The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.
In essence, Third Ten Million Years is a project that seeks to understand human behavior in response to what I call reality, or, sometimes, nature. There exists a world in which phenomena occur, and there is the human interpretation of such phenomena. This is my language for asking, How do we understand human behavior? Personally, I think it is best to acknowledge human conduct in its bare sense: we wage war while we write poems; we traffic women and children into slavery while we explore the universe in an attempt to expand human knowledge. Of particular interest here: we are destroying the environment and changing the climate all while seeing the beauty of the natural world.
There is more than one way to respond to the reality of human activity and its impacts on nature. In earnestness, some have acknowledged our impact and are working to lighten our footprint and lessen the danger of climate change. Others think technology and human ingenuity will more than resolve any such problems, if such problems exist at all. Still others know climate change is happening but also know a loving God will not allow humans to destroy the world. I count myself among the first of these options, but I can understand all three. Reality can be terrifying, and we have to live anyway. These options precipitate faith in our ability to change, in human ingenuity, in God. We interpret the real world, and if we do it honestly, it seems at least possible that things might turn out okay.
Many other interpretive tools exist, of course, though not all of them honest. One was displayed this past week in a bizarre story from the Heartland Institute, the anti-science think tank that formerly lobbied for the tobacco industry, disputing evidence that secondhand smoke caused cancer. Heartland Institute has now become the center of the global warming denial industry. Such an organization throws a corkscrew into any attempt to understand human responses to reality. How do we make sense of behavior that denies reality entirely?
In what I can describe only as a stunning decision, the Heartland Institute decided to run billboard ads that equated climate activists with notorious murderers and other “villains.” The notion at the heart of the campaign was that, if Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson believed in global warming, then other global warming believers are similarly evil. Despite the remarkably poor logic displayed in this line of thought, one must marvel at how this action came to be decided upon. In what world does reality lead to this:
Naturally, outrage ensued. Politicians rebuked. Bloggers erupted. Heartland Institute pulled the billboards and issued a classic not-apology. This story is perhaps a blip on the radar, a momentary outrage on the internet designed to operate exactly as Heartland Institute meant it: stir some controversy and create incredible publicity for their upcoming anti-science global warming conference. That is what happened. But why are such things happening? In the face of such struggles—and this is nothing new—why do we turn away from reality and embrace a denial of reality?
Frankly, such actions from the Heartland Institute are not surprising. They are shocking, even for them, but not surprising. The Heartland Institute is in the business of ignoring reality. That’s not the primary interest for my column; outrage is well expressed elsewhere. But if this space is about the interactions of human behavior and reality, what do we do with this behavior? Can this be an earnest response to the wealth of scientific support for climate change? That hardly seems possible. Such vilification cannot result from an actual willingness to interpret reality as reality.
Even if one does examine the evidence and determines that climate change is bunk, this kind of response seems hard to understand. I generally default to casting off the anti-science movement as a group interested in slowing the mitigation of climate change for economic gain. After all, the longer it takes to establish a national carbon policy, the more money there is to be made in the wholesale extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Is that all there is to it? That seems too easy an explanation. I admit that perhaps there is a chance that climate change is not human-induced, that perhaps human carbon emissions are not responsible for an increase in global temperatures. But such a claim is not supported by evidence; it is not supported by reality. So what the hell? Why has my view of the world been equated to Ted Kaczynski’s? How is that possible?
Has the anti-science global warming denial industry left reason so entirely for the deep waters of illogic and irrationality that there is no way to find a connection between evidence and action? How else can such an interpretation of the world be explained? It must be explainable, because if it is not, then we are in even deeper and more terrifying waters than I presumed.
Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger