What was/ is very telling is that some many climate doomsters, Monbiot aside, didn't change their behaviour one jot. Quite the opposite, they might fly to Singapore to attend a sustainability conference. That's not the behaviour of people who genuinely think that the world is coming to an end unless we take radical action
The one thing I have found interesting about climate catastrophism is how malleable it has been in some respects and how rigid in others. Regarding its malleability, I remember how in the early 2000s you had films such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), where the story involved global warming melting the Arctic ice caps which then cause the Gulf Stream to break, thus leading to a new Ice Age. This was also the prediction in An Inconvenient Truth (2006). This idea about global warming resulting in a new Ice Age has been abandoned by the activists (I am not sure how widely supported this view was in actual mainstream climate science), but few people seem to remember how that was part of the narrative. Similarly, some of us can remember the apocalyptic warnings about vast swathes of the Western world being underwater that have failed to materialise, yet the narrative changed and ignored those failed prophecies.
On the subject of rigidity, the thing I find most fascinating is how almost none of the climate activists who promote degrowth in the West seem to agree to ideas about stopping population growth in the Third World. Similarly, there seems to be no demand to end any form of aid to sub-Saharan Africa or industrial development in the Third World. Likewise, the discussion of environmental degradation does not extend beyond Greenhouse gasses to issues such as plastic pollution in the Third World, open defecation, water being poisoned by chemical birth control etc. All of this shows that it is just part of the omni-cause for most of the activists.
Yep totally. The 'underwater' thing was the first time I think I realised the disconnect between the activists and the science. When I read the actual sea level rise projections for 2100 they were far less catastrophic than I'd been led to believe.
I wonder to what extent the narrative of apocalyptic flooding was influenced by films such as Waterworld (1995) and novels like The Drowned World (1962) or The Incredible Tide (1970), which all feature some great cataclysm that results in much of the world being submerged beneath water? It would be fascinating tracing the history of these ideas and seeing how and why they had such an impact.
Yes definitely I was thinking of waterworld. Flooding is definitely the simplest visual way things could be communicated. Better than extreme heat, and far better than reduced agricultural productivity).
The idea of 'extinction' obviously a good way too. IIRC the 'extinction' in Extinction Rebellion originally referred to the ongoing extinction of many animal species, but it all kind of got confused with human extinction.
Isn't it mainly Roger Hallam who was responsible for the 'extinction' coming to be equated with human extinction? He has made some interesting remarks, comparing climate change to the gas chambers, equating the Holocaust with events in the Congo Free State, and writing prophecies about mass rape and genocide in the future. It is an interesting blend of climate alarmism, Third Worldism, and yet also seems to have potential notes of Camp of the Saints.
Yep he had an eye for publicity! Not sure why was responsible. I knew a few XR activists back in the day and they were always a bit vague about what extinction meant.
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that young people like her believed.." aged 28 I think? Raises the question of when prophets of youth can be said to reach maturity. As an aside, it's interesting that middle-aged activists invest so much effort in school programmes yet still interpret the opinions of 15-year-olds as a broadcast from the progressive future. People seem entranced to hear impressionable youngsters repeating their own words back to them - creates instant 'folk belief'
Have you read this by Scott Alexander? He remembers that lots of things seen as urgent crises in the 1990s have been forgotten without being solved or causing disaster and just aren't mentioned much now.
Good article. His school experience sounds very much like mine, the rainforests were big! And notable that we haven't solved this, they continue to decline. Interesting that he doesn't see a spike in increase in climate change when he was writing. Maybe the American context was different, or maybe it was just beginning.
> I never had much respect for the ‘hard deniers’ who argued either that warming wasn’t happening or that it wasn’t caused by increased CO₂ emissions ... As we’ll come to later, mainstream climate science never remotely supported these sorts of claims, though this had little effect on the activists.
There's nothing wrong in your analysis of what happened except that you're trying to hold onto the scientist/activist split, in which the activists have crazy ideas and the scientists represent honest rationality. There is no such split. They're all activists.
People weren't making these apocalyptic ideas up on their own. They got them directly from mainstream climatologists. You can't see it because climatologists speak out of both sides of their mouth: in papers and IPCC reports where they have to argue with clued-in people, they are more conservative. But then when they talk to the public they are no different from Greta Thunberg. Same people, different claims.
Greta herself is a good example. She famously wrote in a now deleted tweet: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years". This wasn't an exaggeration. The "top scientist" in question was Prof James Anderson at Harvard and she got that idea directly from a 2018 lecture he delivered in Chicago, reported by Forbes:
"We Have Five Years To Save Ourselves From Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says"
> "People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions", Anderson said
> Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth's poles. This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
> Anderson said, "The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years. Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."
> "When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night," Anderson said.
> "People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said, displaying a map that shows the site of Harvard's new $10 billion Allston campus inundated after 3 meters of sea-level rise.
> In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects.
> "I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids," Anderson said, "because they're not stupid people."
The Arctic still permanently has ice, something a Harvard Professor claimed there as was an "essentially zero" chance of. There's nothing special about this event. It's totally normal behavior for climate academics to talk like this: making up wild claims, assigning them 100% confidence and then engaging in left wing moralizing about the awfulness of anyone who doesn't mindlessly obey them.
This stuff starts with the academics themselves. Now think: are people like that trustworthy? Why should you believe them about anything at all?
Agree that the climatologists also behaved as activists, I should have put this in. But the state of the science itself never seemed as catastrophic to me.
You could argue the science itself has no specific state, as predictions shouldn't vary so dramatically depending on the forum and media in which they're made. Which one is the true state of the science? The papers? The lectures that purport to be repeating the papers? The press releases? That they don't agree is a good sign we're actually dealing with a pseudo-science, not a rigorous study - particle physics doesn't have this problem for example.
Some years ago I dived into what the climatologists are actually doing down in the weeds of the science. It turned out that the "deniers" and skeptics were correct. No matter how deep down I went there was never a threshold at which activism faded out and science faded in. It was mendacious deception all the way down, right to the temperature records themselves! (they are heavily faked and censored).
Well particle physics has an experimental side, and is not politically contentious. I don't see why climatology would necessarily be a pseudoscience, it is dealing with a physical system after all, even if it's not experimental. Though it will be more speculative than an experimental or more tightly constrained science.
So what's your position, there is no warming, and increased CO2 does not cause warming? Or there is warming but it's caused by something else?
What makes a pseudoscience isn't the nature of the subject it's studying. Pseudoscience is something that presents itself as scientific without actually being so.
Climatology is especially prone to pseudoscientific behavior because:
1. They can't experiment on the planet.
2. They are interested in very long range predictions, that become in the limit unfalsifiable over the length of a typical career.
3. It's not a deep field. They only really have one theory. If there was no climate crisis, i.e. if the climate changing was mostly a natural phenomenon or was affected by human activity only in ways that didn't matter, then they would be no more famous or important than people who classify obscure kinds of fish. They'd lose all their status, most of their funding and all of their political power. It's not like there's a question they can ask about temperature time series other than what they'll do in future, or any reason for anyone to care about climate changes if they aren't dangerous.
My position is that because climatology is a pseudoscience, we don't actually know much about the climate. Where ideally there would be knowledge there's just a dark hole.
Still, after sifting through lots of very corrupted and marginally useful data I concluded this. Is it getting warmer? Depends on what time period you ask about. The world probably got warmer since 1975 but by maybe half as much as they claim, and before 1975 it was getting colder, and before 1945 it was getting warmer, and in the late 1800s it was getting colder. Over the course of the 20th century these changes probably averaged out to not much of interest. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere might or might not affect much - the responses and feedback loops are too complex to model. Certainly, the claim that temperatures are completely stable unless humans emit CO2 is wrong; there's abundant evidence from other fields (like archaeology) that temperatures have changed significantly over the past few thousand years, even though humans weren't emitting any meaningful amount of CO2. This wasn't controversial before climatologists started campaigning in the 1990s (e.g. the very first IPCC report admits this). Ironically then, it's climatologists who are the "climate change deniers", and it's their enemies the skeptics who believe in (natural) climate change along with the potential for emissions created warming. The problem is we don't understand the natural variations, and we don't have reliable observational data over long enough time periods, so we can't subtract one from the other to find out what the human contribution is.
And if you can't do that, you don't have a field. As they say, it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
If we avoid it, Gaia will take a breather and happily embark on long-term self-preservation.If we avoid it, Gaia will take a breather and happily embark on long-term self-regeneration.
What was/ is very telling is that some many climate doomsters, Monbiot aside, didn't change their behaviour one jot. Quite the opposite, they might fly to Singapore to attend a sustainability conference. That's not the behaviour of people who genuinely think that the world is coming to an end unless we take radical action
The one thing I have found interesting about climate catastrophism is how malleable it has been in some respects and how rigid in others. Regarding its malleability, I remember how in the early 2000s you had films such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), where the story involved global warming melting the Arctic ice caps which then cause the Gulf Stream to break, thus leading to a new Ice Age. This was also the prediction in An Inconvenient Truth (2006). This idea about global warming resulting in a new Ice Age has been abandoned by the activists (I am not sure how widely supported this view was in actual mainstream climate science), but few people seem to remember how that was part of the narrative. Similarly, some of us can remember the apocalyptic warnings about vast swathes of the Western world being underwater that have failed to materialise, yet the narrative changed and ignored those failed prophecies.
On the subject of rigidity, the thing I find most fascinating is how almost none of the climate activists who promote degrowth in the West seem to agree to ideas about stopping population growth in the Third World. Similarly, there seems to be no demand to end any form of aid to sub-Saharan Africa or industrial development in the Third World. Likewise, the discussion of environmental degradation does not extend beyond Greenhouse gasses to issues such as plastic pollution in the Third World, open defecation, water being poisoned by chemical birth control etc. All of this shows that it is just part of the omni-cause for most of the activists.
Yep totally. The 'underwater' thing was the first time I think I realised the disconnect between the activists and the science. When I read the actual sea level rise projections for 2100 they were far less catastrophic than I'd been led to believe.
I wonder to what extent the narrative of apocalyptic flooding was influenced by films such as Waterworld (1995) and novels like The Drowned World (1962) or The Incredible Tide (1970), which all feature some great cataclysm that results in much of the world being submerged beneath water? It would be fascinating tracing the history of these ideas and seeing how and why they had such an impact.
Yes definitely I was thinking of waterworld. Flooding is definitely the simplest visual way things could be communicated. Better than extreme heat, and far better than reduced agricultural productivity).
The idea of 'extinction' obviously a good way too. IIRC the 'extinction' in Extinction Rebellion originally referred to the ongoing extinction of many animal species, but it all kind of got confused with human extinction.
Isn't it mainly Roger Hallam who was responsible for the 'extinction' coming to be equated with human extinction? He has made some interesting remarks, comparing climate change to the gas chambers, equating the Holocaust with events in the Congo Free State, and writing prophecies about mass rape and genocide in the future. It is an interesting blend of climate alarmism, Third Worldism, and yet also seems to have potential notes of Camp of the Saints.
Yep he had an eye for publicity! Not sure why was responsible. I knew a few XR activists back in the day and they were always a bit vague about what extinction meant.
Waterworks should only teach us not to smoke cigarettes around open cisterns of fuel.
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that young people like her believed.." aged 28 I think? Raises the question of when prophets of youth can be said to reach maturity. As an aside, it's interesting that middle-aged activists invest so much effort in school programmes yet still interpret the opinions of 15-year-olds as a broadcast from the progressive future. People seem entranced to hear impressionable youngsters repeating their own words back to them - creates instant 'folk belief'
I swear there has been such abuse of “noble lying” over the past decade that it’s completely destruct public trust is experts.
Yep, Dan Williams's post that I linked to in the article is good on this
Have you read this by Scott Alexander? He remembers that lots of things seen as urgent crises in the 1990s have been forgotten without being solved or causing disaster and just aren't mentioned much now.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/
Good article. His school experience sounds very much like mine, the rainforests were big! And notable that we haven't solved this, they continue to decline. Interesting that he doesn't see a spike in increase in climate change when he was writing. Maybe the American context was different, or maybe it was just beginning.
> I never had much respect for the ‘hard deniers’ who argued either that warming wasn’t happening or that it wasn’t caused by increased CO₂ emissions ... As we’ll come to later, mainstream climate science never remotely supported these sorts of claims, though this had little effect on the activists.
There's nothing wrong in your analysis of what happened except that you're trying to hold onto the scientist/activist split, in which the activists have crazy ideas and the scientists represent honest rationality. There is no such split. They're all activists.
People weren't making these apocalyptic ideas up on their own. They got them directly from mainstream climatologists. You can't see it because climatologists speak out of both sides of their mouth: in papers and IPCC reports where they have to argue with clued-in people, they are more conservative. But then when they talk to the public they are no different from Greta Thunberg. Same people, different claims.
Greta herself is a good example. She famously wrote in a now deleted tweet: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years". This wasn't an exaggeration. The "top scientist" in question was Prof James Anderson at Harvard and she got that idea directly from a 2018 lecture he delivered in Chicago, reported by Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-pollution-has-shoved-the-climate-backward-at-least-12-million-years-harvard-scientist-says/
"We Have Five Years To Save Ourselves From Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says"
> "People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions", Anderson said
> Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth's poles. This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
> Anderson said, "The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years. Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."
> "When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night," Anderson said.
> "People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said, displaying a map that shows the site of Harvard's new $10 billion Allston campus inundated after 3 meters of sea-level rise.
> In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects.
> "I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids," Anderson said, "because they're not stupid people."
The Arctic still permanently has ice, something a Harvard Professor claimed there as was an "essentially zero" chance of. There's nothing special about this event. It's totally normal behavior for climate academics to talk like this: making up wild claims, assigning them 100% confidence and then engaging in left wing moralizing about the awfulness of anyone who doesn't mindlessly obey them.
This stuff starts with the academics themselves. Now think: are people like that trustworthy? Why should you believe them about anything at all?
Agree that the climatologists also behaved as activists, I should have put this in. But the state of the science itself never seemed as catastrophic to me.
You could argue the science itself has no specific state, as predictions shouldn't vary so dramatically depending on the forum and media in which they're made. Which one is the true state of the science? The papers? The lectures that purport to be repeating the papers? The press releases? That they don't agree is a good sign we're actually dealing with a pseudo-science, not a rigorous study - particle physics doesn't have this problem for example.
Some years ago I dived into what the climatologists are actually doing down in the weeds of the science. It turned out that the "deniers" and skeptics were correct. No matter how deep down I went there was never a threshold at which activism faded out and science faded in. It was mendacious deception all the way down, right to the temperature records themselves! (they are heavily faked and censored).
Well particle physics has an experimental side, and is not politically contentious. I don't see why climatology would necessarily be a pseudoscience, it is dealing with a physical system after all, even if it's not experimental. Though it will be more speculative than an experimental or more tightly constrained science.
So what's your position, there is no warming, and increased CO2 does not cause warming? Or there is warming but it's caused by something else?
What makes a pseudoscience isn't the nature of the subject it's studying. Pseudoscience is something that presents itself as scientific without actually being so.
Climatology is especially prone to pseudoscientific behavior because:
1. They can't experiment on the planet.
2. They are interested in very long range predictions, that become in the limit unfalsifiable over the length of a typical career.
3. It's not a deep field. They only really have one theory. If there was no climate crisis, i.e. if the climate changing was mostly a natural phenomenon or was affected by human activity only in ways that didn't matter, then they would be no more famous or important than people who classify obscure kinds of fish. They'd lose all their status, most of their funding and all of their political power. It's not like there's a question they can ask about temperature time series other than what they'll do in future, or any reason for anyone to care about climate changes if they aren't dangerous.
My position is that because climatology is a pseudoscience, we don't actually know much about the climate. Where ideally there would be knowledge there's just a dark hole.
Still, after sifting through lots of very corrupted and marginally useful data I concluded this. Is it getting warmer? Depends on what time period you ask about. The world probably got warmer since 1975 but by maybe half as much as they claim, and before 1975 it was getting colder, and before 1945 it was getting warmer, and in the late 1800s it was getting colder. Over the course of the 20th century these changes probably averaged out to not much of interest. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere might or might not affect much - the responses and feedback loops are too complex to model. Certainly, the claim that temperatures are completely stable unless humans emit CO2 is wrong; there's abundant evidence from other fields (like archaeology) that temperatures have changed significantly over the past few thousand years, even though humans weren't emitting any meaningful amount of CO2. This wasn't controversial before climatologists started campaigning in the 1990s (e.g. the very first IPCC report admits this). Ironically then, it's climatologists who are the "climate change deniers", and it's their enemies the skeptics who believe in (natural) climate change along with the potential for emissions created warming. The problem is we don't understand the natural variations, and we don't have reliable observational data over long enough time periods, so we can't subtract one from the other to find out what the human contribution is.
And if you can't do that, you don't have a field. As they say, it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
If we avoid it, Gaia will take a breather and happily embark on long-term self-preservation.If we avoid it, Gaia will take a breather and happily embark on long-term self-regeneration.