There are multiple different approaches used by The Right to crush attempts to divert money from their pockets to ensuring that their pockets won’t catch on fire. (Which they don’t worry about because they’re quite accustomed to their pants being on fire.)
[ul]
[li]Your various proposals are all too expensive and unworkable, so let’s do nothing.[/li][li]You can’t specify precisely how much your proposals would help, so I’ll claim they won’t help at all, so we do nothing.[/li][li]I dispute your science that says that humans are at fault to any significant degree - so let’s do nothing.[/li][li]I dispute your science that says that humans are at fault to any degree at all, because I want to do nothing.[/li][li]In fact you know what? It’s all a lie! Thermometers are fiction. See also: everything else liberals say is a lie. Unified worldview, yo. (Let’s do nothing.)[/ul][/li]
In all cases the decision making process is to start with what you want to happen, and rearrange the facts as necessary to reach your desired outcome. Whether the goal is reduced government influence or increased money for the polluters, its all about the end justifies the lies.
The supposed evidence of fundamental and innate differences in cognition between self-identified conservatives and liberals beyond their (presumably fungible) world view is, like virtually all social psychology, anecdotal at best, like [this Scientific American article on the topic. The reality is that conservatives tend to come from a socially conservative background environment, and most liberals either come from a more progressive upbringing or have turned to liberal viewpoints as a rejection of conservative strictures, and in either case tend to follow the tribal instinct to surround themselves with like-minded people in work, post-secondary education, and leisure. Attaching any kind of broadly inherent differences in fundamental cognition beyond those involved in group socialization is an exercise in post hoc pseudoscience. This is not to say that people on different ends of the political spectrum don’t display different tendancies and behaviors in aggregate, but that may as well stem from the influences of their self-selected social grouping rather than some kind of genetic or congenital predisposition.
The reason that self-identified conservatives tend to demonstrated excessive skepticism or outright reject the science of global climate change is purely a result of social manipulation, primarily by the Koch-funded [URL=American Enterprise Institute - SourceWatch]American Enterprise Institute](Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives | Scientific American). Self-identified moderates and liberals have a wider spread of beliefs that tend toward acceptance of what the vast majority of climatologists claim simply because they don’t have a singular voice impressing upon them to repeat the same exact message over and over by dint of getting their newsfeed from something other than Sinclair Media Group and Fox News. It is also their weakness; by not having a strong, essentially authoritarian message, they are less likely to hold and express a firm belief without personal evidence, and in the case of a complex phenomenon like climate, it is virtually impossible for a layperson to acquire enough understanding of the models and methods to come to an independent conclusion.
Aside from actual apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists who actually welcome environmental harm as bringing on the biblical “End of Days”, conservatives are not particularly reluctant to adopt innovation as it advantages them (or that they are persuaded by the same voices as noted above, as in petroleum fracking and tar sand extraction), and the notion that conservatives reject “Big Government” is given lie by the broad support for the single most expensive government department and entitlement program, the Department of Defense. The reality is simply that they are a coherent belief group which is easy to sell a pro-business, anti-regulatory platform to on the basis that it is somehow tied to a socially conservative ideology. In fact, rejection of the reality of climate change is, in the long view, counter to the conservative desire to maintain a continuity of the social fabric insofar as the changes that will accompany climate change will have manifest effects on the social fabric of the United States and the world at large. The comparatively modest costs to reduce anthropological carbon emissions, while disruptive to existing energy and transportation industries which naturally oppose them, are nothing compared to the disruption of food systems, the impact of rising sea level on cities and waterways, and the damage and disruption caused by more aggressive weather events.
Certain similarities to an ongoing fear-mongering hoax that requires a steady diet of cash are apparent:
Assuming the worst will happen
Saying “ermagerd, the world is going to end!” unless we throw all kinds of money at the problem
No matter how much money we spend on the problem we always need to spend more
That money could be used for better things because the consequences aren’t realistic
A lot of people have jobs related to the fear-mongering situation and if we don’t keep up the charade they’ll have to go look for real jobs
I am describing the military-industrial complex of course. Conservatives are heavily invested in promoting the fiction that the world is one American tank or plane or gun order away from total chaos. But they know this is bullshit. Since they can serve it up with a straight face they assume climate change is the exact same thing, a nefarious plot to get the government spending money on useless fears.
I grew up in a very conservative church (the Churches of Christ) – I never really bought into the fundamentalist mindset, myself, though – and I can attest to the fact that a lot of these folks really don’t think that global warming is ever going to be a problem. They don’t trust scientists; hell, they prefer their so-called “holy book” over sciency facts, and reject evolution and the modern world in general.
I actually had one guy tell me a few years ago that worrying about global warming (or any type of environmental issue, for that matter) was indicative of “lack of faith” in God. Because God told man to go forth, multiply, and conquer, and we better damm well do that, come hell or high water. Any so-called problems will be overcome either through sheer human inventiveness, or rendered moot by the second comin’ of Christ hisself!
The evidence about climate change is in. If you want to argue against climate change, you need to produce a larger amount of evidence against it than has already been produced in support of it. Arguing that the evidence that exists shouldn’t be believed is a faith-based argument not a science-based one.
Tell them polluting is a sin against God’s creation and climate change is a sign of God’s impending wrath if we don’t turn away from the sin of burning God’s creation on the altar of Mammon.
The majority of actual conservatives who have seen and understood the science accept the idea of climate change. Most people who are not conservatives and accept it have no real idea of the really hard, complex science behind, they just follow suit.
What most science-based conservatives think about CC/GW is
The earth is almost certainly getting warmer
CO2 is definitely one of the causes.
We do not know enough to ascertain precisely how much CO2 is contributing to the temperature increase. We had a very similar increase in the 30s and there was not a lost of “extra” CO2
The unnecessarily catastrophic form of presentation that almost always negate human ingenuity like the massive increase of natural gas use or other measures, is unscientific.
The problems with land stations and the discrepancies with the (much more recent) satellite-record cannot by handwaved away.
Heavy-handed proposals that do almost nothing (less than 0.1° in a century) and cost a lot are just feel-good measures.
Other more present issues like clean water, sewers, vaccines, and micronutrient are much cheaper and super-effective, and are being forgotten.
The almost fundamentalist way in which any doubt or criticism is seen as outright denial of everything.
Also, the misguided “sin” or “1%” or “stoopid” as the reason really make you dislike whoever is proposing something
Because the proposed solution to global warming- a worldwide regimen of imposing limits on carbon emission, whatever the economic consequences- is a socialist’s dream come true. The right even coined the term “ecosocialism” to encapsulate this. The right basically sees claims of global warming as an excuse by leftists to call for the dismantlement of capitalism, and the elevation of a leftist technocracy empowered to dictate how people live on the grounds that just existing impacts everyone. In other words, the end of individualism.
You’ve got it backwards. Libertarianism is a tool that the GOP uses to promote anti-climate-change thinking. Note that libertarianism isn’t used in any kind of consistent way among Republicans; somehow it only gets trotted out for things like environmental regulations, and is carefully placed back in its box for things like religious freedom and military spending. It’s no great mystery why this is.
Butler Bass asserted that “of all the possible theological dog-whistles to his evangelical base,” the Jerusalem declaration “is the biggest. Trump is reminding them that he is carrying out God’s will to these Last Days. They’ve been waiting for this, praying for this,” she wrote. “They want war in the Middle East. The Battle of Armageddon, at which time Jesus Christ will return to the Earth and vanquish all God’s enemies. For certain evangelicals, this is the climax of history. And Trump is taking them there. To the promised judgment, to their sure victory. The righteous will be ushered to heaven; the reprobate will be banished to hellfire.”
This line of fabricated skepticism based on the rationale that “Scientists were wrong previously about global warming/cooling so why should we trust them now?” is contested by several notable facts:
[ul]
[li]the past record of reliable temperatures has been restricted to a geographically limited subset of measurements with a lot of interfence on global averages, particularly before the 1960s, and very little of mid-ocean surface and subsurface temperatures,[/li][li]the more recent record (the last three decades) has included reliable daily global coverage via satellite and remote instrument measurements giving a high degree of precision in recent trends, and[/li][li]Previous trend evaluations and predictions were based upon very crude, highly linearized models due to computational limitations, while modern atmospheric global circulation models run on modern superclusters are capable of vastly more refined and complex simulations which allow us to compared predictions to actual measurements with a quantified degree of confidence.[/li][/ul]
That climatologists have disagreement about the extent of future trends (although they all agree that radical anthropogenic climate change is occurring) is not a reflection that the science is ‘wrong’, but that we are observing an ongoing event that is unprecedented in the last 66 millions years. In other words, we have no real basis for predicting how this will affect the climate based upon the fossil record since mammals and many other modern flora and fauna developed and flourished. Our fossil record before that period is pretty sparse and we can only make very crude inferences about what the climate was like, and only over periods of hundreds of thousands of years at best given uncertainties in geological measurements that far back.
There are not enough rolleyes on the Internet for this notion. First of all, the “economic consequences” of doing nothing are going to be dramatically worse than the most rigorous of controls. Just the need alone to either protect or migrate wealthy coastal cities against sea level rise is going to be vastly more than the costs of transitioning to a lower net anthropogenic carbon output economy. Second, unregulated capitalism is doing a pretty good job of killing itself by creating vast sums of fictitious money from market speculation and then crashing when something pops the bubble, and while experiments in authoritarian Marxism have not gone well for anyone involved, the market socialism/regulated capitalism with broad social services model has been serving pretty well in much of Western Europe since WWII, and has even worked in France despite their innate tendency to fuck themselves politically and militarily on a regular basis.
A global “leftist technocracy empowered to dictate how people live,” makes for nice fearmongering is but even more improbable than the global Western democracy the United States has been trying to imposed on the Middle East for the last twenty-five years. The idea that some leftist cabal is going to force nations to forgoe their national sovereignty in service to “worldwide regimen of imposing limits on carbon emission” is risible given the inability of even a small group of nations to concur on mutually beneficial trade agreements for more than a few years at a time, and the idea that the Paris Accords or other voluntary agreements will lead to the New World Order run by the Trilaterl Commission or the Bilderbergers or whomever is basically a rewarming of the model of the British Empire (RIP) that nobody in developing nations is interested in returning to in the post-colonial period.
Conservatives don’t “believe” in climate change because a small number of manipulative pundits have convinced them that the issue is a “liberal hoax”, and that opposition to it is a core value of being a conservative, so if they don’t agree they cannot be part of the club. That case has been made the same way that the tobacco industry campaigned for decades against the medical hazards of smoking, and by many of the same people organizing the opposition.
That’s probably the most accurate reason posted so far. There’s probably a certain fear of the unknown involved as well- imagining a low to no fossil fuel usage world is probably extremely hard for them to wrap their head around. Since they are more or less science and technology ignorant, they probably assume it takes the place of large declines in standards of living, etc…
The other thing to keep in mind is that the mindset is also very resistant to ideas that they perceive as being some combination of outward control and/or liberal ideas. The worst thing that happened w.r.t. climate change is that Al Gore brought mainstream attention to it. That illegitimized it in the minds of millions of people, because they now assume it’s part of the left’s political agenda that’s being pushed upon them, instead of a fundamentally apolitical geophysical process.
I know a lot of ‘book smart’ people who are republicans. I’m talking college degrees, careers in STEM fields, the whole deal. I disagree that any part of accepting republican ideals relies on idiocy - though of course being an idiot doesn’t make it any harder to accept it either.
When I talk to these smart republicans about anything regarding irrational republican policies, I literally watch their brains switch gears - from thinking to repeating. They’ve been told what to think and their brains accept it - what intelligence they bring to bear on the situation is exclusively devoted to rationalizing and defending the positions they’ve been fed. Cognitive dissonance prompts them to anger very quickly when their positions are challenged, because only via the lubrication of anger can they spout the lousy defenses they’ve been taught without stopping to question their own words.
Where I’m going with this is you don’t have to be dumb to be a republican, but you do have to accept a whole lot of ideology unthinkingly. (Democrats have to accept ideology too but there not a consistent pressure to unthink, so they end up disagreeing about the details of things and end up all over the place.) Climate change denial is a prime example of a thing that has to be accepted unthinkingly - it’s plainly obvious that something is up, and the only reason the average republican has to deny that weather’s different than it was twenty years ago is because they’ve been told what to say. This goes for the uneducated as well as the educated - we’ve reached the point where the effects aren’t subtle anymore.
An academic study some years ago of why conservatives are so pigheaded about this concluded that Al Gore was indeed part of what stimulated stronger opposition among conservatives. Gore was hated by the right to begin with, and the fact that he was wealthy and happened to live in a large house which naturally consumed a lot of energy, and traveled a lot, was enough to drive conservatives into frothing fits of fake outrage.
But make no mistake – the opposition was there long before Gore started his crusade. The fake astroturf campaigns run by front groups for the oil and coal lobby and major industrialists like the Koch brothers had been underway for years. Exxon Mobil was particularly notorious and unethical back in the days when Lee Raymond and his 17 chins ran the place, and finally became somewhat more tempered and accepting of reality when Rex Tillerson took over. Those disinformation campaigns meshed nicely with conservatives’ dislike of government and regulation, and the perception that emissions reduction was going to be costly and harmful to the economy.
(snipped)
Since I didn’t say nor imply “the hottest” "I don’t know what you’re talking about.
What I said was that the increase of temperature in the early thirties ( and even from 1910 to 45) is almost identical to the one between 1975-2010).
Your list is interesting because it says that we have better data now and that past one was unreliable. How can we base our plans from unreliable data?
I never said the science was wrong.
“Unprecedent” is hard to asses. You cannot expect a 150-year resolution in a 50 million-year-ago samples.
It is false that “all agree that radical anthropogenic climate change is occurring”
Why would we need to move a city? Sea level has risen constantly for centuries and we coped. People adapt, you know.
The cost of Kyoto or Paris are ridiculous because their effects are negligible. Clean water is a today problem, vaccines is today. Saving people today is more important than saving them in 50 years.
I didn’t mention capitalism nor communism, so I don’t know why you talk about them,
My WAG is that most conservatives aren’t so much opposed to the idea of reducing carbon in the atmosphere as it is that it’s a cause thoroughly associated with liberals and so they ad-hominem it because of that.