Were Americans ‘Duped’ About Climate Change?

That’s the accusation from an opinion piece found at the Washington Post. And it got me thinking enough to distract me from writing about renewable power.

I believe the short answer is no. The Post piece argues otherwise. It is by Robert Brulle, a professor of not only sociology but also environmental science at Drexler University, qualifications I assume to pronounce on the subject. But a pronouncement is all it is–he doesn’t really offer any concrete evidence.

Were Americans duped? Not if public opinion is any gauge. Majorities of the American public have repeatedly indicated they accept both the fact of a changing climate and the conclusions of climate scientists that humans are responsible for about half the warming since 1950. Right or wrong, Americans have accepted the position Brulle advocates.

Brulle seems to think Americans are duped, however. He writes, “Future generations will look back on our tepid response to global climate disruption and wonder why we did not act sooner and more aggressively. Climate change will adversely impact present and future generations, as well as all species on Earth. Our moral obligation to protect life requires us to act.”

I guess it’s the ‘tepid response’ that makes Brulle think we were duped. And it’s true that Americans, like people everywhere, have put addressing climate change at the bottom of their priority lists. But why does he limit his criticism to Americans then? The U.S. response–regulations, higher fuel efficiency standards, a move away from coal–have led to our meeting the goals of the Kyoto Treaty America did not sign. Not only that, American policy, combined with unfortunate economics and a boom in natural gas, have produced better results than found in countries with public reaction more congenial to Brulle’s taste.

Brulle cites the amazing evidence that fossil fuel companies knew something about climate change back in the 80s. Well, they knew as much as scientists everywhere, which back in the 80s was not so much.

So did the public. And it is the public that consumes the products of the fossil fuel companies. If you want to blame someone, blame us. We had non-fossil fuel options available to us. But we all thought solar power was still too expensive. We thought that hydroelectric power disturbed the landscape and was not good for wildlife. We thought energy efficiency was for nerds and insulation roughed up our hands. So we kept using fossil fuels, as did business, as did government.


I don’t remember Exxon messages ‘sowing doubt.’ There was a lot of doubt about climate change up until 1990 or so. Their scientists published in the peer-reviewed literature–what were they hiding?

The scientific consensus on climate change was not clear in the 1980s, nor in the 1990s. The ‘fingerprint’ of human contributions to climate change was not even part of IPCC doctrine until the mid-1990s and it was controversially inserted at the last minute.

Hypocritically blaming Exxon for not being 20 years ahead of the science, for actually promoting its products, for giving us the products we craved instead of going out of business and pushing us towards products we did not want.

Brulle is duping himself.

Self delusion


11 responses to “Were Americans ‘Duped’ About Climate Change?

  1. Brûlée is typical of that tribe.

  2. Brulle and his fellow climate obsessed apparatchiks have completely dominated the public square. So all we have in Brulle’s long winded essay is a confession. But anyone who has read the Climategate emails and witnessed the ever growing litany of failed predictions knows that Brulle and pals are the problem, not the solution. Tom’s recent book, The Lukewarmer’s Way, documents in detail the faux academics like Brulle in detail.
    By the way, I bet his credentials and ethics are right there with Lewandowsky. Brulle is demonstrating that A is for Anthropomorphic.

  3. If the public was duped, it was duped to believe that the higher end of the sensitivity scale was more probable than it is.

  4. Brulle is as credible as the vast majority of other conspiracy theorists.

  5. My impression reading that piece was that everything he claimed for the vast conspiracy that he thinks duped society more appropriately should be ascribed to the acolytes.of CAGW doom and despair.

  6. Were Americans ‘Duped’ About Climate Change?

    Yes, they were.
    By Mike Mann, Riley Dunlap, Naomi Oreskes and Robert Brulle.

    As you put it at the end, Brulle is duping himself. As Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

  7. If they can’t blame the oil companies they might have to look in the mirror for culprits.

    It’s a popular trick to take an existing bad guy and connect them to something you want condemned. Guilt by association. Brulle uses flawed research that linked companies to right wing think tanks and then to climate scepticism. It pretended that all the money that was sent to the think tanks was spent on climate issues, which is massively untrue. It didn’t identify what the output was supposed to be. It also made a common mistake of thinking that right wing people believe right wing ideas because they are presented by their side. It’s not true for me and I doubt many people work that way. You chose your party because it most closely matches your world view. Often it’s the best of a bad lot. What has been so devastating for warmists is that people (including oil company employees because they’re human too AFAIK) express their personal opinions and findings.

    Rather than deal with the issues the warmists have tried to pretend they don’t exist or shout them down. Every debating and PR trick in the book except strengthening their arguments. Will they ever see sense?

    • Tiny, yes indeed, Brulle and co need to look in the mirror to see why they are losing the argument.

      On your second point, their reasoning seems to go:
      “I hate A. I hate B. Therefore A = B”.
      A and B being climate sceptics and oil companies or conservatives.

Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s