How to answer your crazy uncle re: Climate Change
1) I offer my own handy guide to engage intelligent people who only half swallowed koolaid. Smart guys who proclaim they aren’t climate science “deniers”… but “skeptics” instead.
In fact, this distinction is very real! Moreover, science benefits from critical questioning by genuine Skeptics!
Still, given the pervasive villainy of fox-propelled denialism, a burden of proof falls on those who claim to be above the fray and not Rupert’s hand puppets. My article reveals half a dozen essential (if a bit intellectual) ways to test the claim. And if they pass? Then prove your own adaptability and lack of dogma! Engage and argue with such people, like adults.
2) Alas, most of those marching in Rupert’s Lemming Army don’t make such fine distinctions. They’re fine with anti-science denialism and my intellectual points will be meaningless. But if you think your crazy uncle has a – somewhere buried deep inside – the remnant of an honest “paleocon” conservative, then your role – your duty! – is to gather stamina and wear him down, for the sake of civilization.
Each ostrich conservative who lifts his head is a victory for America. Worth hosannas and paeans of joy. When enough of them get angry at the real villians – the monsters who hijacked conservatism – we’ll get back a conservatism folks can sanely argue with. Negotiate with. You can help, one crazy uncle at a time.
This site offers: simple rebuttals to denier talking points — with links to the full climate science. It’s extended, exhausting and somewhat repetitious. Print it before your next crazy-uncle encounter.
But of course… I found some gaps! So I went ahead and wrote a few more. Add these to the printout.
Some additional rebuttals to Denialist talking points:
1. Practical minded people don’t listen to Climate Change chicken-littles:
The US Navy is spending a lot of time, money and effort planning for an ice-free Arctic. The Russians are too, setting up sub-oceanic mining claims and outposts and reassigning a whole division of special forces. Are the Russians and the US Navy and the Canadians and Norwegians all doing this for nothing? Because they are fools and chicken-littles?
2. Climate scientists are clueless:
The supposedly stupid climate scientists are in many cases the very same people who improved the Weather Forecast from a 4 hour joke (remember those days?) to a ten day projection so useful that you plan vacations around it. Sure, climate is more difficult, but it uses the same equations and same modeling systems. If they proved titanically competent in one area, don’t they deserve some benefit of the doubt in a closely related field? Perhaps more than TV shills who work for coal czars and Saudi princes?
But of course Glenn Beck knows more than they do.
3. Scientists just follow the herd:
Top scientists are the most competitive human beings of all time. Put three in a room and there’s blood on the floor. Below them, “young guns” are constantly looking for some giant to topple or “wrong corner” of current theory to shine light into and make a reputation. If you believe the meek, herd-following nerd image, enjoy! It clearly makes you feel better to express superiority over people who are smarter and know a lot more than you do. But… it… is… a… lie.
4. Scientists are pushing climate change for grant money:
Really? They’d lie for a $50,000 grant? All of them? Even the vast majority who have no such grants and work in other (related) fields? Or who have grants that are secure forever due to their wondrously successful work in weather forecasting? Vastly more is spent on weather than climate: these tenured guys have no “skin” in Climate Change… yet they all believe it.
Oh, but Beck says they are all sucking up to the money gushers in Big Environmentalism. (Do you ever actually listen to your own words?)
How about the major prizes and grants offered by coal companies and petro moguls, for anti-Climate Change “research”? Huge offers, often much bigger than those petty little grants from EPA, NASA, NOAA or private foundations. Why don’t those coal-co offers draw serious, top-rank climate scholars, if they are all such money grubbers?
And how does it feel parroting the exact same lines as the Tobacco Industry pushed, when they cried “the jury is still out” about the health effects of smoking, and Tobacco shills claimed that anti-smoking scientists were all in it to become millionaires off grants from the Heart Association? Have you no memory? No shame?
More to the point, if you are so sure about this slander – that all the scientists backing Climate Change are grubbing for grants – HOW ABOUT OFFERING IT AS A BET? Wagers are on the table. Free money, if you’re sure! Follow the money, prove this and collect the bets. Only a coward would refuse. (Hint: when offered wagers, these folks always, always run away. Try it and watch them scurry for cover!)
5. Accepting the advice of 97% of the people who know about the climate would ruin the economy.
Wrong. Accepting HGCC would only open us to finally arguing over the BEST methods to ease greenhouse warming.
Admitting that something needs to be done would not pre-judge the argument over what to do. It will just start that argument! Many tools would be on the table and economic repercussions would certainly be a factor in negotiations and tradeoffs. We all want to keep the lights on. Given a choice, we’d all prefer the solutions that kept a vibrant economy.
Stop portraying scientists – and those who respect science – as unreasonable people. Stop portraying them as people like yourself.
6. Solving Climate Change would veer us in directions we shouldn’t go.
Exactly the opposite of true. Most of the methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions involve increasing our energy efficiency and stimulating new forms of energy. In other words, exactly the same things we ought to be doing anyway!
Even if HGCC proved to be an utter myth, it would still be worthwhile to bend major efforts toward efficiency and new energy, if only to wean ourselves off dependence upon foreign oil and filthy coal. An accomplishment that George W. Bush swore would be his top priority… and that he sabotaged at every turn. (Hmm… look at his family friends and guess why.)
Indeed, follow the money behind climate change denialism. It leads directly to… foreign oil princes and big, filthy coal. Congrats. You are in good company.
7. The Earth isn’t that delicate:
In many ways the planet is resilient. But here’s a fact that you will hear nowhere else, though as an astronomer I’ll vouch for it:
Our planet skates along the very inner edge of the sun’s “Goldilocks Zone” (GZ). The sun has been getting warmer gradually for 4 billion years. (This has NOTHING to do with the rate of warming re climate change. A separate, slow but inexorable shift over hundreds of millions of years.) Now the inner edge of the GZ is right upon us. That means we must expel almost all of the heat we get from the sun as infrared rays and cannot afford even the trace amounts of greenhouse gas increase that humans have caused. It sounds unfair, and maybe it is, but them’s the facts.
7. In the 1970s scientists were predicting an Ice Age.
An outright lie. There were a couple of very tentative papers, that’s it. But this lie is dealt with in the big list of rebuttals that I cite above. So why do I bring it up now?
Because of a big, popular movie that illustrates just how widely people were already talking about HGCC, even in the 1970s. Proving that science never swerved. Go watch Soylent Green.
8. I don’t care, I hate science:
Yep, that is the fall-back refrain. Hatred of people who know stuff. Not just science, but also teachers, diplomats, journalists, lawyers, professors, medical doctors, civil servants, skilled union labor… you name a caste of knowledge and professional intellect — of knowing stuff – and it’s under attack. Most vigorously by the foxed right (making Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley spin in their graves) but also by the loony far-left.
Pragmatic-moderate problem solving and negotiation were great American virtues. Culture War is betrayal. Treason. And the chief purpose of denialism.
Again. Scientists aren’t being dissed in order to detract from the theory of climate change. Climate change denialism is being pushed in order to help know-nothing-ism win the War on Science. If our generation fails this test – if you refuse to do your part by rescuing some salvageable conservative, luring him or her back to the version of conservatism professed by real men like Buckley – then welcome to the Dark Ages.
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More on bad policy + bad science:
- Nobel prize-winner says it’s time to stamp out anti-science in US politics
- Why are they lying about Occupy Wall Street – and why are they getting away with it?
- Does Mitt Romney believe in climate change? Not any more…
- Climate Change and Science – Cutting Through the Talking Points to the Truth
- Fox News Viewers Misinformed About Global Warming (And Lots More)
- Professor Juan Cole compares big oil to mass murderers
- GOP Votes to Repeal Climate Science
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I’ve been waiting for ages for someone to say this; I used to have this fight with my father (RIP). The simple fact is that there is tremendous money to be made and jobs to be created from embracing climate change… The issue isn’t if climate change is real or not; the issue is whether current power structures will be part of that innovation… and they would rather stay where the money is now rather than risk a big payday later.
We have been subjecting to marketing, and too many swallow it too easily.
*applause* The only difficulty I am finding with this article is the fact that it is written for a similarly minded audience. I couldn’t easily link it to say, my republican friends or relatives because it is incendiary to refer to them as my ‘crazy uncles’. But everything else… is awesome!
Brilliant analysis with a nice engaging tone.. a great line of attack. Falls in the trap of using US nationalism to motivate.. always dangerous and for the rest of us readers just irritating.
I have a brother in law who I love dearly even though in his dotage he has turned into a hard right wing zealot of the worst kind. He worships Limbaugh and Hannity and the whole bit. Anyway his theory on climate change is that it is the left’s attempt to dethrone god by denying he has the intellect and power to keep the planet livable until he comes again. I just don’t talk to him about religion or politics because anyone that delusional is prone to stroke out when confronted with logic, facts and evidence.
To Dan C.- You may want to consider that there are zealots on both sides of the spectrum. Religious kooks who believe the earth was created in six “literal” days are wrong, as is the Kook-in-Chief His Highness Sir Richard the Atheist From Hell Dawkins. Both extremes are foolish and indefensible, not to mention unprovable. The Creation itself speaks to a more sophisticated approach to life on earth. The magnificence we call our solar system is not because of mere chance. The geological record shows the “planet” to be billions of years old, not a few millenium. The Bible does not address the earth’s beginning, only the epoch of man’s placement on the earth. The term “day” in scripture is indefinite and written that way so people of faith don’t fixate on the unprovable. Clearly, there is no scientific experiment that can be done to prove when the earth, life or humanity began to a certainty. ANY scholar claiming to have that insight is a pretender, looking for adulation. The more science looks into the order, the uniqueness, the infinate wisdom of design in all aspects of our universe one cannot escape the obvious. To deny an intelligence behind these vast systems or state as Biblical fact that which scripture does not verify shows more about the observers motives than his intellect.