’Tis the Season of Climate Idiocy
The Winter of Some Malcontents
SOURCE: iStockphoto, SP
Global warming deniers believe selective anecdotes about anomalous local weather refute the fact there is a globally averaged warming trend.
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It’s winter. So global warming must be false!
It’s depressing to note that we’re still debating the issue at this level, yet such is the reality. Consider a recent column by Hoover Institution fellow and Scripps Howard contributor Deroy Murdock entitled “Even left is now laughing at global warming,” containing evidence like the following:
Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
• Nearly four inches of snow blanketed the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Jais region for just the second time in recorded history on Jan. 24. Citizens were speechless. The local dialect has no word for snowfall.
• Dutchmen on ice skates sped past windmills as canals in Holland froze in mid-January for the first time since 1997. Defense Minister Eimert van Middelkoop, who inhabits a renovated 17th Century windmill, stumbled on the ice and fractured his wrist.
• January saw northern Minnesota’s temperatures plunge to 38 below zero, forcing ski-resort closures. A Frazee, Minnesota dog-sled race was cancelled, due to excessive snow. Snow whitened Surf City, North Carolina’s beaches. Days ago, ice glazed Florida’s citrus groves.
Surely Deroy Murdock doesn’t think such anecdotes seriously refute the idea that there is a globally averaged warming trend—or does he?
I sometimes indulge the conspiracy theory that such drivel is intelligently designed to enrage and preoccupy those of us who honor the elementary distinction between climate and weather (the former being, of course, the statistical average over time of the latter). But then I consult the evidence about what people in this country think and know about climate change, and I realize that Deroy Murdock’s column probably speaks to many of us and even to many of our elites—people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, for instance, who has also recently used the vicissitudes of winter weather to cast doubt on human caused climate change. (This is an example of why you need trained science journalists in the media.)
In fact, polling data suggests that Deroy Murdock’s column probably resonates with roughly half of the country—the conservative half. Whenever you break down acceptance of climate science along partisan lines, your quickly see that a vast political divide exists over the nature of reality itself. Last month, for instance, Rassmussen Reports released this finding (hat tip to Joe Romm): “Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats.” The Pew organization has shed still more light on this huge partisan gap by including information about education levels in its surveys. The results are staggering: The higher a Republican’s level of education, the more likely he or she is to reject mainstream climate science.
My sense of how this alienation arises (and here I’m significantly influenced by people like Matthew Nisbet) goes something like this. The climate issue is already highly politicized, so people start out with partisan inclinations. Then, the more highly educated conservatives—people like Deroy Murdock—proceed in a typically “intellectual” fashion to find information about the climate issue that confirms what they already think. For this they go to partisan and like-minded sources, such as Fox News or any number of rightwing anti-science websites. One top stop is the high-traffic “Watts Up With That,” a climate skeptic outlet that was, very alarmingly, voted the “Best Science Blog” of 2008, and right at this very moment features several entries that stoke confusion about the distinction between climate and weather, such as “Mature Arctic Ivory Gull Seen in Massachusetts—first time in over a century.”
And so it is that each winter, we get another recycling of the idea that record low temperatures in individual locales somehow refute the idea that the globe is warming. Thus does an error of statistical reasoning become a political doctrine. And it is virtually futile to refute, because it’s highly likely you’ll be doing so for an audience that doesn’t need the lesson, and ignored or dismissed by the audience that does.
In this context, perhaps one has to look as high as President Barack Obama for salvation. Possibly, just possibly, the White House could launch a sustained public communication and education campaign on global warming, designed to shore up support for pending climate legislation, in such a way that it might actually make a difference. It would be especially helpful if we could get some prominent conservative thinkers to flip, join the show, and speak to the Deroy Murdocks of the world in a way that might inspire them to listen.
Even then, though, it’s best to wait until the ice thaws to start that campaign; as Shakespeare might have put it, “a skeptic’s tale’s best for winter.” After all, it took a record hot summer in 1988 for the climate issue to rise to serious public attention for the first time. Right now, the environmental community is heavily debating whether President Obama and the Democratic Congress will pass a climate bill in 2009 or 2010; perhaps they should really be debating which August.
Meanwhile, the United Nations has chosen December of this year to hold the summit designed to forge the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The location? Copenhagen, Denmark.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
It’s arguments like those Chris highlighted that suggest sticking with climate change over global warming is worth considering. By emphasizing global warming as the proper name for what’s happening, there’s this rhetorical hole that even the simplest opposition can find. By emphasizing climate change, we can emphasize the significant differences that are popping up – of any temperature.
February 4th, 2009 at 5:56 pmI like David’s reasoning, and I’ll take it one step further. Trends in climate are often accompanied by trends in extremes of weather – more intense hurricanes, more and longer snowfalls in Seattle, etc. BY rightly calling it climate change, we can account for these trends in extremes as the likely result of a climate that is being pushed to one end of the spectrum. Afterall, any natural system will try to right itself whenever possible.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:44 amIt is important for leaders to speak out because that keeps the conversation in the news. For example, Steven Chu’s being quoted in the LA Times regarding the fact that California’s biggest industry, agriculture, may be headed to an end.
I still find that there is a change happening in local TV news, one that is welcome. The ABC station in San Franicsco, KGO focused on the fact that the current warm weather in California with it’s attendant lack of rain will be the new “norm” as our climate changes. Warm Weather Comes at a Price. In the same week, the Fox affiliate in Oakland, KTVU, carried a similar story with more detail. Both cited university professors.
When local TV news begins to tell the story consistently, then attitudes will change.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:14 pmWes,
February 5th, 2009 at 4:59 pmI would just add that we also have a better chance of influenceing local news coverage then national news coverage. So its a great feed back loop. Have you contacted those statsions and thanksed them for the coverage? I’d be willing to bet a few emails and letters from locals will go a long way toward making that sort of coverage the norm.
I don’t know that I would consider it fair to use a warm year or a tropical event to bolster your position, while at the same time claiming that a cold year or winter event is not valid for the other side. You can’t have it both ways. Likewise, warming and cooling cannot both be used to justify warming. That is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument. The recent cooling is from a weak La Nina in phase with a tanking PDO, and solar cycle minimum (that is 12 months (and counting) longer than expected). It has as little to do with GHG-induced warming as does the 1998 (you have 1988) El Nino-linked heat wave. Obviously, when ENSO, PDO, and the solar cycle are in positive phase, there will be constructive interference above and beyond the level AGW is responsible for, and yes, it will get really hot. You are no more a scientist than Deroy Murdock, Seth Borenstein, or Anthony Watts for that matter, and until the world comes to peer-reviewed blog posts, we should all stick to taking our “facts” from the ever-changing positions of real scientists (e.g., Emanuel et al. 2008 BAMS Re: GCMs and tropical shear). The mainstream media’s alarmism is just as detrimental to the legitimate science as these online denier blogs.
February 6th, 2009 at 2:26 pmMost definitely, climate change is the appropriate term. It rankles me that you, like many, want to draw a line in the sand between human caused climate change and planetary trends. The truth is that both are in action. The truth is that we can create models but we don’t know the eventual outcome. I think very few people would argue at this stage that releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing. But “global warming” is unfortunately a partisan football and has become more of a belief system than an evolving studied phenomenon. Like religion it is difficult if not impossible for many people to stand back and say, “I believe this now, but maybe I am wrong”. It is much easier to ridicule those who ask the uncomfortable questions.
February 7th, 2009 at 10:12 amI disagree with running from the term Global Warming. Taking a stand that is open to the change in discussion of science is all that’s required. Its a matter of creating open dailogue and not getting sucked in by the emotional spatter.
Running from the denialists only allows them to restrict the ground you work on.
February 7th, 2009 at 4:24 pmThese semantic debates do so very little other than misdirect from the real issue. In more than a century of fossil fuel buring we’ve belched hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 into the air. The vast majority of this is still in the air as CO2 has a residence time of over a century in the atmosphere. The issue is that the CO2 in the air amounts to a lethal dose of slow poison to the ocean ecosystem. Sure it creates cimate change and global warming but those are glacially slow processes that threaten change that is far from what the oceans are already suffering. The carbon bomb airborne and now impacting on the oceans is more than sufficient to destroy higher life in the oceans, that above the level of bacteria for example. Even if we stop the emission of another single molecule of CO2 that airborne carbon bomb will destroy higher life in the oceans… unless something is done to mitigate the damage from the already emitted deadly dose of CO2. No matter whether you jet off to a winter holiday, drive a Prius, or buy more energy efficient lightbulbs the dose of CO2 already in the air will do its deadly job.
ONLY the massive immediate enhancement of photosyntesis on this small blue planet offers a means or even a chance to capture the existing lethal dose of CO2 and convert it into green life instead of acid death.
But engaging in meaningless semantic debates while fueling up the Prius or pointing fingers of blame at those who drive SUV’s is so much easier than actually doing something meaningful like perhaps saving the planet. If we merely sit back and critique others and reduce the amount of new poison we belch into the air it all amounts to doing nothing.
It’s as if we treated patients arriving in hospital emergency rooms bleeding profusely from traffic accidents by first making them take drivers education class before treating the wounds that will surely kill them. Stop carping and do something, get a life, save a life of a plant (and planet) today.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:21 pmGood, intelligent article and comments.
I especially like this idea:
It would be especially helpful if we could get some prominent conservative thinkers to flip, join the show, and speak to the Deroy Murdocks of the world in a way that might inspire them to listen.
But the battle begins on a small scale right here, with your headline writer, whose use of the word “idiocy” serves no good purpose at all and is in fact most certainly a conversation-stopper for the people you aim to engage.
February 11th, 2009 at 8:17 pmHi again, Chris, I linked to this story of yours in my new blog at anneminard.com. It’s called “100 Days of Science,” and the new climate change post is on Day 24 … Check it out! Cheers, Anne
February 16th, 2009 at 8:13 pm