Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, the literary critic, the philosopher, coined the term “suspension of disbelief” in 1817.
It is a tacit understanding between storyteller and audience. The storyteller weaves a fantastical tale and, for the duration of the tale-telling, the audience willingly suspends its disbelief in, say, talking animals or scary monsters or post-apocalyptic Earth.
But there are limits to suspension of belief. If a storyteller creates a framework and the audience buys into it, that paradigm can’t suddenly be turned upside down.
The Wicked Witch of the West can’t become the heroine in “The Wizard of Oz” and Dorothy the mean girl.
This rules governing suspension of belief not only to literature and to cinema, but also to real world issues – like global warming.
The scientific community has told the tale that human activity is dangerously overheating the planet. The left-leaning mainstream media has amplified the alarmist narrative. And the Obama White House has gone so far as to warn this week that climate change poses a greater threat to Americans than terrorism.
Yet, the American people are not buying it, as evidenced by a Pew Research Center survey last month gauging the public’s top policy priorities for Obama and Congress in 2015. Of the 22 priorities listed by Pew, “dealing with global warming” ranked second-to-last.
Neither the scientific community, the mainstream media nor the Obama administration can fathom why the public is not far more concerned about climate change.
Indeed, UC Berkeley education professor Michael Ranney attributes it to a “wisdom deficit,” which is his way of saying that the American people are dimwits.
The media blames uninformed climate change “deniers,” with the Los Angeles Times in 2013 actually banning letters to the editor from readers who express views that do not comport with the global warming orthodoxy.
And Obama suggested last June at UC Irvine’s commencement that the public was being misled by Congress, which is “full of folks” who maintain that climate change is “a hoax or fad.”
But the coolness of the American people to dire warnings of global warming is not because they are dimwits, not because they’ve been unduly swayed by letter-writing climate change deniers, not because the have relied on folks in Congress to tell them how to think on global warming.
No, it’s because the public is no longer willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to alarmist claims about climate change.
Indeed, according to news reports last month, 2014 was the warmest year on record, based on data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. Moreover, the 10 hottest years since 1891 supposedly have come since 1998.
But here’s the problem with such alarmist reports – there’s almost evidence to the contrary from reputable sources.
For instance, John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, said that 2014 surpassed other years as the supposed record-warmest by mere hundreds of a degree, well within the margin of error for global temperature readings.
As to the suggestion the planet has gotten warmer since 1998, that is contradicted by the Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, which reported that global warming has stalled from 1998-2012, and that, by 2017, temperatures will not have risen significantly for nearly two decades.
Finally, what works against climate-change alarmists is the personal experiences of the American people. Like the winter-weary residents of Boston. They have endured the snowiest 30-day stretch in the city’s history – in just 17 days. And the National Weather Service says there’s more to come.
Some climate change scientists are actually suggesting that Boston’s record snowfall – and not by just a few hundreds of an inch – is the result of global warming.
Of course, to believe that requires the same suspension of disbelief necessary to believe in Mickey Mouse, zombies and terminators.
