With this news in mind, a two-man film crew has hit the back roads of America to, in their words, kick-start a new national conversation about climate change — one that might circumvent heated politics by focusing on local perspectives.

On the back of a sky-blue 1971 Royal Enfield diesel motorcycle (run on biodiesel when they can get it) Erik Fyfe and Albert Thrower are traveling across the Northeast, talking with individuals whose livelihoods have been influenced by climate change, including farmers, foresters, resource managers, and insurers. Their aim is to bring attention to the real climate impacts that small-town Americans are already experiencing.

Their project, called Slow Ride Stories, is predicated in part on another finding from the Yale climate change communication crew (who provided financial support for the video tour): Despite their skepticism, Americans are increasingly associating extreme weather events with climate change. This gave Fyfe and Thrower hope that honest conversations, held in diners and barbershops, might make a real difference to how the public perceives, and in time responds to, climate change.

“People are uncomfortable when the conversation turns to global warming. We want to change that,” Fyfe, a personal friend, told me recently when I caught up to the travelers on a weekend stop at Yale University’s experimental forest in northern Connecticut. (Fyfe holds a degree in Environmental Management from Yale.)

In one of their videos, a truck driver describes a recent storm that destroyed a historic building in his hometown of Haverstraw, N.Y. “Hundred-year floods? We’ve had three of those this year,” he says.

In another interview, a young sailor on the Hudson River wonders if he’ll make good on his dream to live aboard a sailboat. “If it’s going to be really bad here, in terms of how often storms are going to come through, then maybe this is not what I want to do with a family,” he says.

The interviews, which will eventually become a documentary film, are heartfelt and touching. They also give you a sense that Thrower and Fyfe are creating space to talk about climate change in America both by striking up conversations with strangers and by injecting a sense of humor and humanity into the debate.

“If people start talking, if they see their neighbors, people like them, talking about these issues, and that inspires new conversations — that’s success,” Fyfe says.

You can find the duo’s videos on their website. A selection of them will be featured here on Grist throughout the summer. We’ll start with their introduction:

James Delingpole is a British journalist for The Telegraph who was primarily responsible for the pseudo-controversy known by the unoriginal name “Climategate.” Last month, he wrote an opinion piece mocking claims by climate scientists that they’d received death threats — in particular, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.

Delingpole wrote:

Maybe it’s time someone did an FOI to see whether the UEA’s dodgy and discredited Phil Jones really did get any of those “death threats” he claims to have received after Climategate and which allegedly drove him to consider suicide. Speaking for myself, if Phil Jones released a report claiming that grass is green I’d feel compelled to go outside just to double check.

Simon Hopkinson did exactly that. Yesterday, the university responded.

Jones is a climatologist who has contributed an enormous amount of research to understanding of climate science. His work has been used by, among others, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

After Delingpole and others made him a target of attack, he received over two dozen threatening emails [PDF]. Here are a few:

Three years ago, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig wrote an essay for The New Republic, “Against Transparency.” His argument was an uncommon one: Political transparency is not an unalloyed good. His core argument is well articulated here:

[R]esponses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response.

I am not a Harvard Law professor, so I will paraphrase the movie Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire version): With great amounts of information comes great opportunity for abuse.

We’ve all been in arguments during which our opponent cites a tangential piece of evidence as an indication that our entire point of view is wrong. This is, in part, Lessig’s point: legitimate debate getting mired in the ceaseless citation of trivia in an effort to call a debate a draw. Or, worse, that random information could be weakly strung together to imply wrongdoing. (It’s the stock-in-trade of Glenn Beck: minor links between unrelated things that give the appearance of conspiracies and nefariousness.) The bigger the pool of data you swim around in, the easier those links are to draw.

The legal profession’s version of this is the discovery process. All pertinent evidence is shared between sides; arguments are culled. The more evidence they have at their fingertips, the more they can build — or demolish — a case.

In 2010, British Petroleum asked two Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientists to assist in determining the rate at which the pipe severed by the Deepwater Horizon explosion was pumping oil into the Gulf of Mexico. They determined that amount to be about 57,000 barrels a day. The more that spilled, of course, the more that BP is liable. So, last week, the company subpoenaed the scientists’ private emails to prepare for a lawsuit against the government.

The scientists wrote an essay for the Boston Globe:

BP claimed that it needed to better understand our findings because billions of dollars in fines are potentially at stake. So we produced more than 50,000 pages of documents, raw data, reports, and algorithms used in our research — everything BP would need to analyze and confirm our findings. But BP still demanded access to our private communications. Our concern is not simply invasion of privacy, but the erosion of the scientific deliberative process.

Deliberation is an integral part of the scientific method that has existed for more than 2,000 years; e-mail is the 21st century medium by which these deliberations now often occur. During this process, researchers challenge each other and hone ideas. In reviewing our private documents, BP will probably find e-mail correspondence showing that during the course of our analysis, we hit dead-ends; that we remained skeptical and pushed one another to analyze data from various perspectives; that we discovered weaknesses in our methods (if only to find ways to make them stronger); or that we modified our course, especially when we received new information that provided additional insight and caused us to re-examine hypotheses and methods.

Their argument, in essence: BP can use our private deliberations to weaken our ultimate conclusions. And with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, that’s undoubtedly exactly what BP’s legal team intends to do: suss out instances in which the debate focused on different numbers and cite those as the examples that should be used. The scenario strongly echoes the infamous “Climategate” debacle which seems only now to be wrapping up. Emails stolen from university researchers were cherry-picked to present evidence contrary to established climate science. Sadly, it worked, further muddying the already gray waters of debate on global warming.

In nearly any debate, you can point to an instance that makes an argument counter to the weight of evidence. But it’s that weight — and its sources, and its derivatives — that are the desired outcome of rational deliberation. The scientists from Woods Hole applied that understood goal to their work for British Petroleum. BP, being motivated otherwise, seems prepared to use that intellectual rigor and honesty against them.

I respond in accordance with internet tradition: a listicle!

5. Conservatives have a long history of advancing environmental progress. In a column directed to Mitt Romney, Thomas Friedman reels off (one suspects from memory) “the G.O.P.’s long tradition of environmental stewardship that some Republicans are still proud of: Teddy Roosevelt bequeathed us national parks, Richard Nixon the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, Ronald Reagan the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and George H. W. Bush cap-and-trade that reduced acid rain.” This familiar litany is slightly misleading, attributing to presidents what is mostly the work of Congresses, but the basic point is valid enough: In the 20th century, Republicans have frequently played a constructive role on the environment.

4. There is a conservative approach to addressing climate change. Law professor Jonathan Adler has laid it out in the past and does so again in a much-discussed post over at The Atlantic. He suggests prizes for innovation, reduced regulatory barriers to alternative energy, a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and some measure of adaptation.

It’ll be no surprise to Adler or anyone else that I believe the problem is more severe than he does; solving it — as opposed to just “doing something” — will involve a far more vigorous government role than he envisions. But he makes an eloquent, principled case for the simple notion that “embrace of limited government principles need not entail the denial of environmental claims.” Conservatives could, if they wanted, spend their time arguing for their preferred solutions rather than denying scientific results.

3. There are conservatives who believe in taking action on climate change. Even those dismal polls we’re always talking about find 30 or 40 percent of Republicans acknowledging the threat of climate change. And support for clean air and clean energy policies remains high across the board. Heck, some — OK, a tiny handful of — conservatives are even brave enough to say so in public! It’s really only the hard nut of the GOP, anywhere from 15 to 30 percent, depending on how you measure, that is intensely and ideologically opposed to climate science and solutions alike. Oh, and almost all Republicans in Congress.

2. Mitt Romney used to say and do moderate things on green issues when he was governor of Massachusetts. He spoke in favor of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system for Northeastern states, and introduced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan. He wasn’t afraid to crack down on coal plants — I never get tired of this remarkable video:

Romney also directed considerable state funding to renewable energy companies and waged open war on sprawl. It’s almost like he was running a state where that kind of stuff was popular.

1. The Republican establishment has gone nuts on climate change and the environment.

This, more than anything, is what American voters need to know about the Republican Party — not what Republicans used to do, or what one or two outliers say, but what the party as an extant political force is devoted to today. The actually existing GOP wants to dismantle the EPA, open more public land to coal mining and oil drilling, remove what regulatory constraints remain on fossil-fuel companies, slash the budget for clean-energy research and deployment, scrap CAFE and efficiency standards, protect inefficient light bulbs, withdraw from all international negotiations or efforts on climate, and stop the military from using less oil.

Which brings me to the piece that drives me crazy, from National Journal‘s customarily excellent Amy Harder: “Campaign Energy Messages Differ; Policies Not So Much.”

Seriously?

No … seriously?

I know journalists don’t headline their own pieces. But the piece itself isn’t much better. Take this bit:

Whether the data is inflated or not, the message that may be coming across most to voters is that there really isn’t much difference between Obama’s policies and those likely to be pursued in a Romney administration.

Ah, so the problem is not that Obama and Romney would have similar energy policies. That’s just the message “coming across to most voters.”

Now, if you’re a journalist, and you determine that voters are receiving a wildly incorrect message, what do you do? Do you write a story about their receipt of the incorrect message? Or do you correct the message?

The fact is, Romney would not pursue the same energy policies that Obama is pursuing. At all. Not even a little bit. It’s interesting, I suppose, that Romney used to run a state (and a state party) where moderate energy policy was demanded by voters. But what matters now is that Mitt Romney serves the present-day Republican Party, which has gone crazy.

The notion that Mitt Romney will rediscover some hidden internal moderate and buck the party on this stuff is just a VSP fantasy. Ever since he started running for president (this time around, anyway), he’s been frantically trying to please the right-wing base. Friedman says Romney’s “biggest challenge in attracting independent swing voters will be overcoming a well-earned reputation for saying whatever the Republican base wants to hear.” But self-styled centrists like Friedman have been saying this kind of thing forever and there remains very little indication that any Republican politician faces a tangible cost for pandering to the right.

Romney will not be elected to follow his heart. He’ll be elected to ratify the GOP agenda. Grover Norquist, a man with as much claim to leadership of the GOP as anyone, made his feelings on the matter extremely clear at CPAC:

All we have to do is replace Obama. … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

…

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared. [my emphasis]

Mitt Romney is well-aware — and if he wasn’t before, the primary taught him — that his job is to “sign the legislation that has already been prepared.” The leadership of the party is in Congress. It has declared skepticism of climate science the de facto party position. It has declared open war on clean energy, efficiency, and environmental protections. It has made clear that it will support fossil-fuel companies at every juncture.

That’s conservatives and climate for you. It’s interesting, intellectually, that there’s a history of green moderation in the party; that there’s a conceptual space where titular conservative principles overlap with climate protection; that many self-identified Republicans aren’t as crazy as their leaders; and that Romney used to pander in a different direction. But what’s relevant to voters who value climate and environmental protection is that they won’t get any under a GOP administration or a GOP Congress.

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had overreached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich — after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards — but also a little pathetic. A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: This tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them — and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That — have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real, it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in The New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences [PDF] that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that “there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children — still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people … may even be more efficient while killing — and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you — because it’s worked. I mean, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age — he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry — plays rough: He regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance. Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it he explained that he agreed with the California representative and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again. His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.” Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in 50 years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue. This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming. Put another way, the various right-wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe, but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years. He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stone earlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue. Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the president clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated. In fact, a spirited countermovement has arisen in recent years. The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block — at least temporarily — the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything — if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history — one that will last for geological epochs.

My previous post covered a new study from Yale researcher Dan Kahan and colleagues showing that greater scientific literacy does not correlate with greater acceptance of the risks of climate change. In fact, polarization on climate change is greater among the scientifically literate.

What divides those who acknowledge climate risks from those who don’t (“skeptics”) is not education, intelligence, or numeracy, but values. Kahan uses the terms “egalitarian communitarian” and “hierarchical individualist,” but I think it’s easier to follow Chris Mooney and just call these personality types liberal and conservative. Possessing the personality traits and values of a liberal inclines one toward accepting the threat of climate change; possessing the personality traits and values of a conservative inclines one toward skepticism. This comports with other studies that find skepticism clustered among conservative white men.

What’s to be done about this? In another post, Kahan emphasizes:

When information is presented in a way that affirms rather than threatens their group identities, people will engage open-mindedly with evidence that challenges their existing beliefs on issues associated with their cultural groups.

How might this work in practice? Well, for instance, Kahan says that individualists are big fans of technology:

So one way to make individualists react more open-mindedly to climate change science is to make it clear to them that more technology — and not just restrictions on it — are among the potential responses to climate change risks. In one study, e.g., we found that individualists are more likely to credit information of the sort that appeared in the first IPCC report when they are told that greater use of nuclear power is one way to reduce reliance on green-house gas-emitting carbon fuel sources.

More recently, in a study we conducted on both US & UK samples, we found that making people aware of geoengineering as a possible solution to climate change reduced cultural polarization over the validity of scientific evidence on the consequences of climate change. The individuals whose values disposed them to dismiss a study showing that CO2 emissions dissipate much more slowly than previously thought became more willing to credit it when they had been given information about geoengineering & not just emission controls as a solution.

I bet if conservatives were offered a souped-up Dodge Charger with a hood-mounted missile-launcher that could obliterate climate change, they’d like that too. I call this the techno-testosterone family of climate-change solutions — big machines that smack down natural limits — and it doesn’t say anything flattering about the conservative psyche that this is what sways them on matters scientific.

But if it does sway them, isn’t that enough? Surely I won’t demand that they also agree with me on how to solve the problem! I’m always being told by Very Serious People that it’s churlish and “tribal” to act that way.

Notice the assumption, though: that getting people to “believe” climate science, to drop their avowed skepticism, is the end goal. Of course it’s not — the end goal is to reform our economies and institutions so that they’re not degrading the climate. If a class of people “believes” in climate change but thinks that nuclear power is a silver bullet (rather than one of the most expensive of a vast array of power options) or geoengineering is a safety valve (rather than a desperate Hail Mary), is that really an improvement? Is anything more likely to get done?

I obviously agree, as a tactical matter, that climate hawks should build bridges and alliances whenever possible. Not everyone has to agree about the Meaning of Life for the U.S. to make incremental progress. Yet it often seems that this short-term tactical orientation is pushed as an alternative to a larger, more ambitious strategy. We’re told not only to take advantage of tactical cease-fires, but to abandon the “culture war” — the war over values, the war over what climate change means — entirely. It’s just too divisive. Etc.

I think that’s terrible advice. If we think climate change is something deeper than a technical problem, something that will not be solved by big machines, something that requires fundamental rethinking and reform, we should strive to win that argument! From my perspective, widespread understanding of physical-science details is unlikely, among climate hawks or skeptics or the public generally, so it isn’t worth sacrificing one’s preferred values-based messaging to secure it. There is little such understanding on most scientific matters of policy significance; it is still possible to make policy in its absence.

The long-term strategic goal is not “belief” in scientific results. It isn’t even particular policies that reduce carbon pollution. It is a loosely networked but intense and activated movement devoted to a shared vision of a better society (a future that makes sense, you might call it). It doesn’t have to be a broad consensus. It can and will start small. But it should serve as a cultural attractor, with the goal of growing large enough to motivate meaningful change.

This doesn’t mean writing off everyone except doe-eyed liberals. A vision of a sustainable society need not be exclusive to egalitarian communitarians, though I suspect it will be more amenable to them than the current set-up. It is possible to attract support from people in the middle of the liberal-conservative personality spectrum, or the middle-right (I’m gonna go ahead and write off the far right), but the way to do that is not to pander to conservatives but to persuade the middle of the desirability of our vision – persuade them to join us. We need to paint a picture of a better quality of life, a more sustainable, prosperous, equitable society, so compelling that it resonates with people and draws them away from the status quo.

If fear pushes people toward conservatism and status quo bias, a sense of shared purpose and aspiration pushes the other way. It opens people up. If they are taken by the vision, they will come around on the science.

It’s been a rough few weeks for the Heartland Institute, the “intellectual” nexus of the fossil fuel-powered machine that disparages climate science in the United States. Nineteen corporations have pulled more than $1 million in expected funding for the institute, leading President Joe Bast to ask attendees at the recent Heartland climate-denial conference whether they had a “rich uncle” who could help out. Seriously.

At a time when most news about climate change is bad, Heartland’s decline has been a rare bright spot. How did it come about? In the reductive rendering of the mainstream media, the narrative has become that Heartland simply overplayed its hand by launching a billboard campaign comparing people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, one of the single dumbest PR moves in recent history. Others have gone deeper, pointing out that Heartland has been painting itself into the crazy corner for a long time, and its lies were bound to catch up with it eventually. In that view, Heartland’s demise was essentially inevitable.

The infamous Unabomber billboard.

While these narratives have elements of truth — the billboards were incredibly stupid, and Heartland has been lying for a long time — neither offers a full explanation because both deemphasize the crucial role of citizen action. Simply put, the post-billboard exodus of Heartland’s corporate donors would have been neither as big nor as fast if not for the actions of thousands of everyday Americans calling those donors to account. Indeed, it might not have happened at all.

For those who haven’t been closely following the saga, here is the basic chronology. In February, documents containing a list of Heartland funders were leaked to a number of bloggers by climate scientist Peter Gleick, who risked his professional reputation to expose the sources of Heartland’s support. Two days later, the organization I work for, Forecast the Facts, launched a campaign calling on all corporate funders of Heartland to withdraw their support, with our initial focus on General Motors. Within a week, more than 20,000 people, including 10,000 GM owners, had signed on. After adding their names to the effort, those citizen-activists then called GM, posted hundreds of comments on GM’s Facebook page, uploaded photos of themselves with their GM cars, showed up at events where GM’s CEO was speaking, and generally made it clear that they were extremely upset about GM’s Heartland association. After weeks of pressure, including considerable media coverage, GM pulled its support on March 28 — more than a month before the now infamous billboard went up.

Forecast the Facts isn’t an established player; our ability to influence General Motors was not due to our reputation. It was entirely the result of our active members, who organized around an idea and spoke in a louder voice than any single person or institution could.

Because GM’s pullout happened before Heartland’s Unabomber messaging fiasco — a key point that’s been overlooked by many media outlets — it offers the clearest demonstration of how citizen activism can impact corporations. There is literally nothing more valuable to a public-facing company like General Motors than its brand. And in the wake of the government bailout, GM has a great deal invested in building its environmental identity. Exhibit A: The Chevy Volt. Twenty thousand customers and potential customers pissed off about GM’s ties to climate-change denial represented a real threat to GM’s image makeover. Which is why GM’s CEO agreed to review the matter personally, and eventually decided that the company’s 20-year relationship with Heartland was just not worth the potential brand damage.

In the weeks following GM’s announcement, Forecast the Facts staff, together with partners at Greenpeace, contacted the rest of Heartland’s corporate donors to ask why they were still supporting climate-change denial. In doing so, we made clear that we were speaking on behalf of the 20,000 people who had signed on to the campaign. And our questions sparked conversations within many of those companies about whether the lobbying that Heartland did for them was worth the risk to their brands.

Then came the billboards. The companies that had already been thinking about leaving because of the aforementioned public pressure immediately did so. Another 150,000 people joined our campaign through groups including 350.org, SumOfUs.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club. And again, these people did more than just sign a petition. Thousands posted on company Facebook pages and chipped in to fund billboards calling out remaining Heartland holdouts, hundreds made phone calls to corporate headquarters, and dozens showed up in person to protest Heartland’s conference. All of those actions sent a message to Heartland’s remaining donors: There are a lot of people who care about this issue, and your brand is at risk. In response, corporate supporters have continued to scurry for the exits.

I’ve asked a number of people why citizen activism tends to get short shrift, and I’ve gotten a lot of thoughtful responses. One of them stuck out as the most likely explanation: People like the idea that Heartland carried within it the seeds of its own destruction — that is, Heartland consists of a bunch of unhinged conspiracy theorists who mislead the public for a living, and they were destined to eventually destroy themselves because scientific truth inevitably wins. While that teleology is attractive, it ignores the fact that the truth only wins when enough people stand up on its behalf.

Institutions like Heartland don’t fail just because they lie to the public. If that were true, Heartland would have disintegrated a long time ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would be defunct, and the corporate-funded campaign to discredit science would no longer hinder our societal response to the climate threat. Institutions like Heartland only crumble when people speak up and say they are tired of being lied to, and provide a credible threat to whomever makes the misinformation possible — in this case, hypocritical corporate donors that profess to care about climate change while simultaneously supporting a group dedicated to the exact opposite purpose.

A shift in cultural attitudes and attendant policy changes will only come when enough people consistently, loudly, and unrepentantly reject climate denial and demand action. So when everyday people do exactly that, and their actions make an impact, they deserve to be credited. We need to reinforce the behavior that is our only hope for real progress on climate change.

Corporations are officially people now, and like people, sometimes corporations will loudly say that they believe one thing while their actions reveal another preference entirely. Like a lady who says she wants to settle down but dates only dudes who are apt to move to Hawaii at a moment’s notice, American companies having been saying they’re concerned about climate change at the same time that they have been fooling around with trade organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups that have been working to undermine climate action.

In a new report, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calls companies out on this behavior. Being an organization staffed by scientists with “scientists” in the name, UCS approached this in a rigorous manner: Its team identified 28 publicly traded companies that had intervened in the climate debate in some way, and looked at their lobbying, campaign donations, advocacy work, SEC filings, earning calls, funding of think tanks, and press materials. You know, basically every shred of evidence the companies had left behind.

The group found that all the companies said they were working on reducing emissions, because, hey, climate change will be bad for business and it’s the Right Thing to Do. But half of those companies were also working their butts off to undermine and misrepresent climate science — funding think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, chilling with groups like Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers that oppose climate legislation, and just generally doing the sort of work you’d do if you didn’t actually want anyone to do anything about climate change ever.

And while people, like corporations, may act hypocritically and inconsistently, they don’t have millions of dollars to play with. Corporations do. And this is what they’re using it for.

North Carolina is no stranger to the “if you dislike it then you should have made a law against it” model of legislation, but this is extreme: The state General Assembly’s Replacement House Bill 819 would rule that scientists are not allowed to accurately predict sea-level rise. By all legal calculations, the sea level will now rise eight inches by the end of the century. Sure, so far models have predicted an increase of more than three feet, but if they keep that shit up, they’re going to JAIL. 

OK, there’s not really a prison sentence attached to this proposed rule, but that doesn’t stop it from being crazeballs. See, actual sea-level rise is nonlinear, because there’s feedback — the warmer it gets, the more the water volume expands, and the more stuff melts, and the more it expands, etc. That’s how most scientific models arrive at their predictions, because that is how physics works. But an increase that big is extremely inconvenient for a state with a beach-based tourist trade. So North Carolina’s solution is simple: Change how physics works, or at least change how people do physics.

Accordingly, this bill mandates that models use a linear increase — a consistent amount of change every year, based on historical data. This will lead to predictions that are much less catastrophic, and much more reassuring for people building resorts in the Outer Banks. The predictions will also be flat-out wrong, but that’s nothing new for North Carolina.

If it’s not obvious why this is stupid, look at it this way: In 1790, the year North Carolina is stuck in, the population was about 400,000. In 1900, it was 1.9 million. That’s an increase of 1.5 million in 110 years — so if there were an analogous rule for population, the state would prepare for 3.4 million residents in 2010. Which might cause some strife among the 9.7 million people who live there now, but you know, whatever — the law is the law, so screw you, math. If the 6.3 million people unaccounted for by the legal model wanted housing and services, they should have fallen in line with North Carolina reality.

Anyway, we wish North Carolina the best of luck in staving off disaster by legislating what mathematical calculations people can perform. It will probably be about as effective as fixing the health-care crisis through etymology, or balancing the budget with entry-level yoga. But if it works, I’m moving to North Carolina, where living in a fantasy world has the force of law.

Why is skepticism about climate change so persistent?

The answer might seem to be obvious: ignorance! People just don’t understand the science. Their education has not equipped them to discern good evidence from bad, or reason properly to valid conclusions. The media is not giving them the facts. They need more, better information and improved reasoning skills.

However intuitively plausible this answer might be, it suffers from one important flaw: It is wrong. Better educated people are not less likely to be skeptics. Greater scientific literacy and reasoning ability do not incline people toward climate realism. Where skepticism exists, additional information and arguments only serve to reinforce it.

This has been evident for some time, but a fascinating new study in Nature backs it up with numbers. Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested the question directly: Is it true that greater numeracy and scientific literacy reduce polarization about climate science?

Kahan found that, among those with low scientific literacy, assessment of climate risk was high among “egalitarian communitarians” (those with a worldview “favoring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs”) and low among “hierarchical individualists” (those with a worldview “that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority”).

So what happens as scientific literacy increases? The naive view — what Kahan calls the “science comprehension thesis,” or SCT — predicts that hierarchical individualists with high scientific literacy will more accurately perceive the risk and converge with egalitarian communitarians. But that’s not what happens (click to embiggen):

As you can see, the SCT prediction is dead wrong — as science literacy and numeracy increase, polarization rises. Well-educated, carefully reasoning hierarchical individualists are less convinced of the danger of climate change.

What explains this? Here is Kahan’s alternative to SCT:

The alternative explanation can be referred to as the cultural cognition thesis (CCT). CCT posits that individuals, as a result of a complex of psychological mechanisms, tend to form perceptions of societal risks that cohere with values characteristic of groups with which they identify. Whereas SCT emphasizes a conflict between scientists and the public, CCT stresses one between different segments of the public, whose members are motivated to fit their interpretations of scientific evidence to their competing cultural philosophies.

The operative concept here is “motivated reasoning.” The idea is, we begin by absorbing the values of our tribes — what is and isn’t important, what is and isn’t a risk — and use whatever numeracy and scientific literacy we possess to seek out facts and arguments that support those views. Getting smarter, in other words, only makes us better at justifying our own worldviews. It does not necessarily give us more scientifically accurate worldviews.

Kahan’s alternative, needless to say, predicts survey answers better than SCT. It follows pretty straightforwardly that SCT is wrong and that educating people on science and reasoning will only reinforce the partisan divide on climate. This much, it seems to me, is beyond serious doubt. SCT is dead. Insofar as people still hold the naive view — and many (most?) still do, explicitly or implicitly — they should let it go once and for all. More and better science is not the answer, at least not a complete answer. If the partisan divide on climate is to be “solved,” it must be solved directly, on the level of worldviews, not by the indirect route of scientific education.

How might that be done? Kahan gestures at an answer:

As citizens understandably tend to conform their beliefs about societal risk to beliefs that predominate among their peers, communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values. Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups. Perfecting such techniques through a new science of science communication is a public good of singular importance. [my emphasis]

This can be crudely summed up as, “to change conservatives’ minds on climate, get other conservatives to talk to them in a language they understand.”

Which is great, as far as it goes. But in my humble opinion, it doesn’t go very far. In fact, this is the juncture in these kind of discussions where the hand-waving often begins. There’s a rather heroic assumption being made: that it is possible to make an accurate understanding of climate change congenial to hierarchical individualist values. Is that so? That is the question I shall ponder in my next post.