Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW): that A-word has a really sciencey zing, doesn’t it? It sounds like the kind of jargon-terminology used in many fields to exclude the laity from the discourse; and we seem to be in a time when quibbles and nuance are systematically discouraged. It is a shame, because if only one side is permitted to speak in any argument, we risk serious error; enter groupthink.
The late Christopher Booker’s ‘Groupthink’ came out last
year (edited after his death by his distinguished collaborator Dr Richard North.)
This work builds on a 1972 study by Yale professor Irving Janis, using insights
about group psychology to explain how the US had stumbled into one foreign and
military policy disaster after another.
Groupthink has three stages: first, to become wedded to some
analysis whose foundations are inadequate; secondly, to bolster up one’s
confidence in this shaky premiss by getting others to agree and provide moral
support; thirdly, to round on dissenting voices, insult them, discredit them,
get them to shut up. Booker added another phase: the turning point when the collective
fantasy runs face first into unwelcome reality.
Chapter Seven deals with ‘Global Warming’ and discusses the
pieces that don’t fit the picture on that jigsaw’s box cover (I wish Booker had
lived to write another chapter on Covid-19!) As with other examples, enthusiasm
or fear must be ramped up and heretics silenced.
Unfortunately, social media such as Facebook and Twitter
have become important vectors in this process. They have a bias towards brevity
so that extended argument is cast aside in favour of bald assertions, slogans,
insults and very tendentious cartoons (you will recall that there was an
explosion of all these in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote.) Site moderators
interfere by sometimes dubious ‘fact-checking’ or may censor dissenters or even
ban them altogether. At a higher level, the law can become involved: think of
the climatologist Michael Mann, who has pursued pundit and wit Mark Steyn for
years in the courts, alleging defamation because of the latter’s mockery of the
former’s ‘hockey stick’ global temperature forecast.
As an aside re Covid, it has got to the stage where the medical
expert Dr Malcolm Kendrick has recently decided to withdraw from the debate https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/09/03/i-have-not-been-silenced/
because ‘I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found
anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been
made up.’
The theory of AGW says that the Earth’s climate is getting
warmer; that the most important factor is the proportion of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, acting as a ‘greenhouse gas’ to trap more solar energy; and
that it’s mostly the fault of us humans. Even the European Community admits https://ec.europa.eu/clima/change/causes_en
that there is more than one greenhouse gas, but still doubles down on the claim
that CO2 from human activities is the main culprit and so ‘the international community
has recognised the need to keep warming well below 2°C and pursue efforts to
limit it to 1.5°C.’
Most countries have signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and
Paris Agreement, but with varying degrees of a sense of urgency: for example, China
plans to continue increasing its CO2 emissions up to 2030 and become ‘carbon
neutral’ at last - by 2060! https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-china-environment-and-nature-climate-change-7e29d68ea8a77ee8ebbe1460f0f09ffd
To be fair, China is only 44th out of 209 nations in its per
capita emissions; https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
but its population is huge and its total output of CO2 (2016 figures https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
) is by far the greatest, equalling that of the next four nations combined.
The issue has become mixed up with other political and economic
dealings; the whole business of ‘carbon trading’ has been something of a fudge
designed to go easy on developing economies while throttling Western countries –
read this from 2010 if you would like to know more. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233681598_Carbon_Trading_How_it_Works_and_Why_it_Fails
Also, there are other, competing moral panics – for example,
the guilt trip over plastics use has led to calls for switching to paper and
cardboard (and a plastic tax from next year https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introduction-of-plastic-packaging-tax-from-april-2022/introduction-of-plastic-packaging-tax-2021
- doing us good always seems to involve a tax!); yet does it help the world to fell
even more carbon-sequestering trees for packaging (cutting down the Amazon for
Amazon?), or for ‘biomass wood pellets’ for power stations? https://www.drax.com/sustainable-bioenergy/what-is-a-biomass-wood-pellet/
Global warming, even if we could stop it right now, is
hardly the only thing that matters. Are wild species being driven to extinction
simply by heat, or is not rather because we are destroying their habitats and
access to the food they need?
[Altered/added from here on as follows:]
Can we ‘save the world’ (defined how?) by focusing on a
single atmospheric gas? Step forward someone, anyone, with the capacity for more
nuanced analysis, please!
One such is former Chancellor Lord Lawson, who launched his
think-tank ‘The Global Warming Policy Foundation’ a dozen years ago. https://www.thegwpf.org/who-we-are/
This was set up to represent a range of views on AGW claims but also to try to
achieve some balance between competing aims and needs. A key principle is that
‘we regard observational evidence and understanding the present as more
important and more reliable than computer modelling or predicting the distant
future’; the hockey stick has been stowed away, for now.
Their latest report, by Professor Ole Humlum https://www.thegwpf.org/state-of-the-climate-2020/
, says that ‘based on observational data from 2020 [it] finds little evidence
to support the idea of a ‘climate emergency.’’ There is little that impassioned
believers hate more than a revisionist, and if you look him up on Wikipedia he
and his group are termed ‘climate change denialist’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum#Climate_change_views
; the connotations of that last word stink of the Holocaust-deniers.
Look in Google News for more dogpiling of GWPF’s skepticism:
Bright Green loathes Andrew Montford on GB News for his ‘scare tactics’ in
outlining the cost of installing domestic heat pumps https://bright-green.org/2021/08/18/taking-on-climate-denial-on-gb-news/
; The Ecologist hates Steve Baker for his ‘lies, damn lies and climate denial’ https://theecologist.org/2021/aug/23/lies-damn-lies-and-climate-denial
, as does The Guardian for his ‘attacks’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/16/uk-net-zero-delay-has-left-room-for-climate-sceptics-attacks-says-tory-peer
; Wales Online urges us to ‘be sceptical about whether Boris Johnson really
cares about climate change' and citing the IPCC’s ‘massive assessment of how
utterly our planet is screwed.’ https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/news-opinion/why-you-should-sceptical-whether-21283869
It’s all there, isn’t it? The personalisation of issues, the
intemperate language, the desperate desire to silence opposition. Even to
listen to the heretic puts one in danger of sin, as with Saint Stephen’s
address to the Sanhedrin: ‘Then they cried out with a loud voice, stopped their
ears, and ran at him with one accord…’ https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207%3A54-60&version=NKJV
The groupthink.
________________________________________
[Previous last section read:] We really don’t need quasi-religious millenarian catastrophising,
back-to-Eden magical thinking, simplistic government propaganda, world-rescuing
billionaires and ‘Chinese whispers’ on social media. Step forward someone,
anyone, with the capacity for complex analysis, please!
