Political warfare /= scientific warfare

Time to quit pretending otherwise

Posted by David Roberts at 10:58 AM on 26 Mar 2007

Late last week Chris Mooney had a long and characteristically careful post on HuffPo clarifying the hurricane/climate change connection, exactly what Gore's said about it, and exactly where Gore can and cannot be legitimately criticized for it. The crucial point in the post, though, is not about hurricanes. It's this:

Nevertheless, when it comes to the science of global warming and its impacts, there's a very significant difference between Gore and his would-be detractors. Gore takes the conclusions of the mainstream scientific community on global warming seriously and for the most part describes them very accurately, albeit with perhaps a few small errors of presentation (which are likely inadvertent) and of omission (some of which may arise from the fact that he has a ton of ground to cover). It's certainly fair to argue that Gore ought to include more nuances and caveats. But for comparison, let's bear in mind that Gore's scientific critics (and especially Inhofe) tend to disregard the large body of accepted science entirely -- except when they find something they think they can use to make Gore look bad. And even in these cases, they're usually much more off base, and much more selective, than Gore himself is.

This gets at a point that Gore's more sympathetic critics (the fabled "centrists") should take more seriously. I've made it before, but what the hell, I'll make it again.

We're told frequently that small omissions or "visual implications" (to use Broad's formulation) in Gore's film "give ammunition" to his critics. To draw this conclusion you have to accept two premises:

The contest between climate advocates and their critics is primarily a scientific contest -- a debate over who has the best science; and thus,
if Gore's movie had been scientifically impeccable, with no relevant omissions and every nuance fully explained, his critics would have no ammunition and would fall silent.

Now, it may be that no "centrist" would consciously accept these premises, but nonetheless they frequently write as if they were true.

The important point is not only that both premises are false, but that believing them, and writing as if they were true, is hurting the cause of getting something done on climate change -- a cause even the fabled centrists claim to support.

First, good science is not determined by public debate. It's determined by scientists as they hash things out slowly and incrementally in peer-reviewed journals. The rest of us rely on reviews of the literature to tell us what conclusions they've come to, and with what degree of confidence.

The scientific contest -- at least as it relates to the basic facts of global warming -- is over. There are numerous open questions and interesting research threads in climate science, but none of them are about whether global warming is happening or whether we're contributing. It is; we are. Nothing you, me, James Inhofe, or that crank in the comments section says bears on the science one whit. We're just not involved in it. Pretending that scientific questions can be hashed out by anonymous commenters on a blog is completely, surreally false.

Contrariwise, every discussion and debate that takes place outside the scientific journals -- even if scientists are involved, even if science is the subject of discussion -- is, in the broad sense, political. That means having the best science is an advantage, but only one of many possible advantages, and not necessarily a decisive one (that should be obvious by now).

Remember: the goal of political debate is not to establish scientific truth, or even to establish which side is closer to it, but to triumph in the realm of public opinion and public policy. No matter how much some people wish that having science on their side is an automatic trump card, it just isn't. The relationship between accuracy and political advantage is tenuous at best.

The most vociferous critics of global warming advocates -- far-right conservatives -- understand this viscerally, instinctively, if not consciously. (Indeed, you could argue that understanding it consciously would hamper them, but let's not get too far in the weeds.) In other words, Inhofe et. al do not need Gore to actually slip up in his presentation. They do not need any scientifically valid points to make. They aren't waiting around for ammunition. They're more than happy to make shit up. To the extent they use science, or whatever skeptical scientists they can dredge up, they use it as a political weapon.

In short: the far-right is going to wage political war against global warming advocates even if advocates issue a fully footnoted fact sheet, signed by every climate scientist in the country, every time they open their months. It's a political battle, not a scientific battle, and it's time we quit pretending otherwise.

One does not win political battles by joining one's opponents in snipping and pecking at one's own side.

For story: Political warfare /= scientific warfare
6 Comments | Post a Comment

totally...

Watching the hearing, Inhofe's questions seemed so ridiculous as attempts to actually get information from Gore.

But Inhofe was not acting in the information-gathering arena. Inhofe and Fox News had already written their news stories for the following week. Inhofe was simply providing backfill - making sure the talking points actually occured - so that the political gesture could occur the following day.

I think Gore has been remarkably good on the 'political battle' - because he's found a way to shift the terrain from Fox News back onto discussions of science, partially by being polite and disarming, but mostly by being so darn accurate.

In a way, a lot of this feels like a technical communication problem. As long as the scientific results remained practically obscure to Americans at large, political outcomes happened regardless of facts.

Gore disseminated the science, communicated it, made it accessible. He put it into powerpoint. And now the conclusions of science exist in the political arena and have political existence of their own.

by Mmimika at 11:30 AM on 26 Mar 2007

<> is the computer symbol for 'not equal'

by sunflower at 11:52 AM on 26 Mar 2007

A lie repeated is not a truth

Look, I already debunked the best article on AGW that you could offer.

Just repeating that Al Gore is more "scientific" when he isn't will only fool the slowest reader.

Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

by jabailo at 1:58 PM on 26 Mar 2007

H.L. Mencken and Frank Zappa said it best

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Or, as Frank Zappa put it at the dawn of the Reagan era, When future historians write about us, if they base their conclusions on whatever material goods survive from present-day America, we will undoubtedly stand alone among nations and be known forevermore as, "Those who chose cheese."

Now, as usual, Frank Zappa was a little less direct than Mencken, but if I may present a little more of his essay, "Cheese," I think you will see that he was getting at an important point that rings as true today is it did 25 years ago, if not more so.

As you will recall, folks, nobody ever had as much going for them in the beginning as we did. Let's face it; we were fantastic. Today, unfortunately, we are merely weird. This is a shocking thing to say, since no red-blooded American likes to think of his or her self as being weird. But when there are other options and a whole nation chooses cheese, that is weird.
Our mental health has been in a semi-wretched condition for quite some time now. One of the reasons for this distress, aside from choosing cheese as a way of life, is the fact that we have, against some incredibly stiff competition, emerged victorious as the biggest bunch of liars on the face of the planet. No society has managed to invest more time and energy in the perpetuation of the fiction that it is moral, sane and wholesome, than our current crop of modern Americans.
This same delusion is the mysterious force behind our national desire to avoid behaving in any way that might be construed as intelligent. Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. To cosmetize it, many otherwise normal citizens attempt a particular type of self-inflicted homemade mental nose-job designed to lower the recipient's socio-intellectual profile, to the point where the ability to communicate on the most Mongolian level provides the necessary certification to become "one of the guys."
Let's face it, nobody wants to hang out with somebody who's smarter than they are. This is not fun. Americans have always valued the idea of fun. We have a national craving for fun. We don't get very much of it anymore, so we do two things: first, we rummage around for anything that might be fun; then, since it wasn't really fun in the first place, we pretend to enjoy it, whatever it was. The net result? Stressed cheese.
But where does all this cheese really come from? It wouldn't be fair to blame it all on T.V., although some credit must be given to whoever it is at each of the networks that "gives us what we want." You don't ask, you don't get. Folks, we now have "got it." Lots of it. And, in our infinite American wisdom, we have constructed elaborate systems to insure that future generations will have an even more abundant supply of that fragrant substance upon which we presently thrive. . . .

Zappa used the word "cheese" to describe the "fragrant substance" he had in mind, hoping that it would slip past the editors at Newsweek (who canned his essay because, ironically, they thought it was weird), but quite clearly what Zappa was talking about was bullshit, not cheese. And he was right. Given a choice between Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war" on energy waste and imports and Ronald Reagan's bullshit about it being "morning in America," where we can all consume and waste freely and get rich and have lower tax bills in the process, a majority of Americans not only bought Reagan's bullshit then, but many of them still think he delivered. This despite the fact that he sent the country into the greatest recession since the Great Depression by merely saying he would cut government spending, then he actually increased government spending substantially while he cut taxes (sound familiar?) and financed it by more than doubling the entire accumulation of national debt since the first days of the country's existence--in a mere six years. Many Americans have been clinging to that bullshit ever since, which is why we are more "addicted to oil" than ever (and more in debt than ever), as the current bullshitter in chief finally admitted.

The only way to cut through the bullshit is to expose the man behind the curtain, so to speak. However, that is only effective if the people recognize the man behind the curtain as someone who cannot be trusted and has been shown to do harm in the past. Otherwise, people are quite happy to roll in the bullshit even when they know that's what it is, much as people like to buy billions of dollars of lottery tickets each year, even though they know they have a better chance of being struck by lightning than ever winning the fortunes they dream of.

Fortunately (and regrettably), some of the most influential men behind the curtain today are known to be quite evil, untrustworthy because they have played the same game they are now playing with global warming to harm and kill thousands upon thousands of Americans in the past (and present). The name of their game is "uncertainty." The pitch is simple: why worry and sacrifice about something that may not happen when it is so much easier and cheaper to just keep doing what you have always done--which has always worked well enough up to know, right? Then the hook is set by pointing out that no one knows with perfect certainty how the deadly risks that the majority of scientists have determined to be real will actually play out on any given day, leaving out the fact that they can say with a very high level of confidence that most people will suffer terribly and terminally at some point if they do not do what they can to avoid the risk at hand.

In the past, when these people played the game, they did it in the name of Phillip Morris, which bank rolled the effort to sow seeds of doubt and denial about second hand tobacco smoke in and effort escape liability or suffer reduced profits because they knew and scientists knew they were making people sick and even killing them. It was from these roots that we got the terms "junk science" and "sound science" as part of the sales pitch, which was made by Steve Milloy (of Fox News and junkscience.com) and the P.R. firm APCO, both of whom are prime drivers behind global warming today. That part of the story needs to get raised every time global warming skeptics play the "uncertainty" game, as the CEO of ExxonMobil--which has replaced Phillip Morris as the new client and financier of the game--did the day after the IPCC announced it unanimous position on the near certainty that emissions of greenhouse gases stemming from human activities and enterprises were driving global warming, which is without a doubt underway.

Simply put, the only way to get Americans not to choose bullshit is to point out that in today's techno-tuned world, unlike the days of ma and pa on the family farm, the stuff is likely laden with a strain of E. coli that has been known to kill people while the businesses slopping it about escape responsibility for the harm they have done. That tends to wake up even the weirdest "cheese" connoisseurs. Even those who buy into some weird nostalgia doing as they damned well please and possibly getting killed as a result tend to see that Mencken had a pretty good point when he said:

To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.

by Rune at 11:00 PM on 26 Mar 2007
[ Parent ]

choosing cheese

That was a brilliant manifesto, Rune. A mixed metaphor now and again never hurt anyone. As the husband of a Mothers of Invention fan, I thank you.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 12:05 AM on 27 Mar 2007

Yes

David, you are spot on.

OTOH, I'm not so terribly sure anyone is correctly estimating the level of mistrust that "Conservative Republican Free-Market" (CRF) types have for the motivations behind this movement, or the people in it, or the importance of it. Part of the problem stems from the (arguable) fact that emotional arguments generally beat logical ones.

I'm also not sure that anyone is correctly estimating the degree of motivation the CRF types have to stop as much of the implementation they don't agree with as they can, as well as by any means needed.

Who cares if we have "projected" or "likely" or a rise "thought to be" of .00005% or .003% or 10% or whatever. Meaningless details, pointless points. There is money and/or power involved here, and it's needed to understand the political, economic, social and other questions here.

That may be (and probably is) too simplistic, but in general, trying to fight your enemies with shades of gray doesn't work.

I'm reminded of something I read related to googlebombs {french military victories} on Albino Blacksheep:

Barbary Wars, middle ages-1830.
Pirates in North Africa continually harass European shipping in Meditteranean. France's solution: pay them to leave us alone. America's solution: kick their asses.

Or even part of a Monty Python skit:

Presenter: The contestant is Karl Marx and the prize this week is a beautiful lounge suite. Now Karl has elected to answer questions on the workers' control of factories so here we go with question number one. Are you nervous? {nods} The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development?
Karl: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie.
Presenter: Yes, yes, it is indeed. You're on your way to the lounge suite, Karl. Question number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle? A what struggle?
Karl: A political struggle.
Presenter: Yes, yes! One final question Karl and the beautiful lounge suite will be yours... Are you going to have a go? {nods} You're a brave man. Karl Marx, your final question, who won the Cup Final in 1949?
Karl: The workers' control of the means of production? The struggle of the urban proletariat?
Presenter: No. It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1.

by Jason Peterson at 4:36 PM on 15 May 2007

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