All the meta-argument about whether climate change is happening and whether it’s anthropogenic seems a little veering from the topic of how Raleigh is working to address the problem. And hopefully the city doesn’t need any such arguments to take action, although one wonders how much good will be done if the state continues to shift along with the overall extremist shift of the nation’s conservative political groups. So I guess in a roundabout way it’s worth arguing about, although it doesn’t seem like that will ever do much good on the internet.
Still, I feel like doing some written processing of ideas. The mood doesn’t always strike me so I hate to let it pass by unfulfilled.
It feels to me like the “manipulative majority media” kind of objection is a smokescreen, whether a conscious one or not. It’s a fairly simple thought experiment: suppose the majority took the view that climate change was a poor theory, would you doubt them? If not, why not? Not being a climate scientist yourself, what other variables are you using to determine what’s trustworthy? Since your party is now the majority in this scenario, their majority should theoretically cause you to disbelieve them and call them powerful manipulators of public perception. You ought to flip and become a climate activist. That seems like a pretty nihilistic way to decide what’s real.
And one can follow that thread to another consideration: if you believe that climate change is a poor theory, the natural desire would be for others to share your viewpoint which you believe to be true. So your implicit goal would be to elevate climate denial to majority consensus, including that of the scientific community. How is that to be done? I would have to guess by the same tools which you complain about in the hands of your opposition: publishing of research, summarizations of that research for broader consumption via public media, and governmental policy changes.
So, ultimately, it seems to boil down to this for me: there’s a precondition that climate change isn’t real, which might come from any number of places (group allegiance, anxiety about the future, overwhelm at the idea of yet another crisis added onto far more immediate societal and personal crises). Rather than addressing this subjective feeling that climate change should not be real, the modern post-Enlightenment person finds a way to rationalize – because only rational viewpoints are acceptable. The rationalization draws on some pretty evident truths: modern media is sensational and manipulative, scientific consensus is rarely unanimous, and plenty of blatantly unproductive or possibly corrupt policies (like ‘carbon credits’ etc) have been proposed or tried in the name of climate change. These synthesize into a framework where the majority narrative can’t be trusted.
Like all people who believe the evidence presented, I wish it weren’t true. Given that I have no expertise at all in this field (although common-sense thermodynamics arguments like those given in this thread certainly seem straightforward), my framework for trustworthiness is pretty much as simple as following the reviewed, majority consensus of those who study the phenomenon (even if they are paid to do it! I would actually find it odd if they didn’t take a salary for doing something so specialized). If someone were to present a more effective framework for me to evaluate the trustworthiness of the results of a field of study I have no expertise in, I would consider it. “Do your own research,” I find insufficient; I am not a researcher, I only know enough to know that research is actually very difficult to do well. If I were to do research at a level I would be able to trust myself, I would need to be paid for it, and that would seemingly ruin my credibility.
Which is to say (in conclusion, hopefully), that all the climate research is still difficult to make immediately accessible to a layperson, which is damned unfortunate, because it actually plays pretty poorly in the media unless it’s simplified to the point of being near misleading (or that is my impression). It’s very hard to play the media mass manipulation machine with nuanced studies and reams of data. Modern media rewards simplicity, rapidity, and intrigue. Unfortunately, the only way climate science gets simpler, more rapid, and more intriguing… is if it progresses as many of us fear it is into frequent, catastrophic, blatant crises. Which would almost be a sort of hope… that the gravity and immediacy of the situation will eventually align with our awful profit-driven systems… except that one fears it will already be too late at that point.
