Spoiling the Party

July 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

The World Meteorological Association included this graph in its report on Global Warming.  Using decades shows the general trend more clearly than would a graph showing year-to-year variation.*

Needless to say, those who scoff at the idea of climate change added their discordant notes at sites like WaPo’s Wonkblog, which is where I found this graph.

Dan Savage – not a climate scientist – in a recent podcast talks of listening to a “This American Life” episode where state climatologists in conservative states say they are afraid to even use words like warming or climate change because the local ranchers and farmers, who just do not want to hear that idea, might force them out of their jobs. It’s happened. This reaction reminds Savage of the AIDS denial by some gays thirty years ago. 

Standing around gay bars in Chicago, in New York, in 1983, 1984 and listening to gay men who were in complete denial about the fact that AIDS was a sexually transmited infection.  They refused to believe it.

The people whose lives are the most likely to be ravaged are the loudest voices in the chorus of denial. 

Of course, the farmers and ranchers are not alone. Big Energy has also worked hard to push the idea that nothing’s happening.  AIDS denial and climate-change denial are examples of “motivated reasoning,” and the motivation in both cases is the same: if the science is correct, we’ll have to stop partying. 

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* The lack of a 0-point on the Y-axis suggests that this is a sort of “gee whiz” graph, rigged to make small differences appear large.  But with global temperatures a change of one degree Celsius is a big deal.