{"id":2196,"date":"2009-12-11T01:19:09","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T01:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2009-12-11T01:19:09","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T01:19:09","slug":"an_instrumental","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2196","title":{"rendered":"An Instrumental Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Juicebox Mafia writes about Climategate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Something those of us who want to prevent catastrophic climate change need to remember is that we’re right. Not just factually right, but morally. But while it’s true that effective communications tactics employed by the other side have been helpful to their cause, ultimately the main thing that’s helped them has been the willingness of people who know better to act in a morally indefensible manner.<\/p>\n

I’m fairly certain, for example, that Fred Hiatt wouldn’t strangle a baby polar bear just for cheap thrills. But he would run an ignorant Sarah Palin op-ed on climate, and repeatedly allow George Will to mislead people about climate science. What’s more, if Hiatt strolled around Washington soaked in the blood of polar bears he’d been strangling, people would treat him like a pariah. But instead his friends and colleagues and professional peers have evidently decided that he’s just a nice guy who happens to run a crappy-but-influential op-ed page.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/a> <\/p>\n

Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack? Certainly, it was hard to imagine how they might pull off such a strike: They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action. Within scientific circles, it was even becoming commonplace to discuss planetary modification, or geoengineering, as an alternative last ditch solution if we couldn’t stop runaway greenhouse warming in time.<\/p>\n

But the skeptics were lying in wait. They didn’t need good science to make another sally: Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You know, I’d say that given what’s emerging as we get – not only into the emails, but into the computer models and raw data that being unearthed, that concrete certainty like this can only be explained in one way:<\/p>\n

…since the essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality that one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.<\/p>\n

– 1984, Orwell.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because truth isn’t just inconvenient, it’s instrumental<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I remain in the ‘not sure’ camp on AGW as science; but put me down into the ‘damn sure’ camp that making society-reshaping decisions on bad science isn’t about the science – it’s really about the reshaping.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Truth is indeed sometimes inconvenient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}