The views of a significant minority of the U.S. population have proved stubbornly impervious to the findings of scientific analysis of climate change. This wouldn’t matter except that a key element of that minority, the Republican Party—in and out power—has blocked efforts to alter policies that might reduce the ever-increasing impacts of climate change. This approach makes it unique among the major political parties of the developed world.
Even though they, like the rest of us, stand chin deep in a deluge of evidence, they are determined to stop implementation of climate-related policies that would have a detrimental impact on the bottom lines of the fossil fuel-intensive industries that make up a hefty proportion of their campaign contributors.
As veteran climate reporter David Roberts noted recently, their success in blocking changes is not based on facts or even the “alternative facts” cooked up by the fossil-fuel propagandists over the past 25 years. Rather they’ve adopted a strategy of disputing the authority of the vast majority of scientists with climate-related credentials. You can’t trust ‘em is the message they’ve spread, assisted by right-wing radio and traditional media that have, until recently, refused to treat their claims with the disdain they deserve. However, just in case access to relevant information might change a few minds, the Trump regime is determined to curtail the collection of climate facts and expunge already collected ones from government websites.
If facts guided policy, the nation would long ago have taken seriously the conclusions of the first climate model developed half a century ago. Ethan Siegel has written about that 1967 model at Forbes. It was developed by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald “and they got almost everything exactly right”:
The title of their paper, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (full download for free here), describes their big advances: they were able to quantify the interrelationships between various contributing factors to the atmosphere, including temperature/humidity variations, and how that impacts the equilibrium temperature of Earth. Their major result, from 1967?
According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO2 content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2 °C.
What we've seen from the pre-industrial revolution until today matches that extremely well. We haven't doubled CO2, but we have increased it by about 50%. Temperatures, going back to the first measurements of accurate global temperatures in the 1880s, have increased by nearly (but not quite) 1 °C.
In 2015, Siegel points out, all the coordinating lead authors, lead authors and review editors on the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were asked to nominate their most influential climate change papers of all time. Manabe and Wetherald’s paper received eight nominations. No other paper got more than three.
Like another paper, Claire L. Parkinson’s “Arctic sea ice decay simulated for a CO2-induced temperature rise”, published in 1979, Manabe and Wetherald’s work should have sparked a shift in government policy. But those were early days and climate science was still a toddler, without dedicated satellites providing data and just a smattering of relevant studies being published. The peer-reviewed journal where Parkinson’s paper was published—Climate Change—was just 2 years old at the time. So it’s frustrating but understandable that the warnings contained in their work didn’t take hold outside narrow scientific circles.
Today there’s no such excuse. Thousands of peer-reviewed climate change studies have been published. A tiny fraction of these, just 0.7 percent, have rejected the consensus on anthropogenic global warming. If facts were going to change how these rightist policymakers deal with climate change, it would have happened long ago.
We can be certain they won’t alter their stance as long as they align their interests—including their financial interests—with the forces they have served for so long to stifle the changes that must be implemented to have any chance of ameliorating the impacts we are creating by continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere. As David Roberts writes:
The right’s refusal to accept the authority of climate science is of a piece with its rejection of mainstream media, academia, and government, the shared institutions and norms that bind us together and contain our political disputes. [...]
Explaining the basic facts of climate science (again) is utterly futile if the intended audience rejects the authority of climate scientists and scientific institutions.
It’s entirely proper and necessary to express outrage every time prominent politicians or corporate leaders spout pernicious climate science-denying nonsense. But we shouldn’t expect this to accomplish anything beyond venting. To get beyond that requires a massive ramping up of our resistance to their self-interested myopia.