"Climate Zombies" and the GOP's Anti-Science Syndrome

[LongTomH]

Joe Romm's Climate Progress Blog has a great post: Attack of the Climate Zombies! Anti-Science Syndrome goes viral within the GOP.

Romm goes into great detail about the anti-climate legislation stands of GOP senatorial candidates by state. A lot of his material comes from R L Miller's blog at Daily Kos:

They mindlessly deny the science of climate change.
Their stupid is contagious.
And if they win, humanity loses.

I'm tracking Climate Zombies: every Republican candidate for House, Senate, and Governor who claims that global warming is a hoax, doubts the science of climate change, and wants a new Dark Ages for America.

There has always been a strain of climate denialism in the GOP; according to Romm: "Climate zombies are now the Republican party norm."

First, a brief note on why. During the Bush years, most Republican politicians ducked questions on climate change, professed a desire to do something vague and unspecified about energy independence, and derided cap-and-trade. Only a few, led by James Inhofe (R-River in Egypt), openly mocked science. The emergence of the American Taliban has changed that. The respected science journal Nature, in a piece entitled Science Scorned:

Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”. The Tea Party’s leanings encompass religious opposition to Darwinian evolution and to stem-cell and embryo research — which Beck has equated with eugenics. The movement is also averse to science-based regulation, which it sees as an excuse for intrusive government. Under the administration of George W. Bush, science in policy had already taken knocks from both neglect and ideology. Yet President Barack Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place” seems to have linked science to liberal politics, making it even more of a target of the right.

US citizens face economic problems that are all too real, and the country’s future crucially depends on education, science and technology as it faces increasing competition from China and other emerging science powers. Last month’s recall of hundreds of millions of US eggs because of the risk of salmonella poisoning, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, are timely reminders of why the US government needs to serve the people better by developing and enforcing improved science-based regulations. Yet the public often buys into anti-science, anti-regulation agendas that are orchestrated by business interests and their sponsored think tanks and front groups.

Get it? The Republican War on Science that Chris Mooney detailed in 2005 is entering a new phase. Anti-science has joined Islamophobia as a major prop of the GOP's campaign for 2010.

A comment for this article put it beautifully:

Basically within the GOP if you are not a climate change denier, you do not get serious funding (if you’re a new candidate).

If you are an existing candidate and you don’t deny climate change (or work with Dems on the issue) then you will be cut off to large sources of funding which are contingent on this issue – and you will become targeted by one of the Koch brothers political front & funding organizations – they will ensure that a well funded GW denier / tea party candidate will be there to try to eliminate you in the next primary (Sen Murkowski R-AK is an example of this process working and Sen Snowe R-VT has already been publicly targeted for 2012).

This isn’t up to the individual candidates in the GOP, if they don’t toe the line on this (or are considered moderate) they are targeted for removal by extremely well funded libertarian political organizations, the process of which is eventually successful.

Check out Romm's article and see how the GOP candidate in your state stands.

This is another reason not to sit out this election! There's too much at stake!

[kristopher]

1. This began decades ago at the 92 Rio Earth Summit.

There is documentation that the right saw that summit as a growing danger to their agenda, and they set out at that time a plan to attack the foundations of science based public policy in order to enable their profit based paradigm to prevail.

Here are two articles that look at the issue and document some of the methods involved.

Rearguard of Modernity in the journal Global Environmental Politics

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

Download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers/71775/Rearguard-of-Modernity



Study to test Jacques theory:
The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism

Co-authored with Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman published in the journal Environmental Politics, June 2008

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.
download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers

[NNadir]

2. There are very few people on this planet who have as much contempt for science as Joe Romm.

I wrote a comment explaining this on another website.

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2010/9/10/14834/2359/37#c37">Joe Romm does science? Don't make me laugh.

Joe Romm isn't particularly good at science (1+ / 0-)
Recommended by:Joffan
himself.

While he holds a Ph.D. in a scientific discipline from MIT, it is worth noting that Kurt Wise holds a Harvard Ph.D in palenotology under Steven Jay Gould no less.

These degrees say more about Harvard and MIT than they say about scientific truth per se.

Joe Romm seems to think, against all experimental evidence to the contrary, that solar and wind power and conservation are useful ways to address climate change. The last 20 years of observation offer no justification for this claim. All of these approaches have failed miserably for simply discernable physical reasoning involving energy to mass density.

Joe, of course, assumes that the citizens of Botswana, for instance, are willing to live in dire poverty so that wealthy people in the West can go to Joe's website and muse about energy, consuming in the process, more energy on the involved servers involved in running "solar will save us" websites than solar energy actually produces.

(I note that many people are annoyed that Indians and Chinese haven't agreed to live in dire poverty so we can talk about conservation in the West.)

Joe has nothing but contempt for the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, a form of energy developed and championed throughout their lives by men like Eugene Wigner, Glenn Seaborg and Hans Bethe, all of whom were awarded Nobel Prizes.

It may be fine to note the anti-science bias of the Republicans - which is clearly observed - but involving Joe Romm is certainly carbonized lung tissue calling the smokestack "black."

When Joe Romm was working at the Department of Energy pushing his bullshit "efficiency will save us" argument, US climate change gas emissions rose so much, it was the equivalent of adding the total dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping of Argentina to the mess.

He's pure "Heckuva job" material.

[Name removed]

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[ThoughtCriminal]

4. ALL experimental evidence to the contrary?

Any SOURCE for that? I'll bet it WOULD make US laugh.

[LongTomH]

5. I'll second ThoughtCriminal's dare!

If you have any evidence to refute Joe Romm - other than ad hominem name calling; please feel free to present them here.

Edited to add: Joe Romm has relevant experience in climate science and energy. He was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton Administration, where he had the responsibility for directing $1 billion in clean energy development.

Anti-science? The American Association for the Advancement of Science didn't think so when the named him a Senior Fellow in 2008.