Conservatism, evolution, global warming, and the truth.

sqweels · January 9, 2010, 9:04pm

As I understand it, the conservative position on global climate change is that no warming is being caused by human emissions. But while many conservatives maintain that warming trends are being caused by long-term natural cycles, many more conservatives gleefully unearth evidence that suggests global warming isn’t happening at all. Like the fact that it’s been really cold this winter.

So I would like some clarification as to what, specifically, is the overall conservative position as to the facts of the matter.

Similarly, I gather that the conservative position on the origin of life is that it was intelligently designed. But while the belief that the earth was created suddenly about 6,000 years ago is very popular among conservatives, I don’t think they’re all on board with that.

So is the Biblical Young Earth model the settled, conservative view on the issue and those who believe in other models are deviating form the party line? Or is there any kind of consensus on a rough sequence of events that encompasses a broader but still conservative outlook?

John_Mace · January 9, 2010, 9:17pm

There isn’t a “conservative party” in the sense that you are using it, so I don’t know who it is you think makes the decision about what is or is not the “official conservative view”.

As for global warming, you’ve got the whole range opinions from:

It isn’t happening.
It’s happening, but not caused by man.
It’s happening, caused by man, but too expensive to reverse.
It’s happening, caused by man, but the free market is the best way to take care of it.

Plus probably a bunch more that I can’t even think of.

Starving_Artist · January 9, 2010, 10:28pm

Conservatives are skeptical about global warming because it’s coming from the same crowd that 40 years ago claimed we were running out of trees; 30 years ago claimed we were running out of oil; 25 years ago claimed we were headed for an ice age; and 20 years ago claimed that all the ozone was being depleted. The predicted outcome of each of these was that we were all going to die - just like now with global warming.

Let’s face it - there is a significant segment of the population that is prone to Chicken-Littleism and that segment tends to skew left. Plus such fears are a great impetus for imposing more government regulation upon private enterprise.

And I’d be surprised if more than a very small minority of the conservative population actually believes the earth is only 6,000 years old.

WarmNPrickly · January 9, 2010, 10:51pm

Deforestation is still a major problem. This has not changed.

Oil is a finite resource, and while we may get better at extracting oil, we will eventually run out.

Several thousand peer reviewed journal articles on AGW versus maybe one or two and a Newsweek article on the ice age. Any attempt to avtually draw an equivalence is deliberately deceptive.

You forgot the order of events here. First, the ozone layer was being depleted. Then corrective action was taken. Then, the ozone layer recovered.

Nobody with any sense is predicting that we are all going to die.

The_Tooth · January 9, 2010, 10:53pm

This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedemir. Explain again how sheeps’ bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.

The_Tooth · January 9, 2010, 10:54pm

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that we are all indeed going to die.

Squink · January 9, 2010, 11:01pm

How old is this crowd now?
No one really gets much of a voice in the science community until they hit 30 and have a nice professorial position somewhere. if it’s the same crowd as 40 years ago, they’d all be 70+ years old now. Is that true? Are most climate scientists really old codgers?
Do they have their foot so firmly on the neck of the younger generation of scientists that none of them get to speak on the issues?
Or does the ‘crowd’ which you view with suspicion really consist of anyone who studies science?
If you want to reject science, so be it. Just tell the rest of us that’s your intention.

Lobohan · January 9, 2010, 11:05pm

Was it the vast majority of the scientific community that thought we were going to run out of trees?

As for 30 years ago, do you think we aren’t running out of oil?

As for 25 years ago, do you understand that that was never the scientific consensus? Do you? Why don’t you know that, I’m sure you’ve been educated that you are simply wrong before? Why is it that you refuse to learn and repeat the same incorrect statements over and over again? Is it that you’d rather seem right than be right?

As for 20 years ago, do you understand that we actually fixed the problem by reducing the amount of CFCs used, right?

More than half of Americans think that it’s probably or definitely true that God created man in his present form no more than 10k years ago.

And way more conservatives believe it than liberals.

Conservatism, at least in the early 21st century, is about fantasy and ignorance.

athelas · January 9, 2010, 11:08pm

Nuh-uh. No political ideology gets to claim to own the full breadth of science, from Pasteur to Crick and Watson to Hawking. What you describe is advocacy, with a few Google Scholar-scouring think tanks fetching the papers to give you the answer you want.

BrotherCadfael · January 9, 2010, 11:13pm

I’ve lived through nine out of the last zero environmental apocalypses. That makes me tend to view environmental doomsaying with a very skeptical eye.

Not to say that I reject them out of hand, but I tend to take an “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” view. It doesn’t help when those who are supposed to be providing that evidence play fast and loose with the data…

Squink · January 9, 2010, 11:13pm

Nope, it’s the typical Post-doc system science has run under for decades.

WarmNPrickly · January 9, 2010, 11:18pm

You’re an imbecile. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the dead wont rise to feed of the flesh of the living.

GIGObuster · January 9, 2010, 11:24pm

Cite for that? It is clear that the ones playing loose and fast with the data are deniers like Fox news and conservative leaders like Inhofe.

Try2B_Comprehensive · January 9, 2010, 11:28pm

I am not responding directly to this post, I just wanted to start with those words re the op’s question.

I posted this article in another thread, but it is interesting enough to offer again for this question. From The Rise of Republican Nihilism:

On climate change, the Republican response has been equally instructive. The largest and most strident bloc of Republican opinion remains deeply skeptical of mainstream climate science. (I don’t have the space here to defend the legitimacy of the overwhelming majority opinion among climate scientists. Suffice it to say that if you believe most scientists have fabricated evidence that carbon emissions contribute to rising global temperatures, you won’t find these five paragraphs persuasive.) Those Republican legislators who have supported any action on climate change have rallied around a plan to construct nuclear reactors, which, in addition to costing $600 billion and taking a decade to have any effect, would reduce carbon emissions by a mere 12 percent. The one Republican senator who has urged a comprehensive solution, Lindsey Graham, has found himself under severe attack from home-state Republicans and threatened by a primary challenger.
Granted, some of the GOP’s reticence stems from its alliance with energy interests–a failing that numerous Democrats share. Yet the Republican opposition to limiting carbon-dioxide emissions also closely reflects currents of right-wing thought.

A decade ago, nearly all conservatives rejected the connection between carbon emissions and climate change. Though many still do, a growing minority of right-wingers now accepts the mainstream scientific position. However, rather than proceed from that premise to some program of reduced emissions, they have feverishly devised a series of rationales for unlimited carbon use. Some have embraced fantastical geoengineering schemes–massive machines, for example, that would suck carbon out of the sky–with the rabid certainty of a science-fiction nut. Others insist that limiting U.S. emissions will do nothing to help force developing nations to do the same. Still other conservatives argue that the future world will be richer and thus able to cope with whatever calamities a hotter planet will bring.

The telling thing here is not that these arguments are provably wrong, though they are highly speculative. It’s that those conservatives who have accepted climate-change science immediately jumped to some other reason to oppose government action. These reasons are, in theory, separate logical propositions: The feasibility of creating giant machines to suck carbon out of the sky has nothing to do with the diplomatic question of whether U.S. climate action could influence China to follow suit.

Yet virtually no conservative intellectuals seem to settle, even temporarily, on the view that climate change is real and that government regulation is therefore appropriate. They cling to climate-science skepticism like a life preserver, and then, when they can’t hold on any more, they grasp immediately for a different rationale. If government intervention appears to be the answer, they must change the question.

From women’s suffrage and other visions of right-wing apocalypse on the history of Conservative thought:

There’s more where that came from.

GIGObuster · January 9, 2010, 11:42pm

So much ignorance in one post, expanding on what WarmNPrickly said regarding that issue:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/world_avoided.html

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth’s ozone is gone – not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, with a twin over the North Pole. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation falling on mid-latitude cities like Washington, D.C., is strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. DNA-mutating UV radiation is up 650 percent, with likely harmful effects on plants, animals and human skin cancer rates.

Such is the world we would have inherited if 193 nations had not agreed to ban ozone-depleting substances, according to atmospheric chemists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bilthoven.

Led by Goddard scientist Paul Newman, the team simulated “what might have been” if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and similar chemicals were not banned through the treaty known as the Montreal Protocol. The simulation used a comprehensive model that included atmospheric chemical effects, wind changes, and radiation changes. The analysis has been published online in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

In the new analysis, Newman and colleagues “set out to predict ozone losses as if nothing had been done to stop them.” Their “world avoided” simulation took months of computer time to process.

The team started with the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry-Climate Model (GEOS-CCM), an earth system model of atmospheric circulation that accounts for variations in solar energy, atmospheric chemical reactions, temperature variations and winds, and other elements of global climate change. For instance, the new model accounts for how changes in the stratosphere influence changes in the troposphere (the air masses near Earth’s surface). Ozone losses change the temperature in different parts of the atmosphere, and those changes promote or suppress chemical reactions.

The researchers then increased the emission of CFCs and similar compounds by 3 percent per year, a rate about half the growth rate for the early 1970s. Then they let the simulated world evolve from 1975 to 2065.

By the simulated year 2020, 17 percent of all ozone is depleted globally, as assessed by a drop in Dobson Units (DU), the unit of measurement used to quantify a given concentration of ozone. An ozone hole starts to form each year over the Arctic, which was once a place of prodigious ozone levels.

By 2040, global ozone concentrations fall below 220 DU, the same levels that currently comprise the “hole” over Antarctica. (In 1974, globally averaged ozone was 315 DU.) The UV index in mid-latitude cities reaches 15 around noon on a clear summer day (a UV index of 10 is considered extreme today.), giving a perceptible sunburn in about 10 minutes. Over Antarctica, the ozone hole becomes a year-round fixture.

In the 2050s, something strange happens in the modeled world: Ozone levels in the stratosphere over the tropics collapse to near zero in a process similar to the one that creates the Antarctic ozone hole.

By the end of the model run in 2065, global ozone drops to 110 DU, a 67 percent drop from the 1970s. Year-round polar values hover between 50 and 100 DU (down from 300-500 in 1960). The intensity of UV radiation at Earth’s surface doubles; at certain shorter wavelengths, intensity rises by as much as 10,000 times. Skin cancer-causing radiation soars.

“Our world avoided calculation goes a little beyond what I thought would happen,” said Goddard scientist and study co-author Richard Stolarski, who was among the pioneers of atmospheric ozone chemistry in the 1970s. “The quantities may not be absolutely correct, but the basic results clearly indicate what could have happened to the atmosphere. And models sometimes show you something you weren’t expecting, like the precipitous drop in the tropics.”

“We simulated a world avoided,” said Newman, “and it’s a world we should be glad we avoided.”

The real world of CFC regulation has been somewhat kinder. Production of ozone-depleting substances was mostly halted about 15 years ago, though their abundance is only beginning to decline because the chemicals can reside in the atmosphere for 50 to 100 years. The peak abundance of CFCs in the atmosphere occurred around 2000, and has decreased by roughly 4 percent to date.

Stratospheric ozone has been depleted by 5 to 6 percent at middle latitudes, but has somewhat rebounded in recent years. The largest recorded Antarctic ozone hole was recorded in 2006.

“I didn’t think that the Montreal Protocol would work as well as it has, but I was pretty naive about the politics,” Stolarski added. “The Montreal Protocol is a remarkable international agreement that should be studied by those involved with global warming and the attempts to reach international agreement on that topic.”

ITR_champion · January 9, 2010, 11:53pm

sqweels:

As I understand it, the conservative position on global climate change is that no warming is being caused by human emissions. But while many conservatives maintain that warming trends are being caused by long-term natural cycles, many more conservatives gleefully unearth evidence that suggests global warming isn’t happening at all. Like the fact that it’s been really cold this winter.

So I would like some clarification as to what, specifically, is the overall conservative position as to the facts of the matter.

Similarly, I gather that the conservative position on the origin of life is that it was intelligently designed. But while the belief that the earth was created suddenly about 6,000 years ago is very popular among conservatives, I don’t think they’re all on board with that.

So is the Biblical Young Earth model the settled, conservative view on the issue and those who believe in other models are deviating form the party line? Or is there any kind of consensus on a rough sequence of events that encompasses a broader but still conservative outlook?

True, although there is a Republican Party, which can give us a fairly clear position on where Republicans stand. Two years ago they nominated John McCain for president and agreed on a platform, so we can make reasonable statements about what the conservative movement in America endorses overall. The platform mentions carbon dioxide and links it to climate change, though without saying with absolute certainty that the former causes the later. Similarly, the section devoted to education makes no mention of creationism or anything of the kind. In short there really isn’t any justification for saying that “the conservative position” includes “no warming caused by human activity” or any endorsement of creationism.

GIGObuster · January 10, 2010, 12:13am

Glad to know that, but that is not what I see coming from the most enthusiastic conservative groups out there, Knowing how Rush and people like Palin are guiding those groups right now, I would be surprised to see that sensible platform in 2012, Even in 2004 John McCain was an odd Republican regarding the environment.

http://www.alternet.org/story/18283/

Perhaps we’re asking the question the wrong way around. It’s possible that there’s nothing so odd about John McCain, no need to explain his conversion as some kind of miracle. In his belief that global warming is a serious problem, and in his desire to do something about it, he’s in agreement with the vast majority of American voters, the legislators of every other industrialized country, and virtually every climatologist on planet Earth. (His proposed legislation, in fact, is far weaker than the weakest laws of the European nations.) Maybe the better question is: How did the other Republicans in Washington get so…odd? How did the party of T.R. become so anti-environmental?

Consider, for instance, Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who chairs the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He didn’t just vote against McCain-Lieberman – he took to the floor during the debate over the bill to describe global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Shortly thereafter, he led an unofficial delegation of eight Republican congressmen to talks in Milan on ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Though President Bush had long since pulled the United States out of the agreement, Inhofe still thought it was important to make clear to the Europeans “that we are not going to ratify Kyoto.” Indeed, he lectured them on his collection of scientific “evidence” disproving climate change – a threadbare assortment of discredited studies that fly in the face of the mountain of peer-reviewed evidence assembled in the last decade, not to mention the observable trends gaining momentum across the planet (glacial systems in rapid retreat, Arctic ice thinning precipitously, all 10 of the warmest years on record in the last two decades). For some reason, the Europeans were not impressed – perhaps because they still remembered last summer’s record heat wave, which baked to death more than 10,000 residents of France and Belgium. “They don’t want to listen,” Inhofe told nationally syndicated columnist James Glassman. “They were zombies.”

Some of this radicalism stems from the perception that environmentalists have been overreaching in recent years. McCain himself talked bitterly to me about conservationists who sued to block the reconstruction of a washed-out road across federal land. “People needed to get their kids to school – all over Arizona people thought that was ridiculous,” he says. But mostly, says Jim DiPeso, the policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, it comes from a kind of worship of the market – a deep belief that there’s never any good to come from interfering with the free operation of laissez-faire economics. “Look at James Inhofe and people like him. They’re so bought into the notion that economic prosperity is tied to the consumption of fossil fuels that they simply refuse to let go of it. They can’t tolerate any argument that postulates that fossil fuels have downsides, that there are reasons to accelerate the transition to other forms of energy.”

“It seems like these Christian fundamentalist far-right Republicans put business ahead of the environment every time,” says Pete McCloskey, who served from the late 1960s until the middle of the Reagan administration as a Republican congressman from California – and who helped organize the first Earth Day, in 1970. “In my day – really, until Newt Gingrich took over – we could always count on a good number of Republicans for environmental issues. The Environmental Study Conference in the House and Senate, which functioned like an environmental caucus, usually had 60 or 65 percent of each chamber enrolled. But those great Republican enviros have largely left or been shunted aside or died – Mark Hatfield, Chuck Percy, Mac Matthias.” Even as recently as the first Bush administration, says Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, the split wasn’t so deep. Indeed, the first President Bush pledged to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” “I was proud to work with his father on the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990,” says Jeffords. “Now this President Bush insists on undoing his father’s legacy.” For Jeffords, of course, it was too much – the environment was one reason he finally left the GOP and began caucusing with the Democrats.

Quartz · January 10, 2010, 12:19am

Cite that it’s a major problem with reference to climate?

Unless someone invents a process for economically creating oil.

Are the ozone holes not still seasonally present?

GIGObuster · January 10, 2010, 12:25am

As posted earlier:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/world_avoided.html

Rune · January 10, 2010, 12:33am

You understand wrong. Although personally I find it important to always ask questions and be sceptical about everything to do with science, faith and politics. For this some people will call me a Global Warming Skeptic, which I understand they believe is very bad. I’ve been called worse than a sceptic though.

You gather wrong.