Why There is Still Debate
<< Risk Management | Videos | The Manpollo Project >>
Script
This video is called “Why There Is Still Debate” and is part of the expansion pack providing further detail to the arguments contained in the video How It All Ends.
This video will explore the question of why there is still popular debate on the topic of global climate change, in spite of overwhelming agreement in the scientific realm.
I’ve sometimes heard the objection: “But I’ve heard the opposite of all that you say about climate change, so doesn’t that prove it’s still being debated?” Sure. I guess by definition if you see differing opinions, then it’s still being debated. In the media. In the popular press. In the blogosphere. But not in the scientific realm.
As you may have seen in the video “Risk Management,” the unprecedented statements from AAAS and NAS—probably the two most well-respected scientific organizations on the planet—make it clear that the best that science has to offer tells us that: 1) the globe is warming, 2) we’re the ones doing it, 3) it’s going to be bad, and 4) we’d better do something about it quick.
If these statements as well as the others examined in that video make for such a slam dunk, then why do we (in the US, at least) still hear so much debate?
I think there are probably a lot of reasons for that.
First off, I found some surveys that indicate it’s the lack of absolute certainty that’s holding most people back. If that’s the case for you, I think that if you watch the “Nature of Science” video, you’ll see that waiting for certainty from science is a losing proposition, and if you watch the “Risk Management” video, you’ll see that we can still make good decisions without knowing for certain what’s going on with climate change.
This hesitation on the public’s part allows organizations and companies which stand to be inconvenienced or economically harmed—in the short run—to delay action by playing up the uncertainty of the science. The basic way it works is this: every statement in science is accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement of uncertainty. Good scientists will be very explicit about the uncertainty. Vested interests—like trade organizations, think tanks, some governments, and individual companies—then emphasize this uncertainty. The media has a couple of reasons to include and amplify this uncertainty. The first is, they know that controversy sells. And the second is, they don’t want to be accused of bias, so they go out of their way to present “the other side.” Unfortunately, this creates the illusion that the two sides actually carry equal weight in the scientific community, which you’ve seen, they don’t.
The Union of Concerned Scientists—which is an advocacy organization, but is rigorous enough that they are often consulted by the government—observed that “public opinion can be easily manipulated because science is complex, people tend to not notice where their information comes from, and because the effects of global warming are just beginning to become visible.”
This is starting to change. Exxon—sort of the poster child for this dynamic of propagating public doubt about climate change—just recently made some stunning public shifts. In a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, when Exxon’s vice president for public affairs Kenneth Cohen was speaking about greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on global temperatures, he was quoted as saying: “society knows enough now—that the risk is serious and action should be taken.” And in 2006, Exxon, after funding them for years, stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that ran ads just last year saying that carbon dioxide is helpful, rather than a problem.
So there is indeed deliberate manipulation of public perception in order to serve the interests of stakeholders. On some level, I suppose you can’t fault them. After all, they are just playing the game we’ve got, since the whole purpose of a publicly-traded corporation is to “increase value for shareholders,” not “do the greatest good for the greatest number.”
Although some of them, you can fault. It’s worth including here a story that I also share in the video “No Holds Barred,” just in case you don’t manage to slog through that one, because it’s significant, and really helped galvanize me to action.
On either side of this bitter debate, you hear accusations that the other side is in somebody’s pocket. From the skeptics you’ll hear “It’s just a liberal plot to get control of our lives,” and it’s not uncommon for a warmer to imply that anyone who argues hard for the skeptical side must be a corporate shill. I figured that the idea of vested interests hiring people to surf the net and argue for the skeptical side wasn’t too outlandish, but I also thought it sounded a little too sinister to probably be true.
Well, a couple months ago, I was reading a back-and-forth discussion about Grist.com’s “How to Talk to A Climate Skeptic,” [Google the exact phrase “We’re all seekers for truth here” WITH THE QUOTE MARKS] and there was one guy really taking the lead for the skeptical view, talking quite reasonably how there’s a lot to be said for both sides, and the science on the issue is divided, which is why people are divided, etc. He was saying stuff like “The truth is that reasonable people of good will can look at the same evidence and come to opposite conclusions, including scientists. This is what makes the climate change debate so interesting. It is one of the greatest scientific debates in history.” Seemed like a very reasonable, nice guy who just happened to hold a different opinion than mine.
Imagine my surprise and horror when someone outed this guy as a consultant hired by the electric power industry! And as soon as that was revealed, the guy immediately disappeared, though he had been countering most every point up to then! It was really creepy! Especially when I looked back on the stuff that he had written that I had excused before as being simply uninformed, but really, was deliberately manipulative, and downright intellectually dishonest. “This is what makes the climate debate so interesting. . .” It’s not ‘interesting’ you jerk—it’s potentially life or death for real people if the worst case scenarios actually come to pass! We’re not sure it’ll happen, but that’s what the rest of us are sincerely trying to avoid. And you find it an ‘interesting’ discussion. It’s hard to convey how angry that makes me, to see someone so careless about their impact on other people’s lives.
I felt so violated! I share this with you here because you should know that there are indeed selfish, dishonest people out there who will try to manipulate you for their own benefit, regardless of any harm to you. Given that I actually ran across a guy doing this leads me to conclude that it’s not that outlandish to assign a good amount of the remaining public debate about the issue to a campaign by vested interests to take the inherent uncertainty of all science and cloud the public’s perception of this issue.
That said, being human, we have a number of psychological factors which make us quite susceptible to that kind of manipulation [of “the inherent uncertainty of all science and cloud[ing] the public’s perception of this issue”].
One is simply fear of change. If what AAAS and NAS say is true, then it sure sounds like we may be in for some really big lifestyle changes. So it’s natural to just tune it out. If global climate change is really as much of a big, ugly beast as science says it might be, that really threatens the status quo, which people assume would throw millions of people’s lives into turmoil and change. So they resist the conclusion because they’re afraid of it, not because they understand it.
I know personally, when I talk to people about climate change, I’m always very anxious of being criticized and dismissed for “using scare tactics,” which for some reason is a fatal criticism—once someone slaps that label on you, your credibility is destroyed and no one will listen to you unless they already believe what you have to say.
But can’t you imagine a possible situation in which perhaps you aren’t scared enough for your own good? Couldn’t “scare tactics” be a positive thing then? I read a totally engrossing newpaper column a year or so ago titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” by Daniel Gilbert. He’s a psychologist, and his basic point was that the human brain is conditioned to respond to threats that are immediate, quick, visible, and personal. I call it the Saber-Tooth Tiger Reflex. I’m not sure if I just made that up. ”. . . [W]e accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly,” he wrote. “If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority. . . . When terrorists attack, we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed. It remains to be seen if we can learn to rise to new occasions.”
And there’s the hitch. Our way of dealing with problems—being reactive to them—has worked out okay for us as a species so far. When we’ve really blown it somewhere, we could just move on to new ground. But now, with six billion people and techonology that changes the whole bloody planet, there’s nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.
Which creates another psychological stumbling block. If a situation is too big to comprehend, or too threatening, then our screen just goes blank. Who among us has not stuck our head in the sand, and ignored a terribly pressing problem, subconsciously hoping it will just go away, and dreading the time of reckoning when it must be faced, knowing all along the situation will only be the worse for our inattention, but still not rousing ourselves to action?
And then there’s the dynamic of confirmation bias which I detailed in the video “Nature of Science,” where we pay more attention to the evidence which supports what we already believe, and less attention to the evidence which contradicts it. This explains what was a very puzzling discovery for me. I came across a poll about public attitudes towards global climate change. And it showed there was a significant split across party lines in terms of the percentage of people who believed that humans are causing the globe to warm up.
Now, you probably don’t find it surprising that more Democrats than Republicans believe in global warming, and ordinarily I wouldn’t either. But I’d been steeping myself in this question of how do you go about deciding what to believe about what’s going on with the physical world, and this split along political party lines about a physical reality just sort of blew me away. Why the heck should political belief influence one’s assessment of what is physical reality? I just got this ridiculous picture in my head of a Democrat and a Republican standing and looking out the same window—the Democrat saying “Gee, it’s pouring rain out there,” and the Republican saying “No, it’s a sunny blue day.” And of course the Greenie saying “Hey—let me see!”
So how does confirmation bias explain that split? It’s fair to say that Republicans have a greater distaste for government than Democrats, and if climate change is really being caused by humans, that strongly implies the need for more government action. A Republican would rather not see this happen, and so confirmation bias ends up making more of the “global warming is a hoax” evidence stick, and less of the “global warming is a problem” evidence stick. Along these lines of conirmation bias, I can’t tell you how many times a skeptic has posted a comment along the lines of “Here are three movies on YouTube you MUST see. They all prove how global warming is a hoax.”
It’s true that films like “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are exactly these sorts of evidence that can strongly feed confirmation bias. And you can bet that the fans of each movie have a pretty strong political profile, despite the significant difference in how the two movies have stood up to analysis by credible sources. That’s probably because we’re not in the habit of going out of our way to see if we’re wrong. Really, who likes being shown to be wrong?
If you’re a fan of “An Inconvenient Truth,” how much research have you done into the critiques of the movie? How about if you’re in the “Great Global Warming Swindle” camp? Have you looked up some of the really embarrassing goofs the filmmakers made, like filling in the blanks on some of the scientific graphs? Oops. Do some open-minded googling there, and you may be stunned. Whichever movie you’re a fan of, you owe it to yourself: if you can only find weak critiques that are easily dismissed, that increases your esteem for your favorite movie. And if you find there are a bunch of fatal flaws, then thank goodness you found out now rather than later, and can dump that stinker as fast as possible.
It’s just natural when you go about collecting evidence and arguing again and again to become really convinced yourself, and lose the ability to see that perhaps you could be wrong; perhaps someone else does make a valid point. I know it’s happened to me as I’ve steeped myself in the evidence and arguments in writing these videos. More than once I caught myself thinking “My God—how could anyone not be convinced??” So it is a difficult but very worthy skill to step back and clear the board, saying to yourself: “Okay, I’ll pretend I haven’t formed an opinion yet. Let’s see how the arguments stack up against each other.” I try to aspire to it, though I’m not always successful.
In fact, as hard as I try to form watertight conclusions, I still hope I’m wrong. Which is an idea so important, it’s got its own video: “I Hope I’m Wrong.”
Comments
Youtube Comments: Part 1
Youtube Comments: Part 2