“Climate Change”, Global Warming and the penchant for catastrophism
Bring a whole lot of folk to talk about their pet peeves and you are bound to get a range of notions expressed. Such as: One idea aired was to strip every Australian of their citizenship and only re-issue it to those people who could prove they were environment-climate friendly.
Now, clearly the 2020 summiteers were not representative of anything but progressivist networks with a few tokens thrown in, but they are definitely mainstream. And it is certainly not hard to come up with an expanding range of these people want to control your lives statements on global warming. After all, if anthropogenic global warming is a looming catastrophe, strenuous measures are entirely appropriate.
Which is clearly much of the appeal of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thesis in the first place. It has both the correct villains (nasty capitalism, led by those wickedly wasteful Americans) and the correct solutions (grade folk into “good people” - climate criminals - and “bad people”, then control just about everything, but particularly economic activity - especially evil market and corporate activity). When Owen McShane told his mentor Aaron Wildavsky that New Zealand had recently appointed the world’s first Minister for the Environment, Wildavsky had been pottering around his office. Suddenly he stopped, paused and looked at Owen and said you know, if you’re Minister for the Environment, sooner or later you’re Minister for Everything. Such as, on the above suggestion, Minister for Controlling Who Can Be Citizens.
A sign of the appeal of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thesis has been the shift from talking of global warming to talking of climate change. The shift in language has been done in the normal way-by establishing it as the new marker that one is one of the morally cool kids and so one keeps up with the cutting edge jargon. But the change in jargon has much profounder implications. Switching from global warming to climate change shifts form the language of an empirical claim which can be verified or not, falsified or not to that of an irrefutable article of faith which ANY weather outcome can be claimed in support of since, of course, the climate is always changing and weather has always done extreme or unusual things. (Though the rate and number of people dying from the same has been falling in recent decades.) That the shift in language occurred when global temperatures plateaued rather gives the game away.
But there are some longstanding patterns here. The first is that the Left has always been prone to catastrophist thinking. Whether triumphant catastrophism (the ever-sharpening crisis of capitalism) or alarmism (over-population, catastrophic climate change, peak oil, etc). They have hardly had a monopoly of such - waves of scientific advance seem to generate these. Consider the eugenics catastrophism of the early C20th - as with catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, a crossover cause with scientists and political activists from right and left calling for urgent policy action to avoid a catastrophic collapse in the human gene pool. Nevertheless, catastrophism has been very much a feature within Left thinking for well over a century.
The next pattern is that these predictions have entirely failed to come true. Since the great virtue of the future is that it is as yet unknown-so the fulfilment of prophecy can be safely consigned to it-hope can stave off refutation for some time (hence the periodic revivals of Malthus). Nevertheless, catastrophism has a very poor track record, and it is not a strength of the Left that is has been so prone to it.
Why the Left has been prone to catastrophist thinking is hardly a mystery, since being “of the Left” is based on seeing existing society as flawed and unworthy. The more dramatically it is about to fail, the more flawed and unworthy it is and the more justified programs of transformative change are. Catastrophism validates being Left.
The context of attitudes-to-change is also why the reactionary Right has also been somewhat prone to catastrophist thinking. If one believes that history is heading in the “wrong” direction, catastrophism validates one’s rejection of the pattern of change. It is the final “proof” of what a disaster said changes are. Hence eugenics being a prop for both progressivists (e.g. George Bernard Shaw) and atavists (notoriously, the Nazis).
That the contemporary Left also tends to feel, given the failure of socialism and the revival of economic liberalism, that history is moving in the “wrong” direction, makes catastrophist thinking even more appealing nowadays. (Of course, other people’s alarmism is silly; one’s own is just rational and informed understanding.)
The third pattern is that, while the Left has a very poor record of predicting catastrophe, it has a rather better record of creating them. Whether broad-but-shallow (i.e. more fiascos rather than catastrophes: such progressivist education, nationalised industry, public housing, urban planning), narrow-but-intense (indigenous policy) or broad-and-intense (Leninist megacides), catastrophic failure is something the Left has managed to produce. Leninism, especially the terror and collectivisation famines, having been a much bigger catastrophe than any of the predicted catastrophes that haven’t happened.
But the grandiosity of the cataclysmic understanding and of the “necessary” social transformations is often part of their attraction. Hence Hobsbawn’s agreeing that if Leninism had worked, the millions of deaths would been worth it makes perfect sense-if your political project is so wonderful that it is worth millions of deaths, it must be truly wonderful. Which is just an updated version of attitudes expressed by Marx, particularly in his correspondence.
So the Left has a poor record in predicting catastrophe, a rather stronger record of creating them. Based on the historical record, betting on Left policies being catastrophic is a much stronger bet than accepting Left predictions of looming catastrophe.
Nor is there any particular mystery about the tendency to produce bad policies. The Left has a strong tendency to define itself against highly successful societies and to define itself against highly successful social mechanisms. It also has a strong tendency to invest ego and identity in a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, so is resistant to being told about problems with the grand visions. After all, if someone is not aware of how unworthy the surrounding society is, how much better we can do, clearly their moral and intellectual understanding is deficient, so anything they have to say can be discounted.
Hence also the grandiose nature of both catastrophism and transformism is clearly part of the appeal.
All of which leads to a dangerously attenuated or distorted sense of history. History is not a source of warnings and lessons, it is a parade of the follies and inadequacies that their moral and intellect will surpass. Any past failures they have moved on from and are “clearly” not responsible for. So, the same patterns get replicated. The tendency to appropriate social reforms from the past by liberals and conservatives as being “Left” and to redefine failure in the past as being by “conservatives” (even where, as in past indigenous policy, it was often the progressives of the day who were deeply involved-who just become part of the past they are rejecting) further blocks the past as something to learn from.
Thus the recent orgy of “sorry” about a more conveniently distant past clearly worked as moral insulation for embarrassingly contemporary failure. Just as people who are not normally solicitous of private property rights (and often deeply contemptuous of property explanations for economic success or failure) suddenly defined “the” issue for indigenous Australia as being one of property rights. But they were collectivist property rights that enabled them to again define virtue against the surrounding society and engage in collectivist and noble-savages fantasies unconcerned with how well or badly such rights may work (or not) in an industrial society, or whether existing forms of property rights represented embodied experience. So a gigantic social experiment was conducted on the most marginal people in Australian society, and hasn’t that worked out well? Just as the main evolved form of connection to the economy (pastoral work) was damned and replaced by “mark-of-compassion” welfarism; a combination which has created devastated communities where violence, rape and child abuse are common. Hence the use of “sorry” as moral insulation and diversion and evoking, yet again, how the past is a parade of follies and inadequacies (but never their follies and inadequacies).
As for the science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, the pre-industrial levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were near record lows, according to the geological record. That same record which shows no long-run connection between CO2 levels and global temperature - the former vary far more than the latter. Indeed, with the exception of the “methane eruption” temperature surge of 55 million years ago, sudden cooling periods (also known as Ice Ages) are the main way temperature levels change from what has been a remarkably stable range. As CO2 only blocks a narrow range of frequencies, and rapidly reaches saturation point in those frequencies, the lack of long run connection between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and temperature is hardly surprising.
Which is why the IPCC forecasts have tended to predict lower and lower levels of warming from CO2 and increasingly rely on (unproven) positive feedback effects, which clearly do not operate in the longer-term and are unproven hypothesis in the shorter term. But it is such a convenient and congenial narrative for so many.
Catastrophic policies are a much more likely danger than systemic catastrophe.
Now, clearly the 2020 summiteers were not representative of anything but progressivist networks with a few tokens thrown in, but they are definitely mainstream. And it is certainly not hard to come up with an expanding range of these people want to control your lives statements on global warming. After all, if anthropogenic global warming is a looming catastrophe, strenuous measures are entirely appropriate.
Which is clearly much of the appeal of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thesis in the first place. It has both the correct villains (nasty capitalism, led by those wickedly wasteful Americans) and the correct solutions (grade folk into “good people” - climate criminals - and “bad people”, then control just about everything, but particularly economic activity - especially evil market and corporate activity). When Owen McShane told his mentor Aaron Wildavsky that New Zealand had recently appointed the world’s first Minister for the Environment, Wildavsky had been pottering around his office. Suddenly he stopped, paused and looked at Owen and said you know, if you’re Minister for the Environment, sooner or later you’re Minister for Everything. Such as, on the above suggestion, Minister for Controlling Who Can Be Citizens.
A sign of the appeal of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming thesis has been the shift from talking of global warming to talking of climate change. The shift in language has been done in the normal way-by establishing it as the new marker that one is one of the morally cool kids and so one keeps up with the cutting edge jargon. But the change in jargon has much profounder implications. Switching from global warming to climate change shifts form the language of an empirical claim which can be verified or not, falsified or not to that of an irrefutable article of faith which ANY weather outcome can be claimed in support of since, of course, the climate is always changing and weather has always done extreme or unusual things. (Though the rate and number of people dying from the same has been falling in recent decades.) That the shift in language occurred when global temperatures plateaued rather gives the game away.
But there are some longstanding patterns here. The first is that the Left has always been prone to catastrophist thinking. Whether triumphant catastrophism (the ever-sharpening crisis of capitalism) or alarmism (over-population, catastrophic climate change, peak oil, etc). They have hardly had a monopoly of such - waves of scientific advance seem to generate these. Consider the eugenics catastrophism of the early C20th - as with catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, a crossover cause with scientists and political activists from right and left calling for urgent policy action to avoid a catastrophic collapse in the human gene pool. Nevertheless, catastrophism has been very much a feature within Left thinking for well over a century.
The next pattern is that these predictions have entirely failed to come true. Since the great virtue of the future is that it is as yet unknown-so the fulfilment of prophecy can be safely consigned to it-hope can stave off refutation for some time (hence the periodic revivals of Malthus). Nevertheless, catastrophism has a very poor track record, and it is not a strength of the Left that is has been so prone to it.
Why the Left has been prone to catastrophist thinking is hardly a mystery, since being “of the Left” is based on seeing existing society as flawed and unworthy. The more dramatically it is about to fail, the more flawed and unworthy it is and the more justified programs of transformative change are. Catastrophism validates being Left.
The context of attitudes-to-change is also why the reactionary Right has also been somewhat prone to catastrophist thinking. If one believes that history is heading in the “wrong” direction, catastrophism validates one’s rejection of the pattern of change. It is the final “proof” of what a disaster said changes are. Hence eugenics being a prop for both progressivists (e.g. George Bernard Shaw) and atavists (notoriously, the Nazis).
That the contemporary Left also tends to feel, given the failure of socialism and the revival of economic liberalism, that history is moving in the “wrong” direction, makes catastrophist thinking even more appealing nowadays. (Of course, other people’s alarmism is silly; one’s own is just rational and informed understanding.)
The third pattern is that, while the Left has a very poor record of predicting catastrophe, it has a rather better record of creating them. Whether broad-but-shallow (i.e. more fiascos rather than catastrophes: such progressivist education, nationalised industry, public housing, urban planning), narrow-but-intense (indigenous policy) or broad-and-intense (Leninist megacides), catastrophic failure is something the Left has managed to produce. Leninism, especially the terror and collectivisation famines, having been a much bigger catastrophe than any of the predicted catastrophes that haven’t happened.
But the grandiosity of the cataclysmic understanding and of the “necessary” social transformations is often part of their attraction. Hence Hobsbawn’s agreeing that if Leninism had worked, the millions of deaths would been worth it makes perfect sense-if your political project is so wonderful that it is worth millions of deaths, it must be truly wonderful. Which is just an updated version of attitudes expressed by Marx, particularly in his correspondence.
So the Left has a poor record in predicting catastrophe, a rather stronger record of creating them. Based on the historical record, betting on Left policies being catastrophic is a much stronger bet than accepting Left predictions of looming catastrophe.
Nor is there any particular mystery about the tendency to produce bad policies. The Left has a strong tendency to define itself against highly successful societies and to define itself against highly successful social mechanisms. It also has a strong tendency to invest ego and identity in a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, so is resistant to being told about problems with the grand visions. After all, if someone is not aware of how unworthy the surrounding society is, how much better we can do, clearly their moral and intellectual understanding is deficient, so anything they have to say can be discounted.
Hence also the grandiose nature of both catastrophism and transformism is clearly part of the appeal.
All of which leads to a dangerously attenuated or distorted sense of history. History is not a source of warnings and lessons, it is a parade of the follies and inadequacies that their moral and intellect will surpass. Any past failures they have moved on from and are “clearly” not responsible for. So, the same patterns get replicated. The tendency to appropriate social reforms from the past by liberals and conservatives as being “Left” and to redefine failure in the past as being by “conservatives” (even where, as in past indigenous policy, it was often the progressives of the day who were deeply involved-who just become part of the past they are rejecting) further blocks the past as something to learn from.
Thus the recent orgy of “sorry” about a more conveniently distant past clearly worked as moral insulation for embarrassingly contemporary failure. Just as people who are not normally solicitous of private property rights (and often deeply contemptuous of property explanations for economic success or failure) suddenly defined “the” issue for indigenous Australia as being one of property rights. But they were collectivist property rights that enabled them to again define virtue against the surrounding society and engage in collectivist and noble-savages fantasies unconcerned with how well or badly such rights may work (or not) in an industrial society, or whether existing forms of property rights represented embodied experience. So a gigantic social experiment was conducted on the most marginal people in Australian society, and hasn’t that worked out well? Just as the main evolved form of connection to the economy (pastoral work) was damned and replaced by “mark-of-compassion” welfarism; a combination which has created devastated communities where violence, rape and child abuse are common. Hence the use of “sorry” as moral insulation and diversion and evoking, yet again, how the past is a parade of follies and inadequacies (but never their follies and inadequacies).
As for the science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, the pre-industrial levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were near record lows, according to the geological record. That same record which shows no long-run connection between CO2 levels and global temperature - the former vary far more than the latter. Indeed, with the exception of the “methane eruption” temperature surge of 55 million years ago, sudden cooling periods (also known as Ice Ages) are the main way temperature levels change from what has been a remarkably stable range. As CO2 only blocks a narrow range of frequencies, and rapidly reaches saturation point in those frequencies, the lack of long run connection between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and temperature is hardly surprising.
Which is why the IPCC forecasts have tended to predict lower and lower levels of warming from CO2 and increasingly rely on (unproven) positive feedback effects, which clearly do not operate in the longer-term and are unproven hypothesis in the shorter term. But it is such a convenient and congenial narrative for so many.
Catastrophic policies are a much more likely danger than systemic catastrophe.