Dupes, idiots and climate change deniers
2009
Do climate change deniers merit a response? My old Director of Studies once gave me a piece of sound advice. ‘There’s a lot of rubbish in the world’, he said, ‘you can’t take it all on. It’s not worth wasting breath on’. Are people really so daft as to fall for the lies and misinformation of climate change deniers? If so, then there’s little hope for the human species in any case, so why bother? It strikes me that the greatest damage that the climate change deniers do is not so much in denigrating scientists and climate science so as to reinforce the death-dealing prejudices of the capital economy than the time that is wasted in having to respond to them, time that could be more profitably spent in promoting the positive vision of the ecological society that is certainly within reach.
The Prospect 1881 Palmer
But it’s worth pausing, every now and then, just to point out that climate change deniers are politically motivated lickspittles of the capital economy that is wrecking societies, destabilising states, bankrupting economies and destroying environments.
I don’t have the patience to work too hard here. Instead I shall rely heavily on an article that George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian, The climate change denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it’s working. (December 2009)
Anyone who tries to keep up with the science on global warming will soon start to have the funny feeling of living in parallel universes. Serious scientific bodies like NASA, the Royal Society, the International Energy Authority and many more will report that it is clear that the world is heating and that carbon emissions are the main culprit. Then we will come across a denier who argues that the planet is cooling rather than heating.
Take Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He argues:
the global economic crisis has effectively rendered costly emission reduction policies untenable. Voters are increasingly hostile to green taxes and higher energy prices. The intriguing fact that the global warming trend of the late 20th-century appears to have come to a halt for the time being has led to growing public scepticism about claims of impending climate catastrophe…
we are beginning to see a period of sobering up, where national interests and economic priorities are overriding environmental concerns and Utopian proposals.
A pretty straightforward assertion of the overriding imperative of capital accumulation in the short run over human and planetary health and well-being in the long run. But it’s the claim that the global warming trend has come to a halt that is most interesting. Not only is global warming continuing, with record temperatures being announced, the evidence for human-made global warming is stronger than ever. So what is behind Peiser’s claim? Nothing more than the crude statistical trick employed umpteen times by deniers – taking the El Nino extreme temperature of 1998 as the base and concluding that the drop in temperature since is evidence of global cooling. They all do it. I heard Roger Helmer slipping that little trick past George Galloway on his Talk Radio show. It also turns up in Peter Sissons’ autobiography. One can point out, for the umpteenth time, that seven of the temperatures recorded in the decade after 1998 are in the top ten ever recorded, just to emphasise that global heating is continuing.
The hysterical nature of the deniers actually expresses fear and insecurity. Look at how extreme their reaction was to the email scandal at the University of East Anglia. Monbiot refers to the tendency of those who don't give a fig about science to maximise the importance of the hacked emails. The denial industry is a politically motivated defence of carboniferous capitalism and has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming. The deniers therefore insist ‘that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.’
Again, one asks of the deniers, is that all they have got? What is taking the public? Why is the public so slow to action? There really is nothing to beat here. The real email scandal was the fact that, as the police investigation concluded, this was an ‘organised and sophisticated operation’, clearly the work of powerful interests. And yet the scientists were portrayed as the villains of the piece. And, for the record, subsequent examination of the science not only confirmed the veracity of the work of the East Anglia scientists but actually firmed it up. August bodies like the Royal Society were involved, but the deniers are not interested in genuine science, are they?
Monbiot is clear: ‘Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed - the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents - the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850, in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.’
The evidence is clear. Of course, deniers propose other theories, solar cycles, the Milankovic cycle, volcanic activity. All of these have been checked, all have been shown to fall far short of an explanation for known facts. To have these same theories put up for analysis time and time again is like having a general election with endless recounts, preventing victory from being declared and the government being formed. Global warming could be the work of the invisible pixies who leave no trace in my magic garden. I can’t prove it and further research is needed, a delay in action so long as to let carboniferous capitalism pollute and exploit without end. A nihilism, in other words.
So we come back to the explanation that scientists do offer, the one which does fit the known facts. The heating trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The science is sound. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. Science does not deal in truth and certainty, so those who claim that there is no proof or conclusive evidence for global warming are demanding things that science, by definition, cannot deliver. Either they know this, in which case they are being deceitful, or they don’t, in which case they are ignorant. Either way, they can be ignored. It saves time for more important things.
George Monbiot compares the hysterical reaction to the East Anglia emails to the muted response to 20 years of revelations about the propaganda planted by fossil fuel companies. He cites the book Climate Cover-Up, written by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. Nothing exposed by the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit's server is one tenth as bad as the least of the revelations contained in this book.
Monbiot is careful to distinguish those who are paid to deny that man-made global warming is happening from the people who express this belief but have not been paid: they are just dupes. The former set out to deceive, the latter are the deceived. It’s incredible how far lies can go when they pander to an existing want or desire or prejudice.
The same language, the same phrases, the same concepts crop up time and again in the claims of the climate change deniers, and are picked up and repeated by members of the general public. They are being duped. It’s an example of memetic engineering at work and reveals everything that is bad about the notion. Richard Dawkins has a lot to answer for here. He is at war with religion and is engaging in his own memetic warfare. But, it has to be asked, what on earth have memes got to do with science and the respect and search for truth? Memes are units of cultural transmission. They do not necessarily have anything to do with the true, the good and the beautiful. It is clear that PR companies, hired experts and bought names are involved in planting and spreading memes designed to perpetuate the commercial exploitation of the planet. The result is a theory and a practice that is false, bad and downright ugly. It beggars belief to hear someone without a scientific background like James Dellingpole criticising genuine scientists as engaging in pseudo-science.
And what of the dupes? Monbiot cites the case of a coalition of US coal companies who set out to persuade people that the science of climate change is uncertain. It targeted two social groups - "Target 1: Older, less educated males"; "Target 2: Younger, lower income women" - and detailed the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that "members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others' motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues". That makes sense. How many people are knowledgeable with respect to science in general? Not many. It’s easy to talk about interests and motives. The phrase ‘masters of suspicion’ was coined about Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, for the way that these thinkers supposedly denied conceptions of truth and goodness and instead focused on underlying motives. ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they’. The whole approach shifts attention from the proposition to the proposer. Rather than do the difficult thing and engage the argument, individuals are encouraged to impugn the motives and question the character of the arguer. Of course, it’s an ad hominem attack that targets the proposer rather than the proposition. And it amounts to the destruction of science and the reduction of truth to base psychology. Of course, it would be naïve to expect characters who are happy to destroy the planet to respect science in any way. But it’s worth pointing out, as the capital system proceeds inexorably to its late, cancer stage as a neo-barbarism. There are alternatives.
Cottages on the Dachau Marsh 1902 Marc
In 1902, the Expressionist artist Franz Marc showed the world a possible alternative future to the mechanised barbarism that was to prevail throughout the twentieth century. Marc felt that animals had access to a superior wisdom with respect to reality than human beings. As he declared: ‘It is a poverty-stricken convention to place animals in landscapes as seen [and created] by men. Instead we should contemplate the soul of the animal to divine its way of sight’. Marc asked the question ‘How does a horse see the world?’
Horse in a Landscape 1910 Franz Marc
Franz Marc was killed on his horse during the Great War of 1914-1918, the ‘war to end all wars’. Dachau ceased to be a picture of bucolic tranquillity and instead became the site of a concentration camp under the Nazis in the war that followed twenty one years later.
“Those who see all creatures in themselves;
and themselves in all creatures know no grief.”
(Isha Upanishad).
Politics is always at work, behind every issue. And that means that these issues are not merely technical problems to be resolved by experts, but are matters of choice and struggle and contest. This political dimension of climate change is worth pointing out, so that people are at least aware of what is going on. So when the likes of Melanie Phillips and Ian Plimer claim that Greens are Pagans and communists, people should be aware that this is not serious argument, just another episode in the meme wars and nothing to do with truth. (And if someone is a Pagan and a communist, so what? Doesn’t that describe Plato?)
One does not have to look far for someone who argues that climate scientists are only in it for the money. So one can read Neil Hamilton in the Daily Express (I know, the words ‘fish’ and ‘barrel’ come to mind) opining from the moral high ground that ‘many academics on the eco-gravy train try to ignore or suppress data tending to undermine their pet theories.’ He doesn’t give names. Of course he doesn’t. He can’t. He daren’t. As soon as Hamilton accuses any scientist of suppressing data, he will be called to account. (The really interesting thing is that the greatest scientists who ever lived, Galileo, Newton and Einstein to take three giants, were guilty of pushing their pet theories against contrary evidence. So the issue on evidence is not so simple in any case.)
On balance, the dupes are guilty not so much of climate change denial as simply putting their prejudices and wants before scientific reason. They are the unwitting footsoldiers of campaigns launched by individuals and groups they have never heard of.
Monbiot gives the example of a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists "whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares". That claim made by the Heartland Institute is false. Whilst many of the scientists angrily demanded that their names be removed from the list, twenty months on, they remain.
Another example given by Monbiot is the way that White House officials during the Bush presidency worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn't approve of and doctored official documents about climate change.
Rather than tediously listing further examples – they are many, and time is limited - Monbiot refers us to Climate Cover-Up, Ross Gelbspan's books The Heat is On and Boiling Point, his own book Heat, and the websites DeSmog-Blog.com and exxonsecrets.org. We know what they are up to. It’s about time the general public caught themselves on. The simple conclusion is this, there is a systematic, well-organised and well-funded campaign to dupe the public. Why is anyone surprised that this should be so?
To those who complain about the lack of democracy, I repeatedly argue that democracy will be achieved when people stop letting others lead them by the nose and instead come to lead themselves by the nous. By definition, we will get democracy when the individuals composing the demos are capable of exercising rule, of ruling and being ruled in turn, to use Aristotle’s definition of citizenship. Democracy is for citizens, not dupes.
The characters organising these campaigns know fine well that the claims they make are untrue. Monbiot cites the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition's own scientists reported that ‘the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied’. The coalition not only concealed this finding from the public, it set out to persuade people that the opposite was true.
Monbiot concludes: ‘These people haven't fooled themselves, but they might have fooled you. Who, among those of you who claim that climate scientists are liars and environmentalists are stooges, has thought it through for yourself?’ When a lie is alleged, investigate further and demand the details.
I once studied economics but abandoned it for philosophy. I soon understood that behind economics was politics, a world of murk and bias where organised interests and manipulated opinions count for more than the three transcendentals of the true, the good and the beautiful. Rather than engage in endless and tedious rounds of claim and counter-claim in the political swamp, I felt it would be more interesting to plunge into the world of ontology, epistemology, ethics, language and logic. And the common moral reason which is the birthright of each and all as members of the species homo sapiens. Once people can think for themselves, then they will be able to act for themselves. They will be led by the nous and not by the nose. That agent intellect connotes the ability to see through the shadows on the wall and break through the chains of illusion. In fine, when it comes to climate change, don’t take my word for it, or George Monbiot’s, or Benny Peiser’s or Neil Hamilton’s – find out for yourself and think. Thinking and Being are directly related. To think is to be properly human. As we think, so we are.