Nov 26, 2008
Snapshots of Proof: Sloppy Thinking on Climate Change
Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth"
Lest we dismiss the effects of dogged right-wing psychosis on the issue of climate change as innocuous, via Gristmill’s David Roberts, via Ezra Klein, come reports that The Politico reporter Erika Lovley, instead of researching her stories dealing with climate change, has been parroting long discredited right-wing talking points lifted from Congressional Republicans’ press releases. The Politico has a large and varied enough audience for its implicit endorsement of misstatements and falsehoods about climate change to be a serious problem. Unsurprisingly, Lovley holds up easily-lacerated former Vice President Al Gore as the embodiment of all things related to climate change. Here’s Roberts on one of a handful of Lovley’s grossly negligent stories:
In the entire article, not one scientist is quoted defending basic global warming consensus, which is supported by a vast array of peer-reviewed research and the vast majority of climate scientists. The one countervailing quote goes…to Al Gore’s spokeswoman.
With due respect to Al Gore, The Politico’s correspondents should know to contact climate scientists, not Al Gore’s office, when they want to talk about climate science. Klein:
It’s incredibly embarrassing that The Politico published these stories. But it’s not necessarily surprising. The stories read like they’re written by a political reporter who got tossed on the environmentalism beat, and that seems to be pretty close to the case. Lovely [sic] is a writer for the lobbying section, but she’s writing about climate science. I can’t speak to whether she has a background in climate science, but if she does, it’s sure not evident. Which is how, presumably, we get stories about the “Gore Effect,” in which it gets colder when Al Gore gives speeches (”While there’s no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the planet isn’t warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say.”) and how we end up with articles that manage to argue that global climate cooling science is convincing scientists but doesn’t mention any of the science or the newly convinced scientists.
As Klein says, this isn’t terribly surprising. Lovley’s negligence, while certainly a personal failing, is a common and necessarily forgivable one; it is indicative of a larger problem with the way we as a society think about cause and effect in the public sphere. Individuals like Lovley, whose goodwill and sincerity we have no good reason to doubt—and there are many of them—have never been properly taught what counts for proof. Lovley:
While there’s no scientific proof that The Gore Effect is anything more than a humorous coincidence, some climate skeptics say it may offer a snapshot of proof that the planet isn’t warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say.
A “snapshot of proof”? What is that?
It is a hypothesis hardened through attrition. It is a projection of what proof would look like. If the projection is reiterated with enough frequency and force, it has enormous potential to become self-fulfilling. That is, in the eyes of those who have no knowledge of a set of corporeal circumstances outside of their situation within the context of the theoretical projection, the circumstances, simply by persisting as they always have, appear to vindicate the theory, which then becomes, with no empirical basis, accepted wisdom—or, dogma. A “Gore Effect” is posited based on circumstances; circumstances persist, seemingly solidifying and legitimizing, for the untrained, the “Gore Effect”’s inherent equivalence with those circumstances themselves. So for Lovley and so many others, a predictive picture of what proof might look like is conceptually confused with proof itself—and the “snapshot of proof” is born. Even if there were solid “proof” that “the planet isn’t warming as quickly as some climate change advocates say,” that in itself would nothing beyond precisely what it says: that some “climate change advocates” might, intentionally or not, be hyperbolizing. It would say nothing whatsoever about scientific fact. Lovley’s negligence here has nothing to do with her climate-change expertise or lack thereof, though some expertise couldn’t have hurt. Her negligence, like that of so many others in the media and certain wings of the social sciences, consists in never having been persistently trained in the art of rigorous thinking.