By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
For years, the loudest voices in the climate-change
conversation sounded like overwrought teenaged girls, so it is only natural
that the loudest voice in the climate-change conversation eventually should be
that of an actual overwrought teenaged girl, Time magazine person of the
year Greta Thunberg. Why settle for Paul Krugman when you can have the real
thing?
“Listen to the science!” they lecture any would-be
deviationist, pretending that a question of politics is a question of science.
It’s a fun little status game, if that and being scolded by teenaged girls is what
floats your personal boat. De gustibus, etc.
But it does pay to check in with the scientists every now
and then. And, as it turns out, they do not sound like overwrought teenaged
girls. Not at all. They sound pretty sensible and — don’t tell poor Greta, or
poor Professor Krugman! — surprisingly optimistic.
In the closing days of 2019, the International Energy
Agency released its annual guidance report, the World Energy Outlook.
“According to the IEA report,” writes David Wallace-Wells
of New York, who is not famously an exponent of climate deviationism,
“given only current carbon policies, which nearly everyone studying climate
considers terribly weak, the world is on track for about 3 degrees Celsius of
warming by 2100, which could, if existing pledges were implemented, be brought
down as low as 2.7 degrees — about one and a half degrees less
warming than is suggested by the U.N.’s IPCC reports in what is often referred
to as the ‘business as usual’ ‘RCP8.5’ scenario.”
What does that mean, exactly? That “the window of
possible climate futures is probably narrowing,” Wallace-Wells writes, “with
both the most optimistic scenarios and the most pessimistic ones seeming, now,
less likely.” In the interest of giving an accurate view of Wallace-Wells’s
very interesting write-up for those who do not follow my recommendation to go
and read
it in full, please understand that he views the current situation as
“really quite dire” but “certainly better than I’ve thought.” But the very
worst-case scenario, and scenarios close to the very worst case, are in this
view less likely to come to pass.
That’s a rare bit of good news from the apocalypse desk,
and Wallace-Wells’s essay is much more illuminating reading than “How dare
you!”
But we live in a “How dare you!” world.
We live in the world of Stephen Porter of London, who
writes in the Financial Times: “I would reject all moderate predictions
on climate change and would trust only the most extreme, accepting that even
the latter will probably greatly underestimate the true consequences of not
taking immediate action to counter the human influences on our climate.” Upon
what does he base that attitude? His view that “most cosmic events are sudden
and cataclysmic.” “Most cosmic events.” In the Financial Times, this is,
that salmon-tinted citadel of fuddy-duddery.
Over at Bloomberg, Mark Buchanan effectively argues
against honesty (excessive honesty, he’d say) in the climate-change
conversation under the headline: “Climate change: Scientists’ honesty is
killing their cause.” (Please, do read
the entire thing if you suspect I am misrepresenting the article.) Citing
psychological research, Buchanan suggests a new kind of discourse, one with
certain inconvenient “uncertainties suppressed.” He tries to have it both ways,
naturally, since it is unseemly for a journalist to be caught writing a brief
for more effective propaganda, and so he backtracks a little:
Acknowledge some uncertainty, he says, but not too much, and “whenever
possible, put quantitative bounds on it. . . . But there’s a danger in going
too far and hiding behind the awesome complexity of the climate system to avoid
making strong statements.” Why put quantitative bounds on uncertainty? Because
doing so offers a more accurate representation of scientific findings? No,
because psychological research suggests that this makes for more effective
marketing.
On
the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in
effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which
means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and
buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well.
And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this
context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially
disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of
media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified,
dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This
‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any
formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being
effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Some of my fellow
conservatives can from time to time take a pretty boobtastic attitude toward
climate change, that it is a “hoax” or a conspiracy cooked up in Beijing. But
one of the reasons some people suspect that climate-change activists are not
being entirely straight with them is the fact that climate-change activists
keep publishing essays rationalizing why they don’t think they should be
entirely straight with skeptics or the uncommitted members of the general
public. This isn’t science — it is salesmanship.
Science enjoys
well-earned and widespread prestige, and so it makes a handy cudgel in
political debates. But the scientific forecasts are the beginning of the
climate debate, not the end of it. Properly understood, this is a question of
risk mitigation: How much climate risk are we willing to bear, and how much are
we willing to pay for a certain level of risk reduction? In my view, there is
an excellent case for a Pigovian tax on fossil fuels (and perhaps on some other
products) that are likely to exacerbate the risks associated with climate
change — the U.S. government is sure to bear much of any climate-change costs,
it will need money to do so, and getting that revenue by putting a levy on the
negative externalities in question looks like a pretty good policy. I don’t
think weepy teenaged girls, or grown men and women in responsible jobs doing
their best imitations of weepy teenaged girls, adds anything of great value to
that.
(I have a
harebrained scheme: Why not substitute a carbon tax for taxes on personal and
business income? Let’s make a deal!)
There is some
good news on climate change, and our policy debate should incorporate that. But
it won’t. Nobody in our Trump-Warren-Kardashian doofus culture is very
interested in the IEA — they are interested in Greta Thunberg, in artfully shot
heroic photographic portraits, in ritual, redemption, and reconciliation, in
the apocalyptic legends familiar from myth and religion, and, of course, in
dreaming up ways to shoehorn their preexisting personal desires and political
demands into the new mystical-political paradigm. Financial crisis and a
subsequent recession? Professor Krugman recommends a big, expensive
infrastructure program. World in flames from global warming? Professor Krugman
recommends a big, expensive infrastructure program. Psoriasis? Try
infrastructure.
Why try infrastructure? Because, as Professor Krugman
writes, “scientific persuasion is running into sharply diminishing returns,”
and needs to be supplanted by “an effective political strategy.” He insists
that “powerful forces on the right” — know your enemy! — “are determined to
keep us barreling down the road to hell.” The IEA suggests otherwise. Does that
matter? Does that matter to Professor Krugman? Does that matter to you? Or
perhaps you simply have a poetical conviction that you possess an ineffable
understanding of the true nature of “most cosmic events.”
One cult is as good as another, and mood affiliation is a
kind of faith.
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