A felicitously presented documentary on global warming -- or rather how to under mine acceptance of scientific findings. Full disclosure: I am a behavioral scientist who has spent thirty years in research and can generally tell the good from the bad.
According to this film it all began with the tobacco industry. I don't know why it's so consistently called "big tobacco" since as far as I can tell there is no such thing as "little tobacco." If there were, what would it look like -- a Mom and Pop store with a patch of tobacco plants in the back yard and a cigarette rolling machine? Anyway -- you'll have to excuse my divagations. The voices tell me to do it from time to time.
Anyway, things began to get a bit hot for the tobacco industry in the 1950s with the growing public awareness of what appeared to be a link between smoking and lung cancer. So they hired a PR firm to help them out, and it worked fine for forty or fifty years. There was a scroll of techniques for disarming the public, for introducing doubt about the conclusion. I didn't write the dozen or so down because I wasn't taking notes, but they ran along lines like "attack the messenger", "find another enemy," "muddy the waters," "pay for your own experts," "say we need more research," and the like.
It was really a dirty business, not just because it wound up killing so many people but because it laid out a playbook for handling controversies in other scientific areas backed by vested interests. The techniques were so effective at inducing confusion that other industries have picked them up and used them. All of the techniques are now being used daily by the fossil fuel industry.
Some of the "merchants of doubt" are proud of their profession, as all effective professionals should be. The most agreeable of them admits to enjoying sending anonymous death threats to climate scientists, and I would be surprised if there weren't ill-paid human robots in Macedonia or someplace who were being paid to grind out insults and fake news about what they call "global warming alarmism."
There is no debate in scientific circles about anthropogenic global warming. The only questions left are about details, not about human contributions to climate change. That matter is settled. Look up Global Warming Controversy in Wikipedia. And recall, though the film doesn't mention it, that most leaders of the developed world came to an agreement in Kyoto about reducing greenhouse gases. We withdrew from the Kyoto accords some ten years ago, when we were the world's leading polluter. It was 2015 when about 200 countries were represented at a meeting in Paris and agreed to more stringent rules governing greenhouse gas emission, including China, which had taken over the number one spot. The USA signed the agreement too but we're now in the process of pulling out.
I'd always wondered what exactly motivated the people who stood firm in opposition to the indisputable findings of scientists around the world. It had to be something more general, more implanted in the mind, than simple skepticism because, after all, scientists are among the most skeptical people on earth. Without giving it much thought, I finally came to think it might be simply that acceptance of anthropogenic global warming had somehow come to be defined as a "liberal" position. (To me, it was about as liberal as the Zika virus.)
But the rhetoric of "climate deniers" pins it down to an impulse that no one can argue with -- the desire for "freedom," specifically freedom from still more government regulations. Nobody wants Big Brother telling him what to eat or what kind of energy to use. Another reasons, briefly referred to, is that most scientists are poor public performers. They don't pound their chests and bellow, and they talk like wimps. Compare Bill Nye the Science Guy with Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones. I mean, for Bog's sake, Nye wears a BOW TIE!
I doubt that the program will persuade anyone who denies AGW that they're wrong. It's tough for anyone to admit he's wrong. I'm afraid a lot of people will dismiss the program as still more socialist propaganda. However, it's a well-done documentary, both in terms of the narrative and the visual effects. It's not at all academic. It's far too clear for that -- and much more entertaining.
