San Francisco freelance writer opines on climate science and the alleged fossil-fueled conspiracy behind climate realism

Cameron Scott: The Tempest In A Teapot

Somehow I missed a hubbub that played out last week after Politico, an influential Beltway newspaper, ran a bizarre article that seemed to conclude that there growing doubt about the quality of the science behind the climate change hypothesis.

The brouhaha is worth a second look for a couple of reasons. First of all, the fallout offers substantive debate on some of climate deniers' favorite "aha!" tactics. (Here is a Grist post that points to several different responses; my favorite, because it's only bias is good journalism, is the one in the Columbia Journalism Review.)

I find climate change denial endlessly fascinating. On one level, it clearly reflects a basic human impulse to reject information that's simply too bleak to believe. But it also reflects too less innate tendencies. First, in the United States, populism—largely the anti-intellectual populism of the Republican party—has spawned a profound disregard for expertise and fact. It ranks among the lesser of many bad outcomes conjured by Republicans' cynical rejection of expertise and the education on which it relies.

In the face of a scientific consensus in which roughly 95 percent of all reputable, and, yes, degreed, scientists (this is an educated guess) subscribe to an evidence-based theory, only such self-deputized Sancho Panzas would refute the theory armed with small nuggets of information taken out of context.

But climate denial has specifically been brought into being by fossil fuel companies. Their fingerprints on much of the minority science, and nearly all of the publicity of said science, are well documented: See Ross Gelbspan's books, and this famous article, for starters. It's nothing short of amazing that they've gotten so much bang for their buck. They've created an army of people who do their work for them, as the comments on this blog attest. (I was fascinated to see how many defensive comments a recent post on Sarah Palin generated; before the election, I would have said that the commenters were likely paid, but after the 2008 election and four full years before 2012, that hardly makes sense.) This army sees insurmountable bias in the positions of reporters and environmentalists, but takes up the energy industry's talking points nearly verbatim. Strange, right?

About Cameron Scott

A former fellow and web editor at Mother Jones and communications manager at Rainforest Action Network, Cameron is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the S.F. Chronicle, the Texas Observer, AlterNet and Mother Jones. As a native of upstate New York, Cameron wishes there were more lakes closer to San Francisco, but he is thrilled to be in a city where it's both easy and interesting to live green. (He has also come to appreciate windy beaches.) He lives in the Mission with his dog, Xochi.