I'd like to comment on the psychology of the steroid years in Major League baseball and the phenomena described by climate science. There are 4 stages associated with both. First, scientists collected data, both current data and ancient data. They showed that during the Quaternary (last couple million years) climate and greenhouse gases have fluctuated, with climates bouncing back and forth between ice ages and interglacial periods similar to that in which we currently reside. Much care went into building this data set, filtering out bad data and refining it. It became clear that the Holocene climate (the last 10k years) was changing in an unnatural way, and in concert with a rapid rise in carbon dioxide, which ancient climates were also sensitive to. It wasn't a guess, or a radical idea, it was simple physics and observation. It was ignored.
During the late 90s and early 2000s, changes were taking place in baseball. Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire in particular put on lots of muscle mass and started belting lots of home runs. The data set was obvious and any person with common sense knew that this was not natural. But it was our national past time and we liked the drama and the round-trippers. The reason that these freakishly over-sized home-run machines were hitting it out of the park was ignored.
Stage two began when climate data were released, concurrent with a change in political and public acceptance of science--not all science, just climate and evolution science. This began with Ronald Reagan, who brought the religious right into the throngs of the Republican Party. And it peaked during Bush's war on science. All of a sudden, the increase in global temperature, which coincided with increased CO2 and methane in the atmosphere, was dubbed the "hockey stick" and was attacked by numerous "experts" funded by the energy industry--most if not all had never published a paper on climate science. Politically and socially, many were in denial. At the same time, Barry Bonds' trainer was coming forth with stories of how he injected Barry with designer steroids. He and many other sluggers--with the exception of McGuire--denied ever taking any steroids. And reporters were attacked if they ran stories of, for instance, seeing actual steroids in a player's locker. If you like things the way they are in your fantasy world where there is no such thing as cause and effect, then deny that there is anything going on. Worked for the tobacco industry.
Stage three began as more and more data came forward, and the weather seemed to change. More satellites and land observations showed oceans warming, glaciers and permafrost melting, deserts growing, and oceans becoming more acidic. But the deniers weren't going to give. Their chorus was that the planet may be warming, but it's natural. The sun was getting warmer and it wasn't our fault. Get out of the way and let us burn fossil fuels. Barry and company also started to admit that something was going on, but he said that though he may have been using, he didn't know it was steroids. He thought it was flax-seed oil--magic flax-seed oil apparently. In any case, it wasn't his fault.
Stage four is the stage where the denier no longer can dispute what is happening, or what is causing it. The planet may have already crossed a tipping point. But the strategy was not to deny or dispute the science, it was to introduce chaos, to spread doubt like OJ's lawyers did. And much of the populace ate it up. "Oh, there's plenty of blame to go around. It's too expensive in these times to do any thing about it. The scientists don't even agree on global warming. Al Gore flies around in a jet, polluting the air while telling us we're no good for warming the earth." All either lies, ad hominem attacks, or straw-man arguments. And, the admission from baseball that the "steroid era" was over, carried the caveat that Barry and Mark were the best hitters ever, and steroids didn't give them that gift--I suppose just an extra hundred feet of distance. Again, it was not disputing the data or the results, just defending the guilty parties by casting doubt whether the steroids actually caused the inordinate number of home runs hit while they were cartoonish muscle-bound freaks.
And here we are. Baseball has presumably cleaned up their act, but the American public, many of whom know very little about what climate science really is, or how amazing many of the scientists are--or how extensive the knowledge base really is--still attack and deny and vilify. They also forget that one cannot excel in science if one is biased. You can't make up climate science. Good science is why we find oil reservoirs, why we know that a drug might work, and why we can get a man back safely from the moon or the Space Station.
But the sick election of 2010 showed us that irrational seeds sowed by the Rovian politics of the 2000s have divided us--in many cases turned off our brains--and given us gifts like multi-national corporations with First Amendment rights, and the tea party movement, whose candidates to a man deny the results of climate science.
We ignored, denied, shirked culpability, and cast doubt. But we do this at our peril. Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire will still be revered by some; may have a asterisk next to their records, and will probably be hated by others. But our planet is changing before our eyes. We will ask God to make it continue to support 6 billion, 7 billion, X billion people. We will expect the same scientists that we hate on Fox News to engineer a way out. We will fight over the last damn barrel of oil and the last arable acre. But there's no hall of fame for climate deniers, and no asterisk for a planet that has lost in a couple hundred years what the previous millions of years took to create and support human occupation. Batter up!
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