Global Warming for Conservatives

Despite all the talk about rebranding the Republican Party, there hasn't been much talk about improving the actual product. There hasn't been much talk, for instance, about abandoning bad ideas.

One of the bad ideas the GOP needs to drop is science denialism, especially if it wants to represent itself as the organized political expression of American conservatism. We're going to talk about the GOP's denial of anthropogenic climate change.

The Denier Model

Whether they're denying AGW or evolution, science deniers rely on a distorted model about how science and scientists work. In this model, scientists are at best incompetent and at worst corrupt. In this model, someone who knows nothing about science is magically qualified to judge scientific work. In this model, science has never done anything for anybody.


In reality, science is one of the pillars of American strength. You know a lot of you deniers like to sneer at scientists. Do you sneer at cruise missiles? Your computer? The greater life expectancy you can expect because you live in a technological society? Science feeds technology, and technology feeds the free market, and that's why you have a comfortable American lifestyle.

In reality, science is probably the most reliable profession we have. The methods of modern science weed out the incompetent and the corrupt, because scientific work has to correlate well with reality. A politician can endlessly repeat a lie, and his peers won't mind. If a scientist lies, the other scientists quit listening.

In reality, a lot of science is too complicated for a layman to raise any useful objections. For example, a lot of science deniers like to claim that the climatologists who tell us we're warming the planet through carbon dioxide emissions have forgotten to take the sun into account. That's a ridiculous objection, because the only reason we know that we need to take the sun into account is that scientists already figured that out.

You see the same thing in another common denier ploy, the "natural cycles" talking point. In that case, the science deniers like to claim that the scientists who tell us that we're warming the planet through carbon dioxide emissions have forgotten to take into the account that Earth's climate has changed in the past. That's a ridiculous objection, because the only reason we know about the past climate is that scientists have already figured it out.

Another part of the science denier model is the myth of no progress. This is the argument, if you can call it that, that because scientists have been wrong in the past, we can ignore anything else they say. This is where rational skepticism is twisted into irrational denialism.

Scientists don't claim to have ultimate answers the way preachers and politicians do. They claim to have working models, to have explanations of the real world that work in the real world. The entire field of chemistry, for example, is a model of how the different substances that make up our world interact. We know that the model works, because we see the results of chemistry feeding technology and thus the free market. You probably have some examples of this cycle in your medicine cabinet right now. You certainly have some in your kitchen and your car and your clothes.

The denier model of science relies on either not knowing or ignoring the history of science and the part it has played in making America a strong nation. It's a model built on nothing.

The Science of AGW

Science is complicated, but it's not hard for a layman to understand some of the basics. For example, you're probably not a volcanologist, but you might have a general understanding of how a volcano works. You're probably not a meteorologist, but you might have a general understanding of how warm wet air and cold dry air can interact to form a storm.

A general understanding of AGW is even easier to achieve than most scientific issues. Our planet has an atmosphere, and changes to the composition of that atmosphere have unintended consequences. An example of this occurred long before man ever walked the Earth.

In its early stages, Earth's atmosphere had little or no free oxygen. That's because the planet was fresh, and there were plenty of elements for any free oxygen to react with. There were also no major sources of free oxygen, so the atmosphere was oxygen free.

That changed about 2.5 billion years ago with the appearance of cyanobacteria and a chemical process called photosynthesis. Since photosynthesis releases oxygen, Earth's atmosphere now had an oxygen source. Much of that oxygen reacted with iron in the oceans' water and settled out as iron oxide in what we now call banded-iron formations, which are a major source for the iron we use today. Eventually, the available iron dwindled, and oxygen began to build up in the atmosphere.

We know about oxygen and it's important effect--we need it to live. What about carbon dioxide? It's been known for a long time that the trace amount of CO2 in our atmosphere has a significant effect. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Without that trace amount in the atmosphere, the planet would be a lot colder.

This is an important point. A lot of science deniers will sneer at the idea that a trace component can have significant effects. Here again, the denier model is completely at odds with reality. Your health depends on trace elements in your diet. Your electronics work only because of trace elements added to a semiconductor. Something that's measured in parts per million cannot just be ignored, because there are countless cases in the real world where ppm matters.

One of those cases is the atmosphere. We've already seen the result of adding a much smaller amount of a chemical to the atmosphere with the cholorfluorocarbon problem. CFCs, another useful scientific development, turned out to have an unintended consequence. They destroy ozone. In this case, the tiny amount of CFCs we released was significant because of the way CFC molecules affect ozone. They don't simply react with ozone and end up locked in a harmless byproduct the way iron and oxygen blended in the past. CFCs keep destroying ozone, so a little goes a long way.

Because of the unintended consequences of our choice for an important industrial chemical, we put the Earth's ozone layer at risk. That's why we had to regulate CFCs.

Carbon dioxide doesn't cause problems through chemical reactions. It's threat comes from its molecular  structure, which makes CO2 transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared. It converts sunlight to heat. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.

Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is basically the same as turning up the sun's temperature slightly. Greenhouse trapping and increased insolation aren't identical processes, but the end result would be the same. The place we live, this boundary between land and air, would get warmer. If someone discovered a way to make the sun slightly hotter, would you agree to the experiment, just to see what happens? Of course not. Yet that's essentially the same experiment we're performing with CO2.

The Short-term Danger of AGW

As to the ultimate effect of increased warming, you don't need to be a scientist to see the problem. Another one of America's strengths is our agricultural capability. From tobacco to cotton to corn to cattle, agriculture has made America prosperous. That's because of two things. One, we have a lot of fertile land across a broad range of regional, local, and micro climates. Two, we've enjoyed a relatively stable climate overall.

You know the climate has been effectively stable, because we're still growing the same crops in the same places we grew them a hundred or even two hundred years ago. That's why family farms have remained in the same place and the same business across generations.

And this brings us to one of the most important reasons that a thinking conservative should be concerned about AGW. America has grown strong because of our agricultural capability. Heating the planet will change the climate that made that possible. How many ways can you think of to make that climate better? How many ways can you think of making it worse?

Allowing AGW to progress unchecked is rolling the dice on America's agricultural capability and therefore our prosperity and security. American conservatism doesn't allow for taking reckless chances like that. It doesn't allow for pretending that there are no consequences to our actions. It doesn't allow for believing that science is less reliable than talk radio.

It's only in the science denier model that such risk and pretense is acceptable. I know my science-denying conservative compadres won't want to admit this, because they have a lot invested in thinking of themselves as "conservative". Their self-image doesn't allow them to see that they've been led astray by twisted tongues.

And yet that's exactly what happened. American conservatism and the GOP are in denial of climate change, even though such denial is inherently anti-conservative. Until the GOP fixes that problem, in other words until they learn to face reality, they won't be able to fix any of the other problems the party faces.