The way in which the environmental movement splits over the issue of splitting the atom for energy is a fascinating phenomenon. I have compared this in-fighting and factionalisation — with some poetic licence, of course — to the Reformation of Western Christianity. On the one hand, we have those who say that the Church’s doctrine besets its attempts to do God’s (Gaia’s) work. On the other, those who want to remain with the tradition.

The issue is only superficially about choices of technique — nuclear versus renewable sources of energy. Like the Reformation, the schism is generated by the turbulence going on around those engaged in the battle, and is more an attempt to navigate political and social chaos for temporal ends than it is an attempt to get souls into heaven. As argued here often, environmentalism, to the extent that it has been absorbed by the political establishment, is much more a response to the political climate than it is a response to a crisis developing in the atmosphere. The crisis is in politics, not in the skies.

John Vidal nails his own theses to the metaphorical door in today’s Guardian.

Apart from a few gratuitous insults on either side, the dispute that has rumbled on for a few years has so far been largely technocratic and conducted with political and personal respect. In the latest skirmishes, the four former heads of Friends of the Earth (FoE) politely wrote to the prime minister advising him to drop nuclear power on cost and other grounds; whereupon the hacks also wrote to No 10 saying this advice undermined government climate change policy. Over the next month Porritt, Burke & co will issue four or five more intellectual blasts, and will convene a press conference, and we can expect the hacks to respond.

Until now it has been a classic “fundi” and “realo” split with the pros’ (the realos) desperation to address climate change set against the antis’ (the fundis) conviction that nuclear takes too long, is too expensive and won’t actually work.

But now, the dispute is getting personal and much closer to the political bone with the fallout potentially damaging the whole idea of “environmentalism”. First we have Lynas suggesting that nuclear protesters are not really environmentalists at all, then Monbiot doubted Burke’s commitment to the environment – despite his 40 years’ active service. Now, in an extraordinary exchange of emails between Monbiot and Theo Simon – who is one half of the renowned radical protest band Seize the Day – all opponents of nuclear power are said to have made their arguments “with levels of bullshit and junk science”.

Imagine that… Environmentalists, getting technocratic and accusing each other of peddling bad science, and of not adhering to the principles of environmentalism. And imagine that, Vidal, accusing other campaigners and journalists of being ‘hacks’, and hurling ‘gratuitous insults’at each other. (But no doubt, that same invective is acceptable, when used to diminish critics of environmentalism.) If it shows us nothing else, it shows the intellectual dishonesty at work here. Neither pro- or anti-nuclear environmentalists seem able to reflect on the substance of antipathy towards nuclear energy.

Vidal offers a synopsis of the exchange between the now pro-nuclear George Monbiot, and the anti-nuclear campaigner and musician, Theo Simon. Vidal quotes Simon:

We need more than ever to champion a vision of the kind of creativity which a democratic revolution would rapidly liberate. Nuclear … can give no ultimate assurance of it’s safety or its costs. Neither can it demonstrate the kind of long-term resilience which may prove necessary if runaway climate change does, in spite of our efforts, develop. Resilience is to my mind something which we should be designing into our energy production plans now, as the future is so uncertain for our children. Nuclear requires a stable and continuous technocratic society to exist for centuries.

I always find it amazing when environmentalists invoke ‘democracy’. It is even more surprising to hear an environmentalist complain about nuclear energy needing ‘a stable and continuous technocratic society’. Environmentalism has entirely failed to develop into a democratic movement, and indeed far more often than not demands that political action to ‘tackle climate change’ should happen in spite of popular opinion, and in lieu of a mass political movement or democratic contest to legitimise any such action. And, of course, the action that is demanded is almost without fail the construction of large, powerful, far-reaching political authorities at the supranational level, beyond the reach of democracy. What are these global bureaucracies, if the aren’t an attempt to build a ‘continuous technocratic society’? Environmentalists are hopelessly naive, and seem incapable of reflection on their own ideas. Vidal concludes:

We are starting to get to the heart of what it means to be green today. One vision can justify a corrupt and odious state if it can make an odious technology work to overcome a terrible danger. The other argues that there are far better ways to achieve the same end without the resulting damage to society and the long-term dangers that the technology entails. The questions raised are profoundly difficult and need to be debated, but personal attacks are inflammatory and really help no one.

Vidal makes an interesting claim. It’s not simply that nuclear power is environmentally dangerous, it’s that in order to overcome the danger, it is necessary to build state apparatus which are inherently prone to ‘corruption’ and ‘odiousness’. He paints too polarised a picture of the debate forming within the environmental movement, and paints one half of it too rosy. Amongst the other impulses driving environmentalism and its opposition to various other possible choices of technique are things like this little gem:

Giving society cheap, abundant energy… would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.

The quote is from neo-Malthusian, Paul Ehrlich.

I wonder, then, what makes Vidal believe that nuclear power leads us inevitably towards a corrupt government, and what makes Simon believe that it takes us inevitably towards ‘continuous technocratic society’?

First, there is the obvious contradiction, mentioned above. Simon is not as against ‘continuous technocratic society’ as he protests. Take for instance, his claims in his letter to Monbiot:

In my opinion, the boundaries drawn around my behaviour by the duty of care and the precautionary principle that stems from it are in line with the biological interests of my species and with maintaining the integrity of the biosphere. In other words they are as inviolable as the 7 planetary boundaries identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (and used by Mark in “The God Species” as the springboard for his own reactionary ideas). That means I have to create ways to live within them and still thrive. That means, like it or lump it, I’m going to have to do it without nuclear.

You can read my review of Mark Lynas’s ‘The God Species’ at Spiked. Meanwhile, Simon continues…

At COP15 I concluded that capitalism (yes Mark, I’m an unashamed anti-capitalist!) could not respond effectively to the challenge of climate change, because it’s primary motive will always be profit and competitive advantage, even where planetary well-being is concerned. At the very least, a large degree of state intervention and socialised initiatives are needed, and this in turn requires a big degree of political control being exerted over capital, which may or may not be possible. It’s that uncertainty which is the difficult bit. I don’t think that you believe we can find the political will or the social base for a meaningful green revolution to occur in time to reduce UK emissions by other means than re-embracing nuclear. I also think that you have forgotten that you yourself are a subjective factor in determining the political landscape, as am I. What is necessary is to encourage and empower a left democratic social movement which is steeped in ecological understanding. Your current commitment to nuclear in Britain cuts across that agenda, and to paraphrase your email to me, potentially undoes all your other good work.

I’m not interested here, in arguing either way, whether or not Simon’s desire for state intervention can be legitimised through a democratic process. It seems painfully obvious, however, that the ‘left’ has failed monumentally in absorbing environmentalism, to build ‘a left democratic social movement which is steeped in ecological understanding’. Hence, the ‘left’ (if it includes those parts of the political establishment which have gone green) has turned away from democracy, to emphasise instead technocratic approaches to climate change — including attempts to engage the public with its objectives by ‘communicating climate change’, which invariably involve scaremongering. Simon has the ‘large degree of state intervention and socialised initiatives’ he wants. He just didn’t get them by building ‘a left democratic social movement which is steeped in ecological understanding’.

There is an extraordinary technocratic flavour to Simons argument. It talks about balancing ‘biological interests’, and justifying state interventions on that basis. I would suggest that this is the fundamental mistake he makes. Individuals aren’t equipped to make decisions about their ‘biological interests’ at the level of ‘species’, only global bureaucracies informed by ‘the worlds top climate scientists’ are. And so in reducing politics to a matter of biological survival, Simon creates the basis for the ‘continuous technocratic society’ he claims to object to. Let me suggest then, that it is not nuclear power, but renewable energy, and demands for austerity and asceticism from the environmental movement that give rise to technocracy. Even Mark Lynas’s revision of Ehrich’s Malthusianism, and ‘limits to growth’ still locates the basis for political authority (i.e. technocracy) in the necessity of survival, in the face of a (mostly imagined) environmental crisis.

So let’s be blunt about it, you’re either going to get an odious state regulating the nuclear energy industry, or you’re going to get an odious state regulating whatever environmentalists want to regulate, lest your desires, ambitions, or interests threaten to trespass beyond ‘planetary boundaries’. After all, it is desires, ambitions, and interests which, in a democratic society, are negotiated in politics. Environmentalism sweeps them to one side, and suspends normal politics, to emphasise the need for survival. Your own sense of your own interests — whether they are best served by socialism or capitalism — is diminished, on the basis that the issue is the interests of the ‘species’.

Simon’s prose is incoherent, absurd, and contradictory. The pro-nuclear green argument isn’t much better. It only offers a future in which the lights stay on for slightly longer. It doesn’t allow a public debate about which technique is best, nor what the priorities for our energy policy should be. We don’t get to decide between, perhaps a bit of environmental damage on the one hand, and energy that is affordable on the other. We don’t get to discuss what institutions or regulatory frameworks are necessary for the operation of various techniques of producing energy. And we don’t get to argue about what we want to use energy for.

Vidal and Simon end up with their dystopian views of ‘odious’ and corrupt governments presiding like monoliths over the rest of us because it is the vision they desire, just not precisely the vision they are arguing for. That is to say that they presuppose the inevitability of technocratic and undemocratic society because they desire a society run along technocratic, not democratic lines. They complain about technocracy and democracy, because they confuse their own will for ‘democratic’ will, and the decisions they make for the decisions that panels of experts would make; forgetting that what makes institutions either democratic or technocratic is the way they function, not the decisions they produce. And for their part in all this, the pro-nuclear environmentalists have not overcome this short-sightedness and failure to reflect on their own ideas and ambitions. Environmentalism’s Reformation won’t make any difference to those of us who don’t share their faith.

For years, I have been an aspiring journalist and labouring under the misapprehension that the job of the journalist is to question authority, and that the worst possible trait in any journalist was credulity.

Okay, I wasn’t actually. But sometimes, you just have to wonder just how ready to repeat utter nonsense you have to be to get a job at a major international news organisation…

Richard Black (yes, him again) writes,

UK children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says.

Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says.

Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the UK than other parts of Europe, and may help explain poor UK rankings in childhood satisfaction surveys.

The trust is launching a consultation on tackling “nature deficit disorder”.

There’s nothing ‘new’ about this. As even Black reports, the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ was coined back in 2005 by a Richard Louv. It is no surprise at all that the epidemic of ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ has been lying dormant and unnoticed since 2005 — it was a silly idea, which failed to fly even at the moment of greatest environmental hysteria. Society has suffered a relapse, not because of the disease, but because the National Trust and BBC environmental correspondents’ brains are suffering some kind of encephalopathy. This is the result, I would argue, of too much — rather than too little — exposure to the idea of ‘nature’. It becomes the explanation for everything. And I do mean everything. You can explain crime, disease, being slightly pissed off and even naughty children through cod psychology and pseudo-scientific theories about ‘nature’ and our supposed ‘optimum’ relationship with it.

Here’s a copy of a presentation I gave back in 2006 on the subject of environmentalism and mental health. I thought the debate had moved on. Perhaps I was mistaken.

Who is Putting the ‘Mental’ into Environmentalism?

In the past, environmentalists have explained pollution simply as the presence of substances known to disrupt biological processes in the environment, such as DDT, or the sulphur from burning coal. Now, a variety of studies and campaigning organisations are claiming that a more fundamental, yet far more complex relationship between humans and nature is being damaged in ways which cannot be explained by mere biological chemistry. According to these ideas, the tendency of urbanisation and modern life to distance us from “nature” makes them toxic pollutants, with consequences for the psychological development and mental health of individuals, the survival of communities, and the functioning of society. But are these claims really all that new, and are they really emerging from scientific insight and research? Or are they simply attempts to frame contemporary anxieties using superficially plausible scientific language, in order to justify environmentalism’s political ideals?

In March this year, the Royal Commission on Pollution (RCEP) published its twenty-sixth report, “The Urban Environment”, which cited urbanisation as a risk factor in mental health.

 The way in which urban living affects mental health and wellbeing is poorly understood, sparsely researched and perhaps unexpected… but there is no avoiding the conclusion that urban living can damage the mental health of some people. This is likely to relate to a lack of social capital…[i]

Neither the paucity of research nor the failure to meaningfully identify a causal relationship between urbanisation and mental health seems to have given the report’s authors cause to consider the idea that their conclusion is not quite so unavoidable. One might expect that having realised social factors confound our understanding of mental health, they might conclude that addressing social problems ought to be a priority. But instead the authors offer us the idea that, ‘One way of helping to mitigate these effects would be the provision of good quality green spaces…’

The gift of parks to those who lack ‘social capital’ is ‘environmental justice’, according to the authors. But what a remarkably degraded sense of justice this is. The opportunity to while away days in parks is seen as a palliative to failures of social justice; to treat just the symptoms of ‘lack of social capital’ as though it was an illness. But it is deeply patronising to say that these are problems of mental health rather than politics, and that these might be mitigated by better access to green spaces, rather than solved by a change in circumstances. The idea seems to be that social problems are inevitable – natural, even – and that government is impotent to address problems such as low income and unemployment. The result is that the poor have their behaviour and heads examined while the political “environment” escapes scrutiny.

If the definition of pollution operating in this report has been broadened to allow the RCEP to study social and design factors in urbanisation, it follows that the definition of health must have been broadened also. Indeed, the report takes its definition of health from the 1947 World Health Organisation’s constitution,

 Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity[ii]

But is this definition of health, used to steer the WHO in the 1940s, fit for the purpose of evaluating urban planning policies and their effect on the mental health of individuals in 2007? The authors appear to think so, and yet seem conscious of the fact that this use of the expression “health” isn’t ordinary, and needs some explanation:

 Thus good health is defined in much broader terms than simply the prevention of illness… We will consider physical wellbeing in terms of optimal physical health and fitness for an individual. Mental wellbeing is interpreted in terms of a number of positive outcomes represented by factors such as high self-esteem, subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction for an individual and a sense of place.

It is only after finding the broadest possible definition of health that the report can create links between mental health and urban planning. While there may be legitimate uses of the WHO’s definition, the RCEP only appear to use it where it suits them; the effect of insufficient provision of green spaces is seen as a health issue, but the more general lack of opportunities for the poor is not, even though the WHO give plenty of scope for it.

It’s not just the poor who are vulnerable to the poisonous effects of modern life. In 2005, futurologist Richard Louv wrote, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, in which he argues that children suffer from a lack of unstructured, unsupervised, outdoor play. So far, so good… But so near yet so far, because Louv goes on to argue that children are being damaged, not just by anxieties about safety, but by lack of exposure to nature.

There is the “biophilia” hypothesis … that suggests we are still hunters and gatherers and biologically we have not changed. That hypothesis says there is something in us that needs natural forms, that needs association with nature in ways that we don’t fully understand. I think we instinctively understand that there is something about being in nature that you cannot get on a soccer field.[iii]

In spite of Louv’s protest that “It’s not good for human beings to live with fear all the time”, and that “in this society we are increasingly living in fear…” he replaces the fear of strangers and injury litigation with something new to panic about. Where the RCEP tell us that a place is unhealthy if fresh fruit or vegetables cannot be bought from anywhere within walking distance, Louv makes a similar argument on the basis that our biology makes us hunter-gatherers. To be healthy, we have to mimic hunter gatherer society. This is more than mere lifestyle advice. It becomes an argument about the direction that society ought to take, and how people ought to live. Claims that the problems of modern life are the consequence of a degraded relationship with nature reveal an ideology, because the inescapable conclusion is that we adjust society accordingly.

This idea is not new. Aristotle’s ethics drew from his idea that everything in the universe has a function, and therefore a purpose within an order. By investigating human nature, we could determine how best to achieve this function, and so how we ought to live – our purpose. But while this view celebrates our capacity for investigation as perhaps the highest form of existence, it also makes us mere objects of nature, and leaves humans without the freedom to determine for ourselves what is right and wrong, or to overcome nature in our own interests. In more recent times, this teleological system of ethics was criticised. Why would there be a morality in nature? Who or what gives it purpose? Regardless of this criticism, Louv warns us about what happens when we deviate from the natural path:

[Nature-deficit disorder is] the cumulative effect of withdrawing nature from children’s experiences, but not just individual children. Families too can show the symptoms — increased feelings of stress, trouble paying attention, feelings of not being rooted in the world. So can communities, so can whole cities. Really, what I’m talking about is a disorder of society — and children are victimized by it.

It is no surprise that a perspective on the world that views modern life as a rampant virus, and demands that our lives be a pastiche of prehistoric society shares something with ancient philosophy and looks for ethics in natural orders. Louv gives us a very broad description of a malaise, and blames modern life for modern problems without interrogating the idea that the problems exist in the first place, or adequately defining them.

Equally lacking in objectivity is a report from the mental health charity, Mind. Published in May this year, it extols the virtues of “Ecotherapy” – literally, exercise in the countryside. And like Louv, it argues that exposure to nature restores essential historical, sensory, childhood, mythological, social and spiritual connections and offers us the chance to:

 [Get] away from modern life, relaxing (as a contrast), time alone or with family, a time to think and clear the head, peace and quiet, tranquillity and freedom, privacy, escape from pressure, stress and the ‘rat-race’, recharging batteries.[iv]

Again, it is the rampant virus of modern life which is underpinning the argument much more than the coherent identification of what it is that has actually been lost or damaged. And again, it is expressions such as “self esteem”, and “sense of well being” which are used as though they had any scientific meaning.

Bold claims are made about the value of “Ecotherapy” to alleviate “mental distress”, which are substantiated by two studies that Mind commissioned theUniversity of Essex to complete. The first of these is a survey of just 108 people who went either gardening, walking, running, cycling, or took part in some conservation work. The second study compared the responses of twenty people after being for a walk in the woods, and after a walk in a shopping centre. A whopping 90% (or 18 people) felt they had higher self esteem after walking in the woods, and 44 percent (that’s 8.8 people) felt they had lower self esteem after the shopping centre.

The discovery that people enjoy waking in the countryside more than hanging out in shopping centres is hardly a scientific breakthrough. Yet Mind continue to make a great deal out of their questionable statistics, never explaining what the subjects of the survey were suffering from, how self esteem in an otherwise normal person relates to self esteem in a person with serious mental health problems nor why self esteem, and ‘feelings of well-being’ are indicators of good mental health. Does low self esteem lead to mental illness? Is low self esteem a mental illness itself? If modern life really does cause mental illness, then does it follows that the only course of action is to escape modern life?

In July, Dr William Bird looked “at the evidence linking wildlife-rich areas and green space with mental health”. The report starts with the statement that

 Past generations have intuitively understood this relationship, perhaps better than we do, yet the evidence needed to quantify the health value of the natural environment is still evolving.[v]

In other words, there is no evidence. Yet just as the RCEP used a broadened definition of health, Bird too uses the WHO to provide him with a definition of mental health which escapes the problem of lacking an objective measure of health,

 There is no health without mental health. Mental health is central to the human, social and economic capital of nations and should therefore be considered as an integral and essential part of other public policy areas such as human rights, social care, education and employment.

And just in case we start to worry about the lack of evidence or lack of objectivity, Bird reminds how serious the problem is,

 Mental ill health affects 1 in 6 of the population and is strongly associated with life events, lower social class, being socially isolated, long term illnesses and financial and work problems… The cost of mental ill health is £12.5 billion to the NHS and £23.1 billion to the economy.

But again, instead of suggesting that these social problems ought to be the focus of any approach to making modern life better, Bird goes on to uncritically outline several theories which explain nature’s role in mental health, such as the biophillia hypothesis in Louv’s book. Among the absurd claims is the idea that “even looking at a natural landscape can help our brain recharge and resume direct attention”. But this is not a convincing argument that we are “genetically programmed” to find images of nature restorative. Yet this theory is used to justify the argument that politics should find a “balance” between the individual, community, and the environment,

After 10,000 generations, mankind developed a position where […] values were balanced… As we became urbanised our values shifted away from the environment. More recently over the last 20 years, we have shifted our values again away from community and environment and towards the individual. Valuing the individual at the expense of the environment and community is not only a less sustainable way of life but favours healthcare that treats disease rather than promoting supportive communities and environments. To regain a sense of wellbeing it is argued that we should change our values and reconnect with the natural environment and community in which we live and work.

Like the other reports, Bird advances an environmental agenda as a cure to the ills of modern life – poor self-discipline, hyperactivity, ADHD, anxiety, stress, crime,  aggression, poor concentration, poor cognitive development, community incohesion, impulsive behaviour, irritability, and aggression.

 By disconnecting from our natural environment, we have become strangers to the natural world: our own world. This has challenged our sense of identity and in some more subtle ways has had a significant affect on our mental health.

Bird is not the first person to have used pseudo-scientific theories to connect humans to nature in order to explain a host of contemporary problems, of course. Naturalistic accounts of society’s problems are neither new, nor untested, and are themselves deeply problematic. Any rational attempt to create a naturalistic framework to look at the world through will appeal to science, and across these four reports, there are an abundance of uncritical references to research, which are all too easily questioned: cod science, which does not deserve the confidence the report’s authors have placed in it. Although these reports claim to offer advice that will liberate us from the failures of modern life, such ideas about human nature end up trapping us within a narrow definition of what it is to be human and an even narrower vision of the future in which possibilities are limited by our biology, rather than expanded by our capacity to understand and overcome problems.

These naturalistic ideas don’t simply shut down debate, they preclude politics. If humans are merely ‘programmed’ gaps between their biology and the environment, which only seek their immediate comfort, and can only exist within a narrow range of environmental conditions, then there is little direction for society to decide upon. Science has done it for us. Our values, mores, ethics and ambitions can be best determined by weighing ‘evidence’, and peering into microscopes. But is this really science, or does it owe more to a desire to generate an unchallengeable consensus for its own sake, than offer any real insight into humanity?

The ambiguous measures of mental health in these reports turn normal, but negative feelings and beliefs into symptoms of diseases. Consequently, everybody suddenly becomes mentally ill. But self-esteem, sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and sense of place, aren’t indicators of mental health. Any well adjusted, healthy person will experience negative feelings, not just as a consequence of an unhealthy life, but also a healthy one. People do not change their circumstances by being ambivalent about them, yet ambivalence is precisely what the medicalisation of normal emotions encourages.

 An important distinction exists between “mental distress” in a person who is not mentally ill, and a person who is. The former is likely to have some insight into why he is distressed, whereas a person suffering from mental illness is far more likely to be confused about his or her experiences. It is this insight which allows healthy people to connect their feelings to their circumstances, and to seek to address them. Yet if people are told that they are unhappy because they lack exposure to nature, they may act on this advice at the expense of addressing real problems. Of course, it could be argued that Ecotherapy wouldn’t necessarily stop an individual looking for other ways to explain their dissatisfaction. But Ecotherapy, Louv, the Royal Commission report, and environmentalism more generally all claim that it is modern life itself is problematic. This view permeates both the establishment, and criticism of it, leaving few opportunities for improving problems which exist in modern society, other than by rejecting it, reinforcing the individual’s impotence. The predominance of environmental and therapeutic ideas limit the expression of the desire for change. And if anything is likely to cause “mental distress”, it is the very real impotence that these orthodoxies generate. If it is true that modern society creates unique problems – and few people would argue that it doesn’t – then rejecting it will only allow old problems to resurface. Meanwhile, people who are told to go for a walk to achieve a “balance” with nature won’t be engaged in any serious, collective attempt to improve modern society as much as they will be wishing it would just go away.

The definitions of health –  especially mental health – and environment in these studies is so broad that they are useless for anything other than the purpose of approaching social problems as though they were diseases. Symptoms are fitted to diagnoses for the sake of realising the remedy – the environmental agenda. Rather than identifying anything essential which connects us to nature, these broad and ill-defined symptoms, and ambiguous diagnosis that society is “sick” do nothing more than emphasise the social as “natural” or biological, to allow naturalistic, and pathological accounts of feelings of dissatisfaction, malaise, and disorientation.

These approaches mirror the incoherence of the environmental movement. Spurious appeals to the importance of myths, identity, place, community, sustainability, balance, and holism surround a broad, subjective, and scientifically meaningless definition of health both in these reports and any environmental manifesto that they could be lifted from. There is no irony to Mind’s report’s sub-heading – Ecotherapy – the green agenda for mental health. This campaigning uses health and the idea that bad design causes deaths as moral weapons to drive a political agenda.

For many people, doing something well away from the city is a relaxing, sometimes social, sometimes private, positive experience. But this is leisure, not therapy. Leisure undoubtedly allows us to reflect on our lives, and to “connect” with things which interest us in a way which is not possible during the working week. By being prescribed, going for a walk in the woods becomes a chore like brushing our teeth. Instead of investigating the world as a personal experiment, it becomes a medicine. Worse yet, being told to go for a walk is like being a dog, let out to pee when it suits it’s master, when in fact we are perfectly capable of deciding for ourselves when it is time for a walk in the woods, but what people lack is the means, not the brains, to enjoy spare time.

And what role does nature really serve in this process? Is it really the essential factor of a healthy life? Is it really nature we seek, or just something different to everyday life? Cities are relaxing if they’re not the city you live in. The countryside is not relaxing if it’s where you work. As Mind tells us – ‘Farmers and farm managers are the occupational group with the fourth highest risk of suicide in Englandand Wales’[vi].

“Getting away from it” is not escapism. It is change which allows us to consider new possibilities for our lives, to make the most of our “nature”, and so to change it in turn. It is not “natural”, but logical that spare time allows for such reflection. In a society which is increasingly hostile to change, and hostile to the affluence which permits spare time, and which treats nature as an eternal truth above the excesses and failures of politics, the possibilities for change and improvement accordingly diminish, naturally.

This video comes via Junkscience.com.

Yuck!

George Marshall, who presents the video, is from the head-shrinking school of ‘climate change communication’, and a campaigning colleague of Adam Corner, whose propaganda ‘research’ was discussed in the previous post. He believes that values are transmitted socially, and thus the way to ‘speak to a sceptic’ is to effect a kind of charm… And Lo! See how they suddenly see the world through your eyes.

It’s very silly of course, because, as has been discussed here previously, even if there is an extent to which values are socially-transmitted, to imagine that somebody holds a view because of the circles they move in, presupposes that they haven’t engaged with the issue rationally. To effect a chummy demeanour, simply to convince a family member, acquaintance, or colleague with whom you don’t have a great deal in common, simply out of some kind of evangelical zeal, is to approach them dishonestly. Like so many attempts at ‘communicating climate change’, Marshall’s instructions are to make instrumental use of people, to turn them into means to an ends. Most genuine friendships are ends in themselves. Friends do not treat friends as means.

What is more, if it is true that values are socially transmitted to the extent that Marshall believes, then what is true of sceptics is true of ‘warmists’.

But the thing which most struck me about Marshall’s lecture is that he himself simply refuses to engage with sceptics. Try leaving a comment on his blog; it won’t get published, even if it’s nice and polite. He tells the world to stop calling people ‘deniers’ and to call them ‘dissenters’, but his own blog is called climatedenial.org. Doesn’t that hint at the fact that Marshall isn’t being upfront?

Hopefully, Marshall’s strategy would back fire. For if his flock of evangelical environmentalists do somehow manage to suppress the anger and hostility that seems to characterise many of them (it’s not climate sceptics who have been closing down debate all these years), maybe they will be forced to actually listen.

UPDATE.

Here are some more of Marshall’s video lectures on ‘denial’.

I love the bit in the video, where Marshall is trying to explain how climate change denial is ‘socially constructed’ (but presumably climate change alarmism) isn’t), and uses an example of someone losing the plot at a dinner party, to accuse his friends of destroying the planet. Marshall then tries to understand the reaction to the outburst psychologically, rather than as a polite way to respond to somebody who has been a bit of a prick.

It’s interesting to see Marshall tie himself up in relativistic knots here. Political ecologists were the first to absorb scientific evidence of climate change, he says, because their ideologies were the most amenable to it. Thus, the climate story got absorbed into the broader environmental narrative of doom. It looks like honesty, but it presupposes that everything he believes in is ‘science’.

My last post here discussed the belief held by Met Office senior scientist, Vicky Pope, that climate change is a matter of ‘evidence, not belief’. It turned out that, in spite of evidence, one of the most vilified climate change sceptics and the public at large had a more sophisticated understanding of the debate about climate change than Pope herself.

Adam Corner, a psychologist at Cardiff University, with a particular interest in ‘the psychology of communicating climate change’ has responded to Pope’s evidence-vs-belief claim in the Guardian, to conclude,

Do you “believe” in climate change might not be the scientifically rational question to ask, but it is the most essential one to address if we are to understand – and ultimately get beyond – climate change scepticism.

Corner’s article is nearly good. There is, for instance, some consideration to the fact that ‘belief’ in climate change can be the result of social factors:

In a paper just published in the journal Climatic Change, my colleagues and I at Cardiff University asked what would happen when two groups of people – one group sceptical about climate change, the other group not – read the very same information about climate change in the form of newspaper editorials constructed especially for the experiment. We found that these two groups of people evaluated the same information in a very different way, attributing opposing judgments of persuasiveness and reliability to the editorials.

In social psychology, this phenomenon – “biased assimilation” – is well known, and no one is immune from it, so both sceptics and non-sceptics rated the editorials in line with their existing beliefs. The critical difference, of course, is that those who were not climate sceptics had the weight of empirical evidence on their side.

But whatever the weight of ’empirical evidence’, evidence, as pointed out in the previous post, does not speak for itself. Corner is as unable to answer — or even understand — James Delingpole’s questions about climate change as told by Andrew Montford (from the Bishop Hill blog):

In his Radio 5 interview, James Delingpole correctly framed the argument over AGW as being over (a) how large the effect is (b) how much warming there will be and (c) how much of a problem it is.

Many sceptics take the view that ‘climate change is happening’, but that i) the sensitivity of climate to CO2 has been overstated; ii) the sensitivity of society to climate change has been overstated; and iii) a great deal of nonsense is spoken about climate change.

In other words, the evidence for climate change may or may not be ‘overwhelming’, as some claim. What is definitely overwhelming is the sheer volume of completely misconceived ideas about climate change.

It is these nuances which escape the attention of people attached to climate change. There is a real tendency to reduce the debate into binary opposites: ‘climate change is happening’ versus ‘climate change is not happening’, excluding everything in the middle. Furthermore, there is the routine confusing of the science and politics of the climate change debate. Evidence that ‘climate change is happening’ may well be ‘overwhelming’, but advocates of ‘action’ to stop it are reluctant to reflect on the fact that this desire is a political, or ‘ideological’ ambition. There is a belief that you can simply read imperatives from ‘the evidence’, and to organise society accordingly, as if instructed by mother nature herself. And worse still, there is reluctance on behalf of many engaged in the debate to recognise that this very technocratic, naturalistic and bureaucratic way of looking at the world reflects very much a broader tendency in contemporary politics. To point any of these problems out is to ‘deny the science’. ‘Science’, then, is a gun to the head.

It is especially interesting that Corner recognises a social component to the formation of beliefs about the world, but then fails to reflect on his own:

What this experiment illustrates, though, is that “belief” in climate change is very much what matters. Without belief in climate change, scientific evidence simply bounces off. And it is social views and cultural beliefs that predict climate change denial, not people’s level of knowledge about climate science.

In fact, recent work by Dan Kahan and his colleagues has found that the more scientifically literate people are, the more their ideological filters kick in when reading information about climate change. It might seem counterintuitive, but the more confidence people have in their ability to grasp the science, the more able they are to slot it into their existing worldview.

So does that mean that climate change communicators should give up? Absolutely not – but we should not be looking to science to provide us with the answer to a problem that is social in nature. The challenge is to find a way of explaining why climate change matters using language and ideas that don’t alienate people. Simply repeating the scientific case for climate change is – unfortunately – not going to cut it.

One problem with this should be immediately apparent. You can have a completely insane view of climate change, but Corner’s approach to understanding it won’t detect it as a problem which needs to be addressed, because his preoccupation is with the idea that ‘climate change matters’. So it doesn’t matter what you think about climate change — that sea levels will rise 5 kilometres next year, or that the polar bears will migrate southwards and eat children — as long as you believe that ‘it matters’.

Let’s be clear then, the only reason why it matters that people do believe that ‘it matters’ is because Corner wants people to obey environmental imperatives — the ones he believes emerge directly from ‘the science’. And this leads him to make a special category for people with ideas about the world that differ from his own:

In fact, the more we know, the less it seems that climate change scepticism has to do with climate science at all. Climate change provokes such visceral arguments because it allows ancient battles – about personal responsibility, state intervention, the regulation of industry, the distribution of resources and wealth, or the role of technologies in society – to be fought all over again.

If it is true that the climate debate is a proxy for all these ‘ancient battles’, it is true for the ‘warmists’ as it is for the ‘sceptics’. But what Corner seems to completely omit is the extent to which he himself is vulnerable to the ‘ideology’ of these battles.

Of course the climate debate takes on this political form. But this is no surprise. If one believes that humans are dependent on natural processes that exist in homoeostasis, then it would seem that one must be committed to the idea that the first job of politics is to ensure the survival of those processes. If, however, one believes that humans and nature are more robust and self-dependent, then one might take a more circumspect view of climate change. An application of this principle can be seen in the treatment of the climate issue by many so-called ‘development agencies’. The planet has experienced about 0.7 degrees C of climate change over the course of the century, and this, it is claimed, accounts for the worsening condition of many millions of people. The facts on the ground, however, are that the conditions for many more millions of people have improved. Similarly, as is discussed in the previous post, increasing temperatures have led to speculation that they will produce water shortages, which will in turn lead to conflict over control of those resources. Gone is the idea that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ — that the means to produce potable water can be found with just a little bit of organisation and effort. The possibility is completely removed from the discussion. Necessity becomes the mother of political authority: “we must act to prevent climate change in order to prevent war”. ‘Science’ is the gun to your head.

So corner is wrong to suggest that ‘one side’ has the monopoly on evidence. How we understand the problem of climate change — the extent to which ‘it matters’ — is something which is much more predicated on our ‘ideology’ than he admits. In most cases, I believe that ‘action to prevent climate change’ is ill-conceived and dangerous. Does ‘ideology’ play a role in that belief? of course. Does that mean that I believe that climate change is not happening and is not a problem? Not in the slightest. My belief is that the problems do not legitimise the solutions: powerful and unaccountable political institutions, with control over material production and material, and by extension, political, liberties. And I believe that the desire for such institutions precedes the evidence that they are necessary, and informs its interpretation. We all see the issue of climate change through such perspectives. No person is immune to it.

Corner continues:

It follows that the answer to overcoming climate change scepticism is to stop reiterating the science, and start engaging with what climate change scepticism is really about – competing visions of how people see the world, and what they want the future to be like.

Contested visions of the future should be matters for political debate, not psychologists. Where else have we seen psychologists searching for the pathologies which give rise to dissent?

When psychologists are recruited into political debates, we can be sure that we are being denied the opportunity to participate in the debate. It is a sure sign that our thoughts are seen as an impediment to somebody else’s political project. That’s not to say that there is something wrong with political projects in general, but that there is something very wrong indeed with attempting to persuade you through any other means than by treating you as a rational agent, capable of making decisions. Such treatment turns individuals into mere instruments. Psychologising dissent — rather than engaging in debate — belittles autonomy. It says that you don’t know what your best interests are, and that either way, what you think is not important. It is the most vile expression of contempt for humanity that is possible within a (nominative) democracy, and is an impulse that is most corrosive to it.

Bishop Hill has an interesting comparison of two perspectives on the climate debate.

In his Radio 5 interview, James Delingpole correctly framed the argument over AGW as being over (a) how large the effect is (b) how much warming there will be and (c) how much of a problem it is.

Vicky Pope at the Met Office has taken a different approach in an article in the Guardian today.

Indeed she has. Whatever you want to say about Delingpole’s style and politics, his three questions about climate change are faultless. And as this blog has attempted to say (perhaps more verbosely), is that the third question – how much of a problem [climate change] is – is one which is not a question for science alone. How much of a problem we believe climate change is depends on how much we believe we are dependent on natural processes.

Here, for instance, is an instance of unmitigated bullshit being spoken about climate change, reproduced entirely uncritically in the Guardian:

Water wars could be a real prospect in coming years as states struggle with the effects of climate change, growing demand for water and declining resources, the secretary of state for energy and climate change warned on Thursday.

Ed Davey told a conference of high-ranking politicians and diplomats from around the world that although water had not been a direct cause of wars in the past, growing pressure on the resource if climate change is allowed to take hold, together with the pressure on food and other resources, could lead to new sources of conflict and the worsening of existing conflicts.

There is so much that anyone, left or right, could say about Ed Davey’s specious claim. There is no shortage of water in the world. End of. There may be local shortages of water. So the first question relates to whether climate change is a global problem, or are the consequences (i.e. problems) of climate change regional? Obviously, they are regional. If problems ever do materialise as a putative consequence of climate change, they will be different in any given place. Second, If the means exist to move water from A to B, then the problem is not one of ‘how to deal with climate change’, but merely ‘how do we organise getting water from A to B’. If the means don’t exist, then the problem is not climate change; the problem is ‘why does this economy not have enough capital to invest in vital infrastructure’. There is enough water in the world, and there is surely plenty of capital, and plenty of opportunity to make more. Climate change is not the problem in any sensible reading of Ed Davey’s speculation. The Minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change sees — or rather, imagines — problems in the world to each be problems of climate change. Of course he does. But water shortage is a problem for people with or without climate change, and it is a problem which has very little to do with the climate.

But back to the two ways of seeing the debate…

Vicky Pope at the Met Office is another person who sees the world only through the prism of climate change…

Given the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change, it could be argued that it shouldn’t be necessary to keep going over old ground to prove it time after time. In fact, it’s essential we move on and focus on the future, because climate change will pose challenges for humanity.

Pope’s words are printed in the Guardian, in an article called ‘Do you believe in climate change?’, which carries the tag-line, ‘That’s not a question you should be asking – it’s a matter of empirical evidence, not belief’.

It is testament to the utter mediocrity of today’s most influential scientists that they believe (yes, ‘believe’) that ’empirical evidence’ speaks for itself. It. Simply. Does. Not.

‘Evidence’, just like facts and numbers, needs interpretation. ‘Evidence’ means nothing without a hypothesis or theory that it pertains to. And indeed, you have to have some kind of theory to go out and hunt for evidence for it, to process the evidence, and to present it in favour of the argument. It does not knock on your door, gift-wrapped, or screaming ‘I AM EVIDENCE’. Global warming is simply not a theory that someone could have developed merely by looking out of their window, nor even noticing changes in a particular climate. It’s not like gravity: a phenomenon which any individual can experience, and which calls for an explaination. Global warming and climate change are beyond our senses as individuals.

All the evidence in the world that ‘man made climate change is happening’ does not make an argument that ‘climate change will pose challenges for humanity’. Granted — and it has never been ‘denied’ here on this blog — climate change may well lead to problems. But — and it is a massive ‘but’ — those problems are problems if and only if there are no means to overcome them. Climate change is not a problem in and of itself.

For instance, the water shortages described by Ed Davey could be easily answered by desalination plants and other water recovery and distribution infrastructure. The problem comes where such solutions cannot be found, due to lack of capital, which is a problem, whether or not the climate changes. The ‘challenge’ facing ‘humanity’ then, does not come from without — the climate — but is the same problem that has always ‘faced humanity’: how to get better at building things and economies.

The question about what kind of a problem we think climate change is, then, depends on two kinds of things. First, contrary to Pope’s claims, it depends much less on material science than it depends on circumstances that are better understood through the social sciences. I.e. it is not the magnitude of the climatic phenomena which is important, but a society’s readiness to deal with it. Second, the way one attempts to understand the problem depends very much on political outlook: for want of a better term, ‘ideology’. Davey and Pope have a tendency to emphasise the importance of the ‘environment’ in understanding ‘challenges’, or ‘problems’. And they also have a tendency to emphasise the need for institutions to deal with these problems.

Pope believes (yes, ‘believes’) that all you need to do is take a measurement of the atmosphere’s temperature, observe that has warmed, and… that’s it… case closed. And she says that ‘it shouldn’t be necessary to keep going over old ground to prove it’. But she has not answered Delingpole’s questions. She believes (yes, ‘believes’) that sceptics argue only that ‘climate change is not happening’. Delingpole, who is famous for being outspoken on the subject, and who is the object of many cartoonish depictions of ‘denial’, has a far more nuanced argument than the climate change expert, Pope, gives him credit for. Vicky Pope, then, simply does not understand the debate she is attempting to engage with.

It is interesting then, to see Pope emphasise that this is about ’empirical evidence, not belief’.

… The scientific evidence that humanity is having an effect on the climate is overwhelming and increasing every year. Yet public perception of this is confused. A Cardiff/Ipsos Mori study on public perceptions of climate change, published in 2010, identifies a number of possible contributory factors: the move from being a science issue to a political issue may have introduced more distrust; “cognitive dissonance” – where people modify their beliefs about uncomfortable truths – may be a factor; people may have become bored of constantly hearing about climate change; or external factors such as the financial crisis may have played a role. There is also increased activity among sceptical groups to obscure the scientific evidence in order to influence public opinion.

Let’s imagine that it really is true that ‘scientific evidence that humanity is having an effect on the climate is overwhelming and increasing every year’. Does the statement tell us anything? No. It could well be that the scientific evidence is increasingly convincing; but at the same time the same evidence could reflect an impact that is less than previously thought. Delingpole’s third question is ‘how much of a problem it is’. Pope cannot say that the better evidence points to a bigger problem.

And indeed, we know from things like ‘Himalagate’ and ‘Africagate’ that the problem of climate change has been over-emphasised. I recently tried to explain to someone of a green persuasion that the extent of ice loss in the Himalayas had been vastly over-stated. He accused me of cherry-picking, and said that the remaining evidence of climate change was ‘overwhelming’. Maybe so, but what my counterpart had forgotten is that many impact assessments and political arguments in favour of policies to mitigate climate change had supposed that the Himalayan Glaciers supply a billion people with fresh water, which they would soon be deprived of. Climate change was now one billion people less of a problem than it had been.

So the public’s perception of climate change was not quite as confused as Pope believed. In fact, it was fairly accurate, if Delingpole’s third question is an important one. She blames ‘cognitive dissonance’, the politicisation of climate science, boredom, the financial crisis, and sceptics distorting ‘the science’ for the change in public attitudes. But she doesn’t seem to take responsibility for politicising her own ‘science’. She suggests that the ‘media’ are responsible:

Around three years ago I raised the issue of the way that science can be misused. In some cases scare stories in the media were over-hyping climate change and I think we are paying the price for this now with a reaction the other way. I was concerned then that science is not always presented objectively by the media and interested parties (even sometimes scientists themselves) in important areas, like climate change. What I don’t think any of us appreciated at the time was the depth of disconnect between the scientific process and the public.

Pope doesn’t take responsibility for having herself been either involved in over-stating climate change or failing to confront naked alarmism. But it is surely her own ignorance of Delingpole’s third question that epitomises the disconnect between science and the public. In her rhetoric, ‘climate change is happening’ is treated as a simply binary matter of true or false. Nobody — apart from senior scientists and environmental activists, it seems — believes that the problem of climate change is so straightforward. Even when she’s trying to set the record straight, to distance herself from alarmism, to call for a sober reflection on the evidence, Pope simply reproduces the same problem as all that hysteria and climate alarmism: she fails to assert that there are degrees to the problem, fails to see nuance to the debate, and fails to provide the debate with perspective.

Delingpole’s outspoken style raises the passions on both sides of the debate, but he sheds more light on it than a senior scientist at the UK Meteorological Office.

No wonder then, that the public no longer find climate change science quite so convincing. The phenomenon of disengagement is not caused by sceptical commentators such as Delingpole ‘distorting’ the debate… unless, that is, pointing out that climate change and its consequences are matters of degree and interpretation is ‘distortion’. The phenomenon of disengagement is owed to the sheer mediocrity of the climate change establishment — for want of a better collective term for Pope and her colleagues. It’s not even worth calling her analysis intellectually dishonest: I don’t think it is dishonest; it is simply daft.

So who is she pointing her ‘cognitive dissonance’ finger at?

Pope moves on to struggle with the concept of ‘belief’:

Which brings me on to the question, should you believe in climate change? The first point to make is that it’s not something you should believe or not believe in – this is a matter of science and therefore of evidence – and there’s lots of it out there. On an issue this important, I think people should look at that evidence and make their own mind up. We are often very influenced by our own personal experience. After a couple of cold winters in the UK, the common question was “has climate change stopped?” despite that fact that many other regions of the world were experiencing record warm temperatures. And 2010 was one of the warmest years on record. For real evidence of climate change, we have to look at the bigger picture.

Pope wants us to look at the evidence — for us to make the evidence part of our ‘own personal experience’. Then we will be persuaded. But how is this different from ‘believing’?

It isn’t. A belief is simply an idea about the world. It doesn’t matter whether the idea is about something that exists or doesn’t exist; they are both beliefs. Moreover, I can no more experience ‘global warming’ than I can experience unicorns. Looking at the evidence for climate change does not make it any more real than looking at pictures of unicorns. I need to trust the evidence — be it temperature records or drawings of mythological creatures — and I need to trust the individuals who produced it before I can say that I believe it accurately supports the idea, theory, or hypothesis about the world. I completely trust Vicky Pope to tell me that the world has warmed about 0.7 degrees C over the last 100 years. I trust the data, the individuals who compiled it, and the processes that were used to analyse it. But I think she completely overstates the significance of the data.

The significance of the warming is predicated on another idea about the world — our vulnerability to change. This was the subject of a post here about ‘belief’ and climate change, two years ago (when this blog was co-authored, hence the uses of ‘we’ and ‘our’):

The expression, “climate change is happening” seemingly stands for a scientific theory, empirical observation, a projection and its human consequences, a moral imperative, and of course, a political response – all at once. We have pointed out before how this progression works and the problems that exist with it. Unpacking the argument reveals (in our view, at least) a presupposition that climate’s sensitivity to CO2 (and other GHGs) is equivalent to society’s sensitivity to climate. That is to say that society is as vulnerable to atmospheric CO2 as the world’s climate system’s current state is. As we have pointed out, this statement of equivalence in turn presupposes society’s impotence, or put more explicitly, it denies human agency. If this isn’t clear, what we’re saying is that the getting from climate science to climate politics in less than one step – by saying “climate change is happening” – presupposes a great deal.
…
“Climate change is happening” means different things to different people. Ask what it means, and get as many different replies back as people you asked. It is not, by itself a statement with any scientific meaning, but one which clearly carries many political consequences. It allows people to express certain ideas about the world – anything between generalised grumble about things, to a design for the entire world’s organisation – in one neat little declaration. And interestingly, it seems to bring together the establishment and radical subversives (they like to think) in one, hollow, hollow slogan.

For all her years of scientific study, it seems that Pope has failed to examine her own preconceptions about our relationship with the climate. This leads her to somewhat arrogantly ignore what sceptics argue, claiming that it is simply a ‘distortion’ of the science. But surely this self-reflection is the first job of any scientist? Surely the point of science is to rule out such subjectivity? The job of science is to unpack all of those presuppositions, prejudices, preconceptions.

So Pope is wrong in two important respects. First, she is talking about beliefs. Second, the beliefs do not pertain to any empirical observation. And indeed, when we try to make sense of what she says, by unpacking it, and then seeing if the implications are supported by empirical observation, we find very good evidence that she is — and many others are — wrong about the likely impact of climate change. In other words, she overstates the sensitivity of both the natural world, and human society to changes in climate. This leads her to a terrible conclusion:

Given the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change, it could be argued that it shouldn’t be necessary to keep going over old ground to prove it time after time. In fact, it’s essential we move on and focus on the future, because climate change will pose challenges for humanity.

Climate change does not create new ‘challenges for humanity’. Nothing produced by climate change science tells us that we face any challenge whatsoever. The idea that climate change presents humanity with challenges comes completely, totally, 100% from climate change ‘ideology’. It rests on ideas about how humans relate to the natural world. And it is in that messy, incoherent and weird space that ideas such as Ed Davey’s notion that ‘Water wars could be a real prospect in coming years as states struggle with the effects of climate change’ are formed. Such idle speculation begets yet more idle speculation, and policy-makers and scientists — who we imagine should be immune to it — become wrapped in their own fantasies. Pope finishes:

The more appropriate questions for today are how will our climate change and how can we prepare for those changes? That’s why it’s important that climate scientists continue their work, and continue sharing their evidence and research so people can stay up to date – and make up their own minds.

We can say now, stuff the science. Before any more ‘science’ is done, scientists like Pope need to reflect on the presuppositions they have already brought to the science. When Pope can answer Delingpole’s questions without claiming that he and other sceptics ‘distort’ science; when she and her colleagues stop blaming a stupid public and ‘cognitive dissonance’; when she and her colleagues develop a little bit more modesty and self-reflection about their political ambitions; only then will there be any point doing any more science. Until then, Pope might just as well be looking for unicorns, and be claiming that these mythical creatures represent ‘challenges for humanity’.

I’ve been busy with other things the last three weeks. Sorry for the lack of posts.

I will be back to blogging form next week.

A Guardian editorial speaks ‘In Praise of Plunge‘…

The arts have a patchy record on the subject of climate change. Greenland at the National Theatre was a play about environmental disaster that was little short of a disaster itself. The temptation is often strong to be preachy. Which is why Michael Pinsky’s Plunge is so interesting. Without any accompanying signage, fluorescent blue rings have appeared on three of London’s most prominent columns – in the City, in Covent Garden and just off the Mall. They could be mistaken for those ultraviolet fly zappers popular in kebab shops. But this clever installation marks sea level some thousand years hence. The science is not available to make accurate forecasts on this timeframe, so Pinsky’s premise that the sea will rise 28 metres is an imaginative one. But imagining a world where St Paul’s Cathedral, the Donmar Warehouse and the Athenaeum are all under water powerfully makes the climate change point.

‘Plunge’ is apparently some of that ‘art’ stuff, on the theme of global warming.

Apparently the blue ring ‘marks sea level some thousand years hence’. But as Geoff observes in the comments, the Grauniad has to admit that ‘The science is not available to make accurate forecasts on this timeframe, so Pinsky’s premise that the sea will rise 28 metres is an imaginative one.’

No it isn’t, ‘imaginative’! It’s simply obvious. And is it any more ‘artistic’ than a tidal gauge? It’s just a blue ring of light, stuck on a column. It’s the kind of idea you might have picking your nose, when not really watching a TV programme — or something else as banal as the ‘art’ itself. Art imitates life, after all.

This is more of that Guardian making stuff up again, isn’t it… ‘Fake, but accurate’ on their view. But simply absurd to everybody else.

Speaking of trends… January was another poor showing for the journal of doom…

The Guardian
Headline circulation: 229,753
Month-on-month change: -0.15%
Year-on-year change: -17.74%

The Guardian lost 17.74% of its circulation over the year to January – nearly one in five readers of its print edition (who are spared most of its ecobabble). That’s the trend they should worry about.

I hope the Plunge continues.

I’ve got myself into trouble recently, for using words like ‘idiot’ too often. Especially on twitter. Here’s my favourite:

#Moronbiot

Am I reaching the end of my vocabulary?

James Delingpole seems equally frustrated. He’s written about “Why I am so Rude to Warmists”

It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about “preserving the planet for future generations”.

You can be sure that there is very little thought behind the kinds of trite little pieties Delingpole alludes to. At best, they are nothing more than a form of moral blackmail, by individuals who have no better reason to explain to anyone else why they have a public profile. In Delingpole’s case, he was sharing a car with the person who uttered the hollow piety on the way back from a BBC debate.

As Delingpole explains,

Does anyone imagine that back in 1012 they were all agonising about how the children of the future might cope in 2012, what with all the scarce resources being used up at an alarming rate to make ships and spears and light warning beacons for the next Viking raid? Somehow I don’t think so. Yet this is precisely the kind of unutterable boll***s you hear being advanced almost every day by people like this liberal-leftie media type with whom I had my big row.

It is indeed utter, utter boll***s as James calls it.

So how to counter it? I share Delingpole’s frustration. “The answer is, of course, that there is no counter.”

He has a point. How can one reason with nonsense?

There is clearly a yawning casm — if not between climate alarmists and reality, then certainly between people who believe in the words they are uttering and people who simply don’t. The really interesting thing about the claim to be speaking “for future generations” is that it doesn’t matter how many people think you’re talking bollocks, you can claim the moral high-ground — you’re speaking for people who don’t exist yet, and who aren’t able to tell you that you’re talking complete bollocks, as well as thinking it.

In short, pretending to care for people who don’t exist is a fantastic ruse for people who don’t give a toss about people in the present.

One of my politics lecturers used to call deep differences in society ‘cleavages’. There’s an obvious pun in that, too. But it’s a good word, which describes how tensions emerge between groups of people, ultimately causing some political change or another.

Speaking of which…

I have no idea who Brian Palmer of Slate Magazine is… But he writes…

I just finished reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, in which Steven Pinker argues that violence in all forms has diminished over the past few centuries. That’s good for people, of course, but it got me thinking about the environment. How does war affect the planet?

I mentioned Pinker’s book a few posts ago. The pessimists of the world believe that wars are becoming more frequent, and thus we are moving closer to some kind of Armageddon. But in fact, the opposite is true, as Pinker shows. The world is far safer than it ever has been. But talk to people — especially greens, and they don’t think so. They are ever less certain about the world and the future.

So even when they are confronted with the facts, miserablists still have to search for a reason to see bad in the good. Brian Palmer’s question looks to me like such a gesture… ‘Huh, so few babies are dying and there are fewer wars… But so what… What about the trees?’

Yeah, what about the trees?

The human and financial costs of armed conflict are so vast that few people have stopped to consider what war does to rivers, trees, and elephants. In recent years, academics have been much more interested in how environmental degradation contributes to war than in how wars degrade the environment. In addition, no two wars affect the planet in the same way. The environmental devastation from a nuclear war, for example, would be difficult to estimate in advance.

Yes, we should all be really worried about the effects of war on trees.

From this side of the cleavage, I’m wondering what the hell Palmer is on about. If a couple of trees get knocked down in an exchange of nuclear weapons… Well, I really don’t care. Where is Palmer’s moral compass? Who really cares about the environment of a war zone, in which people are being killed?

And it’s not even ‘future generations’ Palmer seems to be moved about,

Armies used to defeat each other by killing huge numbers of enemies in direct battle. Today, military strategists try to undermine the enemy’s war machine with less bloodshed. That usually means occupying huge swaths of land and destroying the industrial infrastructure. In other words, as war becomes safer for humans, it may be increasingly dangerous for the planet.

This is just extraordinary bullshit in so many respects. Is Palmer’s claim that, rather than taking direct aim at people’s heads, soldiers now just blow up factories, and that this is worse? It would seem so…

One need only observe peacetime accidents to see what terror a bomb could unleash if dropped on a modern chemical factory. At the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, water infiltrated into a tank holding methyl isocyanate. The mixture caused an explosion that contaminated the surrounding area, killing thousands. Attacks on chemical plants are entirely possible. President Clinton ordered the bombing of a Sudanese factory in 1998 precisely because he thought it was stocked with dangerous chemicals.

Apart from the fact that Palmer seems to be calling for the good old days of war, when men stood opposite men with swords and spears… It looks like he has invented a whole new form of warfare that nobody has ever thought of before: targeting industry and infrastructure to stop the enemy. Gosh… Imagine how much sooner WWII would have ended, had the Allies and Axis powers had thought of such horrific tactics… Oh, hang on a minute…

Who says it’s wrong to call environmentalists morons, idiots, and to say that they talk ‘unutterable bollocks’? Maybe we’re just not rude enough.

I have a post up on Spiked about Fakegate.

One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is – in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick – that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.

Read on.

It was written through the fug of flu. What I wanted to get at is just how powerful ecological mythology seems to be. It seems to reduce even people with advanced scientific degrees to complete intellectual zombies. The idea that an outfit with a budget of £3 million can compete with the INGOs, governments, and the business interests in the green sector simply makes no sense whatsoever.

James Murray is the editor of BusinessGreen.com . Here are his tweets about the Heartland document leak.

The faux-outrage of the ecological righteous about this is amazing, given that they can’t actually say what the Heartland Documents reveal which isn’t applicable to the strategies of the environmental movement, in spades. And James Murray’s tweets and blog posts epitomise the hypocrisy and double standards.

Take, for instance, this warming from him that companies must be consistent…

what this scandal reveals is that if you are going to commit to developing greener business models, you cannot pick and mix which parts of your business get involved. Failure to enact genuinely company-wide change programmes means you are always at risk of seeing otherwise admirable green initiatives undermined by less progressive activities elsewhere in the business.

[…]

Any business that is publicly committed to a greener future needs to know who it is working with, who it is funding, and how its lobbying activities are managed. Failure to undertake this due diligence and ensure all lobbying activities are in line with the company’s wider green commitments leaves an organisation facing the risk that one day a conscientious individual will reveal their support for anti-environmental campaigns. In one swoop, any hopes of establishing a company as a green leader can be lost for a generation. And that is the kind of surprise no green executive wants to face.

Murray is threatening anyone who might dare deal with the Heartland or any other organisation that publicly questions or challenges climate change policies.

And yet, is Murray’s own house in order?

No.

BusinessGreen.com is owned by Incisive Media, which operate a fair number of specialist magazines, covering a range of industrial sectors. Amongst the portfolio are these, surprisingly un-green publications:

Global Technology Forum (GTF) provides senior engineering professionals and executives in the refining and petrochemical sector with leading technical conferences and training events. GTF has recently expanded its coverage of this important sector with its new website, GTForum.com. With a comprehensive global coverage of the downstream oil sector, GTForum is perfectly positioned to meet the needs of industry professionals all over the world.

Energy Risk Online is the leading digital subscription service dedicated to risk management, trading, regulation and trading technology for the global energy and commodities markets. The content of the publication has been described as required reading by chief financial officers, treasurers, chief risk officers, trading heads and fund managers around the globe. With world developments driving volatility in the global oil, gas and power markets, the need for a reliable source of information on risk management and financing is greater than ever.

Guess what… Behind Business Green is a company which trades with and profits from the fossil fuel industry. Tadaaaaaa! Look! A massive conspiracy!

Of course not. But then, neither is there much to the story that is currently exciting environmentalists and people like James Murray, who doesn’t seem to know whether his role is the editor of a trade journal, the director of a business lobbying organisation, or just a propagandist. It’s confusing of course, in these uncertain times. No wonder he’s so confused about the Heartland documents.