By: Paul S. Marchand
It has not been a good last few days for serial deniers of reality, either on the front of climate change or in Libya.
Climate change deniers got a rude shock last week when UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, long known as a prominent climate change skeptic, concluded, after extensive study, that existing climate science is correct, and that the Earth’s surface is indeed warming. For his apostasy from the ideological camp of climate denialism, Prof. Muller has become the target of angry right-wing climate deniers out to attack not only the methodology of this study but also his personal integrity.
Now, nobody likes to be wrong. When evidence disproves a cherished idea or hypothesis, our reaction can range from mild disappointment through irritation to outright concealment and spoliation of conflicting evidence. But one of the signal hallmarks of intellectual honesty, per se, is a willingness to modify an idea or hypothesis to bring it into accord with facts.
It was John Adams --defending the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre case in 1770-- who observed that “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Yet, far too many of us find ourselves subscribing to a philosophy that proclaims “don’t confuse me with facts; my mind is made up.” These are the same kind of intransigent people as Oliver Cromwell addressed in his famous 1650 letter to the Scots Kirk: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
So it is with climate change deniers; there is a strong current of both intellectual dishonesty and ad hominem attack in the claims and assertions climate change deniers use to try to advance what has become for them an almost religious faith. A personal example: a couple of years back, when I was serving on the Community, Economic, and Human Development Committee of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the organization was in the process of finalizing a document relating to alternative energy and the challenges of climate change. Needless to say, conservative Republicans on the committee tried --thankfully without substantial success-- to turn the document into a climate change denying tract.
So common are phenomena like climate change denialism that behavioral scientists have coined the term “confirmation bias” to describe the process. Reduced to its simplest terms, confirmation bias is the tendency all of us have to accept information that accords with our own views and to reject that which does not. In that regard, we all tend to match Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.”
Of course, confirmation bias is hardly limited to climate change denialism; we can see it in the hyperventilating, backtracking, obfuscating, and climbing down in which Republican politicians have been engaging in the days since the late Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s Sheikh of Shriek, met his overdue and unlamented end. To hear the GOP tell it, the President either did too much, did too little, failed to include our allies, let our allies take too much of the lead, or just did or didn’t do whatever it was the GOP did or didn’t want done. All they can seem to agree on is if the President did it, or likes it, they don’t approve. Reflexively.
To listen to people like John McCain or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham complain about the fact that on Barack Obama’s watch the United States and our NATO allies were able to get rid of a perennial disturber of peace is to find oneself in an Alice in Wonderland altered reality in which one does not know whether to laugh, to cry, or to rage against the Brobdingnagian stupidity of a political party which seems to have forgotten its 2008 campaign sound bite of “country first.”
Time was, within relatively recent memory, that elected officials of both parties subscribed to an unwritten, but nonetheless powerful, understanding that domestic politics should end at the water’s edge; when Americans are in harm’s way, we may debate over means and ends, but seeking to undercut the execution of the nation’s foreign policy in order to secure domestic political points was considered out of bounds.
Unfortunately, that was then and this is now; times really have changed for the worse. The willingness of certain Republicans and Republican-leaning Democrats/Independents to criticize and downplay the Administration’s success in Libya, especially after the individuals in question had, to use Sarah Palin’s phrase, been palling around with Col. Qaddafi, does not speak well either for their common sense or their patriotism. Apparently, for Republican Obamanators, party now comes before country, not the other way round.
We had not thought it possible that the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States could have undone so many, so badly, so completely, so quickly, as to bereave ostensibly intelligent and experienced people of their basic faculties of commonsense and commonweal. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened. The confirmation biases of the American right now appear so entrenched as to make it impossible for them to accept the overwhelming weight of evidence supporting the science of climate change, while concurrently making it equally impossible for them to accept that the Obama Administration has in Libya actually accomplished a worthwhile and long-standing foreign-policy goal of the United States.
Such invincible error may incorrigible, but we are under no obligation to tolerate its propagation in silence. If the GOP wants to deny not merely the anthropogenicity of global climate change, but also its very existence, and if the GOP would rather be seen as carrying Col. Qaddafi’s water, or rather than that of the United States and the rest of the civilized world, that is their privilege, as it is our privilege to vote them out of office at the earliest possible opportunity.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own. All rights reserved.
