Climate Deniers Versus Reality, Once Again

In a major speech yesterday, President Barack Obama laid out a plan for dealing with climate change. It's not a perfect plan--it gives too much away to "clean coal," which doesn't exist, and to fracking, which causes more problems than it solves--but it's a start. It's good to see the president finally delivering on the promises he made throughout his first and second election campaigns.

When I posted on Facebook praising the president's speech, I received the anticipated response from a climate denier. With roughly 250 friends, I was bound to have a denier or two among them.

We're rapidly reaching the point where the voices of climate deniers, for all their sound and fury, are being drowned out by common sense. Within a decade, I anticipate, climate deniers will be seen pretty much the way people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are seen: as odd, sad, strange people who, for whatever reasons, refuse to live in the reality the rest of us live in.

Because you know, it is strange.  A recent study demonstrates that over 97% of climatologists--those are the experts who study climate--agree with the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. That's a significant percentage of experts. The proportion of experts who disagree, the study concludes, is "vanishingly small."

When I pointed this out to my climate denier friend, he objected that science isn't based on opinion polls. And I agree. But expert consensus is not the same as an opinion poll.

Experts are those who know a subject best. Opinion polls involve random samples of people who probably know very little about the subject under debate.

We base many of our decisions on expert consensus. When more than 97 percent of cardiologists tell us we have a heart problem, most of us decide to get heart surgery. When more than 97 percent of plumbers tell us we have a plumbing problem, most of us decide to get the pipes fixed. When more than 97 percent of ex-girlfriends tell us we have a bad breath problem, most of us decide to invest in some Tic Tacs.

Opinion, as I tell my students, isn't the same as informed opinion. And informed opinion isn't the same as expert opinion.

We're all entitled to our opinions. But only if we're informed--or better yet, experts--are we entitled to have our opinions count.

35,000.org

As you know if you're following my Twitter feed @JoshuaDBellin (and if you're not, why the heck aren't you?), I was in DC yesterday for 350.org's ClimateForward Rally.  The stated purpose of the rally was to convince President Obama to put the kibosh on the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline, or at least the part of it that's planned to pass through U.S. territory (which, as I understand it, would put the kibosh on the whole deal).  The broader purpose of the rally was to draw together the disparate elements of the climate change movement--people fighting fracking, mountaintop coal removal, the petroleum lobby, and a host of other issues--and thus to forge a single, coherent force capable of halting the juggernaut that is our nation's and our world's fossil-fuel addiction.

Whether the rally achieved either purpose is anyone's guess.  President Obama didn't make an appearance (he was reportedly golfing with Tiger Woods), and whether he'll show the political strength and foresightedness to live up to his recent rhetoric on climate change remains to be seen.  (The fact that he held that rhetoric in abeyance during the election season, bringing it out only when victory was assured, suggests that he knows how unpopular it remains among a sizable portion of his constituents.)  Van Jones, one of the day's speakers, opined that no matter what else the president does during the next four years, all his achievements will come to naught if he fails to act decisively on the world's climate.  I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not sure the president will.

Regarding the climate movement writ large, 350.org creator Bill McKibben announced at the rally that February 17, 2013 was the day the movement finally came together and found its voice.  That may be.  By some estimates, there were as many as 50,000 people marching, chanting, dancing in the streets, and sign-holding (my favorite banner read "We Must Rise Faster Than the Seas"), though 35,000 is probably closer to the actual mark.  That's a lot of people, and we sure did look united.  On the bus ride home, though, I eavesdropped on a rather contentious debate about the merits of solar versus nuclear--a very old debate, and one that's likely to get us nowhere.  I've been in this fight for over a decade now, and every time there's a big rally, someone says our time has finally come--yet obviously, measured in terms of tangible changes in policy or popular conviction, it hasn't.  To expect 35,000 people--or 35 million, which is what the movement will need if it really wants to attract attention--to stand united on any issue seems like a lot to ask.

Still, for the moment, the day belongs to us.

Connecting the Dots

Global warming warrior Bill McKibben has a good piece out on his 350.org website about the relationships among all the bizarre weather events we've had in recent months (tornadoes, floods, droughts, blizzards, etc.). I think it's vitally important for us to realize, as McKibben's essay makes clear, that global warming is not only REAL, it's HERE--right now. I hear too many people saying, "oh, IF global warming happens, then we'll do something about it." These people have failed to do what McKibben does: to draw connections among the surface manifestations (that is, the weather) and trace them to their underlying cause (that is, a warmer climate). It's hard to think systemically; I always tell my students that when they prefer to look at isolated cases out of context. But it's what we need to do, right now, if we are ever to get a handle on this global-systemic problem.

Weird World

The world of environmentalism is a weird one, full of surprises, unexpected juxtapositions and reversals, random facts and realizations. Here are three recent examples:

1. I was driving home a few days ago in blinding rain when it occurred to me that what I was seeing (or, actually, not seeing) was the climate I'm going to be living with for the rest of my life. We all know how rainy it's been in the northeast and the south, how strange the weather patterns have been; we remark about it all the time. But it doesn't strike most of us that the reason the weather's so weird is that the climate has changed; we keep waiting for global warming to happen, not realizing it already has. Weather is the veil of climate: it hides the bigger picture we can't see. But at the same time, weather is the sign of climate: it reveals what we can't see. If the weather is weird--and it is--a weird climate lies just behind.

2. I recently learned of a company, Terracycle, that will turn those pesky juice pouches into kid-friendly products (pencil cases, etc.). If you sign up online, your school gets a few pennies per pouch donated. On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. But then you have to ask yourself: why are juice pouches manufactured in such a way that they're not recyclable by usual means? And is not the promise to recycle the things into yet another consumer product a way of convincing people to buy non-recyclable items, guilt-free? My advice to anyone who worries about juice pouches being thrown into landfills: don't buy the damn things in the first place.

3. A few weeks ago, I attended an event concerning the Marcellus Shale. One of the speakers delivered a passionate address against drilling; she waxed eloquent about the "poisons we're pumping into our chilren's bodies," and she presented herself as a staunch foe of corporate greed, indifference, and propaganda. After the event, I went to congratulate her on her speech. I found her outside, smoking a cigarette.