Friday, June 24, 2011

Climate of Denial: Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?

From the New York Times, 22 June 2011: "Former Vice President Al Gore sharply criticized President Obama as lacking leadership on climate changein a magazine essay published online Wednesday, saying his policies had been little more effective than those of President George W. Bush. In the 7,000-word article in Rolling Stone, Mr. Gore said . . . "

Climate of Denial


Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?

- By Al Gore, Rolling Stone, June 22, 2011


The first time I remember hearing the question "is it real?" was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by "professional wrestlers" one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="251" caption="Illustration by Matt Mahurin"][/caption]

The evidence that it was real was palpable: "They're really hurting each other! That's real blood! Look a'there! They can't fake that!" On the other hand, there was clearly a script (or in today's language, a "narrative"), with good guys to cheer and bad guys to boo.

But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious violation of the "rules" — such as they were — like using a metal folding chair to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him. The answer to the question "Is it real?" seemed connected to the question of whether the referee was somehow confused about his role: Was he too an entertainer?

That is pretty much the role now being played by most of the news media in refereeing the current wrestling match over whether global warming is "real," and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of heat-trapping emissions into the Earth's thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours.

Admittedly, the contest over global warming is a challenge for the referee because it's a tag-team match, a real free-for-all. In one corner of the ring are Science and Reason. In the other corner: Poisonous Polluters and Right-wing Ideologues.

The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business. Is he responsible for ensuring a fair match? Or is he part of the show, selling tickets and building the audience? The referee certainly seems distracted: by Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, the latest reality show — the list of serial obsessions is too long to enumerate here.

But whatever the cause, the referee appears not to notice that the Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the "rules" of democratic discourse. They are financing pseudoscientists whose job is to manufacture doubt about what is true and what is false; buying elected officials wholesale with bribes that the politicians themselves have made "legal" and can now be made in secret; spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media; hiring four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. (Question: Would Michael Jordan have been a star if he was covered by four defensive players every step he took on the basketball court?)

This script, of course, is not entirely new: A half-century ago, when Science and Reason established the linkage between cigarettes and lung diseases, the tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors, and paid them to look into television cameras and tell people that the linkage revealed in the Surgeon General's Report was not real at all. The show went on for decades, with more Americans killed each year by cigarettes than all of the U.S. soldiers killed in all of World War II.

This time, the scientific consensus is even stronger. It has been endorsed by every National Academy of science of every major country on the planet, every major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and 98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world. In the latest and most authoritative study by 3,000 of the very best scientific experts in the world, the evidence was judged "unequivocal."

But wait! The good guys transgressed the rules of decorum, as evidenced in their private e-mails that were stolen and put on the Internet. The referee is all over it: Penalty! Go to your corner! And in their 3,000-page report, the scientists made some mistakes! Another penalty!

And if more of the audience is left confused about whether the climate crisis is real? Well, the show must go on. After all, it's entertainment. There are tickets to be sold, eyeballs to glue to the screen.

Part of the script for this show was leaked to The New York Times as early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: "Reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact." Ever since, they have been sowing doubt even more effectively than the tobacco companies before them.

To sell their false narrative, the Polluters and Ideologues have found it essential to undermine the public's respect for Science and Reason by attacking the integrity of the climate scientists. That is why the scientists are regularly accused of falsifying evidence and exaggerating its implications in a greedy effort to win more research grants, or secretly pursuing a hidden political agenda to expand the power of government. Such slanderous insults are deeply ironic: extremist ideologues — many financed or employed by carbon polluters — accusing scientists of being greedy extremist ideologues.

After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false."

. . . article continues . . .

*  The complete text of the Rolling Stone article available here.

This story is from Rolling Stone issue 1134/1135, available on newsstands and through Rolling Stone All Access on June 24, 2011.

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* The text of the New York Times article  is available here.

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2 comments:

  1. This is an important public statement, but once again Mr. Gore is strong on the problem but not so interesting on what may be the solutions.

    He does talk quite a bit about climate, (ca. 30 references), energy (15), media (10), politics (5), which is certainly fair since that was basically his topic.

    On the other hand I have scanned the text of the article in fain for the following words: demand, management, pricing, externalities, cities, , reduction (1), economy, economics . . .

    What's the point? Yes, we have all these problems. And yes in fact, there is indeed a conspiracy going on. And yes, it does not take a genius to figure out who is on what side. And that the democratic process in the US is failing badly.

    But we also know what to do, and that is to become world experts on demand management and reduction, including through the use of strategic economic instruments – while at the same time demonstrating without a doubt that this new path can lead to even better conditions of life quality for the vast majority of all citizens. .

    And oh yes, we need to be very very strong in terms of our ability to communicate and convince

    ReplyDelete
  2. The problem is that the world economy and businesses are based upon growth.
    The human population is growing.
    Per capita energy and resource use is growing.
    Unfortunately, neither the planet we live upon, nor its resources are growing.
    The only sustainable positive growth in the circumstances of finite resources is zero. There are good reasons to believe the current population is unsustainable in the long-term.
    Therefore, we have to determine the indefinitely sustainable population level, how to reduce our population to that sustainable level and then do so as a matter of urgency, or mother will do it for us. In consequence we have no choice, other than we get to pick the time and method, as long as we don't wait too long. And that assumes that we have the luxury of time.
    If we solve the population problem, it makes the climate and pollution problems relatively easy.
    There is no time to waste.

    ReplyDelete

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