Shock! ‘Conservative White Men’ Deny Moon Made of Green Cheese

Commentary

MARCH 7, 2012

By JOHN SEILER

Supposing somebody insisted that the moon is made of green cheese. This is not a self-evident fact. Camembert, maybe, but not green cheese.

We would demand strong proof. Even if the proof was provided, we could provide counter-arguments.

It’s called science. Except for a few self-evident axioms, such as 2+2=4, nothing is totally “proven.” Certainly not something so complex and controversial as “climate change.” For one thing, it’s only been a couple of years since the politically correct nomenclature was changed from “global warming” to “climate change.” You can almost date it. Just six years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law AB 32, “the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.”

Some graduate student should get a government grant and locate pricesly when the change in lingo began. I think it was around 2007.

And the phrase “climate change” itself is loaded. Of course, the climate changes. The earth and the sun keep changing all the time. They sun’s energy fluctuates, as do the temperature of the earth’s core, the earth’s rotation around its own axis and the earth’s obit around the sun. What the “climate change” crowd really means is, “harmful climate change caused by humans.” Yet everyone lets them get away with their disingenuous use of the shortened phrase.

Anyway, the point is that climate change — or global warming — isn’t self-evident, like 2+2=4 or the Pythagorean theorem. It’s a complex argument that just can’t be asserted.

Sociologists’ Survey

Yet now we have a new “survey” attacking the modern boogeyman known as the “conservative white male” for commiting the thoughtcrime of “denial of climate change.” The study actually is called, “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” It’s by two sociologists.

One is Aaron M. McCright of the Lyman Briggs College, Department of Sociology, Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University. Which helps explain why Michigan has been such an economic basket case in recent decades: They waste tax money on stuff like this.

The other is Riley E. Dunlap of the Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University.

Even their own summary is jargon-laden:

“We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity- protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives.”

System-justification tendencies? I guess I would be in the conservative-white-guys-denialist camp. Even though the word “conservative” nowadays is meaningless it’s been twisted so much. But the last thing I want to do is “justify” the “system.” I want to rip it down.

“We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.”

They keep using “denial.” As in my green-cheese moon analogy, why does insisting on real evidence make you a “denialist”?

And why use a word from 10-step programs? It’s obvious this is an attempt to condemn aberrant thoughts, as in Soviet psychiatry.

After all, when Copernicus came around, those who didn’t accept his new system but stuck with Ptolemy were not dubbed “heliocentric denialists.” People who oppose the Big Bang theory in favor of the Steady State theory are not branded “Big Bang denialists.” I googled that phrase, and got just seven results (as of March 7, 3:24 pm PST), showing the phrase is close to nonexistent.  Then I googled “climate change denialist” and got 152,000 results, showing the phrase is popular.

For that matter, those who hold with the Big Bang theory are not branded “Steady State denialists” by the Steady State camp.

Climategate 1.0, 2.0, 3.0…

That’s because astronomy is a real science, whereas global warming science — excuse me, “climate change” science — is mostly bogus. Although there are some serious “climate change” scientists, the field is choked with charlatans. This is shown by:

Climategate 1.0. In 2009, hackers released a trove of emails from “climate change” crowd showing that scientists cooked the books on the global warming numbers and spiked studies that refuted their theories.

Climategate  2.0. Just last November 2011, yet more climate scientist emails were released showing scientific conclusions based on ideology, not real data.

Climategate 3.0, also called Gleickgate. As Wayne Lusvardi described it on CalWatchDog.com, “Climate activist Dr. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute of water policy in Oakland may face criminal charges that he deceptively obtained data from a conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, then ‘doctored’ it and disseminated it on the web to libel that organization. Gleick has admitted he is the source of the leaked data but denies he produced the doctored document.

So, “conservative white males” have good cause to “deny” that climate change is taking place.

Then there’s this little problem. The scientist at the heart of the Climategate 1.0 scandal, Phil Jones, recently conceded that there hasn’t been any global warming the past 15 years. Yet that time saw the most intense industrial activity — man-caused changes in the envirnoment — in human history, as China, India, Brazil and Russia greatly increased their industrial economies after dumping socialism.

Reported the Daily Mail on Feb. 14, 2012:

“The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

“Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

“Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

“The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

“And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”

Medieval Warming

And that Medieval Warming reference is an important one. That’s because you don’t have to be a climate scientist with a Ph.D. to know that temperatures in Middle Ages were a lot warmer than today, what’s called the Medieval Warm period. All you have to know is a little history.

For example, Greenland is called that because, when the Vikings settled there, the climate was relatively mild and the scenery was green. Later, the Little Ice age struck, and the Norsemen died or fled. Europe and other areas also suffered crop failures and massive famines. Here’s a map of what happened:

Want more evidence? Check out Mark Landsbaum’s blog at The Orange County Register. He provides regular updates of climate denialism.

The Poor Hit Hardest

What’s ironic about this debate is that the “climate change” laws, such as California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, are going to affect those dreaded conservative white males less than everybody else. It’s poor people of color, especially women, who will be slammed the hardest by the climate alarmism legislation. For example, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 is estimated to be killing 1 million jobs.

Those aren’t the jobs of white guys in Silicon Valley or Orange County offices. They’re industrial jobs that generally have gone to newcomers, such as the Poles who decades ago immigrated to Amercia to work in the Chrysler factory in Hamtramck, Mich. Industrial jobs, even today, pay a lot better than mowing lawns or waiting on tables. They’re what got my immigrant family going in Detroit a century ago.

But that doesn’t matter to a couple of well-paid sociology professors sitting in air-conditioned offices in Lansing and Stillwater.

There’s a better name for “climate denial”: climate reality.

Professorial Unreality

Finally, the sociology professors actually write sentences like this one: “More generally, conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”

As opposed to the alternative, the communist system? How’d that one turn out? How did the people of color of Cambodia like it when the anti-capitalist the Khmer Rouge wiped out a third of their countrymen in the Killing Fields? Any women in Poland you know want to return to communism?

Even the milder forms of socialism were horrendous, especially for people of color and women. Socialist India perpetuated its caste system, including keeping down the dalits, or untouchables. By contrast, the capitalism the professors sniff at has lifted the dalits and other lower-order castes into the upper ranks because it rewards effort and smarts, not caste. Last November, The New York Times, of all places, ran an article on this remarkable development.

As in America, advancing the bogus “climate change” claim is bad science and worse policy. More regulations along the lines of AB 32 will suppress women, the poor and people of color.

By contrast, those folks — and everybody — will be helped by climate reality, limited government and freedom.