There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled in 2008. . . . On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category. Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles.

As he asks, ‘What is going on?’. One possibility he raises draws on the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s idea that we protect ourselves with “vital lies” when under threat. I’m not so sure. As Monbiot says, there are two opposed armies at war here: armies of right wing bloggers and their ilk in one corner, and concerned scientists in the other.

What we are seeing, then, is the wash-up of years of political tribalism; a kind of gruesome end-game to the culture wars, and a weak media that lumps science in with questions of ‘balance’ as if scientific opinion were like any other, and that reports climate change as a kind of remote novelty. What chance did science really have?

Meanwhile, Ross Gittins has an excellent column in today’s Fairfaxes, reporting on Treasury Secretary Ken Henry’s recent speech about ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ in Oz. Population growth, global warming, technological change and the rise and rise of India and China are Henry’s themes. But warming is the bit where he gets really interesting. As Gittins says:

His second long-term force bearing on us is climate change. So far, the main thing occupying the minds of our business people and politicians is how we can introduce an emissions trading scheme without hurting anyone.

Henry offers the tart observation that the introduction of such schemes ”is intended to cause a significant shift in the structure of the Australian and global economies over coming decades; quite possibly the largest structural adjustment in economic history. That is the point of doing it.”

Translation: It’s meant to hurt because that’s what changes people’s behaviour. If it doesn’t hurt it won’t work.

So there’s another plank in Monbiot’s thesis about growing denialism: it doesn’t hurt as much right now. But perhaps denialism isn’t the real problem so much as stasis. Gittins continues with a spot-on assessment of the consequences of Ruddism:

Even if the world does get its act together on fighting climate change, we’re in for a fair bit of it anyway. And if the rest of the world is being led by far-sighted leaders like Kevin Rudd, with oppositions like ours, the likelihood is the world won’t get its act together.

If so, we’ll reap the whirlwind. If we find the consequences of mitigating climate change so daunting, what’s it going to be like adapting to it? Our already dry continent will become drier. It’s likely some of our agriculture will be wiped out, with much of the rest having to move north.

It could be that much of the population has to move from the south-eastern corner of the continent. You think we’ve got a problem with boat people? Can you imagine how many there’ll be if the Pacific islands and half of Bangladesh are under water?

But he’s not done yet:

It’s how these four disparate forces could fit together that worries me. Analysis is one thing, synthesis quite another. The possibility of our indulged and indulgent electorate successfully navigating all these cross-currents I find remote.

Which brings us back to where we started: we are now paying the price for an era of extreme political populism is which every voter whim has been pandered to, and in which people expect every policy solution to be cost free to them. Rampant denialism, in other words, is just one more symptom of a deeper political disease. The old public sphere and its redoubts in science, expert opinion and rigorous reporting, has fractured, with some gains (it was rather paternalistic and white and blokey, chums), but at what cost considering that what remains has been handed over to and is dominated by a conservative movement far more powerful and less democratic than its (lefty) critics ever anticipated was possible?

No wonder we can’t move forward on climate change.

. . . has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.

. . . has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.

Bérubé cites several factors in this lack of success, but chief among them is that:

Finally, cultural studies has had negligible impact on the American academic left in a political sense. (I make this argument at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Left at War.) That is because much of the American academic left continues to subscribe to the “manufacturing consent” model, in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media. The point to be made in response is not that corporate mass media don’t dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day. The point, rather, is that work like Hall’s on the ideological underpinnings of deregulation and privatization under Thatcher (which he called “authoritarian populism”) shows that the situation is much more complicated than that propaganda model. The left’s task would actually be easier if all it had to do was expose lies as lies. Instead, you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response. 

. . . Today plenty of people on the left continue to believe that working-class conservatives are bamboozled by the corporate media into misidentifying their real material interests. False consciousness, after all, is what’s the matter with Kansas.

My feeling, for what it’s worth, is that neither Bérubé or his longtime adversary Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, 2004), who he cites as an example of the standard left approach, have a theory of media and reception adequate to the task. The narratives offered by one are too complex; the narratives offered by the other too simple. Both are doomed to lament their failures, chronically unable to counter or account for the successes of the right.

But it seems to me there is a deeper lapse here. Bérubé, Stuart Hall, and Larry Grossberg, are among a fairly small group of cultural studies scholars who have had much to say about the right, apart from a bit of ritualised gesturing in the direction of ‘neoliberalism’, which almost no-one in either of the camps Bérubé mentions actually understands or is able to properly historicise (even the distinction between neoliberalism and neoconservatism eludes most, let alone the distinction between neoliberalism and neoclassicism). Until the Bush presidency cultural studies was in fact almost silent on the topic of conservatism. Enter Thomas Frank. Not such a tragedy perhaps. His attack on cultural studies in One Market Under God is pretty banal, but in other respects Frank has some interesting things to say.

The trouble is that somewhere near the end of this long-running debate (surely we’re nearly there now?) we’ve ended up with a kind of binarist choice between two analytical caricatures: one that says that people are more often or not dupes, and another that says the reader is paramount. It’s just a matter of whose hegemony you prefer: that of producer or consumer. Now ain’t that banal?

GetUp are running a fund-raiser to get a counter-ad shown. It’s excellent.

And Hungry Beast (disclaimer: I was involved in the backgrounding for the show) have also done a pretty good take on things as well:

But perhaps pollies are right to be backing away from the ETS. After all, according to a Lowy Institute poll released today, as reported in the Oz, the public appear to be losing interest in the issue:

In 2007, tackling climate change was perceived as the joint top foreign policy goal, together with protecting the jobs of Australian workers.

In 2007, 75 per cent of those surveyed said climate change was a very important issue. Last year, this fell to 66 per cent, and this year to 56 per cent.

Global warming was viewed as “a critical threat” by 68 per cent in 2007, 66 per cent last year and 52 per cent this year.

Admittedly the sample was only 1003. But the government has done its best to run dead on the issue and kill any real expectations of change, and the rear-guard action from denialists has been strong, especially those arguments that counterpose action on warming against job losses and energy price increases – both issues bound to make any marginal seat holder nervous. And other immediately pressing issues like the GFC have also raised fears about job security for many.

The public and pollies seem to be caught in a mutually reinforcing downwards spiral. Pollies won’t act because the public doesn’t care. No-one in power is showing real leadership, so the public have switched off. 

Global warming? Oh that was so 2007.

So here, for those who may be confused (and Plimer’s aim, like all denialists, is to confuse rather than illuminate), are some good old-fashioned factual analyses of his arguments. Actually, you don’t even need to go as far as the argument to see what unmitigated nonsense the book is. Despite parading his scientific credentials, Plimer can’t even get footnotes or basic data right. A good fact check is here. Nor is he honest in his response to his critics. And here, for good measure, is the review in the Australian by astrophysicist Michael Ashley. As the Ashley wrote, the book is right up there with those that reckon the moon landing was a hoax:

If Plimer is right and he is able to show that the work of literally thousands of oceanographers, solar physicists, biologists, atmospheric scientists, geologists, and snow and ice researchers during the past 100 years is fundamentally flawed, then it would rank as one of the greatest discoveries of the century and would almost certainly earn him a Nobel prize. This is the scale of Plimer’s claim.

[...]

Perhaps we will find a stitch-by-stitch demolition of climate science in his book, as promised? No such luck. The arguments that Plimer advances in the 503 pages and 2311 footnotes in Heaven and Earth are nonsense. The book is largely a collection of contrarian ideas and conspiracy theories that are rife in the blogosphere. The writing is rambling and repetitive; the arguments flawed and illogical.

[. . .]

To appreciate the errors in Plimer’s book you don’t have to be a climate scientist. For example, take the measurement of the global average CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. This is obviously important, so scientists measure it with great care at many locations across the world.

Precision measurements have been made daily since 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, a mountain-top site with a clear airflow unaffected by local pollution. The data is in excellent agreement with ice cores from several sites in Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of scientific papers have been written on the topic, hundreds of scientists are involved from many independent research groups.

Plimer, however, writes that a simple home experiment indoors can show that in a week, CO2 can vary by 75 parts per million by volume, equal to about 40 years’ worth of change at the present rate. He thinks this “rings alarm bells” on the veracity of the Mauna Loa data, which shows a smoothly rising concentration.

While it is undoubtedly true that if you measure CO2 in your home it could vary by large amounts from day to day — depending, for example, on whether you have the windows open or closed, or how many people are in the house at the time — this is not the right way to measure a global average. That’s why scientists go to mountain-tops or Antarctica or to the isolated Cape Grimm on the Tasmanian coast rather than measuring CO2 in their living rooms.

Incredible as it may seem, this quality of argument is typical of the book. While the text is annotated profusely with footnotes and refers to papers in the top journals, thus giving it the veneer of scholarship, it is often the case that the cited articles do not support the text. 

[. . .]

Plimer probably didn’t expect an astronomer to review his book. I couldn’t help noticing on page120 an almost word-for-word reproduction of the abstract from a well-known loony paper entitled “The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass”. This paper argues that the sun isn’t composed of 98 per cent hydrogen and helium, as astronomers have confirmed through a century of observation and theory, but is instead similar in composition to a meteorite.

It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis.

Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not “merely” atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer’s book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.

Just about says it all, really.

Quietly nasty, the review certainly isn’t the ‘scrupulously fair’ price Wallace self-servingly claims it to be in today’s Crikey. It’s a pretty straightforward attempt at gatekeeping that gets its first kick in in para 2 and maintains a condescending tone thereafter. The book is dismissed as a ‘curiously flat’,  ‘friendly political quickie’; a ‘plain-vanilla’, ‘uncomplicated’, ‘description without analysis’. Kent’s most egregious sin apparently being that she had access to Gillard that Wallace hasn’t been granted.

My fave piece of nastiness is: ‘Where The Making of Julia Gillard fits into Kent’s oevre is not immediately apparent.’ The message is clear. Having written a (very well-received) bio of book-editing legend Beatrice Davis and another of pianist Hephzibah Menuhin, Kent isn’t a proper political biographer. Not proper Canberra people. Not ‘one of us’.

But there are lapses of judgement all round. Why did Monthly editor Ben Naparstek publish it, let alone run a front cover teaser pitching ‘biography wars’? Most wars take two. ‘Biography mugging’ would have been more accurate.

Meanwhile, Monthly pater Robert Manne has been cooking up a conspiracy, telling Crikey in the wake of complaints about the review to the Monthly by Kent’s publisher, Ben Ball at Penguin, that former Monthly editor Warhaft, who famously fell out spectacularly with Manne and the Monthly earlier this year, was
 ‘friends with Ben Ball and that she was involved in the launch of
 Jacqueline Kent’s book.’

Apparently Warhaft did indeed moderate the book’s launch event. But so what? That wouldn’t seem to undermine the ethical point of Ball’s complaint.

According to Crikey, ‘Manne also suggested Ball was gunning for Naparstek’s resignation’, and told them that ‘Crikey
should try to find out who is trying to undermine Ben [Naparstek's] editorship, and why’. Now, I like Manne, but someone needs to call him and tell him the time for cold-war-style paranoia is over.

As has so often been the case under all three of its editors thus far, someone at the Monthly needs to have the courage to look in the mirror every now and then and say, ‘well that was a fucking stupid idea’. But they never do. They just keep blundering on, full of hubris. And the poor lame thing — Lord knows we all want it to succeed — just never gets any better.

Even as a left-leaning centrist it’s hard not to admire this legacy. I’ve read a lot of Kristol and even at his most repugnant (his anti-multiculturalist writings, for example), he wrote in a clear, hard-edged style that is always compelling. Like many of his neocon generation — Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — he took  inspiration from the 1960s left and its machine (Kristol was former Trotskyist), even as he was bagging their ‘new class’ (another Kristolism) ways. Probably the most telling marker of just how influential they were is that the left has never really caught up with or been able to counter neocon rhetoric. They got bogged down in an entirely defensive welfarist pro-’big government’ position that was unable to concede its failures. Their ‘public’ turned out to be a fantasy or else moved to the right. Even now, in the wake of the GFC and the much over-hyped ‘death of neoliberalism’, they haven’t been able to craft a narrative that goes far beyond ‘we told you so’. Kristol and the other key strategists of the radical conservative revolution had completely blind-sided them.

Obits here and here.