Tag: AGW

Categories
ideological culture

A Sweltering Storm of Orthodoxy

Can we agree to tolerate disagreement?

Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson’s “defection” from an alleged climatological consensus has been greeted with hysteria from some colleagues. His sin was joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which challenges the received wisdom.

The alleged scientific consensus is that mankind, in its industrial phase, is not only a cause but the pivotal cause of recent global warming/“climate change.” Also that our carbonic effusions are triggering not mild, normal, nothing-​to-​panic-​about global climate variation but imminently catastrophic variation.

Is it okay to dispute these and related hypotheses?

Debate about complex scientific contentions isn’t a bad thing. New knowledge is gained both by positive investigation and by correcting errors and misinterpretations. One does not abet scientific inquiry by treating any challenges to a favored explanation as per se illicit, regardless of evidence or argument.

But Bengtsson reports that he has been subjected to enormous pressure “from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me … I see therefore no other way out … than resigning from GWPF. I had not been expecting such an enormous world-​wide pressure … from a community that I have been close to all my active life.”

What’s the message? “Regardless of your reasons or credentials, don’t dare deviate from our ‘consensus,’ at least not publicly — or else we’ll make your life very very hard.” Whatever the motives and goals here, they have nothing to do with either the methodological or the social requirements of science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Philosophic Anti-​Fanaticism

Popular French philosopher Pascal Bruckner is in hot water with fellow left-​leaning French intellectuals.

Bruckner doesn’t hate humanity and doesn’t want to unplug all the life-​promoting conveniences of industrial civilization. He intimates as much in a controversial new book entitled The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, available only in French for now, but soon in English translation as well.

The book assails ludicrous and nihilistic environmentalist pronouncements of the Left. As the title suggests, the author believes that these are based more in religious fervor than in carefully reasoned science. He stipulates that he does not object to ecology as such but rather to the “greenwashing” notions that the “planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay.”

After all, what is the “carbon footprint that we all leave behind us [but] the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?” A baleful implication of such views is that peoples in developing countries should forget about improving their economic and technological circumstances. The earth has suffered enough, n’est-ce pas?

Bruckner’s observations underscore how radical environmentalism is largely a convenient hook for anti-​capitalism. Long before anybody fretted about our chronic exhaling of carbon dioxide, certain anti-​capitalists urged the extinguishing of industrial civilization and a return to the blissful Tupperware-​free, iPhone-​free, hunting-​and-​gathering way of life.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.