Via Ezra Klein, here's Ross Douthat explaining why Republican politicians are so eager to deny global warming - the only conservative party to do so in the industrialized West:
What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe: 52 percent in the Czech Republic, 59 percent in Germany, 49 percent in Denmark, 51 percent in Austria, just 44 percent in the Netherlands, with highs of 63 percent in France and 64 percent in Sweden. (Doubts about anthropogenic global warming are considerably rarer, the study found, in southern Europe, Latin America and the wealthier countries of Asia.)
There's a reasonably large Western European constituency, in other words, for some sort of climate change skepticism. (And probably a growing one: In Britain, at least, as in the United States, the economic slump has dampened public enthusiasm for anti-emissions regulation.) But the politicians haven't been responding. Instead, Europe's political class, left and right alike, has worked to marginalize a position that it considers intellectually disreputable, even as the American G.O.P. has exploited that same position to win votes.
That is, the Republican party is using climate change skepticism for political gain, while their political peers in Europe eschew the quick fix and are contributing solutions to "the 21st century's biggest foreign-policy challenge," as Britain's Foreign Secretary and Conservative party leader William Hague said. "An effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity."
It's amazing how this political opportunism has morphed into a kind of belief. Take Dave Budge's sophist argument against the entirety of climate science: apparently the body's "oligopolistic nature" is "reinforc{ing} one approach rather than foster{ing} an environment in which a variety of approaches can flourish." Yet there's no evidence offered that climate science has indeed narrowed its approach. In reality, the opposite is true. Competing theories to the origin of climate change are investigated and tested - after all, that's what science is all about. And here's all you need to know: there exists no competing and scientifically valid theory to dispute the consensus that the climate is warming beyond the range of natural trends and that the major cause is rising levels of CO2. Where there is debate is in how quickly the climate will change and to what extent, how the changing climate will manifest itself, and the extent of the negative impacts to human health it will have.
Budge, as an economically-minded kind of guy, came to his conclusion in observing that economic modeling failed to correctly predict the current financial crises - therefore, he reasons, climate modeling couldn't possibly be accurate either, the data is too complex. But the climate - unlike economics - is a deterministic system. Actions always have the same results. If you turn down the sun, it gets cooler. If a surface is white, it's cooler. If you increase the presence of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere - CO2, water vapor, or methane, say - it gets hotter. Accuracy in modeling is easier to achieve. On the other hand, as a human institution the economy is not deterministic. Sure, there are trends, but human free will prevents predictions for the economy (similar to history, say) to be anything other than guesswork. In fact, you could argue that economic theories themselves influence the economy. It's for that reason that economics is inherently political - unlike science.
Maybe that's why so many conservatives have rushed to denialist positions in the wake of their favored party's exploitation of climate change doubt: they come at the issue, not as scientists, but as political and economic ideologues. I suspect the reason why many dislike the findings of climate science is that the free market is inadequate on its own to react to the problem climate change poses. Climate change demands a state-led response that poses great economic risk. No wonder they've taken to quivering hand-wringing...
Still, market forces are incredibly useful as a means of innovation. It's too bad our nation's conservatives have abandoned our generation's greatest challenge. |
