate fuckwits like Salazar.

[ogre-san.livejournal.com]

As well you should. :)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I do, I do!

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

What really bothers me is that, faced with the ongoing and increasing evidence that it may already be too late, the argument isn't about the path to be taken to prevent a massive crash. It's bringing up, over and over, the same tired arguments about how climate experts "got it wrong" thirty years or more ago. If I have to listen to one more smirking SMU brat yammer about how "we shouldn't trust scientists" because "they said we were going into another ice age in the Seventies, and now they're saying we're going the other way," I'm going to go Kurosawa on the inbred twit.

I think that's what really gets me. It's not just that these bums are in complete denial about human-based climate change. That makes sense: just as how Goldberg and the rest of his myrmidons were hyping up the Iraq war so long as there was absolutely no chance of serving in it, they're denying a problem because acknowledging it might mean they might have to make some sacrifices. However, if things do go straight to hell, and we go back to Palaeocene-level global temperatures, you can damn well bet that these same loudmouths will be the ones shrieking the loudest about getting the first seats on the lifeboats.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Goldberg and the rest of his myrmidons were hyping up the Iraq war so long as there was absolutely no chance of serving in it, they're denying a problem because acknowledging it might mean they might have to make some sacrifices. However, if things do go straight to hell, and we go back to Palaeocene-level global temperatures, you can damn well bet that these same loudmouths will be the ones shrieking the loudest about getting the first seats on the lifeboats"

It's really a matter of rights and privileges, isn't it? They believe it's their right to disseminate misinformation and thereby increase the chances of disaster, then theu believe it's their right to be protected from the disaster they've helped to cause. It never seems to occur to these creeps that rights are things societies earn -- things like democracies and freedom of speech don't just happen -- and that, once they have been earned, people (and this means you, Jonah Goldberg) must thereafter work to maintain them. Freedom of speech is a prime example of a "right" that is currently being so severely abused by the likes of Goldberg that this very, very valuable privilege is becoming in effect almost lost to us.

[teacher-bear.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that humans never seem to learn from history. Poor old Galileo was executed for believing the earth revolved around the sun. Replace the church with politicians and we see the exact same thing happening over global warming. One thing is for sure, whether or not we believe in glabal warming, fossil fuels will run out. We have to find viable alternatives. and maybe drive smaller and more fuel efficient cars in this great land of ours!

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"The sad thing is that humans never seem to learn from history. Poor old Galileo was executed for believing the earth revolved around the sun."

Ahem. Ahem. Cough, cough. You, um, better check that biographical dictionary of yours, teacherbear . . . (And to think the man's a teacher!)

I think the situation's anyway a bit different, though. Galileo got into trouble with the Church not because the Church was antithetical to the notion of the earth going round the sun -- the Vatican's own astronomers were well on the way to being convinced this was the case -- but because he kept insisting, loudly and publically, that the Church should accept the Copernican hypothesis right now. This was something the Church was unwilling to do: it wanted to wait until the matter had been decided for certain before the Pope endorsed whichever of the two competing worldviews came out on top.

The reason for this reticence was political: if the Pope, supposedly having been briefed by God, came out with an announcement that the Copernican view was correct, and then tomorrow the astronomers proved beyond all doubt that the old Ptolemaic model was true after all, this wouldn't be good for the street cred of such items of dogma as papal infallibility. So the Church wanted to maintain a wait-and-see approach . . . while Galileo, who was in general (not just in this context) a pain in the ass, kept badgering them to accept what he viewed (correctly) as the inevitable conclusion of science.

The big difference between this situation and the current one is that, in essence, it really didn't matter if the Church delayed a few years while the astronomers fought it out before pronouncing about the Copernican hypothesis. In the case of global warming, however, a delay of a few years -- such as we've already had -- may prove fatal or at least catastrophic, and any further delays exponentially more so. Even if there were much doubt about the science behind warnings of climate disaster it'd still be imperative to act on those warnings: the worst that could happen is that we'd have "unnecessarily" made the world a cleaner place -- and, as you point out, there are anyway other reasons why we need to be looking for alternative energy sources. Doing something to avert global warming is, then, a win-win activity; standing by idly "to see what happens" is a lose-lose approach . . . and the extent of the loss is likely to be terminal.

The real problem is, of course, human stupidity . . .

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by the fact that time and again people insist on proving John Stuart Mill's dictum that conservatives may not be stupid but stupid people are generally conservative (actually, he said Conservative, he was a capital L Liberal MP), right.

Er, Thog, I was under the impression that Papal Infallibility didn't become dogma until 1870. Am I wrong on that?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"I was under the impression that Papal Infallibility didn't become dogma until 1870"

You are perfectly correct, which is extremely irritating of you -- stop it at once.

But the gist of my account was valid nonetheless. The controversy with Galileo arose because of the Vatican's concern over getting it wrong about the Copernican Hypothesis and being made to look foolish in the eyes of the faithful.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Oh, I make mistakes too. Far too many, so clearly I'm not the pope.