I was listening to the radio the other day. I was in my car, driving home from the office, and I had tuned into Rush Limbaugh. I listen more commonly to either my local classical music station, or the NPR affiliate station based at Colorado College, but I had decided to try AM radio. (I will even admit that I sometimes find Rush Limbaugh entertaining. He's almost always wrong on the substance, but he's pretty acute on some of the political personalities around.)
On this particular program, a woman called in from Oklahoma, as I recall, and they talked about this and that. But the main thing I recall, and about which I wanted to comment, was that Rush asked this woman what she thought of global warming. He said it pretty much that way: "What do you think about global warming?"
"I think it's a complete hoax," she replied.
I found that interesting because, while I can see a lot of ways for people to differ in their opinions about climate change, to characterize global warming as a complete hoax strikes me as unjustifiable. I should probably note that I have heard Rush Limbaugh, himself, attack Al Gore over the use the former Vice President has made of the issue, perceived exaggerations, and so on, but I don't think I've ever heard that Limbaugh has asserted that global warming is a complete hoax.
The first problem I have with this characterization is that, as I understand the terms involved, a hoax is a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive. There can be honest mistakes; there can be honest differences of opinion, but there cannot be honest hoaxes. A hoaxer knows that he is making untrue statements and misrepresentations of facts, usually in order to induce some particular response from his audience. The "missile gap," so prominent in the 1960 campaign, comes close to having been a hoax. Hoaxes such as the Piltdown Man have involved not only lying about the evidence, but creating or faking evidence.
In general, although there could be exceptions in terms of people trying to use misstatements about global warming for personal or political gain, I don't detect a lot of falsifying of evidence in the climate change area. As I stated in a post over at the Two Masters blog, there are a lot a ways to interpret such evidence as there is, that evidence is pretty scanty compared to the timeline on which climate changes unfold, and a lot of the computer models may be open to methodological questions, but the same is true of stock market predictions (remember Dow 36,000?), without all such predictions constituting frauds or hoaxes.
Second, while it is true that, as I said above, the evidence can be interpreted differently through the use of different models and assumptions, it is really hard to contend that there is no evidence of global warming. National Geographic magazine ran a long piece - actually, a couple of pieces, in the June 2007 issue on the subject. One of the pieces was called "The Big Thaw." A lot of other publications, popular and peer-reviewed, have documented shrinking glaciers, warmer average temperatures, thinner polar ice, and so on and so forth. I, myself, have observed some species of birds appearing around here some weeks earlier than was the norm years ago.
A lot of this evidence is anecdotal. A lot of it is spotty. In the nature of the thing, we don't have a very complete dataset for the past 18,000 years, let alone the entire Cenozoic period. Accurate thermometers and barometers are quite recent inventions. But to deny that such evidence exists is to deny brute facts.
So, setting aside the idea that some group of liberal scientists are faking evidence in order to force the government to nationalize the oil companies, or in order to obtain huge grants to study wind-generated electricity, or whatever you might think their motive could be, and setting aside the idea that the various reports are all faked or grossly mistaken, there seems to be little doubt that something by way of global warming is occurring.
What I see as the real issues here are these:
I. How long will this warming trend continue?
II. How much will conditions (e.g., sea levels) change before the trend stops or reverses itself?
III. What could we do to slow or reverse this trend sooner, or with fewer effects?
IV. What could we do to avoid or palliate the effects of the warming?
As John Miller points out in QBQ! (The Question Behind the Question), asking "who" or "why" questions is not terribly helpful. To ask who caused global warming is to put on the defensive people and institutions whose help may be vital if we are to limit the effects of climate change. To ask why U.S. consumers use so much energy is to forego public support for efforts to find alternatives to our present consumption patterns. Rather, we should be asking what we can do to alleviate the problems, and how can we contribute to minimizing the social and economic consequences of whatever climate change is going to occur.
Sure, there are interesting scientific questions about how much of this warming trend is due to human agency, but that isn't a useful question from the political point of view. To state that global warming is a "moral" and not a "political" problem, as Al Gore has done, is to ignore the fact that all (that would be ALL) of the potentially useful approaches to the problem require action by the government. Maybe it isn't a political problem, per se, but its solution raises political questions all over the place.
Which brings me back to where I started. Why would someone have the (mistaken) idea that global warming is a "complete hoax?" Because she has been gone from hearing people who want to use global warming as a reason for making unwelcome (to her) social and economic changes, to concluding that they are concocting the idea of global warming in order to promote such changes. To put it the other way around, if she can believe that global warming is a hoax, then she doesn't have to concur in any of the policies - many of which will cost her money - that may be proposed to deal with the problem.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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4 comments:
> Why would someone have the
> (mistaken) idea that global
> warming is a "complete hoax?"
> Because she has gone from
> hearing people who want to use
> global warming as a reason for
> making unwelcome (to her) social
> and economic changes, to
> concluding that they are
> concocting the idea of global
> warming in order to promote such
> changes.
Exactly. She's trying to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.
If she can filter out any information that conflicts with what she already "knows," she can safely ignore all of that information and, in the process, reinforce her prior "knowledge."
In a larger sense, she's demonstrating that she's not an intellectual. That is, for many of us, cognitions that are contrary to our existing knowledge or beliefs are invigorating. They serve to compel our minds to invent new thoughts, beliefs, or theories or to modify our existing beliefs. In doing so, we refine our theories explaining how the world works, and we reduce the stress caused by the conflict between our previous and new cognitions.
Sounds like fun, no? Well, no, it's not fun for lots of people. They perceive new cognitions as threats. Such is the case with your Limbaugh fan.
> ...if she can believe that
> global warming is a hoax, then
> she doesn't have to concur in
> any of the policies - many of
> which will cost her money - that
> may be proposed to deal with the
> problem.
She wins two ways: She avoids the stress of cognitive dissonance, and she saves a few bucks.
My comment on this is simple. The movement (if you will) of people that "believe" that global warming is a hoax seems to be shrinking. Our own government until recently was actively dismissing and intentionally falsifying documents to deny that global warming is in fact real. The fact that people are discussing and investigating and actively doing something about our environment will force this woman (and others like her) to face their vague unease and deal with it.
Glenn:
Good post. I think using the term “complete hoax” is certainly inflammatory, as are terms such as “cognitive dissonance” (Lloyd) and “intentionally falsifying” (Chris). But let me propose a partial defense of the caller.
As I think you know, I personally do not “believe in” the so-called problem of “global warming” but we should all be clear about the definitions. The “global warming” I do not believe in is: “a conclusively proven, human-caused increase in the temperature of the atmosphere and seas that since the turn of the twentieth century is inexorably leading to dangerous if not catastrophic environmental consequences that will affect vast portions of the planet.”
To be clear, I do not deny there are periods when the world has gotten warmer and there seems to be consensus that for about thirty years, beginning in the 1970’s, the Earth seemed to be getting warmer. I don’t know if average temperatures are still rising at this time.
If this woman holds a view similar to mine, and if she is as tired as I am of people no more knowledgeable than I claiming some scientific “truth” that I have reason to suspect is anything but, than perhaps she is simply speaking in anger. Anger is not an emotion that encourages precision in expression.
One corollary that comes to mind concerns “Communism”. I remember as a young man hearing any number of people try to convince me – seriously – of the existence of the “law of history” or some such nonsense. If I’m not mistaken one can still find fools that believe that Communism “works” but (you know what’s coming, right?) it just hasn’t been tried the right way.
I consider the idea of the workability of Communism to be a “fraud” but if I reflect on it honestly, there are probably few adherents of the scheme I would accuse of personally perpetrating the fraud. I have to admit that incredible as it may seem to me, Communists may really “believe in” Communism.
Intellectually, I understand foolishness is different from fraudulence. However it can sometimes be difficult to maintain one’s composure and grace when tempers rise and accusations start to fly. In fact, Lloyd and Chris, the first two people to comment on your post, seem quite content to accuse people they disagree with of, on the one hand cognitive problems, and on the other hand, ill-intent. As you point out, we have precious little data with which to reach the conclusion that man’s activity, by (possibly) marginally affecting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which itself constitutes only about 1% of the atmosphere, is dangerously changing – or even possibly could dangerously change – the planet’s climate. This seems a pretty intricate and technical question yet people on both sides of the question seem to believe the answers can fit on bumper stickers.
Standards and definitions are so often the meat in our dialectical sandwiches, aren't they?
In my initial post, I was looking at the standards by which one judges some proposition to be a "complete hoax," as opposed to "mistaken," "erroneous," "questionable," "exaggerated," or "taken out of context," among other ways in which one can indicate that one believes the proposition to be wrong. And I think we can agree, as Agim does with his differentiation between fraudulence and foolishness, that there is a difference between deliberate falsification and repeating erroneous statements one has oneself accepted.
To put it another way, and I probably ought to, I think that there should be a pretty high standard of evidence to support the accusation that someone is perpetrating a deliberate hoax.
Agim, on the other hand, comes up with a very high standard for accepting the proposition that global warming is, in fact, a problem. His definition of the problem is: "A conclusively proven, human-caused increase in the temperature of the atmosphere and seas that since the turn of the twentieth century is inexorably leading to dangerous if not catastrophic environmental consequences that will affect vast portions of the planet.”
While Agim doesn't like what he sees as loaded terms, like "cognitive dissonance" (which I don't see as a loaded term at all, but that may be another matter), he uses several terms which are, at the very least, stipulative of a certain bias.
"Conclusively proven." For reasons I expressed briefly in my original essay here, and at much greater length in a post on Agim's blog, I am skeptical of any claim that anything, positive or negative, can be proven conclusively about global warming. The data lines are too short, the phenomenal lines are too long, there are too many variables, and too many putative explanations for the phenomena. Moreover, from a policy point of view, waiting until something is "conclusively proven" before acting upon it is a recipe for disaster.
I think that there is a preponderance of the evidence for some degree of global warming, while the models for the consequences of that warming possess varying degrees of credibility.
I take the standard of "conclusively proven" to equate to "beyond a reasonable doubt," and I think that is an unreasonably high standard for acceptance of almost any proposition about an on-going, dynamic set of phenomena.
"Inexorably." This term, in this context, is a fine example of what has been called "the no true Scotsman" maneuver in rhetoric. The very point to efforts such as Al Gore's is to claim that, if we act now, and if we act decisively, we can at least mitigate the effects of global warming. In short, global warming is reversible, not "inexorable." It is, however, claimed to be a progressive phenomenon, such that a failure to act will allow a continuing exacerbation of the problem.
James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, is a big mover these days about energy. Woolsey's focus, as I understand it, is far more on the strategic problems occasioned by our dependence on oil, than on the environmental problems caused by carbon pollution, but he is aware of both, due to the evident overlap between them. Woolsey noted on a recent television interview that there are positive feedback loops in climate change, which means that the phenomena tend to accelerate as the effects get larger. This "snowball" effect raises the possibility that there is some point beyond which the phenomena would be irreversible at an acceptable cost, with current technology.
I actually think that there are three standards that ought to be at work in the area of global warming, and they ought to be at work on various of the individual elements of the problem, rather than on a global statement such as Agim's:
1) In terms of defining the problem and arriving at a scientific consensus as to the causes, the mechanisms, the effects, the flowcharts and feedback cycles, the standard should be the usual scientific standard. (Statistical certainty of 99% that the observation is not due to chance is pretty normal.)
2) In terms of correcting certain observed present conditions and preventing certain probable problems, I think we should be using the same sorts of standards we apply to economic models. If the current rather mixed bag of evidence can lead us to believe that an economy with less than 5% unemployment needs a stimulus, then it is reasonable to conclude that we should be reducing our carbon emissions in the very near future.
3) Before accusing anyone of deliberating messing up the environment, or, on the other hand, of perpetrating a fraud promoting global warming, we should be using the civil suit standard of preponderance of the evidence, or the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
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