Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Vox reporter David Roberts thinks Conservatives can’t be persuaded to change their minds about climate change because we’ve been instructed to ignore climate facts by our “elites”.
Conservatives probably can’t be persuaded on climate change. So now what?
One more round of “messaging” won’t do it.
Updated by David Roberts Nov 10, 2017, 8:40am EST
When it comes to climate change, US conservatives inhabit a unique position, as part of the only major political party in the democratic world to reject the legitimacy of climate science and any domestic policy or international agreement meant to address it. Instead, the GOP is working actively to increase production and consumption of fossil fuels and to slow the transition to renewable energy.
How can conservatives be moved on climate change?
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Core values, not science, are what drive conservative opposition, Dixon tells Grossman, and “free markets” are a core value for conservatives. They view climate policy as a threat to free markets, which is the real reason they reject climate science, so messaging should assuage those fears.
This is wrong.
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Elites shape opinion, only elites can change it
Say we accept that the majority of hardcore conservatives have negative opinions on climate change, and they see those opinions as reflective of deep ideological values. What should be done about it?
There are two hidden premises that typically inform such discussions.
The first is that the only sensible response is to persuade all those conservatives. That’s why the focus inevitably turns to messaging and “framing,” the endless search for the right tone of voice, the right combination of arguments, the right mix of facts, stories, and imagery, to move the conservative mind. That’s what so many thousands of hours of effort have gone toward over the last decades.
But it’s backward, as Mullin says. Assessments of science follow political opinions, they do not precede them.
And how are political opinions shaped in the real world?
Well, as I’ve written many times, public opinion is not some great enduring mystery. There’s a decent consensus in the social sciences on what most moves public opinion: elite cues.
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Conservatives think climate change is a communist plot because that’s what the right’s elites have told them.
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Reality still matters. What we have in the US is not a “difference of opinion” about climate change, it’s conservatives being mistaken about some very basic facts. They’re mistaken because they’ve been lied to and misled by leaders and influencers within their own tribe.
That’s the situation. But it’s not stable. The weather is only getting worse, young people are only getting more engaged, and clean energy is only getting cheaper. Climate change and clean energy will be winning issues in the long term.
Why not claim and own them while it’s still possible? Then the GOP’s motto in the 2020s can be: “Hey, We Like Clean Energy Too!”
In reality, Democrats probably don’t have the wherewithal to mount that kind of fight. But that’s the only thing that has a chance of breaking the stalemate. The quest to persuade US conservatives on climate change has been extraordinarily long, vigorous, and well-documented. It has also been largely fruitless. Perhaps it’s time for a little agonism.
David has apparently moved on from advocating trying to buy off our leaders; he now he wants more “agonism”, more political aggression from his fellow travellers to try to take ownership of the climate issue.
I always find it entertaining to read green analysis of Conservative thinking. Such analysis tend to reveal far more about the way the green left thinks, than any deep insight into the thought processes of Conservatives.
We don’t follow our elites.
If UN works as a source for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate/Chemical etc Alarm, then it also answers the real world question above:
Everyone has freedom to decide their opinions for themselves without interference.
Source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf
The “facts” of CAGW are always spoken of as if they are out there for all to plainly see and no one dares take the trouble to enumerate or precis the most compelling ones. This is because they know the anemic, synthesized “case for global warming” is too easy a target for sceptics to take apart (proponents rely too much on faith in a consensus and fallacious logic – like what else could “it” be? ) , something sceptics have done in the past with both hands tied behind their backs when the “facts” used to be presented.
The biggest signs of the weakness of the
CAGW case are:
1) Climate scientist proponents of the même are largely silent these days on the subject, except for ad hominem twitter haiku, actually thankful for the limit of 180 character limits. The centre of gravity of the their fight has shifted from science to terminally corrupted social science which has morphed over the past 3-4generations into a peculiarly sосiалisт partisan anti-free enterprise rant mill. Social psychology is a pure example – virtually no right wingers allowed.
2) Not letting “facts” speak for themselves, proponents coordinate revisions to the “facts” perpetually to convalesce terminal damage inflicted on the même by sceptic critics. Indeed, dating from reluctant wide acceptance of the non-d’nybal “PAUSE” and its serious implications for the strength of CO2 as a dominant parameter, and the doubling hit of Climategate revealing the manipulative pact of the Team, sceptic critical takedown and Nature’s contrariness has dominated the direction of climate research . Hockey sticks, models… critiques and retractions of papers, ENSO and other ocean oscillation’s demonstrable central responsibility for most of Global Temperature changes were fought against and the dominant enduring Pause finally erased by the Karlization of SSTs without a murmur of dissent from the fauthful- demonstrated the depth of the politicization of the science.
3)The descent of the “climate blues’ – a serious neurosis- that silenced and ended the careers of a number of proponents who had enough scruples to make them susceptible to this blow to their deeply held illusions. The egregious support for the rationalization (grief over ‘knowing’ the end of the world is nigh and not being able to convince people) that locked these unfortunates into their illness by doctrinaire psychologists who buried a real topic of inquiry (classic psychological D’nile ) for this broken starving science, revealed the real motivation of the faithful.
4) The eventual coming clean of important world leaders in this enterprise (Maurice Strong, UNFCCC chief Christina Figueres, etc) when the believed the fight had been won.
It’s interesting to note that back in 1990 the IPCC predicted 5 whole degrees Celsius of warming per century if CO2 emissions continued to rise in a “business as usual” manner, which they have. The IPCC has recently lowered their near term “projection” to just .1 degree C per decade out to 2036.
There is just one point to make: the IPCC wildly overestimated atmospheric temperature sensitivity to increases in CO2.
If the want to persuade me then they have to subject climate scientists to an assessment by thier superiors. Climate data is clearly not up to even the lowest commercial standard when subjected to any quality control exercise. Since they tell us it is life or death then climate data should meet life critical standards. This means criminal charges if the data is changed after it has been used in a condition where a released product is involved in any way.
I may be a piker when it comes to deep scientific knowledge and theory – I am merely an engineer with 30+ years experience. My use of science has been more practical than theoretical.
That said, I do know this: if a model is incapable of accurately predicting future events, it means that the model is incorrect and that the author of the model does not fully understand the system he is modeling.
If engineering formulas were as inaccurate as the climate models we have been told to believe, nothing would work; electronics would not function, cars wouldn’t go, planes wouldn’t fly. No amount of VOX political propaganda is going to change that immutable scientific fact.
When the cooling trend really kicks in, what will happen to WUWT?
Wait no problem . . . we’ll argue with Ivan over ‘global warming the cause of global cooling’.
Phew WUWT is safe.
We will be tipping off the prosecutors and providing expert testimony in all of the many trials for years and years.
We conservatives have this bad habit of thinking for ourselves. It’s fall, the leaves are falling right on schedule and nothing has changed. Snow will come shortly.
See how accurate the reverse is true:
‘Progressives cannot be persuaded to disbelieve climate change.’
And I notice how VOX manages to toss ALL skeptics under the stereo-typical label ‘conservative’ – their favorite manufactured scapegoat.
I guess ‘open minded independent thinkers are not convinced by thin and doctored data’ isn’t incendiary enough to further their propaganda campaign.