8 weeks of clean living

I’m certainly not a scientific expert on global climate change, but I’ve been thinking, reading and talking about the issue for quite some time now. During the course of this experiment, especially, I’ve had the chance to read many thoughtful essays and engage in many serious discussions on the topic. Here are the conclusions I’ve come up with.

I’m going to break this topic down into five sections (over time), each of which I think represents an important part of the global warming debate. I will go through the sections in the following order: Is Global Warming Real?, The Rhetorical Landscape, Personal Responsibility, Governmental Responsibility, Conclusions.

Is Global Warming Real?

This portion of the debate is slowly getting less and less contentious. Organizations that have traditionally denied the existence of global warming caused by human activity have now moved on to claiming that the impact of global warming will be negligible. Nevertheless, in personal conversation I still run into those who believe that global warming hasn’t been “proven” and that there is still significant debate amongst scientists on the issue. These opinions represent leftover successes from the old flat-out denial PR campaigns undertaken over the last couple decades.

As any honest scientist will tell you, global warming is not provable in some airtight abstract a priori mathematical sense. Of course, neither is the existence of the sun. Empirical science relies on a series of theories about the nature of the world, which are then either supported or insubstantiated by observable evidence. A theory that is supported by a tremendous amount of evidence is a good theory, and we can operate under the assumption of its truth (when we’re not researching the subject). Global warming is such a theory, as has been made clear by the most recent IPCC report along with basically every other bit of science on the topic, and we can therefore operate under the assumption of its truth.

Of course, if one is willing to ignore science in general then one might as well ignore global warming too. Certainly this post is not targeted at an audience that denies or selectively denies the efficacy of the scientific method.

What all this amounts to is that there is really no intellectually honest reason to deny the existence of global warming. Of course there are personal, religious, economical and political reasons to deny its existence, and thus people still do. Most of these reasons are obvious, but the most salient to me is a simple personal one. If one is leading a happy, affluent existence within this particular configuration of the world, then the notion of global warming, and the insinuation of drastic change, is fundamentally scary and a bummer. Basically everyone I know fits this description, and thus it is very tempting for all of us to look for a way out, which is the grist for any denial propaganda machine.

Another tempting thought, and one that I think is basically true, is that most of us won’t personally be affected in any substantial way by global warming. For older folks, this is almost certainly true. All they have to worry about is listening to all of the bitching and moaning. For us young folks in America, we (and the country) will presumably be wealthy enough to comfortably make whatever adjustments are required over the next 50 or so years. The brunt of the impact will probably be borne by the world’s poor, as is traditionally the case with environmental damage (wealthy people don’t tend to live next door to coal power plants or depend on some single fishery in Southeast Asia for their livelihoods). Given a hard-nosed appraisal of one’s situation (and it’s the rare one that’s not), then, global warming is on par with starvation, malaria and tainted water, which is to say that pragmatically it’s not that scary (again from the perspective of happy, affluent people).

I think that most people in the developed world, whether or not we would like to admit it, have either consciously or unconsciously internalized the lack of impact that global warming will likely have on our lives. Therefore, what’s really scary about global warming is the insinuation that our lifestyles have to drastically change somehow in order to combat it. In my opinion, the primary rhetorical failure of the environmentalist movement regarding global warming is its apparent inability to recognize this fact. I will discuss this topic in detail in my next post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.