Chris Mooney offers fellow climate alarmists advice on how to patronize skeptics.
English major Mooney writes in his Huffington post commentary, “Why Republicans Deny Science: The Quest for a Scientific Explanation“:
…Here’s the bottom line: An increasing body of science suggests that we disagree about politics not for intellectual or philosophical reasons, but because we have fundamentally different ways of responding to the basic information presented to us by the world. These are often ways of which we are not even aware — automatic, subconscious — but that color all of our perceptions, and that effectively drive us apart politically…
“[T]he next time a Republican denies global warming, liberals ought to be better able to check the impulse to say “what an idiot!” and instead say something like, “I can understand why they have that kind of a response.”
I reject Mooney’s premise that “Republicans” are denying science. Those who push computer simulation output as data are the ones denying science. Those who withhold the raw data and computer codes for their published studies are the ones denying science. Those in publicly funded universities using public grants to do their research and then evading FOIA laws, are the ones denying science. And those useful idiots like Mooney that support them. They are the ones denying science.
In case folks haven’t noticed it, an entire ‘industry’ has arisen to offer analysis of why conservatives/skeptics/deniers can’t accept the concept of man-caused global warming. It’s the usual suspects behind all of this hand-wringing – Mooney, Naomi Oreskes & Eric Conway, Aaron McCright & Riley Dunlap, Myanna Lahsen, William Freudenburg. Problem is, in order to support the idea that there is no legitimate opposition to the IPCC, each says skeptic scientists are corrupted by fossil fuel industry funding. And who do they cite as their singular for proof for this? The king of all skeptic accusers, Ross Gelbspan.
For all of their adulation of Gelbspan, they appear not to have the least bit of curiosity about why his central bit of evidence against skeptic scientists comes from a leaked coal industry memo that neither he, nor a single one of those who quote its #1 strategy sentence, ever shows in its complete context. Or that he never discloses how he ‘obtained’ this memo. Or why wording he quotes from a particular 1991 coal industry annual report about skeptic scientists is not actually seen in that report. Or that he said he was a Pulitzer winner, despite not being a Pulitzer winner. Or that not a single other person has ever independently corroborated Gelbspan’s accusation.
I can’t understand why the left accepts such drastic conclusions based on such shoddy and incomplete science. Actually, I know why they do, it supports their political beliefs and agenda, so they’ll foolishly accept things that no rational person would. The Democrats are the party of groupthink, gullibility, snake-oil, emotions over logic, and rigid irrational thought in the face of conflicting evidence. They are not the party with a monopoly on science by a long shot.