Read an article, Measuring the political temperature in the magazine Spiked, questioning if the wailing and gnashing of teeth over climate change is more a reflection of the hysteria of our age than anything else.
The article's author, Josie Appleton, posits that climate change activists have gotten a bit carried away, and that it's largely our zeitgeist of terror that is running our debate over these issues than the science. She gives examples of other periods in the 20th century where fear has supposedly influenced climate science. In the 1970s, a theory that the earth was about to plunge into a new ice age, and we'd all consequently starve to death, happened to coincide with the Oil Shock. In the early 1980s, during a time of acute anxiety about nuclear war, the theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs via asteroid (ie sudden death from the sky!) was first proposed. Can you see a pattern?
Well, maybe. It could all just be coincidence, and Appleton doesn't provide enough evidence to prove her case. Worse, she concedes that just because a theory might be framed by the time in which it is developed, it doesn't mean it is wrong. The dinosaur theory is still viable, and it has been proposed that if humans hadn't released so much carbon over the last few thousand years we might be in an ice age right now. Nonetheless, she does manage to raise suspicions that the tenor of some environmentalist commentators may reflect the agitation of our age. One of the more hysterical claims going around at the moment posits that we have but eight years to start dropping carbon emissions drastically. It seems very convenient indeed that the science happens to show that now is the last possible moment for saving the world. But again, this doesn't mean it's not true.
It should be fair to point out that Appleton isn't a climate sceptic of the 'it's the sunspots, stupid!' variety. Instead she's gunning for the rhetoric. She points out that when Al Gore frames combatting climate change as the mission that defines our generation, we're getting sucked into a scenario where we care more about the distribution of carbon atoms than how we lead our lives.
Appleton's essay is perhaps the first to deal with what I'd call carbon existentialism. Assuming we can get our CO2 emissions under control, how are we going to lead our lives? Appleton fears that we will live in a status quo world, except everyone will be wracked with consumerist guilt, shuffling around nervously lest they accidentally release carbon. Appleton fears that all this will mean the end to progress.
I think Appleton suffers from a lack of imagination on this point. Society can adapt its attitudes and values to accommodate the new reality. In the same way that it's no crying shame that we can't all own a thousand square miles of land each, we can adjust to not using a car each day, or at all, if that's what it comes down to. I imagine that our transformed world would feature people trying to out-Jones each other with conspicuous acts of non-consumption. Or we might go all hippy and renounce technology (which I don't think will be such a terrible thing, for all that cranks like Ray Kurzweil might get upset).
Shutting out the possibility that a carbon-restrained society can be okay, Appleton instead favours the possibility that miracle technology solutions will allow us to continue the status quo. She then accuses environmentalists of being against miracle tech because it doesn't fit their self-flagellating outlook. I don't think this is a fair characterisation. The problem environmentalists have with miracle technologies is that you can't responsibly count on them when they haven't been invented yet. I also hope that miracle technology can help us, but for now it just seems like wishful thinking.
Appleton also accuses the more extreme environmentalists of misanthropy on a grand scale. Personally, I can't stand humans - they're a bloody menace - but I have sympathy for this view, best outlined in Frank Furedi's article 'Confronting the New Misanthropy'. He argues that even if humans are a bipedal ape nightmare, it's only through collective effort that we're going to solve problems, and being misanthropic isn't going to help.
All in all Appleton's article is interesting, but mostly her arguments don't cut it for me. More than anything the essay feels like the work of a unapologetically uninformed lay person pushing her own agenda. Mind you, this is no worse than newspaper columnists like Rosemary McLeod, but then Rosemary McLeod intends merely to entertain (even if she makes a serious point), whereas Appleton's article is outright advocacy. It's certainly a nice piece of sophistry, but she has to work harder to convince anyone other than the already converted.
Posted by stuart at June 9, 2007 8:13 PMInteresting piece. Agree with your take, more or less.
For what its worth, I take issue with the fundamental frame provided by the writer - she argues that our models of ecology are driven by a preoccupation with metaphors of fragility and collapse; whereas I think it's pretty clear that our preoccupation with fragility and collapse is driven by what we've discovered about ecology.
But the general argument she makes, which is to look at broad themes rather than science in attempting to make judgements of credibility about crucial technical arguments, is actually a good and useful one I think. (Even though she is wrong, wrong, I declare wrong! in this particular instance.)