Al Gore has performed a useful service by calling our nation's attention to climate change, but in his zeal he seems to have lost the ability, or willingness, to make basic distinctions. In a recent interview, for example, Gore compares the attempt to "win the conversation" on climate change to the attempt earlier in our history to win the conversation on racial equality.
Mr. Gore certainly knows that the campaign for equality was a moral, not a scientific, debate. The controversy over climate change, on the other hand, is a debate over methodology, reliability and interpretation of data. To juxtapose the two is, intentionally or not, to subtly smear his opponents as the same kind of people as racists.
The second thing to which to object in his comparison is that the debate over how we should treat minorities was conducted largely by showing people how their behavior failed to conform to their own moral principles and thus essentially shame them into changing their behavior. There should be no place for shaming people in the debate over climate change unless they have behaved unethically. The debate should be conducted in the realm of empirical facts. The use of public censure, which Mr. Gore seems to endorse against his critics, is antithetical to a dispassionate scientific attempt to follow the evidence.
Third, Mr. Gore implies that the evil polluters are motivated by greed whereas the humble scientists, or at least the ones who agree with him, are motivated simply by a noble desire to find the truth. This is naive. Scientists are just as human as corporate CEOs. They may be motivated by different inducements, but they're often still driven by concerns such as the desire for professional prestige, a commitment to advancing a political ideology, lucrative book contracts and speaking engagements, etc. Mr. Gore may be correct that the polluters have selfish motives and the climatologists warning about climate change do not, but he doesn't know this or offer us reasons why we should believe it. Given our lack of insight into the motives of the players it's best to assume, pending further evidence, that one's opponents are simply mistaken without assuming that they're evil.
One further point of interest in Mr. Gore's attempt to subtly treat climate change skeptics* as the modern equivalent of 20th century racists is that his own father opposed equality for blacks and voted against the Civil Rights Act as a member of the U.S. Senate. One wonders if Gore, Jr. ever expressed toward his own father the moral opprobrium and indignation with which he says his generation challenged the older generation during the days of the civil rights movement.
Pat Gray had some fun with this yesterday on Glenn Beck's radio show. Actually, I think Gray is being a bit unfair to Gore, Jr. here since he doesn't know what transpired between father and son, but even so, his diatribe raises a pertinent question about Mr. Gore's pontification on this issue in his interview. How fervently did the young Gore press his own father on the matter of social justice for blacks?
Thanks to Hot Air for the links.
*Actually the term "climate change skeptic" is probably a misnomer. Most people I've read on this subject are not skeptical of climate change itself but rather of the claim that whatever change is occurring is 1. definitely a bad thing, and 2. man-caused.
