After
the devastation wreaked by Harvey on Houston — devastation that was
right in line with meteorologists’ predictions — you might have expected
everyone to take heed when the same experts warned about the danger
posed by Hurricane Irma. But you would have been wrong.
On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh
accused weather scientists of inventing Irma’s threat for political and
financial reasons: “There is a desire to advance this climate change
agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,”
he declared, adding that “fear and panic” help sell batteries, bottled
water, and TV advertising.
He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterward.
In
a way, we should be grateful to Limbaugh for at least raising the
subject of climate change and its relationship to hurricanes, if only
because it’s a topic the Trump administration is trying desperately to
avoid. For example, Scott Pruitt,
the pollution- and polluter-friendly head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, says that now is not the time to bring up the subject
— that doing so is “insensitive” to the people of Florida. Needless to
say, for people like Pruitt there will never be a good time to talk
about climate.
So
what should we learn from Limbaugh’s outburst? Well, he’s a terrible
person — but we knew that already. The important point is that he’s not
an outlier. True, there weren’t many other influential people
specifically rejecting warnings about Irma, but denying science while
attacking scientists as politically motivated and venal is standard
operating procedure on the American right. When Donald Trump declared
climate change a “hoax,” he was just being an ordinary Republican.
And
thanks to Trump’s electoral victory, know-nothing, anti-science
conservatives are now running the U.S. government. When you read news
analyses claiming that Trump’s deal with Democrats to keep the
government running for a few months has somehow made him a moderate
independent, remember that it’s not just Pruitt: Almost every senior figure
in the Trump administration dealing with the environment or energy is
both an establishment Republican and a denier of climate change and of
scientific evidence in general.
Continue reading the main story
And almost all climate change denial involves Limbaugh-type conspiracy theorizing.
There is, after all, an overwhelming scientific consensus
that human activities are warming the planet. When conservative
politicians and pundits challenge that consensus, they do so not on the
basis of careful consideration of the evidence — come on, who are we
kidding? — but by impugning the motives of thousands of scientists
around the world. All of these scientists, they insist, motivated by
peer pressure and financial rewards, are falsifying data and suppressing
contrary views.
This is crazy talk. But it’s utterly mainstream on the modern right, among pundits — even anti-Trump pundits — and politicians alike.
Why
are U.S. conservatives so willing to disbelieve science and buy into
tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about scientists? Part of the answer is
that they’re engaged in projection: That’s the way things work in their
world.
Some disillusioned Republicans like to talk about a golden age of conservative thought, somewhere in the past. That golden age never existed;
still, there was a time when some conservative intellectuals had
interesting, independent ideas. But those days are long past: Today’s
right-wing intellectual universe, such as it is, is dominated by hired
guns who are essentially propagandists rather than researchers.
And
right-wing politicians harass and persecute actual researchers whose
conclusions they don’t like — an effort that has been vastly empowered
now that Trump is in power. The Trump administration is disorganized on
many fronts, but it is systematically purging climate science and
climate scientists wherever it can.
So
as I said, when people like Limbaugh imagine that liberals are engaged
in a conspiracy to promote false ideas about climate and suppress the
truth, it makes sense to them partly because that’s what their friends
do.
But
it also makes sense to them because conservatives have grown
increasingly hostile to science in general. Surveys show a steady
decline in conservatives’ trust in science since the 1970s, which is clearly politically motivated — it’s not as if science has stopped working.
It’s true that scientists have returned the favor, losing trust in conservatives: more than 80 percent
of them now lean Democratic. But how can you expect scientists to
support a party whose presidential candidates won’t even concede that
the theory of evolution is right?
The
bottom line is that we are now ruled by people who are completely
alienated not just from the scientific community, but from the
scientific idea — the notion that objective assessment of evidence is
the way to understand the world. And this willful ignorance is deeply
frightening. Indeed, it may end up destroying civilization.
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