June 16th, 2014
It’s unclear exactly what “climate skepticism” really means. It could be anything from
(1) I’m not sure this “global warming” thing is really happening, to
(2) I’m not sure this global warming thing is man-made, to
(3) I’m not sure this man-made global warming thing can be mediated by any reasonable means, to
(4) I’m not sure this man-mad global warming thing is necessarily the end of the world.
Or it could be:
(5) Between the uncertainty in the models, the manner in which reality has so far not conformed to the models, and the relatively recent insistence that global cooling, not global warming, was the problem, I’d like to wait a while and get some more serious study done by people who don’t have any obvious ideological and partisan commitments.
Because most of the time, the popular definition of a “climate skeptic” is simply: A person who does not share my domestic policy preferences at this very moment.
Anyway, if you’re interested in why people might fall into one of those five categories, it might be because of passages such as the following, from a Jill Lepore piece in the New Yorker. The piece has nothing to do with climate change–it’s about the gospel of disruption in the tech sector–but in the notion of historical progress, Lepore writes:
The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming.
Got that? The two World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the advent of state-sponsored genocide, and . . . global warming. As if they’re all of a piece. Even if you believe the most apocalyptic claims of the environmental left, one of those things is not like the other–because it hasn’t caused mass death yet. And, as a purely factual matter, it simply doesn’t fit the list because Lepore is talking about events which dominated the thinking of the 20th century–and for most of the 20th century no one cared a lick about global warming. In fact, they spent more time during last century worrying about “global cooling.”
People don’t like to be force-fed idiocy.
Nedward June 19, 2014 at 2:28 am
In the halcyon early 90s it was a staple of stand-up comedy and TV satire to mock indignant truth-to-powering by dismissively playing it back at them in the general form of the trope, “Oh man, this is all just like Nazi Germany” (for use when: a parking ticket is issued; Brisco County Jr. is canceled by the network; a school insists on the No Shoes-No Shirt policy for its students; etc.) But Denis Leary-esque social irony must be one of those brilliant butterflies that only lives a day or whatever because there’s no evidence of the Great “Political Incorrectness” Awakening among the generation that came up after it; moreover they seem to demonstrate how effective indoctrination about drowning polar bears, Heather’s two mommies, and malevolent non-governmental bureaucracies can be. There is even a pseudo-intellectual conventional feeling that massive progressive-totalitarian war games can be useful for children & other living things — see national correspondent for “The Week” Ryan Cooper’s proclamation of this June 18th, “It’s time to declare war on climate change, literally” (site has an audio version of the author reading, rather poorly, his own column, but with obligatory Edwin Starr sample)