[Vision2020] Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[Joe Campbell]

The Truth, Still Inconvenient By PAUL
KRUGMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of
marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the
five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional
hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two
actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the
climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface
Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the
Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA
and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the
data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global
warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary
results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the
prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that
shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses,
which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of
committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House —
namely, where do they find these people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in
which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing
Abraham Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new
secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the “new American
fascialistic state.”

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite
the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable
moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that
greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have
been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same
period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of
“analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably
intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such
as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to
environmental regulation.

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty
strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as
“exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate
research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British
climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes
that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist
Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself
“prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my
premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going
to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as
“post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors
on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious
agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody
who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would
accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for
a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the
morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with
increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results
will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re
going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility
to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if
the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly
crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and
instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change
his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair
pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for
that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about
climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the
G.O.P.; actually, the joke is on the human race.
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