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Friday, July 14, 2017

Global Warming Porn: Addiction to Computer-Generated Scenarios - Gary North

So, you want to understand the fringe of the global warming religion. I think I have found it.
First, 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying there is insufficient evidence that any relationship exists between man-made emissions and global warming. You can read this here. In short, the whole global warming scenario is a fantasy.
Second, a truly apocalyptic article appears in New York, which is a mainstream site aimed at mainstream liberals. That is why this article is important. It is so utterly mainstream. It begins with a headline that can hardly be out-apocalypsed: The Uninhabitable Earth. There is a headline:
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
The author is David Wallace-Wells. Who is he? He has no Wikipedia page. All we know is this: he is a writer living in New York.
Third, there was an immediate challenge by an author in The Atlantic, another mainstream liberal publication. He is almost as apocalyptic. He says he just does not know what to think. "But I vacillate considerably on the doom versus no-doom question." He wails:
Consider the world that climate scientists say is more realistic: a place where sea levels cause mass migration within and without the developed world; where the economy is never great but isn’t in shambles either; where voters fear for their livelihoods and superpowers poke at each others’ weaknesses.
Does that world sound like a safe and secure place to live? Does it sound like a workable status quo? And how many small wars need to start in that world before they all fuse together? Who needs planet-killing methane burps when nine different countries have 15,000 nuclear weapons between them? In short, there are plenty of doomsday scenarios to worry about. They don’t need to be catastrophic on their face to induce catastrophe.
If that's the best refutation a mainstream liberal magazine can come up with, then the first article is surely mainstream.
These people live in a self-created fantasy world. They are incarnations of the woman described by Danny Kaye: “Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”
THE HEATED SKY IS FALLING
If global warming merely scares you, you're living in an optimistic fantasy world.
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
By the way, almost nobody actually believes any of this. If people did, real estate prices in these supposedly doomed areas would be falling like a stone. This is apocalyptic porn. Nobody takes it seriously, but lots of liberals love to stare at it. They want to dream great dreams. They want to scheme great schemes.
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings. . . .
So, scientists are holding back. They are not really writing what they believe. How does the author know this? He does not say. He is a mind-reader, perhaps.
The author, whoever he is, and whatever his qualifications, says this:
In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.
He invokes dozens of interviews. (With whom? Conducted how? With notes available where?)
What are we facing? This:
The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough.
Baked into our future. Get it? He's got a million of 'em!
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.
The world will lose Miami Beach. Where will retirees from New York City move to then?
Not to Bangladesh, we are informed.
What are we facing? Here are the article's subheads: I. Doomsday, II. Heat Death, III. The End of Food, IV. Climate Plagues, V. Unbreathable air, VI. Perpetual War, VII. Permanent Economic Collapse, VIII. Poisoned Oceans,
He asks:
So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.”
There is an obvious answer: the fiction is so overwhelming in the official scenarios that there is no need for, or demand for, novels.
Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations.
Where is there hope?
The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do.
The Paris goals are a United Nations public relations stunt affirmed as meaningful by brief-term politicians who have already been replaced. There are no sanctions attached to them. Now President Trump has put them on hold. Once again, we were five minutes to midnight, but the global warming agenda has been put into the freezer for four years.
But have no fear. Human creativity is here!
Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another.
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!
In my youth, there were weekly low-budget serials at movie theaters to get kids to return the following Saturday morning to buy more popcorn and candy. There were Western heroes. There were crime-fighters. There were science fiction heroes. Each week, the hero was trapped at the end of each chapter -- yes, even Superman, who could not be harmed. (If Lois Lane might bite the dust, who cared?) But the hero always got out of the deadly trap at the beginning of the next chapter.
There was always hope. But we wanted to see how the hero would face danger at the end of the chapter . . . even if the solution the next week turned out to be an anticlimax.
That was popcorn porn. It started early.
It still sells.
CONCLUSION
This is a terrific article. I can imagine nothing that is better calculated to paralyze the global warming fanatics. "All is lost! It's too big for anybody to solve! Oh, woe!"
I hope it will mean dozens of articles that are published to attempt to verify this lunatic assessment.
This is apocalyptic porn.