Points of No Return
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 15, 2014
Recently two research teams,
working independently and using
different methods, reached an
alarming conclusion: The West
Antarctic ice sheet is doomed . The
sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the
resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will
probably happen slowly. But it’s
irreversible. Even if we took drastic
action to limit global warming right
now, this particular process of
environmental change has reached a
point of no return.
Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida — much of whose state is
now fated to sink beneath the waves
— weighed in on climate change.
Some readers may recall that in 2012
Mr. Rubio, asked how old he
believed the earth to be, replied “ I’m
not a scientist, man .” This time,
however, he confidently declared the
overwhelming scientific consensus
on climate change false, although in
a later interview he was unable to
cite any sources for his skepticism.
So why would the senator make such
a statement? The answer is that like
that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual
evolution (or maybe more accurately,
its devolution) has reached a point of
no return, in which allegiance to
false doctrines has become a crucial
badge of identity.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about
the power of doctrines — how
support for a false dogma can
become politically mandatory, and
how overwhelming contrary
evidence only makes such dogmas
stronger and more extreme. For the
most part, I’ve been focusing on
economic issues, but the same story
applies with even greater force to
climate.
To see how it works, consider a topic
I know well: the recent history of
inflation scares.
More than five years have passed
since many conservatives started
warning that the Federal Reserve, by
taking action to contain the financial
crisis and boost the economy, was
setting the stage for runaway
inflation. And, to be fair, that wasn’t
a crazy position to take in 2009; I
could have told you it was wrong
(and, in fact, I did), but you could see
where it was coming from.
Over time, however, as the promised
inflation kept failing to arrive, there
should have come a point when the
inflationistas conceded their error
and moved on.
In fact, however, few did. Instead,
they mostly doubled down on their
predictions of doom, and some
moved on to conspiracy theorizing ,
claiming that high inflation was
already happening, but was being
concealed by government officials.
Why the bad behavior? Nobody likes
admitting to mistakes, and all of us
— even those of us who try not to —
sometimes engage in motivated
reasoning, selectively citing facts to
support our preconceptions.
But hard as it is to admit one’s own
errors, it’s much harder to admit that
your entire political movement got it
badly wrong. Inflation phobia has
always been closely bound up with
right-wing politics; to admit that this
phobia was misguided would have
meant conceding that one whole side
of the political divide was
fundamentally off base about how
the economy works. So most of the
inflationistas have responded to the
failure of their prediction by
becoming more, not less, extreme in
their dogma, which will make it even
harder for them ever to admit that
they, and the political movement
they serve, have been wrong all
along.
The same kind of thing is clearly
happening on the issue of global
warming. There are, obviously, some
fundamental factors underlying
G.O.P. climate skepticism: The
influence of powerful vested
interests (including, though by no
means limited to, the Koch brothers),
plus the party’s hostility to any
argument for government
intervention. But there is clearly also
some kind of cumulative process at
work. As the evidence for a changing
climate keeps accumulating, the
Republican Party’s commitment to
denial just gets stronger.
Think of it this way: Once upon a
time it was possible to take climate
change seriously while remaining a
Republican in good standing. Today,
listening to climate scientists gets you
excommunicated — hence Mr.
Rubio’s statement, which was
effectively a partisan pledge of
allegiance.
And truly crazy positions are
becoming the norm . A decade ago,
only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe
asserted that global warming was a
hoax concocted by a vast global
conspiracy of scientists (although
even then that fringe included some
powerful politicians). Today, such
conspiracy theorizing is mainstream
within the party, and rapidly
becoming mandatory; witch hunts
against scientists reporting evidence
of warming have become standard
operating procedure, and skepticism
about climate science is turning into
hostility toward science in general.
It’s hard to see what could reverse
this growing hostility to inconvenient
science. As I said, the process of
intellectual devolution seems to have
reached a point of no return. And
that scares me more than the news
about that ice sheet.
