The foregoing critique of the dominant climate change narrative may have the reader wondering which side I am on. That is always the most important question in a war. Do I, in spite of my critique of reductionism, still affirm the basic principle that carbon emissions pose a grave and immediate threat to the climate? Or am I, instead, a “climate change denier”? Which side am I on in the “fight” against climate change?
As I elaborate the critique I began in the last chapter, it will become clear that this is the wrong question: wrong in its emphasis, wrong in its implications, and wrong in the worldview that underlies it. For now I will say that this book takes a position that is both skeptical and alarmist. It is skeptical of certain aspects of the dominant narrative of climate change, while affirming that human activity is alarmingly destabilizing the ecosphere. If anything, I tend toward an extreme view of the gravity of the ecological crisis. The prescriptions herein partially align with conventional climate advocacy, and in some respects far exceed it, albeit for different reasons and from different motivation. I hope, therefore, my arguments will be persuasive even to those who disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For AGW believers, this book may offer new political and material strategies for addressing climate change as part of a broader ecological regeneration.
What you will see as I deconstruct the conventional spectrum of opinion on climate change is that the dynamics of the debate obscure something more important than which side is right. As with many polarizing issues, it is the hidden assumptions, shared by both sides and questioned by neither, that are most significant and most potent in taking us into new territory.
These hidden assumptions include agreements about what is significant as well as agreements on what not to talk about. To give an example from another realm, in the political debate on immigration, one side says to keep them out, the other side says let them in, and eventually governments institute a policy somewhere in the middle. But neither side asks, “What are the policies that make life in other places so unlivable that people risk their lives and separate from their families to emigrate?” Both sides agree not to talk about military imperialism, neoliberal trade policies, and the global debt regime, or are not even conscious of them. Yet without a change on that level, the immigration issue will never be resolved. The furious mainstream debate draws all the attention away from the underlying causes and toward the superficial symptoms. Therefore, it perpetuates the status quo.
Most polarized conversations are like this, whether in politics or within communities or couples. They are part of a holding pattern that absorbs and squanders the energy of discontent, leaving the real issue untouched. Usually, the real issue is more uncomfortable, because it involves not only the demonized opponent, but oneself as well.
Here is a map of the conventional spectrum of opinion on climate change, which as you will see includes positions that seem extreme and mutually opposed. They are not. However acutely opposed they may seem, hidden agreements unite them, and it is these hidden agreements that make the problem unsolvable. Where we need to go, and where the ecological crisis will eventually take us, is off this spectrum entirely.
What could possibly unite such disparate viewpoints? First, they share a focus on greenhouse gases and global temperatures. On one end of the spectrum, it is that they aren’t a problem; on the other, that they spell the end of civilization. All agree with the general consensus that puts climate change and carbon at the heart of environmentalism.
Accordingly, the skeptics (most of them anyway, but not all) throw out the baby of care for nature with the bathwater of the standard AGW narrative. Similarly, alarmists unwittingly demote other environmental issues (not to mention social issues) to secondary importance in their focus on AGW.
The intensity and ubiquity of the conversation around this issue sucks the air out of the room for issues like wildlife conservation, habitat preservation, toxic and nuclear waste, soil erosion, aquifer depletion, and so on. Tragically, as I will argue, it is precisely these other issues that are the hidden drivers of climate instability. Climate change is a symptom of ecosystem degradation, a process that goes back at least five thousand years and has reached peak intensity today. It arises from the basic relationship that has prevailed between civilization and nature.
Climate change is inviting us to forge a different kind of relationship, one that holds the planet and all of its places, ecosystems, and species sacred—not only in our conception and philosophy, but in our material relationship. Nothing less will deliver us from the environmental crisis that we face. Specifically, we need to turn our primary attention toward healing soil, water, and biodiversity, region by region and place by place. Endless photovoltaic arrays on ruined land are not going to solve the problem. We must enact a civilization-wide unifying purpose: to restore beauty, health, and life to all that has suffered during the Ascent of Humanity.
Across the spectrum, carbon dominates the conversation. Most (but again, not all) skeptics seem to want the environmental problem to go away altogether, and hope that by refuting climate change we will once again have unlimited license to pillage the planet. The climate fundamentalists, despite their general sympathy for other environmental causes, instigate a perversely similar banishment of other environmental issues that gives implicit license to any sort of ecological pillage that doesn’t generate CO2.
I am suggesting here that the frame of the debate is itself part of the problem. The “frame of the debate”—drawing from the Story of Separation—includes:
In overt and subtle ways, these assumptions inform climate science and policy today, from the formulation of basic research questions, to the political arguments about climate, to priorities in funding, technology, agriculture, and industry. They are shared by alarmists and skeptics alike, which is not surprising since the same assumptions also underpin civilization as we know it. The problem and the current modes of solution come from the same place. That is why a different framing is needed.
To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn’t matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future. I would like therefore to offer a new “frame of the debate”:
The converging crises of our time, including the ecological crisis, are an initiation for our civilization. The belief system I just outlined awaits us on the other side of that initiation.
Can you imagine what a society would look like that embodied these beliefs in its agriculture, technology, and economics? Current “green” policies would seem paltry in comparison. Today, the policy ship of environmentalism must sail against the current of the Story of Separation. Pulling the oars furiously, the environmental movement stirs up a mighty froth, yet for all its progress through the water, the ship is carried backward by the current; the overall condition of the planet continues to worsen. Fifty years after the Clean Air Act, pollution planetwide is worse than ever. Forty years after the Clean Water Act, the ocean’s plastic outweighs its fish. Forty years after the Endangered Species Act, biodiversity on earth is in precipitous decline. And after several decades of climate accords, climate derangement continues to intensify.
Is the solution to pull even harder on the oars? If the current is unchangeable, that would be the only hope. Here is where the metaphor breaks down, because the current is not some arbitrary force of nature or human nature, as if we were genetically disposed to destroy the world. No, the current is composed of systems created by human beings: first and foremost the financial system, and also our systems of government, science, technology, education, and religion. What human beings have created, they can uncreate.
How to uncreate them is no trivial matter. We should be skeptical of save-the-world narratives; historically, such quests have done more harm than good. Inevitably, and especially when they demand urgent action, they draw from the existing ingredients at our disposal: existing institutions of political power, existing economic mechanisms, existing modes of technology, and existing ways of thinking. To organize quick action on a large scale usually involves giving more power to institutions that wield power already. We need to look beyond existing institutions, ways of thinking, technologies, and economic mechanisms, all of which are intrinsic to the problem. Uncertainty lies ahead, new social territory in which we will discover unsuspected modes and expressions of human creativity.
I can, however, offer a guiding principle. Our system moves according to a deeper current still; namely, our civilizational mythology: the stories, meanings, perceptions, and agreements that constitute what we think to be reality. The world’s healing must and will come from outside the mythology of Separation that brought us to the present impasse.
The us-versus-them drama that our culture seems automatically to reenact appears not only as the “fight against climate change” but also, in the search for an identifiable enemy, as a battle against those who doubt or deny that climate change is real. The thinking goes as follows: if only the unholy alliance among fossil fuel companies, their financiers and investors, their political allies, and a small minority of venal academics could be overcome, we would be able to take meaningful, swift action to halt climate change. The identity of the enemy is clear. We can settle in to the familiar operating framework of the fight.
A nearly universal tactic in warfare is the dehumanization of the enemy. Accordingly, the Standard Narrative of climate change activism says that those who disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change must not be in full possession of their mental or moral faculties. They are greedy, they are corrupt, they are delusional, they are in denial; they are hypocrites, liars, and psychopaths. Otherwise, how could they ignore the overwhelming evidence, the “settled science,” the consensus of “97 percent of climate scientists”? It seems inconceivable and outrageous.
Trusting that I myself am not a hypocrite, liar, or psychopath, and am in possession of at least some fraction of my mental and moral faculties, I decided to explore the views of climate skeptics more deeply.
The climate skeptic camp turns the above accusations around and speaks of the incompetence and corruption of mainstream climate scientists. (Its more sophisticated adherents emphasize groupthink, publishing and funding bias, and political pressure as the main mechanisms by which orthodoxy is enforced.) In response to the label “climate denialism” they name the mainstream “climate alarmism.”
It may seem from the above that I am leaning toward the side of the skeptics in drawing what may look to the believer like a false equivalency. After all, in World War II the Nazis and the Allies demonized each other as well, but that doesn’t make the two sides equivalent. There were good guys and bad guys in that war (right?); all the more so in this one, where the survival of humanity is at stake.2 To hint at the possible legitimacy of the enemy’s position or to criticize the rationale for war is already an act of betrayal—“rendering aid and comfort to the enemy” it was called during the Bush administration’s War on Terror. Likewise, it is an act of betrayal not to take sides. Such is the mentality of war.
In wartime, pacifists draw more hostility and contempt than the enemy does. Why? Because the pacifist questions the validity of the roles people identify with and the story they live in. They pose an existential threat—not to survival, but to identity.
In my exploration of the skeptic position, I adopted a kind of deliberate naïveté, rejecting both sides’ characterization of the other and temporarily assuming that most parties to the debate are, albeit imperfectly, competent, intelligent, and sincere. I chose various of the main lines of the standard climate narrative and then read extensively the best skeptical blogs and websites I could find, to see what they actually say about what seems to be overwhelming evidence for global warming. I also read the best and most patient rebuttals I could find of the skeptics’ arguments. Let me share a representative sample of my adventure, with my responses suitably exaggerated for dramatic effect.
I started with what looks like incontrovertible proof of AGW (anthropogenic global warming): Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph showing a rapid acceleration in global temperature in the twentieth century. In the graph, centuries of relatively stable temperatures precede a rapid warming closely congruent to the increase in atmospheric CO2. You can’t argue with the numbers. Certainly, correlation does not prove causation, but the absence of any other explanation for such a drastic, unprecedented rise makes a causal link likely, particularly in light of the greenhouse effect of CO2. How could an intelligent person sincerely doubt such strong evidence?
I decided to find out. The climate skeptics claim that there are serious flaws in the statistical methods used to construct the hockey stick graph.3 They criticize both current and historical data as unreliable, incomplete, and heavily “adjusted” always with a bias toward demonstrating recent warming—old numbers adjusted lower, recent numbers adjusted higher. The tree ring proxy data, they say, doesn’t take into account that slower tree growth might be due to less CO2 or less rainfall, not colder temperatures.4 Current data they also claim to be unreliable due to urban heat island effects—compared to the past, an inordinate number of weather stations are located near air conditioning vents, parking lots, airports, water treatment plants, and other heat sources.5 Moreover, raw data is adjusted upward in a process called homogenization.6 If one weather station is giving results that are out of line with neighboring stations, its data is homogenized under the assumption that it is subject to a malfunction or microclimatic influences—but usually, the skeptics say, the ones giving lower readings are adjusted upward, often in comparison to stations that are subject to the warmer temperatures resulting from the presence of buildings or asphalt. These problems have led some researchers to look at alternative temperature datasets gathered by satellites, which aren’t subject to the vagaries of widely distributed surface temperature readings. After all, theoretical models of greenhouse effects predict warming of the entire troposphere. These alternative datasets, say the skeptics, agree closely with each other and show a much slower temperature rise than the surface temperature data upon which the recent part of the hockey stick is built. In any event, present temperatures are still lower than during the Medieval Warm Period, which is the subject of repeated attempts to revise out of existence. Furthermore, say the skeptics, historical carbon dioxide levels follow and do not precede temperature increases, and often are not correlated at all. Ice core reconstructions of CO2 use data from which data points have been removed when they contradict the standard narrative, on the grounds that they must have been contaminated.
My goodness—how could I have been such a fool as to believe the party line peddled by Big Science? I’d been duped along with everyone else into believing the orthodoxy. How could I have been taken in?
Just to make sure, I’ll look at what mainstream climatologists say in response. Hold on here—things are not as the skeptics claim. The critics of the hockey stick are using one or two insignificant errors to throw out the entire paper; besides, the errors were corrected in the 2008 version of the paper. Since the original paper was published, other peer-reviewed research using numerous other proxies has confirmed again and again that the last two decades are the hottest in two thousand years.7 There are now many, many “hockey stick” reconstructions of Paleoclimate data, all more or less consistent with Michael Mann’s.
As for the satellite data, the skeptics don’t realize that the orbital decay of the satellites introduces a spurious cooling effect that would have to be corrected for. You can’t trust the raw temperature readings. Second, temperature readings are also skewed by “diurnal drift.” Third, the satellites aren’t really measuring temperature; they are measuring microwaves emitted by atmospheric oxygen, which is only indirectly a function of temperature. Fourth, the charts I’d been looking at rely on weighted averages of various levels of the troposphere that are weighted in a way that might exaggerate cooling; moreover, data from different types of sensors must be combined and fitted to a single scale. In any case, scientists took the discrepancies seriously, but when they investigated the reasons and adjusted the data, the result was that satellite data matches surface temperature data and theoretical models quite closely. Moreover, there are actually five satellite datasets, and the skeptics always display the one that shows the least warming—even though that one correlates the least closely with weather balloon data, another source of troposphere temperature measurements.8
Historical CO2 levels, says the mainstream, only appear to follow temperature rises because rising temperatures kick off a positive feedback cycle, amplifying what would otherwise be minor warming.
As for the heat island effect and the data adjustments, says the mainstream, these have been handled very scrupulously in order to remove distortions in the raw data.9 Besides, rural and urban weather stations are consistent in the degree of warming they show.10 The same goes for the carbon dioxide levels in ice cores. Scientists had very good scientific reasons for eliminating outlier data points that could not be correct, since there is no possible mechanism by which CO2 could have been at those levels. To ignore the lengthy conversations within the community of scientists and issue an armchair opinion that they have connived to manipulate the results according to some preconceived “agenda” is an insult to the scientists and reveals a profound lack of understanding about how science is really done.
Wow, I’m sure glad I read these rebuttals by real scientists who aren’t on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry before I let any climate denialism infiltrate this book. I’d nearly been taken in by the deniers. Who do I think I am, anyway, to imagine that I know better than the climate scientists who have spent decades studying the topic? How arrogant to think that in a couple weeks of doing “research” on the internet I could find some obvious way they are wrong, and that they lacked the brains or integrity to see. I feel ashamed to have doubted them.
In the interests of due diligence, I’ll see if the skeptics respond. They do. The 2008 version of Mann’s paper, they say, contains the same basic flaws as the original, and other “hockey stick” studies use the same problematic temperature proxies. They claim that the reason that rural weather stations show the same upward trend as urban stations is that while defined as rural, many are also subject to significant urbanization. They say that in fact, the orbital decay factor was corrected for twenty years ago and in any case affected only the lower troposphere readings, which are not at issue here. Diurnal drift has been corrected for as well. The microwave emissions are a better measure of temperature than the electronic resistance method used for surface recordings. The climate establishment is constantly “adjusting the data” every time it doesn’t fit their narrative or models, each “adjustment,” of course, being in the upward direction. The datasets that conform to the weather balloon readings and demonstrate greater warming do so because they include data from a satellite that was not corrected for calibration drift, and then adjust the data for diurnal drift according to a climate model rather than empirical data.11
It looks like I was taken in again, bamboozled by the authoritative-seeming dismissals of the minority position without really understanding the science behind it.
What becomes apparent in this back-and-forth is that in the end I am probably unable to make my choice of belief on purely evidentiary grounds. When I pursued the question of temperature readings a bit further, I got mired in a morass of technical minutiae about atmospheric physics, statistical methods, and so forth that I lack the scientific background to easily understand. Mind you, I am scientifically literate and have a degree in mathematics from Yale University. If I can’t judge the issue on its merits, how can the average citizen? Moreover, as the disagreements among those who do have the scientific background demonstrate, educating myself further still might not resolve the issue. I am left with a nonevidentiary choice of whom to trust.
Unless you are a climatologist, meteorologist, or atmospheric physicist, you are in the same boat I am. Belief in anthropogenic global warming hinges mostly on whether one accepts the authority and integrity of the scientific establishment, including the soundness of academic publishing, the impartiality of peer review and funding, and resistance of individual scientists and institutions to confirmation bias. For many people, especially liberals and progressives, science is the only trustworthy institution remaining in our society. To doubt anthropogenic climate change is to question the very source of legitimate truth in our culture; as well, it is to question the other institutions that draw their legitimacy from science.12 That is why, especially in the United States, those who disbelieve in climate change are generally members of the religious right who also disbelieve in other, even more fundamental, scientific theories. If you already believe that evolutionary theory is a vast unholy conspiracy to deny the biblical creation story, it isn’t much of a stretch to disbelieve in climate change as well. There is some truth in the derisive association of climate doubters with flat earth believers.13 The truth is not in the derision though, because what is happening is not that they are silly or stupid. It is that they are rebelling against the dominant culture’s primary epistemic authority.
Another factor that might predispose someone to disbelieve climate change is that it might conflict with deeply held economic, social, or political views. Unsurprisingly, most climate change doubters hold conservative political opinions. They typically oppose government regulation of business and see climate change as a dangerous justification for increased regulation. They usually favor unbridled exploitation of “natural resources,” deriding the idea that nature poses any limits to human growth that technology cannot overcome. They are usually pro-nuclear power, pro-fracking, pro-offshore drilling, pro-coal mining, and in favor of bringing industrial development to the entire planet. Quite often (though not always), their position that we aren’t harming the climate is of a piece with their position that we aren’t harming the environment generally; that we shouldn’t worry too much about GMOs, chemical waste, nuclear waste, plastic in the oceans, pesticides, pharmaceutical waste, habitat destruction, and so forth. Furthermore, climate-change-doubting blogs and especially their comments sections are often peppered with Islamophobic sentiments (the government is using the climate change hoax to distract us from the real threat: Islam!) and other alt-right canards.
Here, in short, are two nonevidentiary reasons to believe in anthropogenic climate change: faith in the institution of science, and the bad company of those who doubt it’s happening.
So what was the final result of my descent into the world of climate skepticism? If you are still waiting for the answer to “Which side am I on?” I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer (until the end of this chapter). One thing I found in my excursion, however, is that each side is mistaken in the characterization of the other. The skeptic side, while certainly surrounded by a penumbra of ignorance, pseudoscience, and worse, is home to many reasonable, scientifically literate individuals who endure intense hostility for articulating heterodox viewpoints. The “War on Evil” approach to combating climate skeptics (starting with the poisonous slur “climate denier”) is based on false premises. While I think that they sometimes overlook or minimize data that doesn’t support their position, prominent dissidents like Judith Curry, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Jim Steele, and Stephen McIntyre are neither corrupt, stupid, nor insincere, and at least some of them are also passionate environmentalists who care deeply about the ongoing degradation of nature. Moreover, at least from the perspective of a layman who has looked at both sides, some of their criticisms have merit. Whether or not the mainstream view is right, science and the public would benefit from a more respectful and less dogmatic engagement with the skeptics.
The skeptics’ derisive view of establishment scientists is also wrong. It is obvious to me when I speak with climate scientists and read scientific papers that these people are also, generally speaking, scrupulous, conscientious scientists who care deeply about the planet. When skeptical bloggers accuse them of being part of an evil conspiracy, of criminal negligence, financial corruption, or hidden “political agendas”; when they bandy about degrading caricatures of “greenies” and “enviros,” they undermine the credibility of any legitimate criticisms they may have.
Furthermore, many skeptics who are not trained scientists are frequently guilty of intellectual sloppiness of the grossest kind, which suggests that they are the ones with a political agenda. They uncritically embrace flimsy evidence and arguments that serve their desired conclusions. To give a representative example, I came across an authoritative-looking graph of ice core proxy temperatures going back thousands of years, apparently from ten thousand years before present to today, showing that temperatures during the Minoan Warming, Roman Warming, and Medieval Warming were much higher than present temperatures.14 It was presented in a right-wing blog that essentially said, “The climate establishment must be idiotic or corrupt, when their own data shows that present temperatures are far below historical periods.” The comments section was a chorus of agreement. It was an impressive graph, so I went to look at the information source, which was a peer-reviewed paper by R. B. Alley.15 There I saw that the graph created by the blogger was highly misleading, because the data series from which it drew only went up to 1905 (which would make sense since ice cores are not useful proxies for very recent temperatures). Yet the graph was labeled to look as if it went up to the present day. All it showed, then, is that historical temperatures were much higher than they were in 1905—before modern emissions-caused warming is supposed to have begun.16
Of course, the behavior of a cadre of scientifically untrained and politically motivated followers doesn’t entail that the skeptics’ arguments are without merit. It should caution us to proceed carefully though, and to be aware of confirmation bias—our own as well as that of others. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to prefer evidence that conforms to an existing belief and to interpret evidence in a way that supports that belief. So, the right-wing bloggers embraced that graph without subjecting it to any scrutiny whatever, even though a cursory check of the underlying data revealed it as bogus.
The more ego attachment one has to one’s opinions, the greater the likelihood of confirmation bias. Signs of this ego attachment include self-righteousness, smugness, and contempt for those who disagree. I am sorry to say that I see a lot of all three in the writings of both sides, leading me to have little trust for either. Go read the blogs and comments sections of each side and ask yourself whether these people would be open to being wrong.
Now you, dear reader, may think yourself relatively free of confirmation bias, but notice how you respond when you read something critical of your position on climate change. Don’t you subject it to much greater scrutiny than you would something that supports your position? Who is that guy? Was it in a peer-reviewed journal? Is he funded by oil companies? Let me find something that debunks it.… From that mindset, it takes only the most superficial rebuttal, character assassination, unsubstantiated accusation, etc., to cause the believer to dismiss the criticism. By the same token, you will probably give a free pass to articles that confirm your position. You won’t bother to look at the unadjusted raw data, to question the fidelity of proxy temperatures, and so on. Generalize this tendency, and we have a society of increasingly noncommunicating reality bubbles, warring with each other even as their hidden agreements go unexamined, and their shared interests neglected.
A politically progressive friend described her experience of spending a week with her in-laws, who consumed a steady diet of Fox News. By the end of the week, she said, she understood how it seemed to them that anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton must be an idiot. The conservative media creates its own reality bubble.
The same might be said for the world of climate skepticism, and for its mirror opposite, the world of climate catastrophism. I encourage the reader to spend some time in each of these reality bubbles. Anchored by scientists and writers like Guy McPherson, Paul Ehrlich, Paul Beckwith, David Wallace-Wells, and Malcolm Light, the catastrophist camp criticizes mainstream climate science along many of the same lines as the skeptics do. It says that scientists ignore data that doesn’t fit their worldview, or for which they are psychologically unprepared. Even when they do realize that it is already too late, political expediency induces them to tone down their forecasts; privately, they are much more pessimistic than their public statements indicate. IPCC reports are similarly watered down under political pressure. The truth, they say, is that we are doomed.
Oddly enough, climate skeptics and climate catastrophists come to a similar place of inaction from entirely opposite directions. What does it matter, when one party disengages because they think there is no problem, and the other disengages because they think there’s no solution?
Apocalyptic thinking in general fosters a complicity with the very systems that it critiques. Seemingly radical, the catastrophist position is in practical terms completely compatible with the continuation of business-as-usual. Making a similar point, the scholar Eileen Crist writes:
Indeed fatalism is a mind-set that strengthens the trends that generate it by fostering compliance to those very trends. The compliance that fatalism effects is invisible to the fatalistic thinker, who does not regard him or herself as a conformist, but simply as a realist.17
The “realism” upon which so much climate discussion is based takes for granted many of the same beliefs and systems that are generating the crisis to begin with. What we believe to be real, though, may be a projection of the story we live under. As for the systems, humans created all of them. Humans can change all of them.
Catastrophist prognostications of doom range from massive disruptions that would render the tropics uninhabitable and devastate food supplies, all the way to near-term extinction of human beings (in my lifetime) or even a runaway greenhouse effect that would make Earth like Venus. I invite the reader to browse Guy McPherson’s website, “Nature Bats Last,” for a catalog of the scientific evidence behind their position. Basically, near-term extinction depends on positive feedback loops that accelerate climate change. For example:
Most of the alarm centers on methane. According to Malcolm Light, the methane under the Arctic Ocean alone is a hundred times greater than that sufficient to instigate a major extinction event.18 If even 1 percent is released, it would cause a 10°C rise in global temperature—enough to ensure the demise of all vertebrates.
And, say the catastrophists, this is already well under way and irreversible. The feedbacks are already in place. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The Larsen B and Larsen C ice shelves are on the verge of collapse. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing 150 cubic kilometers of ice per year. The oceans are warming at twice the rate previously thought. Sea level rise has gone exponential.
I will not repeat the previous exercise and walk the reader through the mainstream responses to these points, the responses to the responses, and so forth. Methane levels haven’t risen as quickly as the catastrophists predict. Yes, they have—the methane has gone to a higher atmospheric layer than where the measurements are taken. No, they haven’t—that claim is speculation based on sketchy data. Yes, they have…
I seriously recommend the interested reader spend a solid week reading catastrophist literature, and another solid week reading skeptic literature (the website Watts Up With That? is a good place to start, or Matt Ridley’s essay “The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science”).19 It is amazing how intelligent human beings, all sourcing information from what we call science, can come to such dramatically opposed conclusions. What’s going on here? Each camp wields various psychological and political theories to explain the intransigence of the other. Each side is certain that the science is with themselves.
For reasons that will become apparent in this book, I do not accept the catastrophist narrative. It does, however, have three important truths to offer.
First, a great dying is indeed under way on this planet, and human activity is responsible for it. Most people and institutions have their heads in the sand and do not see it or allow themselves to feel it.
Second, we are indeed facing the end of the world. Not the literal end of civilization or the human species, but a transition so profound that on the other side of it, it will seem like we are living in a different world. That is how deep the changes must go for the ecological crisis to be resolved. We face an initiation, a metamorphosis, into a new kind of civilization. From this place, what is possible, practical, and realistic changes as well. Our successful graduation to a new world is by no means guaranteed; nonetheless, the catastrophists are channeling the truth of a possibility. They see the necessity of a death phase, the dying of our present collective self; they do not see the rebirth. And that is normal. In a true initiatory ordeal, often there is a moment when there seems no hope of ever making it through.
Third, the catastrophists are right that conventional means, methods, and mindsets are far insufficient to the task of healing the planet. The catastrophists are like the voice that tells the man in the maze, “Just stop.” They do not recognize that after this stopping a new compass becomes available, a song that can guide us out. The situation is hopeless, yes—but only from within the logic and worldview that entrap us. That worldview (which has generated the crisis to begin with) renders us impotent, because its solution set is entirely insufficient to the task at hand.
Many of my readers have probably had at least one experience in their lives that violated what they’d believed to be possible. A precognitive dream, a healing of an “incurable” disease, an uncannily accurate psychic reading, an amazing synchronicity, an encounter with a UFO—something that implied “reality is much bigger than we’ve been told.” If you are one of them, I ask: Does your despair take that into account? Or do you exclude such considerations from your “realism”?
Ironically, some catastrophists in their despair have indeed hit upon a significant theme of the song that can lead us out. They are saying that since it is hopeless, we might as well dedicate our lives to love, beauty, and life. Yes! That is the starting point, because our current predicament is the result of a long history of denying love, beauty, and life. The revolution is love. What becomes possible then?
Translated into practical action, this change of heart is ultimately more important to healing the climate than the things the conventional alarmists are calling for. It is as if giving up on saving the world opens us up to doing the things that will save the world.
If the skeptical “right” and doomsaying “left” are both trapped in reality-tunneling confirmation bias, perhaps we should flee to the center: the standard climate change narrative. This is comfortable territory, staked out by our society’s primary epistemic authority, science.
The problem is, the dynamics that afflict the two extremes afflict the middle as well. Over the last few years, a growing chorus of insider critics have been exposing serious flaws in scientific funding, publishing, and research, leading some to go so far as to say, “Science is broken.”20
The dysfunctions they describe include:
The system encourages the endless elaboration of existing theories about which there is consensus, but if one of these is wrong, there are nearly insuperable barriers to its ever being overturned. These go far beyond classic Kuhnian resistance to paradigm shift—critics call it “paradigm protection.” Former NIH director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus describes it this way:
The system now favors those who can guarantee results rather than those with potentially path-breaking ideas that, by definition, cannot promise success. Young investigators are discouraged from departing too far from their postdoctoral work, when they should instead be posing new questions and inventing new approaches. Seasoned investigators are inclined to stick to their tried-and-true formulas for success rather than explore new fields.27
It is easy to see how these dynamics might impact climate science, a politically charged field that receives billions of dollars of government funding. Skeptics’ websites contain laments by climate researchers who are afraid to attempt publication of results that contradict climate orthodoxy because they do not want to be ostracized as a “denier”; professors telling of discouraging graduate students from investigating inconsistencies in the data; and anecdotes about reputable scientists who lost funding and professional appointments after they issued mild criticism of official positions.
The dissident climatologist Judith Curry raises questions about the genesis of the scientific consensus around climate change:
The skewed scientific “consensus” does indeed act to reinforce itself, through a range of professional incentives: ease of publishing results, particularly in high impact journals; success in funding; recognition from peers in terms of awards, promotions, etc.; media attention and publicity for research; appeal of the simplistic narrative that climate science can “save the world”; and a seat at the big policy tables.28
All of this adds up to a kind of collective confirmation bias within science, the same cognitive handicap that so obviously afflicts many climate skeptics. In other words, confirmation bias is not limited to those outside the establishment. It is institutionalized within it as well, despite the system of peer review that is supposed to eliminate it. Here is what my father, a retired professor, says about peer review:
Peer reviews in my field were often sloppy, dashed off because reviewers had little incentive to spend time. No one received the authors’ data to replicate. Editors could bias the result through choice of reviewers (this is important). Also, coteries of researchers in specialized fields, who were the only ones who could understand a given article, would make favorable reviews to enhance the status and visibility of their clique.
Let me hasten to add that this doesn’t mean the establishment view on climate (or anything else) is wrong. It means, though, that if it were wrong, we may not easily know it. We would know it only if the self-correcting mechanisms of science-as-institution are properly functioning.
To those who suspect me of being “anti-science,” let me make a confession. The consensus around global warming that brings together Big Science, governments, and most of the world’s elites makes me less confident, and not more, in the standard narrative.
Why should I accept the consensus around climate change when I reject the very same consensus that has been invoked in support of GMOs, nuclear power, pharmaceutical oncology, or the safety of common pesticides?29
The reader might object that the consensus on these topics is weaker than the consensus on climate change, and she may be right. The prospect of offering stronger examples of questionable scientific consensus presents a bit of a quandary, however. If I reveal my doubts about, say, standard Big Bang cosmology, dark matter, the Lipid Hypothesis for arteriosclerosis, or the pumps-and-channels model of cell membrane physiology, then I will be undermining the credibility I need to make my point effectively. The reader will assume I am deficient in intellect, ignorant of basic science, or credulously enamored of kooky theories. He will lump me in with biblical creationists, flat-earthers, and moon landing conspiracy theorists. Or perhaps he will conclude my contrarian views have a psychopathological origin; that I’m rebelling against my father or suffering from oppositional defiant disorder.
It is impossible to cite an example of a fallacious scientific consensus that will be convincing to a person who trusts scientific consensus. Of course, one could adduce historical instances where scientific consensus was wrong—the luminiferous ether, eugenics with its calls to save humanity from genetic degradation, and the hackneyed example of geocentric cosmology come to mind—but the believer can turn those around and say, “See, science works. Wrong theories are eventually rejected and we are converging on the truth.” The implication is that the big mistakes are all safely in the past.
None of this is to say that I believe in every scientific heresy I encounter. After all, many scientific heresies are themselves mutually contradictory. On many issues I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, because when I try to pin it down and figure out which side is right, I end up in a welter of competing claims that I am incapable of evaluating—just as I described in the satellite temperature debate.
The reader may be familiar with this kind of rabbit hole. Whether you are investigating 9/11 conspiracy theories, chemtrails, crop circles, vaccine damage, or nonstandard archaeological, cosmological, biological, or geological theories, the pattern is the same. One side invokes the authority of the scientific establishment, while the other consists largely of marginalized heretics. These dissidents complain about the difficulty they have obtaining research funding, getting published in journals, and getting their arguments taken seriously. Meanwhile, the defenders of orthodoxy cite the self-same lack of peer-reviewed journal publication as reason not to take unorthodox theories seriously. Their logic is basically: “These theories are not accepted; therefore they are not acceptable.” That is confirmation bias in a nutshell.
In most controversies that pit a powerful orthodoxy against a marginalized heterodoxy, the establishment makes liberal use of scare quotes and derisive epithets like “denier,” “conspiracy theorist,” or “pseudoscientist” to exercise psychological pressure on the undecided layperson, who does not want to be thought a fool. These tactics invoke in-group/out-group social dynamics, leading one to suspect that the same dynamics might prevail within the scientific establishment to enforce groupthink and discourage dissent. But again, perhaps the unorthodox theories really are bunkum and deserve the derision directed at them. We the laypeople cannot know. It comes down again to our trust in authority.
I would like to advance a narrative of ecological healing that does not depend on trust in existing institutions of authority, scientific or otherwise. Science can still be an ally (I will draw heavily from it in the next two chapters) but it need not be the master.
In the extremely polarized climate debate, it might be hard for the reader to actually believe that I am not attempting to construct a surreptitious case against anthropogenic global warming. That is not my intention. To repeat: my intention is to uncover hidden agreements shared by all parties to the debate, agreements that will generate a worsening crisis and, ultimately, catastrophe no matter which side is right.
I’m sure by now you are impatiently awaiting my opinion as to which side is right, ready perhaps to breathe a sigh of relief when I excuse the foregoing as an intellectual exercise and assure you that of course, I do believe in climate change. Which side am I on? Okay, here is a summary of my opinion, which I will elaborate throughout this book:
We are in fact facing a very serious climate crisis. However, the main threat is not warming per se; it is what we might call “climate derangement.” This derangement is caused primarily by the degradation of ecosystems worldwide: the draining of wetlands, the clear-cutting of forests, the tillage and erosion of soil, the decimation of fish, the destruction of habitats for development, the poisoning of air, soil, and water with chemicals, the damming of rivers, the extermination of predators, and so on. Through disruption of the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and more mysterious Gaian processes, these activities degrade the resiliency of the ecosphere, leaving it unable to cope with the additional greenhouse gases emitted through human activity. The result may or may not be continued global warming, but it is certain to bring increasingly wild fluctuations not only in temperature but also, more importantly, in rainfall. (This may already be happening, as evidenced by the recent spate of record hot and cold temperatures in various places around the world.)
Standard climate theory gives primacy to CO2-induced radiative forcing as the cause of climate change, relegating ecosystem degradation to secondary status. In standard climate theory, radiative forcing (the greenhouse effect) warms the atmosphere by only a little over 1 degree Celsius for each doubling of carbon dioxide. That by itself gives little cause for alarm. What is alarming is the potential amplification of this heating through a host of positive feedbacks. I will argue that these depend much more on biological processes than we have realized. When biological systems are degraded, they lose their ability to adapt to changing climate and to maintain stable conditions under which they can thrive.
The problem with the climate debate then, is primarily one of misplaced emphasis. Whether average global temperatures are increasing is not the main issue. We are engaged in the wrong debate. Climate derangement will continue even if we stop emitting carbon, and it will bring calamity even if average temperatures remain constant. That is because Earth is a living body, not a machine, and we have been destroying its tissues and organs.
Anthropogenic climate derangement began long before the industrial era, primarily through deforestation and soil erosion. In the last centuries these have reached industrial scale, while greenhouse gas emissions present a whole new challenge that a seriously degraded biosphere is poorly prepared to meet.
Let me put my thesis starkly:
One purpose of this book is to justify these assertions, and to describe the shift in perception and mythology that will support their enactment.
As for the normative climate debate, on the most primal level my sympathies are with the alarmists. Whatever the flaws in their data, arguments, and models, the basic alarm that animates their fervor is well founded. If average temperature stops rising or reverses, we should be no less alarmed. Moreover, the characterization of skeptics as “deniers” also has a core of truth. But it isn’t their skepticism about the science that makes them deniers; it is the denial of the ecological holocaust, the decimation of Earth’s biological wealth and vitality.
It’s like this: Suppose I were infected with a flesh-eating bacteria that is killing me, and everyone is arguing over whether I have a fever or not. Those who say “Yes, he has a dangerous fever. We’d better take care of him” are closer to the truth than those who say “He doesn’t have a fever, so he must be fine.” Now, my condition might indeed be accompanied by a dangerous fever, and it might make sense to take down the fever. But if the flesh-eating bacteria is not stopped, I will die soon anyway, whether by fever or something else. For the planet, the flesh-eating bacteria is the global financial system, and underneath it the Story of Separation. Development and extraction are devouring the world.
If you are a climate skeptic reading this book, I want you to snap out of your denial. That doesn’t mean getting on board with climate science. It means opening your eyes to the ruin of so many precious places, to the wounds of strip mines and oil spills and toxic waste sites, to destruction of habitats and species, to the impoverishment of life on earth. It means feeling the agony of this planet, taking it in, and doing something about it.
In my lifetime the number of monarch butterflies has dropped by 90 percent. Fish biomass has dropped by more than half. Deserts have expanded to an unprecedented extent. Coral reef extent has declined by half. Mangroves in Asia have declined 80 percent. The Borneo rainforest is nearly gone. Rainforests globally cover less than half their former area. Thousands of species have gone extinct. All that is real, and it is just a trace of the degradation afflicting this planet. Be alarmed. We cannot lose many more of the planet’s organs and tissues before calamity strikes.
If you are a climate alarmist, I applaud your alarm and ask you to shift its focus. Alarm needn’t depend on whether human survival is threatened. To me the prospect of humanity persisting on a dead, denuded planet is more alarming than a future without humans. How would you like to be the sole survivor of a holocaust in which all your friends and family perish? “What will happen to us?” is, I will argue, too small a question, and the kind of alarm that comes from it is too narrow and, in the end, counterproductive.
Whichever side you are on, I’d like you to hear a different alarm. It is about the dying of life on this planet. Have you noticed as I have a marked decrease in windshield bug splatter when driving? When I was a kid, I remember the windshield being covered with bug splatter. I wondered if it was memory that was faulty, until I read a twenty-seven-year study documenting a 78–82 percent decline in flying insect biomass in protected nature reserves.30 It is a thorough, extensive, and scrupulous study that echoes similar findings around the world.31
If I were in charge, this study would be a screaming front-page headline. Insects were the first animals to colonize land, arriving around the same time as plants. They are crucial to every terrestrial food chain. Insects are woven deeply into life. Fewer insects means less life. It means the planet is becoming less alive. Let me rephrase that: It means the planet is dying.
No one knows the cause, but the authors note that it probably isn’t warmer temperatures, as these correlated during the study period to more insect biomass not less. They cite chemicals and diminished habitat in nearby farmland as possible causes. I think that is likely, and that a deeper cause lurks underneath. It is that we are not treating the world as alive and sacred.32 We have not acted in service to life. We have instead seen the rest of life as the servant of man. That is what wants to change. The ecological crisis provides the initiatory medicine for the world’s dominant civilization to make that change. The crisis will intensify until the medicine has been fully received.