Scientists Agree On Climate Change, Why Doesn't The Public?

From NPR's All Things Considered:

RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Academies of science around the world agree that climate change is real and caused largely by burning fossil fuels. So do many professional scientific organizations. Polls of scientists point to the same conclusion and so, now, does a review of the scientific literature. It shows that 97 percent of the time, scientists who express a view say that human activity is warming the planet.

ED MAIBACH: It's not a surprise at all. But it is the best, the most ambitious and biggest study done on this point, to date.

HARRIS: Ed Maibach heads the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. He wasn't involved in the study, but one of his students was. Volunteers combed through 12,000 studies from around the world. In about a third of the cases, the authors took a position about climate change. In that group, only 2 percent of those papers rejected the idea that human activities cause climate change. This is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. And although this consensus isn't news to anybody who studies the climate, Maibach's opinion surveys show the public isn't aware of it.

Read or listen to the rest here.

Really, this ultimately is about how we know what we know.  That is, when you get right down to it, we don't really know, for instance, that the Earth revolves around the sun, or that the brain is where we think, or that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  I mean, humanity knows.  But the vast majority of us have to take the word of scientists that all these notions are true.  And that's okay.  Humanity has developed a vast body of knowledge about reality.  No single individual can truly do all the research and work involved in knowing everything.  But all individuals can learn enough about how science operates, about the whole system of observation, experimentation, hypothesis, ad infinitum, such that we can have a fair sense of trust that what scientists tell us about the nature of reality is, in fact, true.  We also can rely on the fact that, if we really wanted, we could, given enough time and opportunity, learn what we need in order to figure out a given fact for ourselves.  

And that's how scientific knowledge must work in a complex civilization such as ours.  There's a lot of stuff about which we have to trust the experts, with, of course, some knowledge about what an expert actually is, and how they approach their work.  Actually, it's a pretty good system virtually all the time.  Unless, as with the Catholic Church and Galileo, certain opinion-makers with megaphones don't like what scientists are telling everybody.  That's when the system breaks down.

So here's the deal.  Global warming, the kind caused by human activity, is a scientific fact.  Nearly all of the relevant scientists are on board with this, and have been for some years now.  There are no serious skeptics anymore, or, at least, none who don't receive their funding from Exxon or the Heritage Foundation.  But people who simply don't like that global warming has been scientifically verified over and over again are taking advantage of the trust-cracks in the relationship between laymen and scientists in order to create doubt about it.  That is, hardcore pro-capitalists, the wealthy, rank and file conservatives, the oil industry, and others intuitively understand that the only way out of this is to radically change how we approach economics, which also means radically altering who has power in our society.  So, instead of resigning themselves to the inevitable, they are doing their damnedest to make everybody put their heads in the sand.  And they don't give two shits that this may very well mean the end of civilization as we know it.

No, it doesn't matter that you took a geology class in college and you really think you understand.  You don't understand.  It doesn't matter that you read an article in some magazine somewhere trumping up the mistaken scientific views of one of the last honest skeptics.  You're wrong.  The only reason you're clutching at straws like this, the ONLY reason because you don't do this with any science but climatology, is because you hate what getting serious about global warming will do to your cherished conservative beliefs.  And all this crazed cognitive dissonance you're spewing to your friends and family is just confusing people.  You need to stop.  Right now.  Not only are you being totally dishonest, with yourself, and with the world, but you are also endangering your countrymen, your children, and your grandchildren.  You're endangering the nation.  The world.

Global warming is a scientific fact.  It is no longer controversial.  It hasn't been controversial for a long time.  The "debate" about it is a sick joke.  A delaying tactic that will doom us all.  When people engage in this denial, this intellectual claptrap, they become as guilty as any right-wing think tank butthole who gets on television with his suicidal disinformation campaign.  It needs to end.  Now.

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