I don't like to talk about global climate change, because the subject depresses me. It seems fairly obvious to me that climate change is happening. Consensus among the vast majority of scientists throughout the world is that it's happening. The US Military is so sure that it's happening, that they've already started to put contingency plans into place. Satellites show that the polar ice cover is steadily shrinking. Extreme weather events are becoming more common all over the world. And yet here in the US we continue to do nothing. We keep on buying our big gas-guzzlers and filling them up with $4.00 gas. We keep on making our hourlong commutes, from a job at one end of the county, to an expensively heated and cooled home in a suburb at the other end. And we angrily (and stupidly) deny even the possibility of a man-made climate crisis in our future.
What? The climate is changing? Don't be ridiculous! We had snow this winter! Fox news says that means there isn't any! It frustrates the hell out of me when my fellow countrymen act dumb like this. Experts are called expert for a reason. They study one thing, for a long long time, and when they make pronouncements about it, it's only after careful thought and lots of research. Unlike blowhards like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who get paid handsomely for stoking emotion and keeping their audience ignorant. I want to see people pay attention to the real scientists, the ones who know the subject and can be counted on describing it accurately, not just because we're running out of time to make the changes we'll need to make to protect the climate we're used to, but because I don't like seeing people voluntarily choose ignorance over fact.
But I think I know why so many Americans do it. And I think you can find the explanation by looking at how we do religion:
I was raised in a conservative Christian household. My dad's never believed much of anything as far as I can tell, but my mom's one of the kind of Christians who believes every word of the Bible is literally true, and you'll probably go to Hell if you doubt any of it, even the really unlikely parts like ...well, like the earth being created in six 24-hour days. I grew up creationist (of course). I even took the creationist side in a debate when I was in High School (against nobody, because none of my classmates could be bothered to argue for the other side). I went to my mom for help, and we worked together to find the materials I used to prepare. And it was then that I learned exactly what it takes to be a creationist in the modern world:
Number one, you have to make common cause with people you don't respect. In general, the church I grew up in was pretty strict about who counted as Christian and who didn't. There was a long list of other churches, including the Catholics, the Mormons and the Seventh-Day Adventists, which were basically cults by their standards. Which were of course the standards my mom accepted, and that I was taught to accept as well while I was growing up. But my church wasn't so much for publishing books themselves. And there weren't all that many mainstream publishers putting out books in favor of young-earth creationism, so when it came time for me to research creationism for my debate at school, my mom told me to ask the local Seventh-Day Adventist church for books. Then as now, the Seventh-Day Adventists were putting out a lot of books defending creationism. Back then, they were mostly printed on really bad paper and cheaply bound, the kinds of things that screamed THIS IS A MARGINAL PUBLICATION!!! Plus they came from a cult-y church. But they were what there was in favor of creationism, and God forbid I should give up my belief, right?
Number two, you have to favor the fringe-y theories over the mainstream ones. My parents weren't big on fringe-y ideas coming from either side. For example, they had some of Ayn Rand's books on the shelves in the den, but when I asked about reading them, my mom told me, "well, they're kind of immature." As opposed to the mainstream, "mature" conservatism she favored, the kind you'd find put forward by nice respectable thinkers, like William F. Buckley. When she gave me some books by Immanuel Velikovsky to study for my debate, she told me right out that some of his theories were questionable. They were iffy, immature like Ayn Rand, not trustworthy like Buckley and his kind. And yet I was supposed to use them to make people believe in creationism? Why? I could only conclude that you were allowed to lower your standards where needed, in order to protect your faith.
Number three, you have to actively reject science. I remember the big pile of books I finally collected to use for my research. I remember reading them, being alternately stirred by their ringing denunciations of those evil, evil evolutionists, and confused when they'd get into technical science-details to support their arguments. There was a lot in there, I remember, about Carbon-14 dating. Apparently, it had never been conclusively proven how much carbon would break down in how much time, and you could never use it for anything more accurate than an estimate of how old a fossil or something really was. I don't really remember the details, probably because I used to skip past them as quickly as possible, and jump to the bits that would always say, "well, if their estimates could be right, ours could be right too." Even though "theirs" said one million years, and "ours" said six thousand. It didn't make much sense even if you did skip the details. But that didn't matter, because the point wasn't to make sense. The point wasn't to give both sides a fair study and then pick the one with the most evidence. The point was that you believed. You had to believe, or else you'd go to Hell, and that meant you had to reject whatever got in the way of your belief.
Conservative Christians have been in this mindset since the 1920's, I think. When John Scopes won the right to teach the theory of evolution in Tennessee schools in 1925, a lot of believers went into defense-mode. They felt they were being required to make a choice between their faith and objective science and, when push came to shove, they believed the stakes were just too high for them to choose science.
Denying evolution and denying climate change are two different things of course. There's not much in the Bible about climate one way or the other, for one thing. For another thing, there's not that much at stake survival-wise, if you choose to believe that life was created by a deity in 144 hours, rather than evolving on a planet in a small solar system, over the course of millions of years. But once you're in the habit of rejecting objective scientific information, I don't think it's that easy to turn the rejection on and off. You start looking at things differently. Scientists are Hell-bound enemies, sent to test your faith. Your friends are the ignorant, the ones who can bring real conviction to their voices, when they say, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it."
There is A, LOT, OF, MONEY being spent to encourage people to reject even the possibility that humans are contributing to a change of climate on Earth. Personally, though, I think half the job has already been done for the deniers, by the previous century of religious-based science-rejection that has primed so many Americans to believe them.
HyperSmash
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