Climate-change solutions depend on open dialogue
SCIENCE AND POLITICS
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 5, 2012
Katharine Hayhoe is a busy woman. As an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, she studies the regional impact of climate change. As a Christian, she volunteers, sharing her science with church and public groups. And as the mother of a young child - well, enough said.
So it's not surprising she was frustrated when a chapter about climate science she wrote for an upcoming Newt Gingrich book was casually dumped by the Republican presidential primary candidate in the lead up to the Iowa caucuses. "Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash," she wrote in a message to her Twitter followers on Dec. 30. "100+ unpaid hrs I cd've spent playing w my baby."
What happened? The 2012 Republican primary season happened, that's what. In a year when contenders could be leading in the polls one week and down in single digits the next, the list of policy positions candidates can't afford not to hold has grown. To the traditional litany of taxes (no way), guns (absolutely) and abortion (never), add a new Republican litmus test: climate change (not even if the science says it's so).
Throughout the Great Winnowing, Republican primary candidates have been rushing to distance themselves from the scientific consensus on climate change - that it's happening, it's a problem, and humans are the cause. They're not simply rejecting specific climate policies. Just acknowledging the vast, well-documented evidence that humans are changing the planet's climate has apparently become forbidden.
That has any number of prominent Republicans worrying their party has become antiscience. But it also raises a deeper question: If we can't even agree on observable, verifiable facts, how are we supposed to govern ourselves in a democracy?
Reasonable people can disagree about some of the projections of future climate, and on policy prescriptions for fighting the negative impacts of climate change. But when it comes to the basic conclusions - that humans, by producing greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, are causing an enormous, ongoing shift in global climate conditions - the science is settled.
The proof of that assertion lies in literally thousands of peer-reviewed technical articles. But it is reflected in definitive statements by all the relevant U.S. scientific societies and the National Academy of Sciences. The reality of human-caused climate change is further underscored by the serious action that traditionally conservative organizations, from the insurance industry to the American military, are taking to cope with its effects.
In other words, calling climate change a hoax (Ron Paul) or suggesting we don't know the cause (Mitt Romney) and that humans couldn't possibly be it (Gingrich) is more than just a radical political position. It is a rejection of the facts on the ground.
In 2008, Gingrich pronounced in an ad - while sitting on a couch with San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi no less - that "Our country must take action to address climate change." But by 2010 Gingrich was calling the idea that humans were the main cause of climate change "an act of egotism." Romney, meanwhile, has shifted from supporting a regional climate change initiative when he was the governor of Massachusetts, to claiming "we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet" last October.
The scientific evidence for human-caused climate change, meanwhile, continues to accumulate. National surveys show that between 90 and 97 percent of scientists who study relevant fields agree that humans are causing climate change. But Gingrich and Romney know what they're doing - American public opinion has moved markedly in the opposite direction.
Or rather, Republican public opinion has. According to a 2011 study by the Pew Research Center, just 43 percent of Republicans - and 31 percent of conservatives - agree there is solid evidence for climate change. That's compared with 77 percent of Democrats. Is it any wonder we've got political impasse on our hands?
The climate debate is in danger of devolving into a "logic schism," says Andrew Hoffman, a management professor at the University of Michigan who studies environmental issues and who hosted a meeting recently about communicating climate change. "We're no longer arguing about facts and what to do about them," Hoffman says. "It's about opposing worldviews, and people will fight to defend their worldview, no matter what the facts say."
The list of reasons we disagree about climate is long, Hoffman says, and most of them - varying degrees of trust in government action or unregulated markets; comfort levels with risk - track to political ideology. Together, they're a recipe for a political logjam.
Unlike other litmus-test issues, however, the climate debate will eventually come to a firm resolution on its own. If the great preponderance of climate science is even partially right, after all, the impacts of climate change will soon enough reach the point where even irrational denial is no longer a tenable position.
Is there any way forward before we reach the least satisfying "I told you so" moment in history? Right now, according to Hoffman, we've effectively put our hope in a technological breakthrough, such as carbon capture and storage, that could solve the climate problem without threatening anyone's lifestyle or worldview.
More realistic hope lies in the reality, recent prominence aside, that climate-change denial is still a fringe belief. Most people simply have more immediate concerns, and are open to considering new views on climate when they come from trusted members of their own communities. That's where scientists like Hayhoe come in, along with the growing numbers of evangelical groups, business leaders and conservative commentators who are taking climate change seriously, and sharing their reasons with their communities.
Richard Cizik, a prominent conservative evangelical Christian, provides some of the most convincing testimony that science and conservatism can still coexist. Until 2002, Cizik says, he rejected climate change. Then, he says, he accepted an invitation to learn about it, from scientists. "I was persuaded at that time by the scientific evidence," Cizik says. "It was one of the most disturbing things I'd ever heard in my life - that climate shifts are negatively altering the planet forever. There's no denying the catastrophic impacts from global warming on people, never mind the rest of the planet."
But it was the theological implications that humans were changing the planet so profoundly that really moved Cizik. "You have to care," he says, "not because of the science, but because God cares."
The best solution to the climate impasse, in other words, and to get science back into the national conversation, is probably not more data. And it's certainly not more heated debate. Rather, it lies in finding ways to talk across political and cultural divides, and within communities and organizations. Democracy, in other words. The way it was meant to be.
Thomas Hayden teaches science communication and environmental sustainability at Stanford University. He is a trained scientist and has worked as a journalist for Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and other publications.