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In conversations with our exasperated green friends, we are often
asked what we would accept as ‘proof’ that global warming ‘is real, and
is happening’. This is a fairly typical misunderstanding of the
sceptical position. Well, ours anyway. We do not argue that humans have
not caused global warming. Our position is that even scientific proof
of mankind’s influence on the climate is not sufficient to legitimise
Environmentalism, or the environmental policies being created by
governments in response to pressure from Environmentalists. It is
possible to decide that even 10 metres of sea level rise is a price
worth paying for constantly increasing living standards; the problem
would be in extending the benefits of that increase to those who, in
the short term, might lose out. But too often, environmental policies
and rhetoric bear no relation to science whatsoever, let alone ‘proof’.
What we believe is happening when people mistake
political arguments for scientific ones is that people have lost
confidence in making calculations about human values, and so turn to
’science’ to provide them. Thus we see a mad rush to derive ‘ethics’
from the issue of climate change. It is much easier to create a
direction for your otherwise defunct moral compass with a crisis on the
horizon. It gives purpose to otherwise purposeless politics. That huge
looming catastrophe overwhelms any other considerations that might get
in the way. Environmentalism epitomises the widespread loss of moral
reasoning. Its desire to possess an unchallengeable moral imperative -
as though it were the unmitigated word of God - doesn’t reflect its
actually possessing it, but the disorientation of its constituency.
When you are lost, you do not look for detail, you look for the biggest
thing to orientate you. So it is for Environmentalism. And what could
be bigger than the end of the world?
Accordingly, Environmentalists have had to defend the idea that
catastrophe is just around the corner. It is where their entire
political capital is invested. Without it, they are disoriented;
disaster avoidance is a poor substitute for goal-seeking. In lieu of a
definitive scientific proposition linking anthropogenic CO2 to the
imminent end of the world, the idea of a ‘consensus’ was forged out of
necessity (not through scientific discovery), allegedly consisting of
‘the vast majority of the world’s top climate scientists’. These
scientists agree, we are told, that ’something must be done’, even if
they don’t agree about why, or how they know. It turns out, in fact,
that ‘certainty’ relates not to the scientific understanding of the
influence of CO2 on natural processes, but the application of the precautionary principle.
This fragile and nebulous consensus is protected by a variety of
myths about anybody who wishes and dares to challenge it: they have
vested interests; they have prostituted themselves; they belong to an
organised conspiracy; they stand lonely against a vast and entirely
unanimous scientific body. One of the most prominent myths is that
sceptics employ a ‘tactic’ to subvert the public’s trust in the
consensus by challenging the integrity of the scientific theories it is
assumed to consist of (even though these theories have not been
identified, let alone confidence in them measured). Along these lines,
Naomi Oreskes’ thesis gives it the title ‘the tobacco strategy’, which
itself owes much to George Monbiot’s book, Heat, which in turn draws on the Exxonsecrets.org website run by Greenpeace. We have written about the ‘tobacco strategy‘ and its variants before. But it hasn’t gone away, and so, reading an article
by custard-pie-thrower-turned-respectable-‘science’-writer, and shrill
Gaia-botherer, Mark Lynas, we thought it deserved some further
attention. Read rest…
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