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Over at the Daily Kos, and European Tribune,
blogger 'Johnnyrook' attempts to connect 'denialism' with an ideology.
The piece itself is an answer to a blog post elsewhere by Joseph Romm, The denialists are winning, especially with the GOP. David Roberts tried this approach on the Nation blog back in February:
Long-time
greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming
skeptics are like zombies in a '70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed,
and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their
feet and staggering forward. That's because -- news flash! -- climate
skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such
it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence
and inference.
We replied that environmentalism used 'science' as a fig leaf.
Environmentalism is an ideological position, whereas scepticism
encompasses a range of objections to it, some of which are, in fact,
perfectly valid on scientific grounds.
What Johnnyrook writes in Why Climate Denialists are Blind to Facts and Reason: The Role of Ideology
is, frankly, unmitigated and unimportant crap. But it does offer some
insight into the 'thought processes' of grass-roots Environmentalism.
Johnnyrook whines that
Anyone who has tried to discuss
Climaticide with a climate change denialist knows just how frustrating
it can be. No matter how well informed you are, no matter how many
peer-reviewed studies you cite, or how many times you point out the
overwhelming agreement based on the evidence that exists among climate
scientists that global warming is real and is principally caused by
human fossil fuel use, you will get no where. Your adversary will deny
the facts, cherry pick the scientific evidence for bits of data that,
taken out of context, support his/her denialist view, or drag out
long-debunked counter-arguments in the hope that they are unfamiliar to
you and that you will not be able to refute them. If you succeed in
countering all of his arguments he will most likely reword them and
start all over again.
Climaticide? Climaticide? Is
it even possible to kill a climate? But moving on, Johnnyrook clearly
believes himself to be in possession of a faultless argument. So it
must be the rest of the world that's wrong. Who said environmentalism
was emotional, arrogant, and infantile?
After a
couple of hours of this, you end up frustrated, angry and confused. You
give up and storm off vowing to study and learn even more so that next
time you will be better prepared and able to convince the denialist of
the error of his/her ways.
Our advice to little
Johnny is that perhaps his tantrums would be easier to manage if he
reflected on why his arguments aren't convincing, rather than sought to
find other reasons to explain his failure. But Johnny's tantrums are
characteristic of the environmental movement as a whole - a movement
that is unable to take responsibility for its own failures.
No, the true climate change denialist is an ideologue. Understanding
this fact is key to comprehending the denialist mentality and to
knowing how to respond to denialist arguments. Ideologues are adherents
of closed, ideological systems, in which all problems are ultimately
attributed to a single cause: original sin (Christianity), the
accumulation of private property (Communism), restrictions imposed on a
superior race by inferior ones (Fascism), the destruction of "freedom"
by "Big Government" (Conservative/Libertarian).
And
here Johnny gives us some insight into why he fails to make convincing
political arguments. First, he doesn't recognise his own perspective as
ideological, and that it is, in his own terms, about a 'single cause'.
Perhaps we can help him - spell it out for him, in fact - with the aid
of some emphasis to illustrate our point: Read rest....
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