This essay is adapted from Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, due out in April from Wiley.
I can still remember when I first
realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts”
would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones.
It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics
and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that
people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only
make the problem worse.
Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.. It’s
a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical
tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have
become more firmly established.
Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been
burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this
has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially
carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics
takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to
as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap
infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a
warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed
that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it
has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural
fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The
only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with
their cars and their smokestacks.
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