It’s Healthy to be Skeptical, Just Not Cynical

Whenever I come across global warming/climate change deniers, I try to carefully listen or read what they have to say.

Some don’t really deny it’s happening.

They believe we’ll just overcome it somehow as we have major crises in the past without seeing that those were ultimately overcome by action, after being made worse by waiting.

I used warming/change in my opening because a new Yale University study shows that Americans feel a sense of urgency when the term global warming is used.

Which, in part, is why more than a decade ago savvy Republican researchers suggested the substitution of “climate change” to make it seem less threatening.

That warm and fuzzy approach to global warming turned out as predicted to not only divide Americans but cause 1-in-5 to be not at all worried (p. 16.)

As an Independent I may have been cynical about the motives of “professional confusers” behind today’s gridlock but now having read this memo I’m not even skeptical.

Ironically, the 2002 Republican research called for a flip-flop.

A decade earlier conservatives had teamed in a bipartisan effort under the first Republican President Bush to break a 13-year logjam by deploying market-based “cap and trade” to successfully curb another harmful emission.

In 2002 there wasn’t the overwhelming scientific consensus there is today that climate change/global warming is a real and present danger or that it is due to human actions above and beyond natural causes over the last 250 years, especially the last 60.

If you are a skeptic who happened to read this far, you may want to read the research by scientists at Berkley Earth who until recently were also skeptical.

It is summarized their new report entitled, Know The Facts: A Skeptic’s Guide to Climate Change.

Then again, studies of “motivated reasoning” find that in many people skepticism is really a cognitive cover used to deflect unwelcome information.

This is especially true when it is sincerely held that what ordinary people believe will not make a policy difference.

Showing irrationality is often rarely enough to “induce individuals to process information in a different way.”

There is a difference between being skeptical and being cynical.

Skeptics have reservations.  Cynics believe others are motivated by selfish concerns and don’t believe in altruism or even honesty.

If you’ve never been into reading and understanding various philosophical outlooks, a new book illustrates each one instead, entitled Philographics.

Deniers often fall into both categories though it seems more often the latter while global warming believers sometimes can get caught up in being cynical about deniers.

New science shows that cynics on both sides run a much higher risk of dementia, especially perhaps those cynical about scientific studies.  The study also shows that cynics won’t die any earlier, perhaps they just won’t remember.

That 2002 Republican research memo predicted more than a decade ago what a new Yale study confirms: use of the terms global warming and climate change are synonymous to Republicans and Conservatives (or as we Independents often joke, is that now redundant?)

But the term climate change “actually reduces engagement” among Independents, Democrats, moderates and liberals.  Fortunately, groups that will soon dominate elections such as minorities and young adults light up when global warming is used instead.

And that might be why global warming is still the most used by Americans personally, as well as in the news media, and in conversation according to the Yale study.

The Berkley Earth report meant for climate change/global warming skeptics includes a breakdown of what events are unrelated, e.g. tornados and earthquakes.

Hurricanes, droughts, forest fires and floods may change due to global warming/climate change but the amount hasn’t been established.

There is a link established to increased heat waves and coastal flooding.

New research also shows that global warming is not only reducing snow pack where water has historically been stored until released into rivers and reservoirs each spring, the means by which 1-in-6 people worldwide receive fresh drinking water.

But paradoxically, the resulting switchover to rainfall also means these water ways are less full in part because it is held in place by soil instead.

Sitting idle, we are likely to see much more rainfall but much less available for human use for drinking water.  This also mean less available for electrical power and agriculture.

Of course the use of climate science has been outlawed for the time being by the legislature in North Carolina because it was inconvenient for a few coastal land developers.

And some members of Congress are trying to do the same regarding military research which over the last 60 years has been the foundation of nearly all of the technological changes driving American innovation.

Fortunately, corporations are paying no heed and building the price of reversing global warming into strategic plans. Nor are many states.

Nine northeast states which banded together to cap emissions in 2009 have seen their economies grow faster than the other states while reducing greenhouse gas emissions nearly five times quicker.

A similar combine of five western states and two Canadian provinces fell apart after conservatives seized control in 2010.  But British Columbia in 2010 and California last year moved ahead.

Regressives such as those banning the use of studies on global warming and other research are easy to spot.

Even those who make it onto the governing boards of much smaller organizations where research is a core value are obvious by using every opportunity to demean it and to starve it of resources and focus.

All conservatives are not regressives, nor are all regressives conservatives. What they have in common is a disdain for research and resistance to progress.

In the words of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers then Yankees announcer Red Barber, “back, back, back, back (smile.)”

Regressives in the North Carolina General Assembly today are failing to head the warnings in that landmark 2002 research for Republicans, because that would, uh, be using scientific research.

It warns that while conservative attempts to negatively brand environmentalists had been successful by 2002, Americans as a whole remain overwhelmingly sensitive about the environment.

They just prefer instead labels such as pro-environment and conservationist.

The memo warns that “when we [Republicans] talk about ‘rolling back regulations’ involving the environment, we [Republicans] are sending a message Americans don’t support” and when it comes to regulations, Americans are “most comfortable with local oversight.”

The last part is lost on North Carolina regressives seeking every means possible to strip local governments of any oversight while demonizing science and regulations meant in the publics interest.

Not all narcissists in high office (found in greater proportion and much further up the spectrum than the general populace) are regressives, but uber narcissism among regressives may explain their claim “we don’t give a damn how many people this hurts.”

Oops, I hear someone banging on my door but keep the faith.  Whoever it is that thinks I’m part of a conspiracy probably won’t remember long.

If We Care So Much For Future Generations…

My favorite portion to read and re-read in the King James Bible has always been the four thousand years of the Old Testament including the frequent mention of some remarkable forests.

In fact, while I haven’t attended church for four decades now, I may be better read than most who do.  I just find it much easier to replenish my “awe” in the quiet of a forest, if even just an urban forest.

But those Old Testament trees I have always found intriguing had already been deforested for much of the span that text covers for uses such as King Solomon’s Temple and to build ships, first for the native-Phoenicians and then the Egyptians.

At one time, these magnificent ancient cedar forests had carpeted the whole of what we call Lebanon today which was the northern reaches of Canaan back then, climbing from the Mediterranean Sea up over 6,000 foot mountain ranges.

Only 1/5th of the world’s ancient forests remain, and the nearly 5,000 acres of cedars that remain in Lebanon - 30% in one national reserve alone - may not qualify.

During that country’s 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, a Druze militia leader surrounded this forest remnant with mines to protect these sacred trees as the Roman Emperor Hadrian had tried to do with stone markers in the second century A.D.

Nearly 140-years-ago, British Queen Victoria erected a high stone wall to protect a 250-acre remnant but soon all but 5% of Lebanon had been cleared of the slow-growing forests as slow-burning fuel for to fuel steam engines.

Still, the tree serves as that country’s symbol and an inspiration for reforestation, including initiatives guided by the United States Forest Service.

Humans have deforested fully 4/5ths of the earth’s ancient forests since agriculture emerged 10,000 years ago and deforestation today equals the greenhouse emissions for all cars, trucks, planes and ships on the planet.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that researchers have documented in studies of the Pacific Ocean, that temperatures have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they apparently did during natural warming cycles over those 10,000 years.

The good news is that while the 22% of Americans that are in denial about climate change have gridlocked the President and Congress from implementing a market-based cap and trade solution (once inspired but now blocked by Republicans) that has been cost effective to reduce “acid rain,” the nation’s largest corporations are building it into long-range plans.

In fact, in a USA Today/Stanford University poll earlier this month, only 30% of Americans felt that arbitrarily taking action to reduce global warming would hurt the economy.  Fifty-five percent believed government should play a role, 58% felt average people should take part and 63% believed business should participate.

One thing was clear from the survey, even among many deniers, it is recognized that the pain from not addressing climate change will fall on future generations.

A Fatalistic Denial

One of my favorite memories of my near-decade in Alaska are excursions across Prince William Sound which always included a stop near the face of the spectacular, tidewater Columbia Glacier.

There are easier ways to see glaciers.  There are more than two dozen named glaciers in or in closer proximity to the Municipality of Anchorage where I was in charge of community destination marketing in the 1980s.

One is tucked into the very southwest corner of Anchorage where during my time there, we were involved in facilitating a far more accessible glacier visitor center and excursion.  In fact, the idea surfaced when our organization conducted the community’s first inventory of potential visitor features.

There are nearly 800 named glaciers in “The Great Land.” An expert once estimated there were 10,000 in Alaska in all.  I expect many have vanished forever.  Even Columbia Glacier has retreated more than 12 miles in the span from a year or two before I left Alaska until now, two miles in just the last six years.

Icebergs calving off Columbia had multiplied by four times between when I first arrived in 1978 and my first visit to the glacier in the very early 1980s. 

By 1989, my first year in Durham, accelerated iceberg production off Columbia was of concern when the fully-loaded Exxon Valdez supertanker changed course to miss hitting one and hit a reef instead, spilling 750,000 barrels of crude oil.

Today, the excursion to the glacier’s face is almost 20% longer than it was during my last visit.   The fastest moving glacier in the world has also lost 1,300 feet of thickness.  Climate warming causes land glaciers to lose mass from run-off, but tidewater glaciers are much more severely impacted.

The Columbia is projected to transition from tidewater to land/shallow water by 2020 after retreating another 10 miles, making it only half the length it was when discovered in 1794.

It will then be stable until the year 2100, according to researchers at the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Science.

I’m no environmental saint. In fact, I drive a Jeep and a Harley and use a commercial-grade blower to manage leaves and pine needles raining down from 110 towering trees on my little city lot a mile from downtown Durham where I still live after retiring several years ago.

Many of my truly environmentalist friends seem on ideological autopilot, as do the few climate change deniers whom I know.  A Yale University survey identified 13% of Americans as the former and 10% as the later.  The majority of Americans were concerned or cautiously concerned.

Like George Marshall, the author of the blog Climate Change Denial, I too wonder “why, when the evidence is so strong, and so many agree that this is our greatest problem, are we doing so little about climate change?”

Even scientists who were climate change skeptics, such as Dr. Richard Muller who established Berkley Earth, have now confirmed that the unsustainable change in global warming we are now experiencing was set in motion by the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s. 

As he noted in an op-ed last month, Muller’s team even predicted the current lull.  While this has caused some deniers to go on the offensive, Muller notes this is not the end of global warming.

Deniers who aren’t robotic seem merely fatalistic, believing that eventually the earth will be uninhabitable again one day so why mitigate it.  Fatalism may also shed light on why so few deniers access ideological neutral explanations such as the series of seven videos at this link.

It doesn’t seem American to give up without a fight.  Would these people be similarly fatalistic if economic freedom was at stake?  Somehow, I don’t think so.

This month in the scientific journal Nature, climate scientists pinpoint that 2047 is when the reality of global warming will be undeniable.  They called it the year of climate departure, not the year of cataclysm, but the tipping point.

Unless I live to be 100 years old, I’ll miss that departure, but my grandsons will only be in their 40s.  The researchers index to a period beginning in 1860 and ending four years before I retired at the end of 2009.

Currently, the Columbia Glacier it is calving off 2 cubic miles a year, according to one study.  “That is five times more fresh water than Alaskans use in a year.”

The point that “deniers” miss is that while the earth has always had periods of climate warming and cooling, the severity of the change underway is due to human activity, period.

But all of the recorded swings have impacted humans.  One need only look to those attributed to the so-called “little ice age” between the early 1300s and the late 1800s to see that.

As my ancestors from North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts were converging on the western slopes of the Rockies in the late 1840s, the snout of the glacier feeding the Rhone River extended 1,700 vertical feet further down the Swiss Alps than it does today.

It has pulled back a mile in the past century.  Click here for before and after photos and etchings documenting the change to this glacier and others over that span.  The Portage Glacier attraction I helped evolve in the 1980s during my time in Alaska was a short walk from the road in 1914.

By the time I was born, it was tidewater but still close.  It was barely visible 15 years after I left Alaska for Durham, North Carolina and five years before I retired from community marketing.  In fact, that glacier could only be seen by excursion boat or by air.

Glaciers are something climate scientists study closely because they are, by nature, always in motion.  As an article in the current issue of National Geographic notes:

“Glaciers are supposed to advance and retreat at a glacial pace.  Now they’re disappearing before our eyes.”