* RADIO RANT: Global Warming--Facts and Reason

Quot. of the Day:

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
    --Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's words will seem to some as the worst sort of postmodernist, relativist drivel; but his point is that there is no "statement of fact" within human discourse that is disinterested, that is not biased by our own subjectivity, colored as it is by our membership in our species, nation, political ideology, et al. The current political debate about global warming is a fine case in point: whatever the objective truth about its causes, extent, or very reality, the debate itself is nearly entirely a whirlwind of subjective, self-interested ideologies (and I don't exempt scientists here). My own "liberal" pro-environmentalist is certainly colored by my own self-identities, by my lifelong reading of Romantics and naturists, by my minority-status allegiance to colonial discourse theory—and maybe even by a certain inveterate misanthropy that really resents the view that "man is the measure (and center) of all things."

But I'm just as struck by the knee-jerk reaction against the possibility of global warming by every talking head I've heard in conservative talk radio, including Limbaugh, Savage, Beck, and Drudge (and strangely on first sight, George Noory). WHY? It can't be that conservative values per se have led each and all to the same interpretation of the scientific data. No, it's gotta be one thing (sort of a "conservative value," I guess): the Republican self-interest of pro-Big-Business. "There's nothin' wrong, people! No need to worry about legislation regarding emission standards! (Etc., etc.)"

I must qualify myself. In the wake of recent overwhelming evidence against them, these talking heads are gradually adopting a more "reasonable"—if just as dangerous—position: "Maybe there is global warming, but it's a natural-cycle thing; humankind and our techno-industry have had nothing to do with it, and there's certainly nothing we can do about it now." This again lets big business and industrial capitalism off the hook.

Last night (3/20/07), as an example, Michael Savage grasped the most recent straw of this latter argument, rehearsing the new finding that Mars is warming up, too; ergo, it's a solar thing, and no fault of good old homo sapiens. . . . However, in explaining to us peons in his usual supercilious fashion how the solar system works, he said that the sun is "the smallest star in the solar system"(?!). HUH? He was just misspeaking here, no doubt, but he was just plain wrong in his argument that, because Mars is warming up and the Earth is warming up, they MUST be related out of sheer "Aristotelian logic." No, this is actually a fallacy of cause & effect, and is certainly not a syllogistic proof, if that's what he had in mind. (In other words, if I go bald tomorrow and Tom Cruise goes bald tomorrow, the fact that we both use Suave shampoo [right!] is no sufficient proof of cause.) I am reminded of Limbaugh's tried-and-true dichotomy between the liberal-as-emotional-feeler and the conservative-as-rational-thinker, a facile dualism at least implicitly assumed by most later conservative talking heads. But characteristically, the conservatives' vaunted "reason" is ultimately a series of specious rationalizations, based on their own (very emotional) self-interests. (Moreover, it assumes the view that "Man is a rational animal." As I watch cable news or listen to talk show callers, I find this very hard to believe.) . . . But all of this is only my interpretation.