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Oklahoma, Where The Denial Comes Right Behind The Drought
First published on ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which was recently named one of Time magazine’s Top 25 blogs of 2010.
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Over 90% of Oklahoma is now in extreme drought, up from 72% just a week ago. The drought seems to intensify the denial — a feedback that, if it continues, will turn the state into a permanent Dust Bowl.
by Brian Powell, via Media Matters
The Oklahoman advocated for the separation of science and policy in its editorial pages, expressing serious misgivings about the veracity of manmade climate change and warning that we shouldn’t “mi[x] science” with politics. The newspaper is Oklahoma’s largest source of printed news and is owned by billionaire oil and gas tycoon Philip Anschutz.
In a November 28 editorial headlined “Mixing science, politics can result in bad policy,” The Oklahoman put scare quotes around the word “science” when discussing global warming and argued that, because the science of climate change isn’t “settled,” it may as well be ignored by policymakers (emphasis added):
[S]cientific evidence for global warming remains muddled at best. The United Kingdom-based Daily Mail recently noted data compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea showed the world stopped getting warmer nearly 16 years ago. Before that, temperatures rose from 1980 to 1996, but had been stable or declined for the 40 years prior to that period. Some scientists believe those temperature changes are a product of natural variability and non-manmade causes. Definitive proof remains elusive for all sides.
Those who claim science is “settled” don’t understand science. In 1854, cholera was tied to contaminated water. It took nearly 30 years before that explanation was accepted over theories blaming bad vapors for outbreaks.
When politics taints science more than science improves and informs policy, the results can be distressing. Should we wipe out countless jobs and increase economic hardship for families in the name of global warming theories that could ultimately prove no more valid than the cholera-vapors link?
Skeptical Science, a website dedicated to “explain[ing] what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming,” responded to arguments by climate change skeptics who claim, like The Oklahoman, that the science isn’t “settled,” and is therefore unworthy of consideration by policymakers and politicians:
No science is ever “settled”; science deals in probabilities, not certainties. When the probability of something approaches 100%, then we can regard the science, colloquially, as “settled”….
Outside of logic and mathematics, we do not live in a world of certainties. Science comes to tentative conclusions based on the balance of evidence. The more independent lines of evidence are found to support a scientific theory, the closer it is likely to be to the truth. Just because some details are still not well understood should not cast into doubt our understanding of the big picture: humans are causing global warming.
In most aspects of our lives, we think it rational to make decisions based on incomplete information. We will take out insurance when there is even a slight probability that we will need it. Why should our planet’s climate be any different?
The National Research Council (NRC) echoed these sentiments in a climate change report, stating that the occurrence of manmade global warming was “so thoroughly examined and tested” that there is a “vanishingly small” likelihood that the findings will be overturned. The report also reiterated the point that certain scientific conclusions have been more thoroughly verified than others, which should have been obvious to editors at The Oklahoman, who dubiously compared modern studies on climate change to 19th century theories about cholera outbreaks. From the NRC report (emphasis added):
From a philosophical perspective, science never proves anything–in the manner that mathematics or other formal logical systems prove things–because science is fundamentally based on observations. Any scientific theory is thus, in principle, subject to being refined or overturned by new observations. In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities. In other cases, particularly for matters that are at the leading edge of active research, uncertainties may be substantial and important. In these cases, care must be taken not to draw stronger conclusions than warranted by the available evidence.
The Oklahoman published its editorial just one week after the Washington Examiner (also owned by Anschutz) published an op-ed arguing that cutting carbon emissions is futile, raising ethical questions about the papers’ tendencies to oppose any policies that would harm their owner’s pocketbook.
And The Oklahoman’s editorial serves as yet another piece of evidence that conservative voices will attack any peer-reviewed science that doesn’t align with their political agenda. Earlier this year, a study by the American Sociological Association looked at “trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010.” They found that “conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest,” a finding that seemed to confirm the theories expounded by Chris Mooney in his 2005 book The Republican War on Science — that the conservative movement has developed a uniquely adversarial relationship with scientific conclusions. The Oklahoman‘s “Mixing science, politics can result in bad policy” is a clear illustration of this phenomenon.
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2012-12-02 09:51:54
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Be wary of any info you get from these Soro’s Clinton orgs. They are pushing the Adgenda 21 carp… John podesta is the big wig here for these ugly people.