Nov 23, 2008
Political Psychosis and the Rhetoric of Climate Change
U.S. vice president, environmental activist, and perennial joke-butt Al Gore
From his misstatements about the internet to his run-of-the-mill treehugging, from his trademark clunky carriage to the whizkid intelligence it belies, Al Gore is excellent fodder for jokes, and will be long after he’s dead.1 Peppering environmental policy arguments tailored for mass audiences with Gore jokes became a kneejerk impulse for the right back in the prosperously complacent 1990s. If Wesley Pruden’s “The killer frost for global warming” in this Friday’s Washington Times is any indication, Gore jokes are about the only ammunition remaining for the politically-psychotic fringe of the American right wing that has yet to accept the fact of global climate change. Citing2 the data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pruden says that (presumably in the United States) “Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one”—clear evidence, for Pruden, that “global warming” is a myth. You can almost hear him shouting, “Gotcha Al!”
Pruden’s argument—we’ll call it that, charitably—makes sense if and only if you believe that those who warn and have warned of “global warming” speak or ever spoke of a simple, linear trend—always up, always warmer, everywhere!—which no one with any credibility on the issue has ever actually maintained. There has never, though, been any serious dissent about the overall trend of global warming in the scientific community, regardless of how skilled right-wing hacks like those at the The Washington Times and The National Review, that fallen bastion of conservative intellect, have gotten at cracking Al Gore jokes.
Pruden’s correct to say that the terminology we use to talk about this trend has shifted from “global warming” to “climate change” over the past year or so, and yes, the rationale for that change partially rhetorical; but there’s nothing sinister or obfuscatory about it. The phrase ”global warming” does imply a linear trend to anyone who doesn’t care to actually look into the issue, and thus serves as an invitation for specious “arguments” like Pruden’s. We’ve stopped talking about “global warming” and begun talking about “climate change” simply because the latter is a more precise description of what’s actually happening. The shift has happened not in spite of science but in the name of better science, and it implies no concomitant shift in scientific opinion about the gradual, manmade warming of the planet.
On the issue of climate change, The Washington Times is one of the few right-wing organs that has yet to emerge from the bizarre, ascientific, and irresponsible psychosis that dominated the antienvironmental rhetoric of Gingrich-era conservatism. By now, even Gingrich himself has gotten the message.
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1. With thanks to Helen Danilenko and Albert Fang.
2. Pruden chooses to merely reference these figures rather than provide us with the ability to independently verify them for ourselves. Pruden similarly references “false figures” from the United Nations Panel on Climate Change—and again, instead of providing us with the primary-source figures themselves, he elects to make a joke, this time about the clearly laughable United Nations (”No giggling, please,” he reminds his readers). Who needs facts when you can make xenophobic cracks? Pruden’s reluctance to adequately cite his work would be more understandable on the printed page, where space is at a premium, but is more than a little suspicious online in an age when citing a source is as easy as inserting a link.