Climate conspiracy, classical liberalism and Q-Anon

Some families have crazy uncles. My family has a crazy nephew, a libertarian global warming denier and an opponent of gay marriage. He’s a pretty bright guy, a professional computer journalist, but his defense of his positions isn’t particularly coherent.

The prevalence of conspiracy theories has been widely discussed: here, David Gorski ably expounds on its manifold forms, citing Mark Hoofnagle’s work, creationism, Flat Earth theory, the blood libel and much else. Fred Clark of Slacktivist has extensively explained the odd appeal of Satanic Panic.

I would like to offer two meek suggestions: first, that one obvious conclusion to be drawn from the expert opposition to one’s firmly held opinion is that their position is likely as self-interested as one’s own, which is often true, as for example in the cases of the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel companies. There really have been conspiracies to conceal the truth!

The second is more relevant to controversies less obviously tied to financial gain: evolution, vaccines, the shape of the earth, relativity and quantum theory. In these cases the argument that academic elites somehow benefit from their intellectual hegemony is
hard to make. My guess is that the opposition is little more than cognitive dissonance: I’m sure I’m right, and only a conspiracy can explain the scientific consensus!

Okay, Big Atheism may be to blame for evolution, and perhaps even for twentieth century physics, but Eratosthenes?

Are there any actual libertarians left, or better yet were there ever any, as opposed to grifters, paid mouthpieces and astroturfers?

Hidari, to global warming deniers the stolen Climategate mails from CRU is just such a case of evidence leaking out. It isn’t really, but by carefully picking a few sentences out of a massive trove of letters it has been possible to make it look like that.

Any working conspiray has to be restricted to just a few people. Even if they all have incentives to cooperate, once you start involving thousands of people some will screw up, gain a conscience, change their mind etc. Or, in this case, just be bought over by a libertarian think tank giving a better offer. Look at Lomborg, he has made a succesful career out of trivializing environmental problems.

Climate change deniers often claim that the incentive for climate scientists is to keep the grant money flowing. You know, get rich by skimming NSF and NOAA grants while running a research program. I point out that any legitimate climate researcher with good data controverting global warming would become an overnight millionaire working for the oil industry. But, for some reason, the best the Koch brothers have been able to buy is Willie Soon and his written-to-order crap. So far, no minds changed.

@
”Before denouncing QAnon, libertarians ought to take some responsibility for their own leading role in the campaign against reality”.

I blame it all on people who believe that the chaos we are dealing with is somehow ”planed” and that there was and is some concentrated effort by some people – or group of people – who are able to ”manipulate” complete random STUPIDITY”.

Anarcissie 02.08.21 at 4:52 am

” Why would a bunch of religious fanatics from the Middle East decide that flying airplanes into buildings in the United States and killing thousands of people would be a really great idea? Doesn’t make sense. Must have been an inside job.”

To strike back at something which they believe has hurt them (and their families, countrymen, co-religionists). And done in an extension of a proven system (suicide bombers, airline hijackers).

But aside from that, you’re correct.

Mike Huben @ 10

Scrolled down to respond to SJ, a remark about the b) people in your classification. I was going to say “Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke pot and/or have gay sex, and these days they can do that and just be Republicans, mostly.”

“… at most a few percent and shrinking…”

If the above is largely correct (I’ve run the numbers have you?).

No, I have not run the numbers.

When you read where somebody on the Web says ‘I have run the numbers’, do you think that is a sufficient basis for accepting whatever conclusion they then state?

Then you might understand why I am deeply disturbed by the current plan to watch the world burn/flood, starve the poor, and ensure that none of the dirty folks at the implementation end of our power gird or liquid fuels industries can speak about it in public without being compared to holocaust deniers.

If there were such a plan, I could understand why people would be disturbed by it. If there were such a plan, I would be disturbed by it. Good news! There is, luckily, no such plan.

Please explain to me how my above conspiracy views are worse then people who perpetrated an armed revolt on our capital building.

Why are you asking for an explanation of something which isn’t true? The holding of an opinion, however ill-founded, is not as grave a matter as an armed revolt, and I don’t believe anybody ever told you that it is.

That said, your opinion that there is such a conspiracy as you describe is as ill-founded as the opinions held by the people who perpetrated the armed revolt you mention (not more ill-founded, but as ill-founded).

{Resisting “renewable” energy policy == conspiracy theorist} seems like a low resolution view of your political opponents (me), perhaps you could be persuaded to update your stereotype to a higher resolution?

If you genuinely want people to develop a more detailed understanding of your position, then the appropriate course of action for you is to provide more detailed explanation. If you don’t provide a detailed explanation, the obvious conclusion is that you’re not interested in generating a more detailed understanding.

An Engineer @ 14

“The already implemented policies have”[…]”made the emissions situation worse.”

That is an interesting claim – would you care to elaborate? I think “already implemented policies” is a pretty broad statement as there seems to be considerable differences in policies (even between countries within the EU and states within the US, for example).

“If the above is largely correct (I’ve run the numbers have you?).”

OK, I’ll bite. What percentage of VRE, RE, Nuclear, etc. implementation have you calculated to be necessary for rapid decarbonisation, and in what ways does this differ from current policies and/or (for example) IPCC recommendations?

”by the current plan to watch the world burn/flood, starve the poor”

I am unaware of any plan to watch the world burn/flood, and starve the poor. Perhaps you could point to a plan which outlines this?

“ensure that none of the dirty folks at the implementation end of our power gird or liquid fuels industries can speak about it in public without being compared to holocaust deniers.”

I am unaware of any plan to prevent people working in the power grid sector or liquid fuels industries from speaking in public.

Whether or not they are compared to holocaust deniers would likely depend on what they are saying – for example, someone claiming that climate change is not linked to GHG emissions (which would seem to be the topic raised in the OP) would, I imagine, likely raise a few eyebrows.

Perhaps you could point to a plan which does indeed outline what you claim has been planned?

” I’m not pro-nuclear I’m just pro-numbers.”

Good – I look forward to seeing your analysis. Do you have it in a published format, on a blog, or somewhere where I can examine it?

@An Engineer

Sorry, I didn’t see anything terribly wrong with what you wrote. I take it your beef is mostly with the abandonment of nuclear power. There’s a debate there on the risks vs. rewards, but not an especially acrimonious one. My view is that humans design by trial and error (steam boilers blew up and killed a lot of people in the 1800’s, then we learned how to design them better) and the errors in the evolution of nuclear power have had the capacity to do a lot more damage than previous technological growing pains and caused a commensurately adverse reaction. So we may be abandoning that technology just as we have almost ironed out all the bugs, if I believe the stories about the latest generation of nuclear reactors. But meanwhile, solar power development has proceeded and has killed people on a much more ignorable level (individuals falling off roofs) and that seems to be where all the money is going.

It will require a lot of grid infrastructure work (which as I understand it was proposed and then killed by the coal-mine lobby under Trump) which isn’t being done yet in the USA. Germany should not not have shut down safely-operating nuclear plants–although you may get some pushback on that. A lot of … less-than-optimum decisions have been and will be made.

That isn’t what JQ wrote this post about. His post is about the outright deniers and liars. You are not on fire–yet.

“The AEI survey found that white evangelicals were especially prone to subscribe to the Q Anon movement’s conspiracy theories. Twenty seven percent said it was “mostly” or “completely” accurate to say Trump “has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.”
“As with a lot of questions in the survey, white evangelicals stand out in terms of their belief in conspiracy theories and the idea that violence can be necessary,” Cox says. “They’re far more likely to embrace all these different conspiracies.”

These people are so prone to embrace particular conspiracy theories because their basic world view is nothing but a vast and utterly delusional conspiracy theory, but again you’re not allowed to say that, because that would not be very diverse and inclusive now would it?”

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/02/the-paranoid-style-is-now-completely-mainstream

notGoodenough @ 18
(would love to respond to all of ya’ll but as was pointed out by John Quiggin the thread has slid of topic {my fault} and it’s his blog so /shrug)

Briefly, therefore:
1. As I understand the replication crisis, there are many instances in which attempts to replicate experiments in many fields (although in some more than others) have failed to replicate the original results, and part of the reason it’s described as a ‘crisis’ is because it’s hard to get resources for or interest in experiments repeating work already done, which means, in effect, that nobody has any idea how many incorrect findings are tacitly accepted because nobody’s bothered to double-check them.
Surely the rational response to this is not to treat all scientific findings as valueless?
2. If the error bars in climate science are bigger than they are supposed to be, surely the rational response is not abandonment of any effort to do something about global warming? Is there serious doubt about the basic physical findings which lead to the conclusion that increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increases global temperature?

An Engineer @ 22

Thank you for the response, and for taking the time to clarify your reasoning. As you say, we shouldn’t derail the thread with the discussion on VRE, so it is fair to leave that to one side for now.

Regarding Patrick Michaels: I do think some of what he said are things one can reasonably object to – for example, when he talks about science being ideologically motivated, “academy” being “bought off” and “enslaved”, the literature as incentivised to be biased, and that he is at least open to there being an actual conspiracy.

I’m afraid that at the point someone is arguing along these lines, I think it is reasonable to conclude the rhetoric is very much veering into the conspiracy theory territory. For it seems to me that at that stage he has gone from a discussion over what may or may not be errors and issues (or reasonable disagreement over conclusions) to actually casting aspersions on the integrity of a broad discipline involving many people around the world.

And that is a pretty worrisome thing to do.

Science is a tool which (at its best) provides us with models to better understand the world around us, where confidence is assigned proportional to the evidence, and where iterative improvement helps refine our understanding further. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the single most reliable method for investigating and understanding our reality – if anyone has a superior method I am certainly open to hearing it, but otherwise we have to use the most reliable method we have.

Now I would never pretend scientists are perfect – mistakes are made and sometimes there are indeed bad actors. However, we discover and correct this by encouraging more scientific research and by presenting alternative and superior science – not by merely poisoning the well regarding the whole endeavor.

If people object to the models offered by climate scientists, they can make their own. The models offered by climate scientists and the IPCC have generally proved surprisingly reliable – particularly given the complexity of the system we are trying to understand (model evaluation studies retrospectively comparing future model projections to actual observed data seem to support this). However, if people can offer models which prove more reliable, we can adopt those instead. [It is, perhaps, worth noting at this point that Patrick Michaels’s own predictions have proven less than reliable (I’d recommend looking into his past statements and how frequently they have been borne out – I am, I’m afraid, less than impressed).]

In short, while people may reasonably disagree on some points, when someone paints science, scientists, and various bodies like the IPCC as ideologically driven and corrupt and climate science as propaganda (as Patrick Michaels did) they are (in my opinion) stepping outside the bounds of reasonable discourse – which would seem to be the point made in the OP.

A lot of the above commenters are falling into the classic American blindness of black and white thinking.

What makes you think the commenters are American?

I have a low opinion of the work coming out of the IPCC and sundry attached organizations and people.

If you read a comment on a website saying that the commenter has a low opinion of the work of an organisation, what conclusion do you think you are justified in drawing on the basis of that comment?

I commented here because John Quiggin said a very gross thing. He said that now that an actual anti-reality movement is afoot in the land we must not re-evaluate weather other less delusional schools of thought can be taken as honest. No the division must remain until Johns old political enemies “take some responsibility”. I just couldn’t abide that kind of a call for a forever war. I will not give apologies for evaluating data and reading scientific papers and having thoughts about those papers and that data, even when I’m told that coming to the wrong conclusions means I must be an endorser of genocide.

I think your interpretation of John Quiggin is mistaken. If I am right, and you have misunderstood John Quiggin, it’s possible that this partly or wholly because he has not expressed himself sufficiently clearly. On the other hand, I concede the possibility that I have misunderstood John Quiggin’s meaning, but I’m not clear on what value there is, at this point, in competitive parsing of his words. It seems to me, at this stage, that it would be a more constructive contribution to this exchange if you made an independent statement of your own position on the subject of climate change without reference to what you consider to be wrong with other people’s positions. Wouldn’t that be a better way of fostering a choice of understanding over hate?

An Engineer @ 28

I will endeavour to be brief.

As far as I can tell, no-one on this thread has accused you of endorsing genocide or treated you as a punching bag. While I am sorry you feel ill-treated, I would say that to me it seems as though people here have interacted with you fairly civilly – we might disagree, but disagreement is hardly abuse.

I have looked through the comments here to see if any expressed hatred towards you – I didn’t find any. What I did see were several where people (including myself) made good faith efforts to try and understand you and to explain our positions so you might understand us. As that seemed to be the general wish you made in your final remark, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.

It is true that I disagree with your general statements regarding climate science and the IPCC – since you’ve given me no evidence to assess (perhaps because you don’t wish to derail the thread), I am afraid I will continue to do so.

Consequently, I would like to make the following suggestion – if you believe you have good reasons to doubt the findings of climate science, I would encourage you to:

1) look into climate science in detail, and read through sources which disagree with your positions. Mann offers a free online MOOC and several books aimed at non-specialists, the RealClimate blog offers links to many resources, etc.

2) formulate your ideas coherently and think about what major issues you believe you have identified which you wish to discuss

3) read through climate science blogs (such as real climate or sceptical science) to double check if there are any rebuttals already. Consider any such points carefully, and revise your own work accordingly

4) try to organise your ideas so that people can easily follow – ideally try to break it down so people can address your arguments point by point

5) disseminate your work. Feel free to put it in a blog or something, and send me a link. Even better – contact actual climate scientists and politely ask them to discuss. There are several blogs where such experts will interact with those commenting – and if you have concerns, I think it quite likely you will get a response should you be genuinely open to discussion. Of course, this is a bit hit and miss – sometimes commenters can be unpleasant (given that you seem so deeply affected by CT’s polite discourse, you may find more rough and tumble blogs upsetting). But, for example, Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate is generally quite reasonable in his responses to people.

You are, of course, welcome to comment or not as you wish (within CT’s pretty relaxed guidelines), but if you do wish to encourage understanding then I would suggest that presenting your thoughts in a way people can assess the soundness and validity of your arguments is probably a good first step.

But that is just a suggestion.

John Quiggin @ 30

“on the broader issue: how should we deal with those who have contributed to the rise of Trumpism, but now oppose him? In my view, it is important to ask that they acknowledge how they got things wrong in the past (as many have done). Otherwise the temptation is to treat Trump as an aberration, and seek a return to rightwing politics as it existed in 2015.”

This is a key point, and I think one which is more generally applicable too. My thoughts, for what they are worth:

From the “war on terror” to the more recent storming of the capital – with numerous scandals, abuses, and untold corruption in between – the number of times I have been urged to “look forward and not back” (or some similar sentiment) is beyond counting now.

But yet the question remains – how can anyone learn without self-examination?

“Mistakes were made” – OK, by whom, and how will they avoid repeating them? “We are reviewing our policies” – great, now what concrete changes will you make? Etc. etc.

Acknowledging you’ve got it wrong (sadly already rare enough) is certainly one step in the right direction, but the follow up should be “what lessons were learned”? What action will be taken to prevent repetition? For while I welcome anyone seeking to undo harm they may have caused (certainly I would never wish to discourage them) I do think these are reasonable questions to ask.

Much in the same way that an apology for harm is only convincing if accompanied by an attempt to improve, an acknowledgement one has had an error in judgement becomes valuable when accompanied by an attempt to avoid future blunders – and without that (or, even worse, when there is an attempt to avoid responsibility at all) how can any confidence be restored?

We all make mistakes (goodness knows I’ve made my fair share, and likely will make many more), but the key part is to learn from them. When people show an inability and unwillingness to do so, I think it is reasonable to assign confidence in them accordingly low.