Rhinocrisy

Check out this little poll the Chicago Tribune has running on whether homosexuality is immoral, with their columnist Eric Zorn bravely holding the fort in defense of the obvious answer. A fairly unvarnished question. I don’t think I know a single person who would answer yes. But the poll stands at an almost even tie. O tempora, o mores.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.