Leap of Resignation

At Huffpo, Ted Kaufman begs us to take the issue of climate change serious, pointing readers to the websites of serious science organizations and warning us of the horrific consequences of doing nothing.

Virtually every reputable organization of scientists in the world has reached the same basic conclusion. Climate change is real and poses a threat to every living thing on the earth. To not take climate change seriously, you must somehow believe there is a gigantic international conspiracy involving the world's top scientists, all of whom have agreed to distort their data. Come on.

I highly respect Ted Kaufman for speaking up when we needed to hear him, both on this issue and with regard to banking reform. He often seemed to be the lone thoughtful voice among the clowns and chaos of Congress. He's no longer in Congress, but I do think he's spot on here. Unfortunately, it seems that the people (at least the people I know) have made the leap from climate change skepticism to climate change resignation. I remember wincing when I heard Al Gore's line at the end of Inconvenient Truth that we shouldn't make this leap--it seemed even then that our economic incentives are all in the wrong places and that is exactly what we would do. I fear that is what we are now doing. Here's what I'm sensing out there: "Yep. We're destroying the Earth. We're destroying it in a thousand ways, and climate change is but one of these ways. And we're not willing to do much of anything about it. We don't even like the low efficiency light bulbs, so please leave us alone about this issues of climate change."

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A climate warming skeptic sees the light

A darling of many climate-change skeptics is a physicist who has done his own analysis and concluded:

The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is "on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions." The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmed at a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century.

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What’s not to like about cap and trade?

Barack Obama once promoted "Cap and Trade" as an alleged method for reducing carbon emissions, but has since backed off of that idea. Thank goodness, because cap and trade is a terrible approach for several major reasons that are well illustrated by this video, "The Story of Cap & Trade" by Annie Leonard. Now, if we can only get Barack Obama to quit using the term "clean coal" as if such a thing is economically feasible.

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The growing global warming gap . . . psychoanalyzed

MSNBC offers the following on the global warming gap, based on a recent Gallop poll:

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.
Notice that the question wasn't about causation. It did not ask the cause of the warming (human caused versus natural fluctuation), but merely whether the Earth was warming. Perhaps Gallop should have coupled its question with these just to get at the root of this insanity (and see here):  A) Do you trust thermometers? B) When your mother used a thermometer, did you trust her? and C)   When scientists announce the following data, are these highly credentialed professionals actually acting as conniving scam artists who are out to try to somehow make a bunch of money? Caveat:  I know that I've betrayed my beliefs that the earth is, indeed warming.  This is not to suggest that I ever advocated any sort of cap and trade approach to the problem, which I consider to be a fraud in general and riddled with corruption wherever it has been allegedly implemented (based, for example, on this Harper's Magazine article titled "Conning the Climate," (October 2007). Rather, I believe that we need to have the intelligence and courage to directly regulate our production of CO2.   I'm not confident that we'll be able to do that.  Why?  Because America has an extremely long track record of failing to do what intelligence and self-restraint would require.   We are a nation steeped in ignorance, as demonstrated by the large numbers of people who refused to believe basic thermometer data. People don't engage in climate denialism because they are "stupid."   Most evidence deniers are quite capable of considering evidence and making rational decisions, but there is a lot more going on in humans than rational thought.  There is also our emotional/social side. To describe human animals, psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a lawyer riding an elephant.  Public assertions that contradict clear evidence are public displays of group loyalty, and sometimes people are more compelled to display loyalty than to crunch data to a logical conclusion that conflicts with tenets embraced by the group.  For the most part, this decision to choose loyalty over evidence is not a fully conscious one, but it can often result in a compelling display of loyalty to the extent that it is an expensive display.  Amotz Zahavi has written extensively on this topic of expensive and therefore reliable displays.  I discuss this urge to display as a badge of group belonging in my five-part series called "Mending Fences."  See also, this post on the work of Richard Sosis. I would describe the process like this: It's as though the felt compulsion to show loyalty to the ingroup erects an electrified fence in the mind of the group member protecting the group's creed of beliefs from serious critical inquiry.  If humans were really heating up the planet, it could call for humans (to the extent that they acted as good-hearted moral beings) to make dramatic coordinated changes in the way we run our society.  But if this could be done at all, it could only be done by government fiat.  But modern conservatives hold it as a religious belief that government is feckless and wasteful.  Although it seems pointedly absurd for those of us who trust the readings of thermometers, it is much easier to deny rising temperatures than to admit this evidence but then explain why one is not doing anything meaningful about the problem. Especially given the fact that conservatives tend to live inland (coastal areas tend to have more liberal inhabitants--Jonathan Haidt explains this geographical dispersion).

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