As US Climate Policy Stumbles Past Farce, Nothing Will Pierce The Denial Bubble. Nothing. [View all]

[hatrack]

EDIT

I look forward to the glorious day when our confidence in the basics of climate science finally makes it from 97 percent to 100 percent. But I think we have reached a point where we can say conclusively that the substantive scientific case for climate change is not going to pierce the conservative bubble, no matter how sharp the spear. Hurricanes are battering our shores, the West is on fire, that poor 2 percent of remaining scientific skeptics has been refuted, and here’s Rush Limbaugh, telling people in Miami not to believe meteorologists.

It’s time to realize that more and better science isn’t going to make a difference because the conservative movement has become detached from mainstream science just as it has become detached from mainstream journalism. If you believe an institution is corrupt, captured by your enemies on the left, you’re not going to care if its confidence goes from 97 to 98 percent, or to 100 percent.

Mainstream science and journalism are saying one thing, conservative media and leadership are saying something else, and US conservatives have been trained for decades to listen only to other conservatives. I called this “tribal epistemology” in a long post earlier this year, if you’re interested in digging in. But the ludicrous dichotomy is right on the surface for all to see: an ever-strengthening case for climate action bouncing off an ever-more-adamantine wall of denial.

For years, US political and media elites have treated GOP climate denialism as a kind of peculiarity, an idiosyncrasy, occasionally to be mocked or “fact-checked” but mostly, like climate change itself, to be politely ignored. Now it seems climate denial was a canary in the coal mine, harbinger of a more thoroughgoing alienation from mainstream understanding of the world, leaving the right “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science,” as Ornstein and Mann so memorably put it.

EDIT

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/7/16258848/us-climate-politics-farce