Don't Even Think About It (3 page)

Inhofe is as keen as any other campaigner to use climate events as a “teachable moment” for his own arguments. In February 2010, when an extreme blizzard deposited two feet of snow on Washington, D.C., Inhofe enjoyed some interactive family fun with his grandchildren by building an igloo on the National Mall. Alongside it, he erected a sign reading, “Al Gore’s New Home!” and “Honk If You
ª
Global Warming.”

At the same time, the West Coast was experiencing record-breaking warmth that forced organizers of the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver to run fleets of trucks and helicopters, day and night, to bring in snow for the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events. Across North America as a whole there was enough evidence available to support any number of positions on climate change. Maybe
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman described the overall situation best when he simply called it “global weirding.”

The problem is that, in a field normally dominated by technical specialists, weather events appear to be well within the range of laypeople’s personal expertise. We might be in no position to judge the levels of trace greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or sea levels, or the extent of glaciers, but we all think we know about the weather.

This is especially true in Britain, where, for some inexplicable reason, variations in our bland, damp weather are the subject of intense public interest. In his weekly opinion column in the
Daily Telegraph
, a national conservative newspaper, London mayor Boris Johnson pontificated on his own climate expertise:

Two days ago I was cycling through Trafalgar Square and saw icicles on the traffic lights; and though I am sure plenty of readers will say I am just unobservant, I don’t think I have seen that before. Something appears to be up with our winter weather, and to call it “warming” is obviously to strain the language.

Johnson likes to cycle around town noticing things. When Franny Armstong, director of the climate change documentary
The Age of Stupid
, was attacked by muggers, she was astonished to see the huge wild-haired bulk of the London mayor cycling into view, shouting, “Clear off, you oiks!” Johnson’s public persona, you see, is that of a decent, up-for-a-laugh sort of fellow who makes up his own mind on the basis of common sense.

Johnson concluded his column, no doubt resonating like a tuning fork with the middle-age conservative readership of the
Telegraph
, by writing, “I am speaking only as a layman who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility—however remote—that the skeptics are right.”

Because weather events can never be ascribed with certainty to climate change, we are therefore prone to interpret them in light of our prior assumptions and prejudices. If we regard climate change as a myth, we regard variable and extreme weather as proof that weather can be naturally variable and extreme. If we are disposed to accept that climate change is a real and growing threat, we are liable to regard extreme weather as evidence of a growing destabilization.

These selective processes are called
biases
by cognitive psychologists because they draw on preformed assumptions and intuitions to influence decisions.
Confirmation bias
is the
tendency to actively “cherry-pick” the evidence that can support our existing knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. These create a mental map—what psychologists would call a schema—and when we encounter new information we modify it to squeeze into this existing schema, a process psychologists call
biased assimilation
. We exercise both of these biases of selection and modification compulsively: to confirm our choice of restaurant, the attractiveness of our partner, the cleverness of our children, and to prove to ourselves that we have been “right all along” or that some personal mistake is “not as bad as all that.” These two terms are subtly different in their academic usage, but, for ease of reading, I will use just one term for both: “confirmation bias.”

Research finds that both of these cognitive biases are guiding our interpretation of extreme weather events and climate science as a whole. When asked about recent weather in their own area, people who are already disposed to believe in climate change will tend to say it’s been warmer. People who are unconvinced about climate change will say it’s been colder. Farmers in Illinois, invited to report their recent experiences of the weather, emphasized or played down extreme events depending on whether or not they accepted climate change.

Researchers discovered similar patterns in Britain. Interviews with flood victims in England found that their interpretation of the event largely depended on their views on climate change, and a wider poll found that Labour Party voters were twice as likely as Conservative voters to ascribe extreme weather to climate change. Consistent with my observations in Texas and New Jersey, people who had been personally affected were significantly less likely overall to ascribe it to climate change than those who were far away from the flooding.

Attitudes toward climate change are so politically polarized that it is not surprising that independents are the most likely to form views drawn from their direct experience of the weather. Sociologists at the University of New Hampshire found that 70 percent of independents were inclined to believe in human-caused climate change when they were asked about it on an unseasonably warm day. On abnormally cold days, that fell to 40 percent.

These contextual decisions display yet another form of bias—
availability bias
—that disposes people to make up their mind on the basis of the evidence that is most readily at hand. It can be just as misleading as any other form of confirmation bias, leading people to hugely overestimate the dangers of recent events and disregard the threat posed by more distant ones that they have not experienced.

Despite these biases, Tony Leiserowitz at Yale remains convinced that the teachable moment of changing weather is changing attitudes over the long term. He cites his own research showing that around two-thirds of Americans believe that global warming made specific extreme weather events worse. The highest number, not surprisingly, agree that the heat wave of 2011 and the warm winter of 2010–11 were linked to global warming.

These polls show that extreme weather is affecting ever-larger numbers of people and prompting them to consider climate change when the subject is raised. The larger question, though, is whether the growing experience of extreme weather will bring people together in a shared commitment to action, or whether their confirmation bias will push them even further apart. And if the weather extremes continue to intensify, whether the experience of coping with loss and anxiety will make people push it aside as something that they would rather not think about.

As the changes in the climate accelerate, new opportunities are emerging for us to engage or deny. Extreme weather events of entirely unprecedented scale and duration are now occurring regularly. Climatologists may be reluctant to ascribe a single weather event to climate change but are far more willing to agree that it is influencing widespread patterns of ever more extreme and bizarre weather.

As I complete this book, hail is falling in Cairo, snow in Israel, Syria, and Jordan. The United States is having the most extreme arctic cold it has ever experienced. Meanwhile Scandinavia has record-high temperatures, and Australia is entering its second year of unprecedented drought after temperatures reached so high that weather forecasters created a new color scale for the weather maps to accommodate them. Britain is ringed with more than a hundred flood alerts, and my hometown of Oxford has just had the wettest January since record keeping began in 1760. The day after I visited my nearby seaside town, the entire seafront was ripped apart by thirty-foot waves. The locals say they have never seen anything like it.

But they are still not talking about climate change. What
is
going on?

4

You Never Get to See the Whole Picture

How the Tea Party Fails to Notice
the Greatest Threat to Its Values

I spend almost all of
my working life with people who understand and accept climate change, so I decided to spend some time with people who are no less passionate in their conviction that we are completely wrong. This was how I came to find myself cruising along Texas State Highway 71, some thirty miles south from Bastrop, in the largest car I have ever seen: a seven-ton Ford Excursion, a car so huge that you need to lower a step before you can even climb inside.

My companions have little patience for environmentalists like me. We are arrogant, so arrogant, they said, to even think that we humans could possibly change this beautiful land enough to affect the world’s weather systems. Our differences are directed by the selective vision of our respective confirmation bias—ironically the views to the left and right of our speeding SUV. Looking to the
right
they saw the wide-open fields and woodlands. Looking to the
left
I saw the railroad track that runs alongside the highway and a coal train reaching the end of its thousand-mile journey from Wyoming. The train was so long that I could see neither the front nor end, though I could see, silhouetted by the setting sun, the smoke stacks of its destination, the Fayette Power Project, pumping as much carbon dioxide into the air as the entire nation of Guatemala.

We were heading for the ranch home of Debra Medina, the feisty, fast-talking, take-no-prisoners mother of four who won one-fifth of the state vote as a wildcard candidate in the 2010 Texan gubernatorial election. On the first Friday of every month, forty Tea Party activists gather at her house to share home-baked food, their visions, and their frustrations—and to have a good laugh. It was with some trepidation that I accepted Debra’s invitation to talk with them about climate change. I enjoy challenging audiences, but rarely ones that are this opinionated. Or this well armed. During her campaign for governor, Medina appeared across Texas TV channels waving her semiautomatic pistol, which is always loaded and ready to go. “It stays right here beside my car seat, where I can reach to it easily,” she told the cameras, lifting the flap between the front seats where normal people keep their small change.

Scarcely two weeks before my visit, the Texan Republicans released their policy platform calling for protection from “Extreme Environmentalists,” who purposefully disrupt the oil and gas industry, and demanding that climate change should be taught in schools only as “a challengeable scientific theory subject to change.” This was going to be new territory for a former Greenpeace campaigner who founded a climate education charity.

So I presented Debra with a peace offering between our rival tribes: a King Edward VII tea caddy, and asked her to cough up two centuries in unpaid tax. Luckily, they laughed. Then I said, tell me what you think about climate change.

They hated
everything
about climate change: they hated the science, the scientists, Al Gore (especially Al Gore “and his garbage”), the United Nations, the government, solar power, the hypocritical environmentalists.

It was soon clear that climate change, or rather the narrative they had constructed around it, fit perfectly into a set of pre-existing ideological grievances about the distribution of power. The word they kept using was “control.” James said that “carbon is a universal element that the government want to control.” Denise added that climate change “is a convenient crisis. The government is using this as a tool of control.” David said that the whole thing has been invented to create a “global tax for a one-world government”—this was clearly a familiar phrase and several people joined in to say it at the same time.

Which brought us rapidly to Agenda 21, a long, dull, and largely forgotten resolution proposing local goals for sustainable development that emerged from the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development. To the Tea Partiers, Agenda 21 is the constitution for a one-world government containing the detailed plan for how “they” will create the issue of climate change to control us and suppress our local freedoms. It is unthinkable to them that there would not be a constitution of some kind for global dominance—after all they regard the U.S. Constitution as a sacred text and can quote it from memory. After the meeting, Dave signed his own copy and presented it to me. It was exactly the same color and shape as my British passport, causing predictable confusion later on in my travels.

But even with a written constitution to hand, the truth remains complex and elusive, because, they tell me: “You never see the whole picture—you have to draw the line a little segment at a time.” They maintain that they have to be constantly vigilant and ask questions: “We’re not anti-intellectual people in this group. We want to know the truth. We think outside the box and search for our own answers.”

And they certainly ask a
lot
of questions—it is a hallmark of their conversational style. People’s statements frequently broke down into a string of questions: Which way is the wind blowing? Where does the money come from? What happened to the scientists? What happened to their opinion? Could they also have been misled? Or they could be mistaken? What’s the baseline? What is normal? When was normal? Was there ever supposed to be a normal?