Richard Jones
Part 5: Climate Politics vs Climate Science
My title for this instalment is descriptive of the content, but began as reference to a dilemma. I thought of the last episode as being about the science, and aimed to address the politics now. Then a friend, paraphrased, said “after that account of the politics, I’m looking forward to the science”.
So for some time, I worked on the idea of writing some hard core science, and trying to explain elements of thermodynamics, interaction of radiation with matter (in which I have some expertise) and other specialities (where I don’t and need to research). I may yet do something on those lines, but I’m not sure of the value for readers, nor of my ability to do the job adequately, and I really don’t think it belongs here under ‘Reflections’. These articles are not intended to propagate a climate gospel, or to tell the ‘truth’ about climate change: quite the contrary. They are just to share some thoughts prompted by being immersed in the politics that is parasitic on what could be a scientific matter.
And there’s the nub. To find the science immersed in the swamp of entertainment, careerism, and liberal-totalitarian hypocrisy is a daunting prospect, and the more I try the more I am disillusioned.
That swamp is what I have been calling the ‘politics’. In the Anglosphere, the public face of climate science is the liberal-totalitarian media machine. The actors in this theatre have sometimes been called names such as ‘presstitutes’ (which is rather insulting to honest sex workers). ‘Stenographers’ is highly accurate without insulting anyone. Since journalism was banished from the imperial media, the actors that stand in as journalists transcribe the messages from the rulers to the masses.
Journalists used to gather information about current events and pass on filtered, more or less weighted. to the public. Today’s stenographers gather The Word from their oracles and feed The Word to the public. The oracles that speak The Word include ‘intelligence’ agencies, ‘think tanks’, ‘experts’ with close ties to ruling cliques, and dedicated wholesalers of The Word like Bellingcat. So, for example, in regard to the US war against Russia in Ukraine, a current news item about BoJo scuttling the settlement agreed in Ankara may have derived from a government press statement, a feature about the context, such as the US-fascist putsch, would have its script from Bellingcat.
The oracle for climate change is the IPCC, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, perhaps with its Vestal Virgins in the guise of the people nominated as experts by the IPCC. If that seems a bit cultish, I will admit that I never would have thought on those lines until learning how the IPCC ‘scenarios’ became the means to predict the apocalypse.
Not long ago when thinking about climate politics, I was observing things like climatists attributing opposition to oil industry interests and denialists branding the climatists as–how wicked!–socialist subversives. Historically, the Empire did indeed oppose the climatists, and its devotion to oil interests is currently on display in the form of the Palestinian genocide implemented by its European colony planted in the region for the specific purpose of protecting imperial oil interests.
So why has the climatist agenda been given the nod? Here our reflections can benefit by considering the peculiar situation where the empire that for a hundred years eliminated democracy in every country that (to that point) had a degree of sovereignty, enough to give meaning to democracy, and installed puppet dictatorships: this same empire now justifies its global aggression as guided by devotion to promoting democracy.
There was an interesting article by Thomas Frank about ‘liberal’ hysteria against Trump, published in Le Monde Diplomtique a while after he (maybe) lost to Biden.
https://mondediplo.com/2021/08/06usa . Curiously, Frank in conclusion says that, of course, Biden is a much better chap, tally ho. Before losing the plot, however, his rant is all about how the rants against Trump are baseless fiction. He appears to know that the whole Biden-Trump contest is, and was even back then, all theatre to reinforce the illusion of a democratic process. Trump’s supposed attempts at a putsch are just a bonus, of course. (I’m moving from the article to the current theatre.) The invented insurrection at the Capitol, protection measures in the precinct, supposed assassination attempts, all work to reinforce the notion that it matters to Americans and indeed the whole world who ends up in the White House. Do Palestinians care whether Biden is crying for them when annihilating them, or Trump is gloating?
The Empire adopted climatism because it costs the Empire nothing and costs the oil companies nothing, because it is, like democracy and sadness for murdered Palestinian children, just words. The Empire declared in favour of democracy, even while eliminating it, because it recognised that a lot of people thought of it as a Good Thing, and notably the industry that employed its stenographers was accustomed to assuming that it is a Good Thing. So now, democracy no longer refers to fantasy like ‘government by the people, for the people’: it means a non-sovereign nation having elections to choose between one or another servant of empire.
Just as the Empire declared in favour of democracy. and funds ‘experts’ globally so long as they extol its virtues while remaining silent about its impossibility within the Empire, it can add support to a ‘climate emergency’ while doing nothing about it but encouraging poor countries most at risk to invest in taking action that can only have minimal effect.
Conversely, China, perhaps the world’s most sovereign and most democratic country, is taking climate change seriously and taking more action on its own than all the rest of the world. For me this is a unique piece of evidence from the political arena that climate change is something that needs action.
Returning to the dismal politics of the ‘Free World’, the stenographers are bit parts in what is essentially an entertainment system for promoting the sale of retail goods. They can’t give much weight to what actually happens in places like Ukraine or Gaza, but with climate change, which is hardly going to unite Americans in rebellion against the military-financial complex that rules them, they are free to do what sells. What would sell better than, on the one hand, apocalyptic hysteria, and on the other hand, intemperate dissent?
Along comes the IPCC, providing the hysteria, and Roger Pielke in an article “How Climate Change Became Apocalyptic” provides the details.
I have mentioned how IPCC forecasting employs ‘scenarios’ that offer us different futures based on how much carbon we chuck into the atmosphere. Also, and perhaps I should have spent much more time on this, I mentioned how the divergent predictions for a particular scenario are averaged into a prediction from the IPCC oracle.
There is a curious ‘principle’ that is thrown at students of statistics, called ‘regression to the mean’. In biology, you are likely to encounter the version that says something on the lines of ‘the height of a person tends to be closer to the population average then the height of the parent(s).’ On the face of it, this seems to be saying something about genetics or inherited characteristics, but it is really just about numbers and probabilities.
For anyone interested, there is a Wikipedia article that (at the time I checked) looks fairly good:
Essentially the same properties of numbers and probability ensure that if you have a number of really bad estimates of some real quantity, and you average them, the average will be a whole lot better than a lot of the estimates. This can turn what seem like a bunch of random numbers into something close to real information.
So testing the reliability of climate forecasting by doing a lot of ‘hindcasting’ (applying the forecasting algorithm to data in the past) and averaging the results, is fundamentally flawed, if not fraudulent. Unless the real historical record is rather extreme, it is almost guaranteed that the result of averaging the predictions will be perceived as close to the record. By the same token, averaging predictions of the future trend are probably closer to the real future than many of the predictions. However, that is just the nature of probabilities. The real future may be more extreme, and the averaging process does not lend one iota of legitimacy to any of the predictions.
Returning to the scenarios, the predictions are in any case based on a particular scenario, i.e. an assumption about carbon (dioxide) that humans add to the atmosphere.
When it comes to the interaction of politics and science, the article by Roger Pielke is quite astonishing as it indicates that, deliberately or not, the IPCC has used the scenarios in a way that directs predictions towards the worst conceivable outcomes.
As a result, I find myself utterly weary of this topic. At the outset, I mentioned the preconceptions that I had realised I held, without evidence. Now, I have no conclusions to offer or persuade a reader to believe, but I will simply state that my enquiries have to some extent added to my conviction that there has been some warming, on average, globally, and also added to my skepticism about all predictions about where this is heading.
If warming continues, it doesn’t necessarily mean disaster for everyone. For instance, thawing in Siberia may release carbon dioxide locked into the permafrost, adding to the input for global warming, but it also makes previously barren land available for farming, providing income for local battlers and nourishment for a nation victim of imperial aggression. As for the people at risk from global warming, the climatists have little to offer.
If the climatists are serious about being the Good Guys, how is it that they put so much more effort into telling the poor to stop burning for energy and so much less into calling for helping the poor to cope with the damaging consequences of climate change?
Labour Affairs 