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Media Mayhem: The skeptics 'win' -- for now

The status quo gets what it wants when it sows confusion.

By Ken EdelsteinMon, Feb 15 2010 at 8:06 AM EST
 5

SNOWPOCALYPSE: Does the recent snowstorm in the Mid-Atlantic disprove global warming? Some skeptics believe so. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
 
So, this is how it happens. This is how we prove ourselves unable to deal with climate change.
 
Not with a bang — not with a clear rejection of the science or with some nihilistic decision to burn more coal and oil anyway. But instead with whimpers of confusion, apathy and inertia.
 
The debate has gotten tiresome. In every response to new lies and sophistry, we trot out the same boring answers. The truth hasn’t changed much, other than getting scarier and more certain. It may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not as nimble.
 
It’s impossible to combat with every made-up “scandal,” every supposed “smoking gun” of the great “hoax” of global warming. Every response to the lies and sophistry spawns more lies and sophistry. Until each imperfection — any flaw in any study, even the human frailties of one or two scientists — is spun into “proof” that climate change is a big hoax. Until we arrive where we are now.
 
The stories have built toward their intended end — more of a swamp than a climax. The anger of some breeds doubt among many. Together, they sap the political will to do something. In politics, the status quo wins with confusion.
 
I cannot quite grasp the anatomy of reaction elsewhere — in Europe, say, or China. But here I understand it. So long as the oil companies remain in the shadows, the scientists are King George and the deniers are, well, the Tea Party.
 
Myths are elegant. They smoke out reason. A virtual consensus among scientists is made to seem like arrogant gasping. Growing frustration among scientists over inaction in the face of mounting evidence is recast as self-righteous moralism.
 
The grasp of climate change denial is more difficult for me to fathom. One would think that most people knew better than to be won over by obvious manipulation, that most people would distinguish between the authority of science and the yammering of political operatives.
 
For a brief period in our history, an elite club helped us discern that difference. They held the keys to information. They ensured, for the most part, that what was communicated was actual true.
 
Now, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite to Glenn Beck. From Arthur Sulzberger to Matt Drudge. From listening to the teacher’s pet give a presentation in the classroom, to hurling insults during recess. What could be more fun! The bully wins. Mockery replaces facts.
 
A photo of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth sitting in the D.C. snow on cable’s most popular news network — hardy-har-har — is more than enough to muffle the boring detail that heavier snows in temperate regions are precisely what climate models predicted.
 

 
Some say the solution to the climate communication challenge is to emphasize the grand economic challenge that lies ahead. Clean energy means green jobs, prosperity and a safer future.
 
There is much wisdom in that approach. Surely, the environmentalists and the media (me, included) spend more energy than we should arguing with the skeptics than describing a vision of economic and ecological revival.
 
Such talk will go only so far, however. The sad fact is that as long as the fossil fuel industries are able to foist onto everyone the cost of what they’re doing to the climate, they’ll work as hard as ever to hang onto their markets. And when they smell that the threat of placing a price on their pollution is declining, they will move aggressively to snuff competing energy industries in their cribs.
 
“Clean energy” then morphs into “clean coal” and offshore drilling. And pretty soon we’re back to where we started: Subsidizing carbon instead of placing a price on it.
 
For months, I didn’t get why the deniers were starting to boast that they’d “won” the argument over climate change. Won? How does one win a debate with nature?
 
But, for now at least, they have won. Climate change is all around us; yet it’s nearly impossible to say what it has done. Refugees in Alaska? Maybe. Malaria in Florida? Maybe. A hurricane in New Orleans? Perhaps. A blizzard in Washington? Hardy-har-har.
 
The crisis is like the primer on a paint job. It’s there, but for the most part invisible. By the time the rot has set in, "I told you so" just sounds obnoxious.
 
By then, the debate will have moved on to engineering the atmosphere, to funding seawalls, to keeping out endless streams of refugees from hard-hit nations. Worst of all, we still may be paralyzed from acting while a cascade of ever-changing conditions keep us off-balance. Our society could become as unstable as we have made nature.
 
If you believe the climate science, this ultimately is what you fear. If you are in full denial, you think I am a messianic fool for predicting Armageddon. If you sit in middle and think nothing of it, I do not understand you.
 
 
 
Journalist Ken Edelstein writes the Media Mayhem column for the Mother Nature Network. From various coffee shops in Atlanta, he publishes an environmental news site at MyGreenATL.com.
 
MNN homepage photo: Imagebear/iStockphoto
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Related Topics: Global Warming, Media Mayhem, Skepticism

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anonymous
Guest 02/13/2010 10:15 AM

The flaws in the science aren't just a couple of minor technical points, but completely unsound arguments based on assumptions that just don't stand up. The alarmists have done this themselves, from the hockey stick to the ridiculous modeling that has been demonstrated to be totally bogus. The left has jumped all over this supposed science and it clouds the real debate, which is far more complex. They have tried to halt dissenting opinions, defunded legitimate science that refutes their.... More

anonymous
LL 02/12/2010 20:24 PM

Hello from Portugal...
When some Scientist tells me that there was a temperature growth of 1ºC in last century i know he/she is lying. There is no way to know anything with that precision, what was the Earth temperature(and that concept have much more problems). What data we have from Soviet Union at time of Gulags, Africa at start of XX century, Asia and whole China.
Today there are still many places: just look at oceans 70% of earth surface, without much of thermometers. Now think.... More

anonymous
Isonomia 02/12/2010 16:14 PM

The real "tipping point" for me in the emails was the one where mann says: "I'll put that on realclimate.com". Up to that point I'd just thought RealClimate.com was a bunch of fanatic environmentalists - who whilst clearly putting a slant on everything - that's what freedom of speech is about. But when I realised, that this fanatic site was being run by the scientists at the heart of the climategate emails, I suddenly realised why the fanatics were so well informed of the "science", it was.... More

anonymous
Isonomia 02/12/2010 16:13 PM

The real "tipping point" for me in the emails was the one where mann says: "I'll put that on realclimate.com". Up to that point I'd just thought RealClimate.com was a bunch of fanatic environmentalists - who whilst clearly putting a slant on everything - that's what freedom of speech is about. But when I realised, that this fanatic site was being run by the scientists at the heart of the climategate emails, I suddenly realised why the fanatics were so well informed of the "science", it was.... More

anonymous
CommieBlaster 02/12/2010 15:57 PM

FLASH!!

This Brand New Video Blows a Huge Gaping Hole in Obama's Cap and Tax Scheme and his Claims of Global Warming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVm5-6H_sH4

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