Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida 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. Over time, 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. 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.
The same kind of thing is clearly happening on the issue of global warming. As the evidence for a changing climate keeps accumulating, the Republican Party’s commitment to denial just gets stronger.
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.
Today, conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party;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. And that scares me more than the news about that ice sheet.
PAUL KRUGMAN is a Nobel winning economist and a New York Times columnist.
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