Is Climate Change Real?
“Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee — I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013
Ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising and temperatures around the world are increasing. The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly real and visible as the days go by — unless you are a firm believer that climate change is merely one big lie. Here, we have an example of this thriving species — the 45th US President Donald Trump.
When science and politics are mixed into a cocktail, the results are potentially problematic. There are possibilities for constructive discussions to happen regarding climate change and politicians have the ability to go in-depth to discuss policies that for instance, reduce carbon emissions. (Dryzek and Lo, 2015).
Despite this, most of the headlining political discussions about the climate are stuck on the surface level and people are relegated into two camps — it’s either believing or denying (Corry and Jørgensen, 2015). Climate change has become a political arena instead, and people are made to pick their side based on the political teams they support. It’s almost as though debates on climate change should be played on ESPN!
Here’s the catch — governments and their officials are not experts. Similar to how a medical practitioner is not an expert on veterinary science, government officials are also not experts in all areas (Nichols, 2018, 178). While they are well-read enough to make decisions and implement certain policies, they do not go in-depth as true experts would.
Governments are usually dependent on scientific experts for advice. Having said this, recent events have made it evident that some governments have the ability to contradict and cherry-pick expert opinions to suit their agenda, resulting in actions that defy expertise.
For instance, Donald Trump’s climate change denial contradicts scientific expert opinion but resulted in actual change. The United States left the Paris Agreement in 2020 (MacGrath, 2020).
When issues and facts such as climate change become political, and politicians are biased towards their own agenda, this widens the gap of trust between expert opinion and public sentiments. Wrong government decisions and moves eventually lead people to come to their own consensus that experts are in collusion with governments — and with the bridge between expertise and the common man set in flames, there is a tendency of a people becoming a “sceptical of authority and prey to superstition” (Nichols, 2017.5)
In Conclusion
We often find ourselves playing the blame game especially when it comes to the internet. “The internet caused increasing privacy issues!” (Cranor, 1999) or “The internet is causing the spread of fake news!” (Kirby, Valaskova et. al, 2018).
The few case studies mentioned in this blog have shown that the internet is merely a tool that facilitates and aggravates the issue at hand. At the heart of death of expertise lies human fallacies, that governments, experts and normal people are sending the idea of expertise to its grave.
I wonder whether it is too late to salvage the situation. In all honesty, the future of expertise seems bleak. Just as how everything that lives is designed to end — expertise seems to be nearing its expiry date.
However, nothing is certain — I am no expert.
Bibliography
Corry, O., & Jørgensen, D. (2015). Beyond ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’: Towards a map of the politics of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 32, 165–174.
Cranor, L. F. (1999). Internet privacy. Communications of the ACM, 42(2), 28–38.
Dryzek, J. S., & Lo, A. Y. (2015). Reason and rhetoric in climate communication. Environmental Politics, 24(1), 1–16.
Kirby, R., Valaskova, K., Kolencik, J., & Kubala, P. (2018). Online habits of the fake news audience: The vulnerabilities of Internet users to manipulations by malevolent participants. Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 10(2), 44–50.
McGrath, M. (2020). Climate change: US formally withdraws from Paris agreement. BBC. Retrieved 10 January 2021, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54797743.
MSNBC. (2017). Donald Trump Believes Climate Change Is A Hoax | All In | MSNBC [Video]. Retrieved 10 January 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqgMECkW3Ak&t=95s.
Nichols, T. (2017). The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. Oxford University Press.
