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Originally Posted by Lucy Audley's Movie Journal
Global Warning, or Do You Know Shit?
Watching An Inconvenient Truth was a depressing experience for me. Not because of its subject matter (though God knows the prospect of climate change is hardly a cheering one), but because the entire movie is an hour and a half of Gore trying desperately to convince America of a truth that is about as controversial in the scientific community as the belief that the Pope is based in Rome.
The most telling statistic on global warming is this. In December 2004, a paper published in the December 2004 edition of Science, reviewed 928 articles on climate change published in peer reviewed scientific journals (i.e. reputable, academic journals without political or religious bias). Not one of these articles disagreed that climate change is happening and that human activities are contributing to it. In other words, there's a clear scientific consensus on this subject.
Here in Europe that comes as no surprise. Few peopel here genuinely think that climate change is not happening, and those that do are given little air-time and less credit. We know that our summers are getting warmer because we can feel it when there's a heatwave. We see it in record temperatures, registered year after year in the south. We see it in droughts. We know winters are coming later because plants that would have been killed off by frost in early October now bloom until the end of the month, and harvests can be gathered later. And we've known for some time: I can remember watching TV shows on it as a kid nearly fifteen years ago. For some time in Britain, it's been the government's chief scientists who have been speaking out and demanding change.
So why are so many Americans convinced that climate change is one big hoax, against the evidence of science and the evidence of their own senses? The obvious answer would be that they have been subjected to a level of political spin on the issue that we in Europe have not experienced, and that this created confusion. Yet when you think about it, this raises more questions that it answers. Europe is also wealthy and Western. We share many economic interests with the States. Governments and corporations here in Europe have just as much of an interest in discrediting the scientific consensus as those in America. Yet very few have actually attempted to do so. Why?
I believe that the reason, in part, lies in the very different ways in which we educate our kids to assess and evaluate evidence. Since the early nineteenth century our highly secular, English society has placed a great deal of emphasis on teaching kids to discriminate between different kinds of evidence, to question all testimony, to examine potential sources of bias, to distinguish between expert and non-expert views. Unlike America, we are not plagued with partisan news networks like Fox: instead we have a serious culture of news-gathering, independent of corporate imperatives, that is probing to the point of invasiveness. Any infraction of journalistic rules in presenting evidence in the broadsheets or on any TV station is treated as a highly serious matter. If a government knows that it can't get away with dissemminating untrue and biased material to the people, because they are used to sifting through evidence, and sorting truth from falsehood, and they are protected by strong and independent journalism, then they are far less likely to attempt to deceive or deliberately confuse their people.
In America, however, it appears that too many people are unable to tell the difference between political speeches on global warming and serious, independent scientific studies. Time and time again on the internet I hear the say-so of a politician, or a body sponsored by the oil trade, quoted as a serious riposte to independent, unbiased research. All too many of the Americans who deny climate change are making important judgements based on purely on faith, without even realizing how flimsy their case is. They have faith in utterances of a particular celebrity, they have faith in their easy-on-the-eye politicians, they have faith in their religious leaders. They get their opinions, in digest form, from others, instantly on 24 hour TV or the internet. And there is little secondary-level filtering to prevent them from drawing the wrong conclusions, since dumbed down or partisan news outlets do not provide the necessary level of evidentiary analysis.
Yet this faith in politicians and non-experts is not the faith of the humble. This is not the faith of people who don't trust their own ability to look at the issue for themselves. This is the faith of the blind and the ignorant. Because the vast majority of those who deny climate change do so in an incredibly arrogant way. Instead of listening to the scientific experts who have spent years gaining the knowledge and the experience, and performing the research which qualifies them to speak about climate change with more authority than anyone else, these people put their trust in the opinions of people who are the tools of an incredibly mendacious government, and then run around loudly proclaiming their opinion as undeniable fact. It really is like watching these people run around trying to convince the rest of us that the earth is flat.
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