Global warming denialism reached a fever pitch this last year, with pathological liar George Will leading the way, thanks to a high-profile platform with the mendacious Washington Post. Back in March, I added my voice to the mix:
George Will , Washington Post: Traitors To Humanity
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
But now, NASA has announced that 2009 was tied for the second hottest year ever recorded, and the 2000s were the hottest decade. It's not even close to being close:
[Author's calculations from NASA data]
This chart of decadal averages filters out a great deal of the year-to-year noise that global warming deniers--George Will one of the most prominent among them--have tried to use to confuse matters. But there was never really any doubt, as one can see from the chart I included in my March post, just below the passage I quoted above:
No rational person can pretend that there's any doubt about global warming. It's way too late for that. By now it's clear that the "let's hear both sides" crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.
What's really happening is that anthropogenic climate change is a fundamental assault on right wing ideology and the solution requires a worldwide implementation of liberal policies that will undercut right wing ideas at every level well into the future. Right wingers maybe do not grasp this fear consciously, but intuitively everything about this issue stinks for them. Denial is the only way to save their worldview.
All the above would be true if conservatives really understood it, but they do not. Most importantly, the "instinctively feel" version, which you present, doesn't really improve the argument. It only creates our own "just so" story. (Or a "rational reconstruction" of irrational attitudes, if you will.)
I think the answer is much simpler: conservatives deny global warming because (a) liberals talk about it and (b) conservative blowhards have been demonizing liberals for talking about it for about 20 years now. In short, global warming denial has become an integral part of conservative identity politics...
It was an off-the-cuff remark (even though I went on to quote from a 2006 MyDD diary) that made an important point, I think. But simply stressing a broad-brush picture of how the conservative base came to assimilate global warming denialism into conservative identity gives a very incomplete picture. After all, there are reasons why liberals talk about global warming, and why this is a particularly fertile ground for demonization by conservative blowhards.
This weekend, I want to discuss a social science approach to risk-perception that can shed a good deal of light on identity and ideology, and how they figure into the case of global warming denialism. It's going to take three diaries to do this properly. First, this diary will introduce the broad outlines of the approach, known as "Cultural Cognition", whose work is centered at The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. Cultural Cognition is an interpretation of the Cultural Theory of Risk (CTR), first articulated by anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky in their 1982 book, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. In this diary, I'll discuss the broad outlines of CTR, and how Cultural Cognition differs from earlier articulations of CTR. One of those differences is the specific mechanisms of culture cognition. I will desrbie several of them in this diary. Diary number two will then deal those specific mechanisms in some detail,illustrating how they work. Diary number three will then look specifically at global warming, as well as some unresolved issues of more general importance.
In his diary from Copenhagen, "The Orly Taitz of Climate Change? 'Lord' Monckton in Copenhagen ", Nick wrote about the top of the pyramid of global warming denialism. I'd like to follow up with some thoughts about the base--not the material base of the big oil and coal companies with so much money at stake, but the large mass of rightwing folks with no material connection, similar to the Birthers, who seem passionately attached to denialism as a kind of belief system. Digby recently wrote a diary,"Knowingly False", in which she wrote:
Following up on posts of the last few days asking why the global warming deniers are global warming deniers, Mike the Mad Biologist offers up another explanation, which is very intriguing:
I think Fred Clark at the Slacktivist hits on a key point in these two posts: "It isn't intended to deceive others. It's intended to invite others to participate with you in deception"
He then excerpts Clark's discussion an earlier right wing rumor that ran rampant on the right about Procter and Gamble being a satanic cult (seriously) culminating with this observation:
Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you're mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won't be able to forget that you're just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it's true for you if you will pretend it's true for us. We need each other.
I think that's getting to the heart of this. And for those who observed the chauvinistic fantasies of the keyboard commandos after 9/11, you will recognize some of the same impulses.
I read Clark's original two posts with great interests, and they contain a good deal of insight. I think he's definitely onto something quite important. However, I don't completely buy this argument in one important regard: Clark argues that, for the most part, people just can't be that stupid. They have to know that what they are saying isn't true. It's driven by malice, he argues, not stupidity. I take a more complicated view: many people--including even you and me at some points in our lives--don't really have such clear sense what's believable and what's not, what's self-contradictory and what's not, what's real and what is not. Most of us in the reality-based community like to think that we're not like that, but anyone who's ever fallen in love knows that's just not true. Intense dysfunctional relationships make this painfully obvious, but even the fairy-tale version has the capacity to melt what we think we know of the world. And charlatans from time immemorial have found ways to use this and related aspect of human nature to make people believe all manner of absurd things.
My difference with Clark is a significant one, but it doesn't really come to the fore until after one absorbs the insight in his posts, and the thrust of the argument he makes, which I sort through on the flip.
This week brought disappointing news that Asian-Pacifie world leaders--including President Obama--do not foresee a climate change treaty being signed in Copenhagen next month. This set-back comes on top of a legislative process in Congress that shares many of the shortcomings of the health care reform legislative process. The two are obviously related, as both represent major needed changes in direction that a deeply opposed by entrenched special interests with enormous economic and political clout.
In my previous diary, "Finding the keys," I argued that what we need to be about is building progressive hegemonic power, and that expecting to win pristine major victories right away--such as single-payer health care--was, unfortunately, not only unrealistic (I'm all for demanding the impossible), but also very likely to misdirect us in terms of long-term strategic thinking. The same thing applies to the struggle to combat global warming.
It's not that I don't want the best legislation possible--I wrote several diaries promoting the work of 350.org, which I think is utterly invaluable. But we have to seriously grasp the extent of what we're up against and the extent of the deficits we have in order to be effective over the long haul. 350.org is particularly valuable because it's about shifting the whole framework of debate, and that's arguably the most important thing we need to do. But we also need to connect the shifting framework to everything within the macro-framework as well.
Toward that end, I want to step back from the disappointing big news for a moment to focus on three different story fronts that merit attention in order to reflect on the broader strategic struggle to bring rational decisionmaking to the fore, and put special interest propaganda campaigns in their place. These three fronts are denialism (which involves two different stories), nuclear (concerning a study that undermines claims about the role it can play) and coal (concerning a study that shows its true cost makes it uneconomical even for coal-producing regions). None of these stories is closely coupled with the intricacies of ongoing Congressional action, all are intimately related to the basic conditions in which those intricacies play out.
This is stupidity so deep it's invincible-stupidity far too stupid to ever be capable of realizing it might not have all 52 cards. After all, how can you realize that, when the whole damn deck is missing?
Here's the deal: Barton asks Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Steve Chu a dumb-ass question: "Where does Alaska's oil come from?" Then he proudly posts the exchange on YouTube, bragging on Twitter:
But, of course, Chu wasn't the least bit baffled-except, perhaps, as to why this clown was asking him such an irrelevant question. Barton was just way too full of himself with delight at his "coup" that he didn't even bother listening to what Chu said--and even if he had, there's no way on God's green Earth he could have understood it. He's just far too dumb:
Making an ass of himself and then pointing at the other guy is, apparently, about as bright as Burton gets. A few folks around the blogosphere have had some fun things to say about him, but I wanted to underscore that upside-downism may well be his own particular style of dumb. You see, back in early 2006, when the oiligopoly had driven prices through the roof, and Hugo Chavez used Venezuela's ownership of CITGO to lower prices to low-income communities in the US, Barton decided to go after CITGO (and only CITGO), using the cover story of investigating potential anti-trust violations. Waaay too stupid to know how stupid he is.
Grand Theft. Pathological Lying About Global Warming. Attempted Genocide.
Back in February, George Will went into a paroxym of lies about global warming, and WaPo editor Fred Hiatt and Ombudsman Andy Alexander both vigorously defended him. I wrote about this (as well as the work of debunkers--Hilzoy, The Wonk Room) in "George Will, Washington Post: Traitors To Humanity". Now Will is up to his same old tricks. A deeper look is called for this time around--a look into Will's class-based criminal pathology.
George Will is a criminal. In 1980, he helped Ronald Reagan prepare for the presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, using a stolen Carter debate book. Receiving stolen property is a crime. The value of the stolen debate book was incalculable. Possibly enough to cost an election. But certainly enough to qualify as grand theft. That makes receiving it a felony. And George Will is guilty of it. One should always remember this about George Will: He is a criminal. A felon. An unrepentant one. But, then, he is a member of a criminal class--the aristocracy.
When I wrote a diary about narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) last weekend, several commentators made the point that the aristocracy as a class suffered from NPD, and while there are certainly plenty of individual exceptions, the point is most certainly true. And a perfectly straightforward way to show what this means is to look at George Will, and his steadfast refusal to acknowledge any error whatsoever when he gets absolute everything wrong about global warming.
Sane, mature adults make factual claims based on facts, to the best of their knowledge. When challenged in a reasonable manner, they either defend their claims by marshaling facts in support of those claims, or they admit to having made a mistake. But narcissists cannot be bothered with any of this. Engaging in good faith arguments is beneath their exalted sense of dignity. Indeed, the only way that aristocrats know how to settle factual disputes is the same way they settle all disputes: by dueling. Which is to say, by ritualized attempted murder.
Attempts to get George Will to act like a responsible interlocutor on the issue of global warming have failed once again, and this is the simple reason why: he is psychologically incapable of being a responsible interlocutor. He does not recognize anyone else's factual claims. He is an aristocrat. The only thing he recognizes is an offense to honor, from another aristocrat. Nobel Prize-winning scientists be damned. The fricken human race be damned. He is a lord of the realm. Only we don't have such things in America. It's time we remembered that and started acting accordingly. Because George Will is damn sure never going to.
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
Extended quote:
Global temperatures during 2007
The analyses made by leading climate centres rank the year 2007 amongst the ten warmest years on record. The Met Office Hadley Centre analyses showed that the global mean surface temperature in 2007 was 0.40°C (0.72°F) above the 1961-1990 annual average (14°C/57.2°F) and hence marks the seventh warmest year on record. According to the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global mean surface temperature anomaly was 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the twentieth century average (1901-2000) of 13.9°C (56.9°F), which ranks 2007 the fifth warmest year in its record.
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
I'll say one thing for George Will: at least the guy believes in recycling--when it comes to global warming lies, that is. Because that's his entire shtick in his most recent columns on the subject, "Dark Green Doomsayers" (Feb 15) and "Climate Science in A Tornado" (Feb 27), both of which have been widely and thoroughly debunked, perhaps most succinctly here at the Wonk Room, which also takes note of the Post's Fred Hiatt's dishonest defense of Will's lies as 'inferences.' (Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, provides the lowdown on the Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander's shameful performance here.)
[Author's calculations from NASA data]
This is stupidity so deep it's invincible-stupidity far too stupid to ever be capable of realizing it might not have all 52 cards. After all, how can you realize that, when the whole damn deck is missing?
Grand Theft. Pathological Lying About Global Warming. Attempted Genocide.
