Mother Jones notes that in private interviews, Glenn Beck, fiery loon of the right, privately seems to believe in anthropogenic climate change.
Last week he mocked climate scientists for being “alarmists” who believe that “we’re all going to die in a fiery flood.” Not long ago he touted the global warming chapter of his An Inconvenient Book as “kryptonite against your Gore-worshipping psycho friends.” And in May 2007 he hosted an hour-long television special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, featuring an all-star lineup of climate change denialists and promising the “other side of the climate debate that you don’t hear anywhere.” Beck was also, of course, the driving force behind the successful right-wing push last year to bring down Obama’s green jobs guru, Van Jones.
But an interview with Beck in USA Weekend revealed that his private views on climate are very different from those he espouses on his day job. In fact, Beck appears not only to be convinced that global warming is real, but that it’s a genuine problem:
“You’d be an idiot not to notice the temperature change,” he said. He also says there’s a legit case that global warming has, at least in part, been caused by mankind.
The article also says that Beck has felt compelled to “buy a home with a ‘green’ design and using energy-saving products
I think this is more compelling evidence for the proposition that many of the people who are most invested in discrediting climate science are intellectually dishonest, doing it for political or economic gain, rather than out of sincere conviction. We’ve seen similar admissions made by energy company execs who are funding climate denial at the same time they accept the science.
I think most of the ordinary people who believe them are genuinely misled by the claims being made and confused by complext material. As I’ve written, I can sometimes get along better with someone who believes that we can’t go on as we are but who doesn’t believe in climate change than many people who accept climate change but believe the solutions are someone else’s problems. But at the leadership level, I think the evidence for profound intellectual dishonesty is quite compelling – far more compelling than the grounds for criticizing climate science.
Sharon