Last week I described a substantial problem I had with climate science. This week, I want to focus on a complaint I have about the way in which climate science is presented – i.e., the style, not the substance.
It seems that conservatives in general think that the theory of global warming is some kind of hoax. This allows them to say that we don’t need a big, world-wide government solution (because there is no problem), and government should relax their environmental rules, so that the free market can operate unimpeded. So, what possible evidence will it take to change their minds?
For the optimistic liberal, I have some bad news for you: there is no such evidence. The idea that the free market doesn’t need any guidance from government is fundamental to their belief system, and it is very, very, difficult to get someone to admit that a fundamental belief that they have is wrong. The scientific community doesn’t seem to understand this. They just keep doing research, publishing articles, etc, hoping that some evidence that they produce will finally get the conservatives to admit that they were wrong about global warming.
This will never happen. So instead of wasting time trying to produce new evidence in hopes that some of that evidence will be convincing, we need to shift the environmental conversation to other, less controversial issues. For instance, our oceans are in big trouble, we are running out of room to store our trash safely, our aquifers are being depleted by our desire for meat, the world is running out of arable land, and, as we learned last week, nuclear energy needs greater security. These are just a few of the dozens of issues confronting our generation as the world’s population continues to rise with no end in sight.
What these problems have in common is that they are not really controversial. But since conservative believe that climate science is ‘junk science,’ and scientists and the media associate environmental concerns with global warming, the result is that conservatives are hostile to any environmental concerns. This is why the conversation about the environment has to start with concerns that are not controversial – such as dirty air, toxic pollution, etc. Even conservatives will have to admit that we need laws to prevent such things. These should be ‘common ground’ issues.
