Year 3, Month 7, Day 20: Lexicography Edition

The Wisconsin State Journal’s Cynthia Tucker says that “Global warming skeptics rule GOP”:

For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.

If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?

They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.

This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.

Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Barack Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.

I hate it when words are misused. Don’t you? Sent July 9:

Describing the GOP as being “ruled by global warming skeptics” would be right on target, were it not for one small problem: genuine skeptics rely on evidence; they’re ready to change their minds when the facts demand it. They distrust their own preconceptions and are ready to suspend judgement in order to accumulate and analyze relevant facts. And genuine skeptics always seek to avoid confirmation bias in their research.

Conservative politicians’ approach to climate change, like their approach to every other policy area in modern American life, embodies none of these qualities. Rather, they’re entirely driven by confirmation bias, dismissing any information that threatens their preconceptions. Having decided long ago that climate science was a “liberal” issue, they’re ideologically bound to deny its existence, severity, and causes.

True skepticism demands intellectual discipline and rigor, qualities not found in any contemporary Republican analysis of climate change. Describing Republican true believers as “skeptics” is an undeserved insult to the genuinely skeptical, and an undeserved compliment to cynical and intellectually complacent politicians who wouldn’t recognize intellectual rigor if it slapped them in the face.

Warren Senders