How Does Tucker Carlson Use Personal Attacks Instead of Proof about Climate Change?

Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast two diatribes against Democrats and liberals last week about climate change. He led his viewers to think that there is a big scientific controversy about climate change and that climate change is a liberal conspiracy, while giving not one scrap of scientific evidence. There is no controversy among scientists, but Carlson is not arguing in the scientific community, is he? He’s not trying to convince scientists. No, he’s trying to convince the Fox News audience.

Carlson unleashed an arsenal of persuasive methods. This post looks at two of them: personal attacks and turning the tables.

Why does this matter? Propaganda like Carlson’s has convinced 88% of Fox News viewers that human beings are not causing climate change. Yet among climate scientists – people know what they’re talking about – there is very little controversy that fossil fuel combustion is raising carbon dioxide to record levels, causing the climate to warm. Search for “climate change” on Google Scholar, which indexes research publications, and you will find nothing to support the Republican Party’s position that human beings are not causing massive climate change. This controversy does not exist among scientists. It only exists among politicians and media personalities. That doesn’t mean that the controversy isn’t real. It is real. It means that the controversy occurs among a different community than what people might expect. The media controversy, in turn, makes it sound as if it is the scientists who disagree.

So, Carlson wants his listeners to believe that climate change is a liberal plot. But he can find no facts to support his opinion. That places him in a terrible dilemma. What does he do? In this post, I show how Carlson attacks his opponents with a two-step parody dance:

Step One: Personal Attacks

Plenty of famous people think that climate change is real. Most of them use fossil fuels! The way our economy works right now, sometimes that’s all they can use. Some of them use more fossil fuels than they need to use. Oops!

This lets Carlson complain that they’re hypocrites. Carlson interviewed former Bill Clinton advisor Richard Goodstein. Carlson asked: 

“If you really believe this, that this was such a massive existential problem, that you would take up the whole U.S. Economy to fight it, why the hell are you flying on private planes, seriously?" Carlson continued: "They're telling me that I have to change my whole life because this problem is existential, but they're not changing their lives at all.”

Philosophers call this ad hominem argument. Ad hominem is Latin for “to the man.” People commit this fallacy when they attack the source while ignoring the argument. Suppose, for example, that two people debate about same-sex marriage. One debater calls the other homophobic. Maybe he is homophobic. So what? The debater’s personal faults are irrelevant to the issue. Dr. Bo Bennett defines the tu quoque twist on ad hominem argument as “Claiming the argument is flawed by pointing out that the one making the argument is not acting consistently with the claims of the argument.” But liberals’ supposed hypocrisy has no bearing on their argument’s truth.

Step Two: Turn the Tables

Clever debaters refute their opponent by Turning the Tables. That means to use your opponents’ argument against them. Carlson knows how to turn the tables. He’s good at it. So, he said that “The basic precept of science is, don't tell me. Show me. Prove it. And no one bothers to do that. Instead they throw slogans at you. They attack you. Nobody doubts the climate changes. It always has changed. The question is, is man causing it and can we stop it?”

What’s going on here? Tucker launched a personal attack against his opponents. He complained that his opponents attack him personally. He says that science is about proof. He wanted to see the proof. Yet Carlson has given no proof of his own.

Now, here it gets interesting. The truth about climate change is available to anyone who takes time to read the scientific literature. But Tucker isn’t arguing in the scientific community. He is arguing in the mass media. And what do liberals say in the mass media? Many people in the mass media say that we must cope with global warming. They say (as I did above) that the scientific community agrees with them (which it does). But does that refute Tucker Carlson? No, it does not—because they are not bringing the right evidence into the right setting. I’ll explain why, and show what we might do about it, in an upcoming blog post (maybe in a day or so). I’ll also write more about Carlson’s many propaganda methods. Stay tuned!

Technical note: German philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote about what he called “spheres of argument.” Arguments in different “spheres” work differently. British philosopher Stephen Toulmin published volume one (but never finished volume two) about “rational enterprises” that use different kinds of proof. If you’d like more insight into the theoretical point that I’m making, and if you are up for some very heavy reading, both books are worth your time. 

Image from https://climate.nasa.gov/.  Be sure to read NASA's climate change info when you can; it looks to me as if it's being purged for political reasons.