Can't Deny Global Warming? Jonah Goldberg Just Changes the Subject

For years the coal and oil industries relied on an out-and-out denial of global warming as their strategy. Obfuscating the issue and confusing people allowed them to stave off regulations and continue business as usual with their CO2 producing products.

            There are still people and organizations that work at global warming denial, attack climate scientists, or repeat the “more research needs to be done” meme. But now as the glaciers retreat farther, the seas rise higher, and temperatures inch up every year, it’s harder and harder to get people to take you seriously when you deny that there is global warming. So what is a GOP supporting, right wing rhetor supposed to do when he is confronted with climate change?

            He changes the subject.

            That’s what Jonah Goldberg tries to do in his latest op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. In the piece, Goldberg takes aim at Bill McKibben, who took part in a short piece for The Atlantic titled “How and When Will the World End?” The author, environmentalist, and co-founder of 350.org had this to say about the world’s end:

In a sense, the world as we knew it is already over. We have heated the Earth, melted the Arctic, and turned seawater 30 percent more acidic. The only question left is how much more fossil fuel we’ll burn, and hence how unfamiliar and inhospitable we’ll make our home planet.

Goldberg has worked for the American Enterprise Institute, an organization that receives a great deal of money from Exxon-Mobile and that tried to buy off scientists with large cash payments to write articles critical of the IPCC’s 2007 report on global warming, and he doesn’t like what McKibben has to say. He knows, however, as the science backs up what McKibben is talking about, he cannot criticize what McKibben says. So Goldberg just changes the subject and rejoices in the facts that malaria is virtually unknown in North America, smallpox is eradicated across the globe, much backbreaking labor for people in the industrialized world is now mechanized, and—despite the mechanized slaughter of modern warfare—humans, we assume, kill each other less frequently than we did when our ancestors lived in caves.

            While I don’t necessarily share Goldberg’s happy faced view of human history, he does make a good point. At least for a good number of people who live in an industrialized society life in the 21^st century is bitchin’. But that has nothing to do with what Bill McKibben said in The Atlantic. We not only have the ability to wreck the planet with CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, we have already irrevocably started down that path, that is McKibben’s point. That I’m not threatened by Neolithic tribal warfare has nothing to do with McKibben’s dire statement.