Basically, the same reason a nine year-old denies having been given any homework to do – they don’t want to have to have to put down their toys and do something about it.
Okay, but there are tons of things the right claims to be against but won’t actually do anything to change, so why can’t they say “Global warming is happening, but those damned libruls won’t let us fix it!” the same way they do with everything?
Well, some people on the right are doing more or less that, for instance by resisting the Kyoto Protocol not on the grounds that there isn’t any global warming, but on the grounds that the Kyoto requirements aren’t severe enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that would actually stop or reverse the warming. Expect to see a lot more of this leapfrogging in future, as more of today’s climate change skeptics stop claiming that global warming is a myth and switch to complaining that all the solutions proposed by “those damned libruls” are either too ineffective, too costly, too economically disruptive, or all of the above, so the only practical thing to do is nothing.
For many climate change skeptics, though, I think the answer is simply that a self-congratulatory skepticism is easier and more fun than actually sweating through the ignorance-fighting process to learn something about the scientific issues involved. Just like lazy liberal thinkers automatically assuming that their opponents are motivated solely by corporate greed/patriarchal sexism/imperialist domination/whatever, there are lots of lazy conservative thinkers ready to automatically assume that the other side’s viewpoint can be easily explained away as mere opportunism/socialism/attacking the American way of life.
When you think you already understand the “real reasons” behind someone’s argument, that means that you don’t have to bother trying to understand the apparent reasons. You can smugly congratulate yourself on being too smart for your opponent, even without actually knowing what s/he’s talking about. And lazy thinkers on all points of the ideological spectrum are attracted to that kind of easy out.
It’s like Linus in the Peanuts comic strip faking his way through a test in school by guessing the probable sequence of “True” and “False” answers, and chortling “If you’re smart, you can pass a True-or-False test without being smart!” (The strategy ultimately didn’t work out very well for poor Linus, who turned out to have “falsed when he should have trued”.)
Because really the only thing modern conservatism stands for is More Money For Rich People. Now since you can’t get elected running on a platform of MMFRP, conservative politicians talk about a lot of other stuff, but when it comes to actually getting things done that’s pretty much their only focus.
The right-wing noise machine has two purposes:
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Convincing conservative voters that right-wing politicians are going to eventually do something about the other issues they care about. (Even though they’re really not.)
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Convincing conservative voters that policies that make More Money For Rich People are actually good for everyone. (Even though they’re really not.)
The conservative opposition to global warming is an example of #2.
I have come to a conclusion: The conservative movement is affixing dogmatic certainty to an increasing number of falsehoods. If one is strongly enough broken, it will shatter them.
Simple.
- Al Gore is a famous proponent of global warming.
- Al Gore is a “liberal”.
- Therefore, global warming must be a hoax.
Simple people. Simple minds.
Sadly, no. If that was the way it worked, Iraq would have been a death blow to the “conservative” movement.
The IPCC report seems to have flushed the Global-Warming Deniers out of the woodwork here at the Dope too. It’s been pretty annoying trying to deal with some of the more cretinous of them in the four (count 'em, four) threads going in GD at the moment. And **Clothalump ** looks smart compared to some of them, which is quite an achievement. BTW, props to Kimstu on the excellent response.
Here’s a link to one of my favorite Doonesbury strips, on Situational Science
Situational Science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts! Teach the controversy!
You might want to review these three ongoing GD threads, where every conceivable GW-skepticism argument has been advanced and, IMO, decisively shot down. But hey, weigh in, maybe you can prove them all.
Who exactly stands to make money off the anthropogenic-climate-change theory, and how?
This little poll of senators and congressmen (pdf) illustrates the extent of denial going on in republican circles:
Climate ‘skepticism’ amongst Republicans in congress is higher now than it was last year. Heck Republican denial is as high now, as their support for president Bush was last year; before things went undeniably to hell.
Maybe were headed for Global Neutral, 68F everywhere.
Still dead, but perfectly comfortable!
Well, maybe that will change just as abruptly. We may hope.
I think this is it. doing something might cost the oil companies and power companies - gasp - money, which might shave a million or two off the bonuses of the CEOs. so, they send their trained monkeys out to say “the jury is still out.” And right wingers fall for it.
If the problem doesn’t get mitigated, I wonder if there will be uprisings.
Who would rise up?
Oh please. Who sounds more ridiculous now? You or the right wingers? ZOMG TEH BIG OIL AND GAS CONSPIRACY!!!
Cry as much as you might, oil and gas is not going anywhere, anytime soon. What about alternative fuel sources? Unfortunately for the short sighted individuals, almost all of them still require hydrocarbons to gain access to economical fuel sources (the only exception being Nuclear Fusion or Fission).
About Kyoto:
CO2 has a resident lifetime of somewhere around 100 years in the atmosphere. That means, that the CO2 that we put up today, will still be around for another 100 years before it is finally removed from the atmosphere either due to rock weathering, precipitation in the oceans, or any of the other numerous methods which remove thousands and thousands of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.
At this point you might be asking what’s the point of my little diatribe here… Well… Even if we do reduce our emissions today, we are still fucked. Good game, nice try. It’s still over, if we have already exceeded the critical tipping point. There is no sense in going ahead and severely constraining the economy and creating more chaos now, to potentially reduce CO2 levels in 50 years ( muchless it appears that China will merely overtake our place in terms of overall emissions by that time anyways).
Without a doubt, our best hope to solve this problem is to allow technology and science to remedy it… Interestingly enough, a number of new technologies are being examined, as well as ways to accelerate the Earth’s natural processes for locking away CO2.
Oh, and please do not get me started on the accuracy of the modeling techniques these guys are using. I will just say, that anytime you extrapolate data you are already on shaky ground.
Can’t anyone see the obvious? Clearly we need to blow up a few nukes, and create some Nuclear Winter to counter the Global Warming trend CO2 emissions are causing! 
Then we’ll all be a comfortable 22 degrees (C). Sure, we’ll all be choking and gagging on the smog, and glowing at night – but we’ll be doing it at a comfortable temperature! :rolleyes:
Wrong. Global warming IS happening, and is almost certainly partially caused by human activity. Get the facts right and then you get to ridicule the hicks.
I just flashed on Slim Pickens, cowboy hat in hand, riding that H-bomb…
Slim: "Yeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaw!
[Cue music:] “We’ll meet again…Who knows where? Who knows when?”
Sweetums, I think this is a really important point; one borne out by the rest of this thread. It has finally (finally!) begun to dawn on the religious right that they can’t win arguments by bald assertion, but they refuse to cede authority on any topic and so have begun to co-opt the language of science without having any clue of what intellectual honesty or the scientific method actually means.
So we get “let’s teach both sides of the controversy” and “now there are TWO gaps!” and “this report here that went through our special vetting says GW is unsubstantiated” and “let’s put the management of our national security laboratories up for bid by private corporations, because goodness knows they value nothing more than science in the national interest.”
God love 'em.