Ellen Goodman, in her Boston Globe column on Friday equated global warming denial to Holocaust denial: "...global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers..."
On any number of bases (offensiveness, nonsensicality, bad writing, gross lapses in reason) that statement--and the rest of the column--would be enough for me to cancel my subscription (if I hadn't already done so ten years ago) or to write a letter to the editor (if I didn't think they'd pitch it in the trash, laughing as they did so).
If we're going to combat this fantasy ideology however (global warming religion) it will help to deconstruct its larger frame and to avoid accusations of taking a quote out of context. So here goes, paragraph by paragraph (I've skipped the fluffy intro). Goodman writes:
By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.
Clever. Goodman speaks a narrow truth while creating a false impression. The IPCC does indeed raise the level of alarm. So does yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre. What it
doesn't do is
ensure that science has stayed separate from politics. Yes, the IPCC summary report uses the word 'unequivocal'--but
inappropriately so.
Dictionary.com defines unequivocal as:
"having only one possible meaning or interpretation... absolute; unqualified; not subject to conditions or exceptions... admitting of no doubt" Yet there are plenty of other possible meanings and interpretations that have not been and cannot be 'unequivocally' ruled out (measurement uncertainties and long-term sun cycles being merely two of them). And qualifications, conditions, exceptions and doubts
are present if only because numerous reputable scientists have raised them. The only way to get to 'unequivocal' is to declare that a) they are not numerous, b) they are not reputable and/or c) that they are not scientists. In Goodman's piece, as well as folks like
Heidi Cullen, we see a campaign to push on all three fronts. It is by its very nature a personal campaign: attacking the messengers rather than the arguments... which is a political, not a scientific approach (and an ugly one at that).
Goodman also doesn't reflect on what other things in history--both scientific and not--have been seen as 90% certain and not come to pass. In my field (scenario planning), 90% is the kind of figure that groups tend to bandy about when what they really mean is "we
think the number is substantially more than 50%". It is in the nature of odds-making that putting a percentage on something requires either a) an open-ended group with the ability to put skin in the game based on their level of personal confidence or b) a track record of having made predictions of similar scope and magnitude and (in this case) having been correct nine times out of ten. Preferably both. Neither is present in this case. On to the meaty part. Goodman writes:
I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. [emphasis added]
Never mind that she or her editors could have cut word count by 30% and lost absolutely nothing. Those who live in glass houses... ;-)
Goodman's sleight of hand here is equally clever. She takes the one plank
out of ten in the global warming debate for which there is the most support and leverages that into perplexity about how the world hasn't gotten on board with the other nine--most of which are not scientific.
The really weird/nonsensical part (to say nothing of the really offensive part--which I'll get to in a moment) is to lump together denial of past, present and future. It's the same error the left made (deliberate or not--doesn't matter) in claiming that Bush "lied" when what he really did was to make a reasonably informed judgment based on incomplete knowledge. He admitted as much in making his claims--which is more than the left can say about its hysterical and 'unequivocal' claims about future global warming trends, consequences and policy prescriptions. Goodman is also guilty of sloppy thinking by making the past/present/future distinction--then dropping in the rest of her analysis.
An example may help here. Which of the following statements is closest to 'unequivocal'?:
- From February 6-8, 1978, Boston received over three feet of snow.
- As of this writing is not snowing in Boston.
- The Boston area will receive at least six inches of snow tomorrow.
- Next year, the Boston area will receive at least two feet of snow in February.
- Between 2075 and 2085, Boston area snow accumulations will average two feet.
I've widened the future statements just to be fair but even so, they are not and never can be on par with past and present statements of
fact. And therein I detect an important, more generalized kernel of liberal psychosis, applicable well beyond global warming:
the past is malleable; it is wholly dependent upon whatever larger societal narrative you happen to pick as a platform for interpreting it. The weather is unusually cold: global warming. The weather is unusually warm: global warming. Wet: global warming. Dry: global warming. Windy: global warming. Volatile: global warming. Unusually
normal for several weeks
but just you wait!: global warming. When the answer is always the same whatever may come, the diagnosis says more about the world view of the diagnoser than about the evidence.
In Goodman's world, there are
no truths that can or ought to be self-evident to everyone. Relativism. There is no evidence that can penetrate
pure faith. (Which is
not to say that religion dispenses with evidence altogether.
It doesn't; but that's another post.)
There is only one's perspective. The core assumption behind global warming is the same as that behind fascism, socialism and a pernicious breed of referenceless multiculturalism (that last bit is almost redundant). Whoever manages to grab hold of the reins of the social narrative, goes the thinking, can deny the empirically observable superiority of one set of values over another. They can make two plus two equal five as Goebbels once said about Hitler. And finally, they're bent on reversing the polarity and projecting their psychoses onto their opponents, insisting that it is the reality-grounded who guilty of relativism instead.
But I digress. Others have covered the great big stinking turd in the middle of Goodman's piece and one of the better ones is
Dennis Prager, who writes of the Ellen Goodman editorial:
...it helps us to understand better one of the defining mottos of contemporary liberalism: "Question authority." In reality, this admonition applies to questioning the moral authority of Judeo-Christian religions or of any secular conservative authority, but not of any other authority. UN and other experts tell us that there is global warming; such authority is not to be questioned... the equation of global warming denial to Holocaust denial [also] trivializes Holocaust denial. If questioning global warming is on "a par" with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can questioning the Holocaust really be?
Exactly. The problem with Goodman's argument is not so much that she doesn't trust the skeptics or the administration (hey, we're a free society) but that she trusts the UN
utterly. Short take for new readers: at what point in history has
averaging the opinions of world leaders ever led to truth or justice?
Prager's second point is devastating and very much in line with what I was
blogging last night:
the left finds itself unable to see the pure evil in a man like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because to criticize him would be to criticize their own most fervently held positions, among them being Bush-loathing, expressed (disingenuous) pacifism, and a lack of confidence in American values and culture and their cumulative impact on the world versus any of the available alternatives.
In the intro to her piece, Goodman spent several paragraphs talking about how she felt guilty about her own energy impact but was trying to do her part by changing lightbulbs. As I read it I couldn't help thinking: this is a confession of 'sin'; this is an appeal to her own good works, this is a roundabout plea for forgiveness. What's perverse about it, of course is that her 'sin' in this case is self-constructed, her good works futilely misplaced and her plea not to God but to the opinion of her audience. I don't know what Ms. Goodman's religious beliefs are and don't really care. What's relevant here is that the structure of her story revolves around apparent feelings of personal guilt, inadequacy and shame in a wholly secular context. Goodman continues:
But light bulbs aside -- I now have three and counting -- I don't expect that this report will set off some vast political uprising. The sorry fact is that the rising world thermometer hasn't translated into political climate change in America.
Here we get at Goodman's leap from current/past data to future social policy. She is not alone in
skipping the intermediate steps. What's interesting about this paragraph--and maybe I'm reading too much in here, but I sense it--is that the end (change in administration, change in political orientation) is so dear to her that the means are almost unimportant. It is assumed that if global warming hysteria gets us to political change then it's a worthwhile horse to ride and who cares if it still has legs ten years down the road when Hillary is running for her third term and Bill is Secretary General of the UN. She seems confused by the following though:
The folks at the Pew Research Center clocking public attitudes show that global warming remains 20th on the annual list of 23 policy priorities. Below terrorism, of course, but also below tax cuts, crime, morality, and illegal immigration.
My first thought: relief. I had not seen the Pew numbers. Yet there are two possible reactions to such numbers and Goodman takes the one I could have predicted by her political persuasion:
One reason is that while poles are melting and polar bears are swimming between ice floes, American politics has remained polarized. There are astonishing gaps between Republican science and Democratic science. Try these numbers: Only 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it.
Instead of assuming that adult Americans are reasonably intelligent and free to determine their own collective future through democratic government, she takes the liberal-elitist approach (the
rest of the piece makes this more plain). I.e.,
those redneck, red-state, red-faced, red-baiting yahoos need to be educated and I'm the one to do it!It's a familiar and thoroughly offensive line not only because it flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence (
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...) but also because it leads inevitably to authoritarianism, either petty or grand--something we're seeing amply demonstrated as the EU extends its power over the details of Europeans' lives.
In observing the Republican/Democratic split over global warming, Goodman jumps to the conclusion that some nefarious, unnamed forces conspiring to prevent conservatives from seeing the truth about the future. What she should have asked instead is: If this is
purely about science then why is there any political divide whatsoever? The answer of course is that on questions where the scientific evidence is truly settled, there is none.
Despite the science being less than a century old, I know of no political division say, around what happens when two hydrogen atoms are fused under intense pressure and heat or for that matter when sperm and egg come together in a woman's body. It's how the consequences of such things are dealt with where a process of moral discernment and political dialogue needs to take over. Until such time as a better one presents itself, I'm sticking with the one
laid out by the Founding Fathers, based on, and in concert with the one
laid out by the Founding Father.
"The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists... are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic." - Newsweek, April 28, 1975 (also the source for the 'inconvenient' chart we don't see anymore, at right, below)
If you don't have a sense of God's hand in history and of there being nothing new under the sun, this will give them to you. Short takes: we've been fighting Islamic terrorism since August, 1776; but for the Civil War, Israel might have been formed 85 years earlier than it was; George Bush was active in these matters long before the current one was born; the copy of the Koran (from Thomas Jefferson's library) on which Keith Ellison swore his oath of office earlier this year contains an introduction from the translator stating that his purpose is to enable readers to better understand and fight the Islamic jihadist enemy. 
). He is using them to play us like a fine stringed instrument.
