Largely in the US; the very existence of anthropogenic global warming is not a partisan issue in most of the world.
> I wonder what would have happened to the Ozone Hole if it too got politicized at the time
It did; there are people who deny it _to this day_, amazingly.
> or the link between smoking and cancer
It did; tobacco companies lobbied and continue to lobby mightily, and politicians were arguing that tobacco wasn't unsafe for a long time.
did these politicians suffer any discredit as a result?
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_and_Billy_Bush_re...
[3] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/sally-yates-pr...
Apparently not...
>This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit.
> We will hear about how this phalanx of government elates has suddenly grown a conscience after decades of subsidizing the product which, we are now told, "kills millions of Americans each year".
> Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
I remember too how it was poo-poo'd by the political establishment of the time and lots of claims that its just the way it is and we're not going to be able to fix it, it would hurt jobs, it would hurt the economy.
But regulations were passed, and hard work was done, and we don't really hear much about acid rain (as much!) anymore.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/acid-rains-dirty-legacy...
Science and its-already-gone-too-far not-withstanding, I hope the US in particular will return to sanity and realize that we can make a difference in what is going on, and that doing so raises the quality of life not just for the US but for the entire world.
(I've also wondered: with the dismantling of environmental regulations and associated funding of the current administration, we're seeing individual states pick up the gauntlet and fund their own initiatives. Is this some sort of subtle "see, you don't need the feds to intervene when states have the power and ability" ploy? Then they can gut federal regulations and claim their smaller federal government mandate works? The fallacy being that climate doesn't follow state boundaries.)
Not the US. Conservatives.
1) I don't think local news media has helped last few decades. The constant reports of study that say "X" bad, followed by no no "X" is good (all the while both studies were describing tiny results) has led to distrust.
2) Govt funding of stupid studies creates image where researchers are scam artists who provide results by money
3) Lots of research is done by universities. Growing dissatisfaction with university system being projected onto researchers therein.
4) It was always sold wrong. It should have been sold as energy independence (freedom) not a burden (we need to change how we are doing things and limit ourselves).
I think just about everyone I've talked to who doesn't believe in climate change arrived at that position from spending lots and lots of time listening to Rush Limbaugh or similar.
I know this is a broad generalisation, but in this case, I believe it to be true.
That doesn't apply to HN. I rarely if ever figure out what the commenters here are watching or listening to. But I would be surprised if they were much different.
It did, and a large number of people on the Right took attitudes exactly like the Right takes on climate change today.
That faction was somewhat weaker within the Right at the time, and the Right somewhat weaker overall, so the political resistance to the science wasn't as successful in preventing federal policy action as it has been in the US on climate change, but the same overall shape of political dispute occurred.
And another: http://www.newsweek.com/ozone-hole-our-heads-194308
It precisely matches my recollection, as someone who spent far too long listening to Mr. Limbaugh at the time.
How in the holy hell would it be Gore's fault? He has tried to be a communicator on this issue for decades. He's "highly polarized" because the great smear machine felt it needed to destroy him for having the temerity to run for President.
The "lame folksy rhetoric" is Gore's way of trying to appeal to the skeptics. The problem with issues like climate change is that they're so large and complex that most people feel powerless to affect change, so they do nothing.
An Inconvenient Truth was meant to impart the severity, but also the hope that small changes will make a difference and that, collectively, there's a chance to change course. At the very least, lower our contribution in an effort to change course.
Honestly, blaming this on Gore is beyond comprehension. I'm trying to not to be hyperbolic, but this type of knee-jerk reaction and selective bias highlights how this issue is politicized, and will, as evidence suggests, lead to devastation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JIuKjaY3r4
This 6 minute clip made me question the entire thing, because it was so full of half truths, innuendo, false conclusions, and then topped off with a politician's favorite rhetorical device--morality.
So when Al Gore started caricaturing the "so-called skeptics" I started listening closely. Because that's what you do when someone is trying to bamboozle you. And at every turn, when he laid down reason and picked up rhetoric, there was an "inconvenient truth" that he knew he could not hide so he resorted to lame arguments and hand waving.
Al Gore's inconvenient truths, just from that clip:
1:30 - The medieval warm period was actually quite warm, and you can't simply will it away by adjusting your chart or appealing to humor. Did you notice the chart goes from big smooth lines to little jagged lines? I did. Apparently it's a reconstruction where scientists have attempted to compare prehistoric temperatures to modern ones. I fundamentally reject that this is a fair way to present data to make your case. Those jagged lines should have error bars at least. The "hockey stick" has since been removed from IPCC reports out of embarrassment (see the 'Climategate' scandal and efforts by McIntyre and McKitrick to reproduce the hockey stick study).
2:55 - "In all of this time, 650,000 years, the CO2 level has never gone above 300 parts per million". First of all this is wrong. The Holocene has seen an oscillation from 210 to 385 ppm. I don't know where he's getting his numbers. What he also does not say is that this trend is actually quite rare. In most of the Earth's history the CO2 level has been many many times higher, from 2000 to 8000 ppm in the last 500 million years.
3:00 - The two charts very clearly fit together because of the opposite relationship that Gore is implying: A warmer climate means more biological activity, therefore more CO2. Duh. But somehow he is bamboozling his audience into believing that the relationship goes the other way. An elementary scientific attitude would at least say "hey wait a minute, correlation does not imply causation."
6:00 - After the elevator gag, he responds to "so-called skeptics" with hand-waving. "If this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be?" The audience is left to conjure doomsday scenarios in their minds. The answer could very well be "far more economic growth due to great swaths of land opened up for farming" but no, Al Gore is sure it's going to be a catastrophe.
6:15 - Then here comes the "this is not politics, this is a moral issue" which is a politician's favorite thing to say. Love the finger pointing and lowered tone of voice. Again this is the kind of behavior that makes a reasonable person question the basis of the whole thing.
I get that Gore really believes he needs to stop Manbearpig and needs to do it ASAP. But he and everyone else on the political left that wants vast international control over economies (and that's really what his political plan is) should have expected some blowback from this kind of rhetoric. And that's my answer to chasing's question of "how could it be Gore's fault" that there is skepticism over his crazy agenda.
I will forever be amazed at people's ability to blame other people for issues because they raised them. It's amazing.
I don't see Gore at fault but rather an unintentional result.
People have tried to politicize the smoking links. Mike Pence in 2001:
pence> Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20010415085348/http://mikepence.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
> Also in 1985, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation."[21] And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."
"We" do. It's a faction of conservatives in the US who either don't or find it politically useful not to. Unfortunately they're currently in charge. Obama had started to move the US towards working on the problem, but that's hit a wall now.
>(Is this, sort of, Gore's fault, combined with a highly-polarizing media? I have to wonder.)
This is madness. Gore didn't politicize the issue, the right did by gearing up their ideology media machine to skewer him as part of its anti-climate change crusade.
Very many people, even on HN, do not trust doctors. There's a bunch of anti-vax bollocks on HN, and any thread about doctoring includes people saying they can't wait until all doctors are replaced with AI because doctors don't know anything.
Everything's ridiculously polarised. :-/
A renewable that is cheaper than coal is really the only thing that is going to work.
Here is a video trailer for the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu6637cjk8A
Edit: This interview with Dave Rubin may also be helpful in understanding the other point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJmL9hRrpIQ
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443
It's both hilarious and sad at the same time
The last 2 summers have had heatwaves that killed Indians, Europe just had a big one the last few weeks. Meanwhile, German automakers were caught in a conspiracy about diesel. Their government actually argued to keep lax testing methods a few years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...)!
I can't tell if you are being cute because both of those things were very much politicized.
Nobody in the US has an intuition for what a change of 2 degrees celcius feels like.
I'm not. I grew up in the US and lived there for 26 years. How is it idiocy to lack an intuitive sense for a unit of measurement that you don't ever use?
At this point I have almost no faith that until things get dire enough to cause even the most ignorant layperson to realize there's a serious problem going on, that anything impactful will be done to stop it, and by then it may be too late due to runaway multiplicative effects (such as the thawing of permafrost methane in the Arctic, or the absence of snow cover resulting in less planet-surface reflectivity)