Paul Krugman (et al.) on Marco Rubio: Today, for a Republican, "listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated"

Antarctic ice sheet past 'point of no return'

Warning: In this clip there's every chance that you may hear from (shudder) a scientist. Just thought you should know, and take the appropriate precautions.

"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 -- hence Mr. Rubio's statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,
Points of No Return"

"My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record. On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one's."

-- FL Sen. Marco Rubio, quoted by The Borowitz Report

by Ken

As Daily Kos's LaFeminista says, "Paul Krugman is in fine form today" -- "nail[ing] the modern GOP."

Institutionalized stupidity is a subject we necessarily keep coming back to in recent years, since the Rampaging Right has made the worship of ignorance the dominant feature of our political landscape. Not surprisingly it's also been on PK's mind, with unapologetically slimy, slithery pandering whores like Marco "I'm Lovely, Absolutely Lovely" Rubio and Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz staking their claims to "leadership" roles as the 2016 presidential rodeo descends on us.

Just to refresh your memory of the story he's harking back to in today's NYT column, here's how The Borowitz Report covered it:

May 12, 2014
G.O.P. RIVALS QUESTION RUBIO’S IGNORANCE CREDENTIALS
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) echoed Gov. Perry’s criticism, calling Rubio a “dummy-come-lately” on climate change.

“At the end of the day, I have faith that Republican voters can tell the difference between someone who’s truly uninformed and someone who’s just faking it,” he said. “These comments by Marco don’t pass the smell test.”

By Sunday evening, a defensive Sen. Rubio was pushing back against the attacks, telling reporters, “Any questions about the authenticity of my ignorance are deeply offensive to me.”

“My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record,” he said. “On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one’s.”

HERE'S HOW PAUL K STARTS HIS COLUMN TODAY

The column is called "Points of No Return," and begins thusly (lotsa links onsite):

Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.

Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves — weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied “I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he 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.

Drawing on his own field of economics, PK says, he's "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." Apparently it's become a common operating principle in economics, "but the same story applies with even greater force to climate."

He offers as a parallel from economics "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. And, to be fair, that wasn’t a crazy position to take in 2009; I could have told you it was wrong (and, in fact, I did), but you could see where it was coming from.

Over time, however, as the promised inflation kept failing to arrive, 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?" PK asks. "Nobody likes admitting to mistakes, and all of us -- even those of us who try not to -- sometimes engage in motivated reasoning, selectively citing facts to support our preconceptions."

Bu-ut --

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. Inflation phobia has always been closely bound up with right-wing politics; to admit that this phobia was misguided would have meant conceding that one whole side of the political divide was fundamentally off base about how the economy works. So most of the inflationistas have responded to the failure of their prediction by becoming more, not less, extreme in their dogma, which will make it even harder for them ever to admit that they, and the political movement they serve, have been wrong all along.

Does this begin to ring a bell, folks?

The same kind of thing is clearly happening on the issue of global warming. There are, obviously, some fundamental factors underlying G.O.P. climate skepticism: The influence of powerful vested interests (including, though by no means limited to, the Koch brothers), plus the party’s hostility to any argument for government intervention. But there is clearly also some kind of cumulative process at work. As the evidence for a changing climate keeps accumulating, the Republican Party’s commitment to denial just gets stronger.

Think of it this way: 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 — hence Mr. Rubio’s statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance.

STUPIDITY IS HARDLY A NOVELTY IN AMERICAN POLITICS

We are, after all, a country that can boast in its heritage of a Know-Nothing Party. But the Know-Nothings were a fringe party. Rafael "Ted" and Marco are vying for the leadership of a putatively mainstream party. I think again of that point Dana Milbank made so well in January 2013 in connection with the return to Congress of Texas crackpot Steve Stockman -- "the same [Steve] Stockman I found so entertaining back in the '90s. What's frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier."

Now, says, PK, "truly crazy positions are becoming the norm."

A decade ago, only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; 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.

"Turning into hostility toward science in general," Paul? Hasn't that turn long since happened?


RUTH MARCUS TAKES NOTE

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus sounds pretty disgusted writing from her familiar perch in Jane Eyre's attic ("Marco Rubio’s changing climate; more links onsite):

“I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” Rubio told the [Miami] Herald in December 2009 when asked whether climate change was the result of human activity. Climate change, by the way, isn’t the only issue on which Rubio punted to scientists: When GQ asked in 2012 how old the Earth is, Rubio demurred, “I’m not a scientist, man.”

Which is it, senator? You don’t know as much as these scientists or you don’t believe them?

Rubio’s shift sadly mirrors his party’s. As Paul Waldman recounted on The Post’s Plum Line blog, in 2012, the leading Republican presidential candidates had “embarrassing flirtations with climate realism.”

The 2016 crowd, by contrast, ranges from skepticism to blanket denial. “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming,” asserted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “The Earth’s 4.5 billion years old, and you’re going to say that we had four hurricanes and so that proves a theory?” offered Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

“Climate is always evolving,” Rubio told ABC. Sadly, it’s not the only thing.

EVEN MICHAEL GERSON TAKES NOTE

The man who takes pride in pretending to bring a voice of moderation to far-right-wing extremism writes about Americans' resistance to science ("Americans’ aversion to science carries a high price"), though he spins like mad to make it seem as if the modern-day worship of ignorance comes primarily from people on the Left, rather than being the centerpiece of the 21st-century right-wing creed, so that his column winds up being a moderate-sounding orgy of lies and imbecilities.

It never seems to occur to a useless blob of protoplasm like Gerson that having spent his career coddling right-wing merchants of imbecility and evil, from which he draws every dollar that finds its way into this pocket, as his admittedly piddling payoffs from the merchants of evil and death, he has been a central enabler of the worship of ignorance. (Whores who sell out relatively cheap don't earn brownie points.)


PK'S TRADITIONAL KO PUNCH IS LYING IN WAIT

And boy, does he land it:

It’s hard to see what could reverse this growing hostility to inconvenient science. As I said, the process of intellectual devolution seems to have reached a point of no return. And that scares me more than the news about that ice sheet.

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