McCarthyism lives: Global Warming, Gore, and Corporatism as the new Communism
I recently saw “good night and good luck”, which re-awakened my interest in the cultural impacts of fascism and the ability of people with media power to smear people with inaccurate but effective half-truths, or out and out lies. To avoid dealing with the unfair social ostracism such smears create, many of the best and brightest quit the game, or go along with the party line in the hopes of keeping at least a few sane voices in the mix.
As I have watched the press and media around the global warming issue, it reminds me heavily of this “McCarthyism” style of debate. I am watching every climatologist I am aware of who questions Gore’s (and the IPCC) data or agenda being written off as spurious or even malicious. This time, instead of “communism” these previously well-respected climatologists are smeared with “corporatism.” They lose funding, get their articles rejected without review, and become fodder for the “conspiracy” theorists in the global warming camp.
Gore regularly smears (meaning asserts without proof or context) the more prominent anti-global warming climatologists with “ties to oil interests” and “their work has been discredited.” This public comment gets reprinted thousands of times. Meanwhile, the scientists themselves question how and where their work has been discredited. They offer systematic defense of their work which are not published by the journals that publish their status as discredited.
What about the funding that these people get, and the political power and fame? Are those, perhaps, motivations that equal the supposed “oil” ties of anti-global warming hysteria?Alvin Gouldner pointed out that in Marx’s system of capitalists, workers, and landlords, he left out the intellectuals. By leaving them out of the equation (he happened to be one, go figure), Marx’s system leaves room for them to dominate the system, which they did and have. When we add them back into the equation, we see that the leaders of the communist revolutions have all been intellectuals, and those in power after the revolution as well.
In the same way, I question whether we might want to add “alarmists” to the political/scientific equation around global warming. Why is it that people are so quick to jump on Gore’s bandwagon? Why do they so easily write off those scientists who claim that the data does not lead to a preponderance of evidence for HUMAN impact on global warming? Why do they listen intently to scientists whose speciality is not climate but ignore the climatologists that dare to question Gore’s Claims? Why are they so easily led by those who use clearly ambiguous scientific reports to mean certain “proof” of their position?
And what are the source documents that the politicians and pundits use to “prove” their case? Upon what basis do they claim “scientific consensus?”Several critics point out the variation between the substance of major reports and the “summary findings” that end up in the conclusions, showing that the DATA suggests major uncertainty, but the summaries suggest that the issue is decided. Here are a couple examples cited by Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous “summary for policy makers” reported ambiguously that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument–e.g., we can’t think of an alternative–to support human attribution. But the “summary for policy makers” claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that “In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.” This was sufficient for CNN’s Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a “unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room.” Well, no.
I wonder if, in retrospect, if and when we discover that the human contribution to global warming is insignificant, or given in terms of millennia rather than decades, we will look back on the current “certainty” of public sentiment as yet another symptom of the same human desire that lead to the spread and horror of socialism and communism. Even more, I wonder if we we learn that historical lesson, or simply repeat it on whatever issue of the day promises the most powerful feelings of self-righteousness and distracts us from the existential issues of being a human being in an era of power and choice?