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I watched Frontline’s Climate of Doubt last week, an examination of how, in less than four years, U.S. politics moved from a bipartisan consensus that climate change is real, human-generated and a serious threat, to the status of an issue neither politicians nor voters care to mention. It’s not that the evidence of the threat disappeared. Indeed, in the last year, public recognition of climate change has begun to rise again, inspired not by pundits and politicians but by droughts, floods and forest fires. You can still watch the show on the link above, and you may come away from it, like I did, wondering how it came to be that matters of science are now decided not by the scientific method, but by political persuasion.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one this week who say New Jersey being washed to sea and a record storm surge flooding lower Manhattan, and remembered Mitt Romney promising at the RNC that, as president, he’ll spend no time worrying about rising sea levels. As John Kerry reminded Romney from the podium of the DNC in Charlotte, “Despite what you heard in Tampa, an exceptional country does care about the rise of the oceans and the future of the planet.”
