Has This Guy Been Living Under A Rock?

In Canada’s National Post columnist Jonathan Kay writes about global warming deniers and how they’re hurting the conservative movement. Does Canada have kinder, gentler conservatives or has this guy lived under a rock since the 1990s? Kay discusses the talking point about a “growing number of scientists who reject global warming:”

Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense. In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].”

Please stop confusing us with facts. It snowed in winter! Kay argues that this knee-jerk conspiracy-mongering is hurting the conservative movement.

This is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also conservatives themselves: The conviction that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud now has become a leading bullet point within mainstream North American conservatism; and so has come to bathe the whole movement in its increasingly crankish, conspiratorial glow.

Conservatives often pride themselves on their hard-headed approach to public-policy — in contradistinction to liberals, who generally are typecast as fuzzy-headed utopians. Yet when it comes to climate change, many conservatives I know will assign credibility to any stray piece of junk science that lands in their inbox … so long as it happens to support their own desired conclusion. (One conservative columnist I know formed her skeptical views on global warming based on testimonials she heard from novelist Michael Crichton.) The result is farcical: Impressionable conservatives who lack the numeracy skills to perform long division or balance their checkbooks feel entitled to spew elaborate proofs purporting to demonstrate how global warming is in fact caused by sunspots or flatulent farm animals. Or they will go on at great length about how “climategate” has exposed the whole global-warming phenomenon as a charade — despite the fact that a subsequent investigation exculpated research investigators from the charge that they had suppressed temperature data. (In fact, “climategate” was overhyped from the beginning, since the scientific community always had other historical temperature data sets at its disposal — that maintained by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most notably — entirely independent of the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where the controversy emerged.)

I’m not sure I agree with Kay. Conservatives have pursued non-reality based platform for a while. And if one cue Rush Limbaugh says something completely insane (and harmful if people listen to him):

Limbaugh kicked off today’s show by reading a New York Times story about the White House issuing new rules requiring health insurance companies to provide many types of medical tests and screenings free of a co-payment. His outrage grew in volume until he finally called the new rule a “fatwa” issued by the Obama administration. He later cited a Wall Street Journal article to criticize the rule as little more than a plot to force Americans to abandon their old health insurance coverage and a plan to destroy the private health insurance industry. Eventually, Limbaugh simply declared that “there is no such thing as preventive medicine” and later ranted that “preventive medicine equals mind control” and “1984.” Rush, of course, has his own ugly history when it comes to the national debate over health care.

Eventually, Limbaugh simply declared that “there is no such thing as preventive medicine” and later ranted that “preventive medicine equals mind control” and “1984.”

So says a guy who’s probably on multiple medications for heart conditions. You know, the ones to prevent a heart attack? Rush is not only wrong and stupid, he’s giving people dangerous advice. Has he been so twisted by anti-Obama hatred that anything Obama says is good must be automatically opposed?

I think Jonathan Kay is probably right in the long run. The Republican Party, as it stands now, can’t survive. Republicans are appealing to smaller and smaller groups of people (older white Southerners). In the short run, the GOP is benefitting by appealing to people’s fears.