 [“The
best antidote to the doom merchants is skepticism. We must be willing
to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But
apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder
to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn
makes it harder to know how to deal with it.” (Robert Skidelsky, May 22, 2008)]
Do not miss this most powerful comment by Robert Skidelsky,
Baron Skidelsky of Tilton, a British economist of Russian origin,
Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of a major three-volume
biography of John Maynard Keynes (for which he received, in 2001, the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography): ‘The apocalypse is the scientist’s fundamentalism’, The Taipei Times, May 22, p. 9.
In
his short essay, Skidelsky bemoans the fact that the “misreporting of
science is so routine now that we hardly notice it.” But, even more
worrying, he argues, is when “science itself becomes infected by the
apocalyptic spirit [my little cartoon, above].
Faith-based science seems a contradiction in terms, because the
scientific world view emerged as a challenge to religious superstition.
But important scientific beliefs can now be said to be held
religiously, rather than scientifically.”
And his example? You have guessed it in one: ‘Al Gore and climate change’, which he describes as:
“...
the second doomsday scenario of recent decades, the first being the
Club of Rome’s prediction in 1972 that the world would soon run out of
natural resources. Both are ‘scientific,’ but their structure is the
same as that of the biblical story of the Flood: Human wickedness (or,
in today’s case, unbridled materialism) triggers the disastrous
sequence, which it may already be too late to avert. Like Biblical
prophecy, scientific doomsday stories seem impervious to refutation and
are constantly repackaged to feed the hunger for catastrophe.”
Captains In A Salvationist Army
Skidelsky
then notes wryly that scientists are themselves partly to blame for
this state of affairs “because they have hardened uncertainties into
probabilities, treated disputable propositions as matters of fact and
attacked dissent as heresy.” In a brilliant sentence, he observes that
“their intolerance of dissent is hugely magnified when they see
themselves as captains in a salvationist army dedicated to purging the
world of evil habits.” Somewhat paradoxically, he concludes that it is
now “the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the rest of the
world.”
Finally, Skidelsky highlights the real danger, the “proper doom”, as I called it in an earlier blog today [see: ‘A Proper Doom’, May 23]:
“The
danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus that we
end up creating a real catastrophe - the meltdown of our economies and
lifestyles - in order to avoid an imaginary one.”
Just so. This is a first class comment. I
do hope that readers of ‘Global Warming Politics’ will make it as
widely-known as possible. How our politicians need to read it!
And, the best antidote to the devil of apocalyptic doom is, of course, “skepticism” - plus “a beaker full of the warm south”.
But
beware the subliminally whispering devil: “Believe in ‘global
warming’!” “Believe in ‘global warming’!” “Believe in ‘global warming’!” Source
|
