Skepticism on Global Warming

There are four distinct reasons for skepticism about political action on global warming.

The first ground is the positive question of fact whether the global atmosphere is heating up. Any given person cannot know this through his own senses. Everyone, including all the scientists, must rely on other tools of knowledge. Skepticism here notes the uncertainty in the astronomically complex data sets, the uncertainty in the many, various and complex models used, and the statistical uncertainty involved at every stage.

It also seems relevant to observe that scientific expertise is incapable of predicting the weather one week in advance: what makes us so sure they can predict it with such certainty in fifty or a hundred years? Also science is itself an anthropological phenomenon. It is affected by human culture, fashion, orthodoxy, and interests. Most of the history of science, scientists have believed what is now known to be untrue or inaccurate. Skepticism is indeed the scientific attitude. So it is perfectly appropriate to approach scientists and their interested prognostications with skepticism.

The second ground for skepticism is whether global warming is being caused
by man.

‘All seemed confident in a sort of reverse astrology. Instead of believing that every aspect of their lives was affected by heavenly bodies, they believed that heavenly bodies were affected by every aspect of their lives.’
 — P.J. O’Rourke, on delegates to the Rio Earth Summit.

If global warming is bad, what does it matter whether or not it is being caused by human or by solar, or tectonic, or volcanic, or other activity? The eruption of Mt St Helens spewed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any one person, industry, or country in history: yet we don’t hear people calling on governments to stop volcanic eruptions. Why not? Because the environmental movement don’t just want anthropogenic global warming to be a fact: they want it to be morally bad. They want it to be a modern sin. Every other individual of every other species uses natural resources, and affects the distribution and abundance of life and death. But human economic activity is morally wrong apparently. Human beings have no right to be disturbing the beauty of nature, the environmental movement seems to be saying.

This in turn seems to show a value system that believes in values over and above human interests. But of course who could say what these super-human values are, without placing themselves in a position of superiority vis-à-vis their fellow human beings? Who could possibly have the authority to pronounce on such values, without being involved in a fatal conflict of interests? This is precisely what is involved in the whole idea that climate change warrants governmental intervention. The idea that we should stop global warming because it’s caused by man is certainly ground for skepticism, because it shows that the problem is not global warming as such, it’s the environmental movement’s conception that so much human life, activity, satisfaction and happiness are fundamentally morally wrong.

Yet even if the globe’s climate is warming, and even if it’s caused by man, the third ground of skepticism is:- so what? Nothing whatsoever follows from those premises. The atmosphere itself, the air we breathe, is the waste – the pollution – produced by earlier organisms. Should they have fretted about filling the atmosphere with oxygen? The earth has not stopped changing since it began. Earth’s climate is constantly changing – always has done, always will do. During eighty percent of the earth’s history there have been no polar ice caps. And there have been at least two ice ages when global temperatures were warmer than they are today. The whole fret-fest is foolery on a grand scale. What sort of extreme and pathological conservatism demands a world in which there is no change; or which demands to dictate at the cost of other people’s lives, health or fortunes, what change in the air is permissible? Why should you or I or anybody else do anything about global warming, let alone be forced to?

It may be said that global warming warrants action because of all the detriments, or disasters, that it will cause mankind. There will be floods, droughts, hurricanes, and so on. However those who cite all the disadvantages never seem to cite the corresponding advantages: areas which will be more fertile, places that will be more inhabitable or beautiful, new rivers and lakes and forests and plains, new abundance of life and happiness that will be made possible by the change. ‘Ain’t it awful?’ they seem to chorus, or whine. This view is fundamentally unbalanced.

And of course how could anyone possibly know *what* the balance of advantages and disadvantages would be across the globe, what continents or oceans will experience what changes in the distribution and abundance of individuals of different species? The answer is, of course, they don’t know! They are in the realm of vaulting presumption, as they must be on a topic of such global complexity and uncertainty. We should be far more concerned about the dangers of their vanity, their negative view of human life, their bloody superiority, and their readiness to use organised violence against their fellow human beings, than we are about global warming.

The great rise in the human population since the advent of industrial capitalism is because people more and more use machines powered by coal and petrol to produce food, clean water, housing, light, warmth, medicines, clothing, transport, communications and entertainment: in other words to support life, health and happiness in greater abundance and quality. But all these are unworthy to those who look down on their fellow human beings as some kind of noxious pest, as the environmental movement seems to do. (One animal liberationist recently declared that she thought the world would be far better off if there were no human beings on it: and she is by no means alone in this misanthropic opinion.) Curtailing the use of industrial activity must mean that there will be fewer of the benefits that such activity provides.

However it may be said that cutting down on current industrial activity will make life better for people in the future. But of course on the other hand, cutting down on such activity has the obvious disadvantage that it reduces the benefits to human beings now. Do people seriously imagine that you can cut Australia’s by fifty percent of current levels, and no have a major effect on life, health, and happiness of real human beings? The recent $100 per year rise in electricity bills is the merest taste of what the environmental fascists have in mind. Who is to decide who should have to go without what, and for whom, when, why and how? How could anyone possibly know the technical facts or ethical values necessary to answer these questions? The truth is that no scientist, economist, politician or bureaucrat can provide the answers to these questions. They are a matter of arbitrary power; nothing else.

Appeal to science to answer these questions is mere voodoo. Every human being matters. Therefore what is needed is to know in individual terms who must be deprived of food, or medicine, or light, or heating, or other benefits of which industrial activity, when, and why, for whom, when and why.

Mere statistical analyses of great piles of data, mere aggregations of measures of central tendency, mere generalisations over ages and continents and millions and billions of human population, are so very incapable of even coming near what would be necessary to answer the practical and ethical questions inovlved, that the very attempt to put them forward, shows the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy behind the move for political action on global warming. The fraud consists precisely in valuing human beings not as individuals with their own life and family, but as troublesome quantities to be manipulated forcibly and ‘scientifically’ in vast lumps of groups – in this case, ‘countries’. The confiscation of private property to fund this offensive anti-social scheming has already begun. It displays the familiar statist tactic of insisting that the freedoms and even lives of individuals must be sacrificed in the name of an ethereal greater good based on large groups and understood only by politicians. The fourth ground of skepticism about climate change is that, even if we were capable of knowing that governmental action on climate change is desirable, that still would provide no ground for believing that government is capable of achieving the result it wants.

Government has just spent the last hundred years forcing everyone to pay for coal-fuelled electricity, and now it turns out that was all wrong! Since in its own terms this must be acknowledged a monumental cock-up, do we see government renouncing the misuse of its taxing and regulating powers for purposes of manipulating people into particular energy outcomes? Not a bit of it! And somehow the answer always seems to be more tax, not less governmental intervention.

How are we to know that government’s choices now are going to be any better than they were then? We aren’t! Why should we presume that governmental policy – ie taxation and bureaucratic regulation – is even capable of dealing with the complexity of the problem in the first place? Presumably government has some kind of magical power to know which energy sources are preferable on balance in every case and all circumstances? Yet if one energy source were clearly preferable, why would not everyone be already using it?

And why should we believe that vested interests close to the machinations of power are not likely to miscarry the public will so as to line their own pockets? Why should we blithely believe that there will be no unintended consequences, or that the advantages of governmental action will necessarily outweigh the disadvantages? Why should we believe that, even with all the political will in the world, government will not end up making the problem worse rather than better? The socialisation of the air should expect no greater success than the socialisation of the Russian economy enjoyed.

There are indeed weighty grounds for skepticism at the current political pretensions to knowledge and power on climate change. The G8 recently resolved not to let the global temperature rise by more than 2 degrees – like they have a thermostat(!). The very idea that government now controls the weather is like a throw-back to the ‘we should sacrifice virgins to make it rain’ thing.

What we are witnessing here, folks, is superstition. Elizabethans had their witchcraft, Haitians have their voodoo; and modern man has a superstitious belief in the magic of governmental intervention. This manifests in the climate change debate in a belief that science and government are capable of dictating the relevant values and actions on climate change.

The current rush to political action to forcibly curtail industrial activity so as to wage war on warm weather should be opposed on principle: the principle of human freedom.

The position of a political party devoted to liberty and small government should be to have no policy on climate change. Libertarians should openly challenge the advocates of governmental action on climate change to show who should have to go without the food, medicine, housing, light, warmth, transport currently produced by industry fuelled by coal and petrol to satisfy who in the future, and why, and how is it known?

The answer, or failure to answer, alike will show the intellectual and ethical incoherence of the whole hysterical load of pious nonsense.