Note: The script below is from the author at Manpollo.org
and other
site (on this second site, the author asks for help translating
the topics to Spanish for DVDs, etc.) The script doesn't correspond
100% to the video and still needs checking over.
This video is called “Why There Is Still Debate” and is part
of the expansion pack providing further detail to the arguments
contained in the video How It All Ends.
This video will explore the question of why there is still popular
debate on the topic of global climate change, in spite of overwhelming
agreement in the scientific realm.
I’ve sometimes heard the objection: “But I’ve heard the opposite
of all that you say about climate change, so doesn’t that prove
it’s still being debated?” Sure. I guess by definition if you
see differing opinions, then it’s still being debated. In the
media. In the popular press. In the blogosphere. But not in the
scientific realm.
As you may have seen in the video “Risk Management,” the unprecedented
statements from AAAS and NAS—probably the two most well-respected
scientific organizations on the planet—make it clear that the
best that science has to offer tells us that: 1) the globe is
warming, 2) we’re the ones doing it, 3) it’s going to be bad,
and 4) we’d better do something about it quick.
If these statements as well as the others examined in that video
make for such a slam dunk, then why do we (in the US, at least)
still hear so much debate?
I think there are probably a lot of reasons for that.
First off, I found some surveys that indicate it’s the lack of
absolute certainty that’s holding most people back. If that’s
the case for you, I think that if you watch the “Nature of Science”
video, you’ll see that waiting for certainty from science is a
losing proposition, and if you watch the “Risk Management” video,
you’ll see that we can still make good decisions without knowing
for certain what’s going on with climate change.
This hesitation on the public’s part allows organizations and
companies which stand to be inconvenienced or economically harmed—in
the short run—to delay action by playing up the uncertainty of
the science. The basic way it works is this: every statement in
science is accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement of uncertainty.
Good scientists will be very explicit about the uncertainty. Vested
interests—like trade organizations, think tanks, some governments,
and individual companies—then emphasize this uncertainty. The
media has a couple of reasons to include and amplify this uncertainty.
The first is, they know that controversy sells. And the second
is, they don’t want to be accused of bias, so they go out of their
way to present “the other side.” Unfortunately, this creates the
illusion that the two sides actually carry equal weight in the
scientific community, which you’ve seen, they don’t.
The Union of Concerned Scientists—which is an advocacy organization,
but is rigorous enough that they are often consulted by the government—observed
that “public opinion can be easily manipulated because science
is complex, people tend to not notice where their information
comes from, and because the effects of global warming are just
beginning to become visible.”
This is starting to change. Exxon—sort of the poster child for
this dynamic of propagating public doubt about climate change—just
recently made some stunning public shifts. In a January 2007 Wall
Street Journal article, when Exxon’s vice president for public
affairs Kenneth Cohen was speaking about greenhouse gas emissions
and their effect on global temperatures, he was quoted as saying:
“society knows enough now—that the risk is serious and action
should be taken.” And in 2006, Exxon, after funding them for years,
stopped funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think
tank that ran ads just last year saying that carbon dioxide is
helpful, rather than a problem.
So there is indeed deliberate manipulation of public perception
in order to serve the interests of stakeholders. On some level,
I suppose you can’t fault them. After all, they are just playing
the game we’ve got, since the whole purpose of a publicly-traded
corporation is to “increase value for shareholders,” not “do the
greatest good for the greatest number.”
Although some of them, you can fault. It’s worth including here
a story that I also share in the video “No Holds Barred,” just
in case you don’t manage to slog through that one, because it’s
significant, and really helped galvanize me to action.
On either side of this bitter debate, you hear accusations that
the other side is in somebody’s pocket. From the skeptics you’ll
hear “It’s just a liberal plot to get control of our lives,” and
it’s not uncommon for a warmer to imply that anyone who argues
hard for the skeptical side must be a corporate shill. I figured
that the idea of vested interests hiring people to surf the net
and argue for the skeptical side wasn’t too outlandish, but I
also thought it sounded a little too sinister to probably be true.
Well, a couple months ago, I was reading a back-and-forth discussion
about Grist.com’s “How to Talk to A Climate Skeptic,” [Google
the exact phrase “We’re all seekers for truth here” WITH THE QUOTE
MARKS] and there was one guy really taking the lead for the skeptical
view, talking quite reasonably how there’s a lot to be said for
both sides, and the science on the issue is divided, which is
why people are divided, etc. He was saying stuff like “The truth
is that reasonable people of good will can look at the same evidence
and come to opposite conclusions, including scientists. This is
what makes the climate change debate so interesting. It is one
of the greatest scientific debates in history.” Seemed like a
very reasonable, nice guy who just happened to hold a different
opinion than mine.
Imagine my surprise and horror when someone outed this guy as
a consultant hired by the electric power industry! And as soon
as that was revealed, the guy immediately disappeared, though
he had been countering most every point up to then! It was really
creepy! Especially when I looked back on the stuff that he had
written that I had excused before as being simply uninformed,
but really, was deliberately manipulative, and downright intellectually
dishonest. “This is what makes the climate debate so interesting.
. .” It’s not ‘interesting’ you jerk—it’s potentially life or
death for real people if the worst case scenarios actually come
to pass! We’re not sure it’ll happen, but that’s what the rest
of us are sincerely trying to avoid. And you find it an ‘interesting’
discussion. It’s hard to convey how angry that makes me, to see
someone so careless about their impact on other people’s lives.
I felt so violated! I share this with you here because you should
know that there are indeed selfish, dishonest people out there
who will try to manipulate you for their own benefit, regardless
of any harm to you. Given that I actually ran across a guy doing
this leads me to conclude that it’s not that outlandish to assign
a good amount of the remaining public debate about the issue to
a campaign by vested interests to take the inherent uncertainty
of all science and cloud the public’s perception of this issue.
That said, being human, we have a number of psychological factors
which make us quite susceptible to that kind of manipulation [of
“the inherent uncertainty of all science and cloud[ing] the public’s
perception of this issue”].
One is simply fear of change. If what AAAS and NAS say is true,
then it sure sounds like we may be in for some really big lifestyle
changes. So it’s natural to just tune it out. If global climate
change is really as much of a big, ugly beast as science says
it might be, that really threatens the status quo, which people
assume would throw millions of people’s lives into turmoil and
change. So they resist the conclusion because they’re afraid of
it, not because they understand it.
I know personally, when I talk to people about climate change,
I’m always very anxious of being criticized and dismissed for
“using scare tactics,” which for some reason is a fatal criticism—once
someone slaps that label on you, your credibility is destroyed
and no one will listen to you unless they already believe what
you have to say.
But can’t you imagine a possible situation in which perhaps you
aren’t scared enough for your own good? Couldn’t “scare tactics”
be a positive thing then? I read a totally engrossing newpaper
column a year or so ago titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global
Warming,” by Daniel Gilbert. He’s a psychologist, and his basic
point was that the human brain is conditioned to respond to threats
that are immediate, quick, visible, and personal. I call it the
Saber-Tooth Tiger Reflex. I’m not sure if I just made that up.
”. . . [W]e accept gradual changes that we would reject if they
happened abruptly,” he wrote. “If climate change had been visited
on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming
would be this nation’s top priority. . . . When terrorists attack,
we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors
would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because
it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep
in a burning bed. It remains to be seen if we can learn to rise
to new occasions.”
And there’s the hitch. Our way of dealing with problems—being
reactive to them—has worked out okay for us as a species so far.
When we’ve really blown it somewhere, we could just move on to
new ground. But now, with six billion people and techonology that
changes the whole bloody planet, there’s nowhere to run to. Nowhere
to hide.
Which creates another psychological stumbling block. If a situation
is too big to comprehend, or too threatening, then our screen
just goes blank. Who among us has not stuck our head in the sand,
and ignored a terribly pressing problem, subconsciously hoping
it will just go away, and dreading the time of reckoning when
it must be faced, knowing all along the situation will only be
the worse for our inattention, but still not rousing ourselves
to action?
And then there’s the dynamic of confirmation bias which I detailed
in the video “Nature of Science,” where we pay more attention
to the evidence which supports what we already believe, and less
attention to the evidence which contradicts it. This explains
what was a very puzzling discovery for me. I came across a poll
about public attitudes towards global climate change. And it showed
there was a significant split across party lines in terms of the
percentage of people who believed that humans are causing the
globe to warm up.
Now, you probably don’t find it surprising that more Democrats
than Republicans believe in global warming, and ordinarily I wouldn’t
either. But I’d been steeping myself in this question of how do
you go about deciding what to believe about what’s going on with
the physical world, and this split along political party lines
about a physical reality just sort of blew me away. Why the heck
should political belief influence one’s assessment of what is
physical reality? I just got this ridiculous picture in my head
of a Democrat and a Republican standing and looking out the same
window—the Democrat saying “Gee, it’s pouring rain out there,”
and the Republican saying “No, it’s a sunny blue day.” And of
course the Greenie saying “Hey—let me see!”
So how does confirmation bias explain that split? It’s fair to
say that Republicans have a greater distaste for government than
Democrats, and if climate change is really being caused by humans,
that strongly implies the need for more government action. A Republican
would rather not see this happen, and so confirmation bias ends
up making more of the “global warming is a hoax” evidence stick,
and less of the “global warming is a problem” evidence stick.
Along these lines of conirmation bias, I can’t tell you how many
times a skeptic has posted a comment along the lines of “Here
are three movies on YouTube you MUST see. They all prove how global
warming is a hoax.”
It’s true that films like “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and
“An Inconvenient Truth” are exactly these sorts of evidence that
can strongly feed confirmation bias. And you can bet that the
fans of each movie have a pretty strong political profile, despite
the significant difference in how the two movies have stood up
to analysis by credible sources. That’s probably because we’re
not in the habit of going out of our way to see if we’re wrong.
Really, who likes being shown to be wrong?
If you’re a fan of “An Inconvenient Truth,” how much research
have you done into the critiques of the movie? How about if you’re
in the “Great Global Warming Swindle” camp? Have you looked up
some of the really embarrassing goofs the filmmakers made, like
filling in the blanks on some of the scientific graphs? Oops.
Do some open-minded googling there, and you may be stunned. Whichever
movie you’re a fan of, you owe it to yourself: if you can only
find weak critiques that are easily dismissed, that increases
your esteem for your favorite movie. And if you find there are
a bunch of fatal flaws, then thank goodness you found out now
rather than later, and can dump that stinker as fast as possible.
It’s just natural when you go about collecting evidence and arguing
again and again to become really convinced yourself, and lose
the ability to see that perhaps you could be wrong; perhaps someone
else does make a valid point. I know it’s happened to me as I’ve
steeped myself in the evidence and arguments in writing these
videos. More than once I caught myself thinking “My God—how could
anyone not be convinced??” So it is a difficult but very worthy
skill to step back and clear the board, saying to yourself: “Okay,
I’ll pretend I haven’t formed an opinion yet. Let’s see how the
arguments stack up against each other.” I try to aspire to it,
though I’m not always successful.
In fact, as hard as I try to form watertight conclusions, I still
hope I’m wrong. Which is an idea so important, it’s got its own
video: “I Hope I’m Wrong.”
This
video-article is part of an advanced listening activity for advanced
learners of English. 
The video on Youtube:
