Thoughts on the environment

Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.

- Charles Peguy

Thinking about pollution as a public health problem and selective conservation of the natural world, for the sake of present and future generations, are in no way new endeavors. They arose toward the end of the 19th century, led by a variety of people who never dreamed of reading humanity out of nature or expressing hostility toward scientific understanding of nature, then emerging from its infancy. One of the best-known representatives of this movement - which predates the modern environmentalist movement by almost a century - was Teddy Roosevelt, who experienced raw nature first-hand, exploited it by hunting, wrote about it - and then created parks so others could taste the same experience. He was our first, and so far only, "environmental" president. There was nothing coffee-table-ish or armchair about his views, and he made his forays in the wilderness before cell phones, waterproof matches and tents, and other hi-tech paraphernalia were available. Today's environmentalist movement has moved far that orientation, representing a very different and basically mistaken view of nature and of humanity's relation to it. Environmentalism is a movement, not a science. The science is ecology, as practiced by ecologists. That hasn't prevented a long-standing and pervasive confusion between the two.

Born during the period that saw the breakdown of liberalism and its turn towards punitive and backward-looking guilt, the environmentalist movement started as a piece of counterculture and absorbed the older conservation and public health movements, usurping popular acceptance of the latter for its own ends. These ends are motivated by a hatred of technology, science, and modern civilization and bring in train all the classical fallacies of Romanticism: pre-existent "natural harmony," "noble savages," and the evil corruption of civilized humanity. Only once American civilization had reached a certain level of material development could such thinking take hold among more than a tiny number of the unbalanced. It's had a longer run in Europe, where it arose in the late 18th century in reaction to the rise of modern science, industry, and commercial society. The Germans gave a special twist to this thinking, one that merged nature-mysticism with reverence for the Volk and pre-industrial life.

The environmentalist movement has raided non-Western cultures and creatively invented bogus quotes about their attitudes toward the natural world. As shown by Dan Botkin and others, almost all of the supposed wisdom the movement peddles about natural "harmony" and "balance" comes from pre-modern and pre-scientific thinking within Western history, precisely the thinking that has been abandoned by modern science. (It wouldn't be modern or scientific otherwise.) The "pre-existent harmony" or "balance of nature" metaphor is the most common of these fallacies. Such discoveries as organic evolution and chaos (in the technical sense of the word) have forced ecologists to give up "equilibrium" pictures of ecosystems and face the reality of their ceaseless and usually messy change. Ecosystems come and go, start from a little, grow into a lot, mature into a period of glory - then fall apart and are replaced by something else. For example, it's precisely because the chaotic atmosphere and oceans have only a limited "invariant" structure that pinning down what "climate" means is so hard. So it has been throughout the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth; human activity just adds some more twists to the mix of permanent chaos.

But the "harmony," "balance," and "equilibrium" metaphors have, since the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, taken on a life of their own, now divorced from scientific thought and philosophical criticism. They continued to be sustained by religious feeling and the rise of counter-Enlightenment Romanticism. It helps that the core of Western religious thought since the rise of Christianity has been the template of Paradise-Fall-Redemption, with perhaps an apocalypse in there somewhere. The relationship of environmentalism to this paradigm and the related concept of Original Sin is too obvious to require comment. So is the environmentalist hope that humanity's supposed trashing of the planet demonstrates that humans are still at the center of things, if only in a negative way. High German Romantic thought of the 19th century (with echoes and variations from the American Transcendentalists) recommended withdrawal from both human society and the five senses as a preliminary to communing inwardly with Nature - not the thing you can perceive, but a "telephone from the beyond," as Nietzsche wittily once put it.*

This is the paradigm of Thoreau's time living alone at Walden Pond, a Romantic exercise if there ever was one. He wasn't scientifically studying the ecosystem at Walden, getting his hands dirty. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was staring at his navel.** The root of environmentalism lies in a restless search for a new religion to replace older faiths no longer believable or relevant.

After the fallacy of pre-existent balance, the most powerful bad metaphor reigning over environmentalist thinking is its misplaced and often childish anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Wild animals are not pets or farm animals, which are selectively plucked out of "wild" nature and bred by us to heighten characteristics that fit into human domestic and food needs. (After all, the wild ancestors of dogs could have been selectively bred to heighten other characteristics and turned into mean predators with no socially redeeming features.) Ecosystems and, indeed, the whole planet lack the integrated purposive and functional unity of individual animals and humans. It's a gross mistake to take metaphors like "Gaia" as more than fanciful poetic usages; the Earth doesn't think, feel, remember, or command anything.

But environmentalist literature and discourse are thoroughly polluted with such language and the concepts behind it. "Charismatic megafauna" (such as polar bears and baby seals) are projected as quasi-pets (instead of, respectively, hungry predators and their tasty, blubbery lunch). Gorgeous nature photography (itself a selective and superposed human art) is twisted into a "picture-window" or "don't-spoil-my-view" environmentalism that is really little more than middle- and upper-class kitsch. Debate about the human and non-human environments is mired in superstition and dishonesty if it assumes that nature would remain frozen were it not for our interference. It becomes enlightened and honest when the question shifts to, "Well, what do we want it to look like?" Not that we always get our wishes - but they're our wishes, not nature's. Nature has none.

If we're interested in a scientifically-informed view of nature and our relationship to it, we must abandon any notion of pre-existent "harmony" or "balance" that we are violating, restoring, or revering as an authoritative command. Nature commands nothing and speaks nothing. Or - better - it speaks many contradictory things: it's prodigious, wasteful, and hidden; beneficent and poisonous; abundant and barren; peaceful, aggressive, and indifferent - all at once. It is relentless change, on all scales of space and time, with incessant destruction, creation, and overturning. Any harmony or balance we bring to our relationship with nature is a balance or harmony strictly of our own devising. We're not even "managing" nature, except in a limited way. In limiting and modifying how we use nature, we really managing nothing but ourselves.

That is why environmentalism is not science, but a political and religious movement. It is why this movement so frequently turns tyrannical: there's nothing so satisfying to a fanatic than "managing" other people as a vehicle of righteousness.† Perhaps this is the unwittingly ironic sense in which Job urges his friends to "speak with the Earth, and she will teach you." She will teach you all right: she'll teach you that she has no trite moral lessons to offer. Equilibrium, balance, and harmony are not the norm, but temporary and local. Indeed, at the center of Job's encounter with the divine is, not a garden or a zoo, but a whirlwind.

In absorbing and condescending to the older public health and conservation movements, the nearly forty years of modern environmentalism have done our society a large disservice. It is the most potent social force today in attracting the general public away from science. Scientists involved in ecology themselves often lead mentally conflicted lives, caught between knowing and believing. People now routinely use meaningless or wrongheaded concepts to misunderstand the world around them and how human activity affects it. Recycling is often more harmful than just throwing things out. No one has a "carbon footprint," unless they've rubbed graphite on the bottom of their shoes. The Earth's climate is not a greenhouse. Nuclear power plants are not bombs, any more than a coal-fired power plant is a firearm. Runaway metaphors and bad policies motivated by them are the fallacies of the Boomers - history's first mass over- and miseducated generation - and now constitute the brainwashing of the next generation. Led by their delusional gurus, currently starting with Al Gore, they have injected a potent revulsion against modern technological and progressive civilization into our politics.†† But that passion proves nothing about the rightness of their cause, which is essentially romantic, pessimistic, and reactionary.‡

POSTSCRIPT: For an example of what I'm talking about, consider M. Night Shyamalan's embarrassing new movie, The Happening, "the most morally abhorrent film ever made" - but still, important for laying bare the logic, which pervades conventional environmental politics in a watered-down form. Or just read this New Republic blog posting and skip the film itself :)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Everyone interested in this problem, whatever their opinions, should read Wallace Kaufman's No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking. Published 14 years ago, it is more relevant than ever, and a blog posting cannot do it justice. In related vein, consider as well the two books by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood and Playing God in Yellowstone.
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* While not able to speak English, Nietzsche could read it and counted an edition of Emerson's works as one of his prized possessions; he annotated it, heavily in places. His famous Übermensch, or Overman, probably owes something to Emerson's Oversoul. I don't know if Nietzsche read any Thoreau.

** That said, I like Walden Pond as it is now and try to swim it at least once every summer. There's been no attempt to "freeze" it in some mythical past, and it is accessible by car. It was pretty accessible in Thoreau's day, and he was never more than an hour walk from the center of Concord and medical and food supplies. Thoreau even took his laundry home to his mother for washing periodically. The old railroad line, already in existence when Thoreau spent his two years there, still runs right past the pond, behind some trees. Even more than in Thoreau's day, the setting now is as much a product of human artifice as it is of nature and a perfect example of the older conservation movement - but not of modern environmentalism.

† Thoreau himself said it: a man feels a disturbance in his bowels - and he sets off on a crusade to save humanity.

†† Using "progressive" again in the right sense.

‡ The absolute weirdness of our political vocabulary strikes me more and more. Opponents of environmentalism are usually called "conservative" - are they, really? And is environmentalism really "liberal" and "progressive"?

Little darling ...

... it's been long, cold, lonely winter. It has been, the longest, snowiest, and coldest overall and worldwide, in quite a while. And there's still that big Antarctica freeze-down going on Way Down Under.

The UN World Meteorological Organization has belatedly recognized what many meteorologists and ordinary people have been noticing for the last decade: apparently, the globe hasn't warmed since 1998. The trend has been a little more complex, I think: probably cooling slowly from the mid-90s to around 2003, then sharper cooling since then - all interrupted by a couple hotter, drier years 2000 and 2001, suspiciously around solar magnetic maximum. (The same happened in 1988-89, at the previous maximum.) Readers of this blog will not be surprised, either about the longer cooling trend or the short warming spells around solar magnetic maxima. The post-1998 seems to be connected to a re-sync-ing of the Earth's internal climate cycles, signaled most forcefully by changes in El Niño/Southern Pacific Oscillation (ENSO). Something similar going the other direction happened in 1977, apparently leading to a nearly two-decade warming spell.

I'll leave aside that little technicality about spatial averages of local thermodynamic variables like temperature being meaningless. A statistical proxy index doesn't have to be the temperature of anything (and it isn't) to still indicate a trend. What the trend means, is far less obvious than many people (including the IPCC) think.

Naturally, this frustrates my plan to write my mature masterwork, an Italian opera called Si Ricalda Il Globo. It's supposed to feature, as protagonist, the frustrated crown prince Alberto, so rudely pushed aside by the nouveau riche and less polished Arbusti clan from Texas. His scientific antagonist is Il Dottore Termale, played by a certain Christoforo, who enters with his dramatic baritone aria, "Non si fà la media delle temperature." Alberto also sings baritone, but more screechy. They're rumored to be twins separated at birth.

I guess I'll have to wait til the next warming spell.

POSTSCRIPT: Is Ted Turner senile? I guess only Jane Fonda knows for sure. Recently on the Charlie Rose show, he raved on about yestercentury's "crisis" of overpopulation and how we're all going to be eating other in a fit of cannibalism as it gets warmer and warmer. Nothing like crabby left-wing billionaires bloviating about a world they don't understand.

If it is cannibalism, let's eat the Left first and agree now to play my opera as background.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: But no cannibalism on Passover - chag sameach!

Maybe the masses don't want to be agitated

John Tierney of the New York Times' Tierneylab has this interesting tidbit about the larger public's perception of "global warming," and it fails to conform to the Gore et al. propaganda machine notion that scoffing at Gore's pet cause is a result of ignorance - quite the reverse:

After asking a national sample of more than 1,000 Americans how much they knew about global warming and how they felt about it, the researchers report that respondents who are better-informed about global warming “both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.” Another unexpected result: “Respondents who showed a great deal of confidence that scientists understand global warming and climate change showed significantly less concern for the risks of global warming than did those who have lower trust in scientists."

Tierney, at least, is honest in admitting his own views about "global warming," unlike many journalists. That helps to keep his postings and articles on the subject relatively free of sanctimonious BS posing as "objective" journalism.

The result is striking. I don't know how well or poorly educated these surveyed people are about the subject in an absolute sense. And the way the survey is worded necessarily narrows down the scope of the answers. But it does show the strong connection between the hysteria about "global warming" and lack of scientific literacy. The hysteria feeds on ignorance and fear. It couldn't be otherwise.

(Hat tip to Instapundit. As Reynolds points out, once we get to July, the "climate" will be "warming" again, of course.)

It's still cold outside

Here's more detail on the post-1997 cooling trend: it really is cold out there, and this winter's snow and ice accumulation trends are sharply up. They've been inching up since the end of the 90s, but this winter's additional increment is the largest since the early 90s. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) Contrary to the ignorant hot air from Gore, it's the latitudinal coverage of the ice that is tied directly to "global warming" or "global cooling," not the ice thickness.

By itself, the thickness is just a sign of how much snow has fallen, itself a function of the humidity. Since colder air has lower water vapor content, colder winters and less snowfall will produce thinner ice sheets (remember, they melt a little every summer, regardless). Of course, this sort of effect needs several years before it takes hold. This is not science that's hard to understand - it just takes turning off the tube and thinking for a few minutes about things that everyone in northern climates sees every winter.

Something else has become clear: since the IPCC and other "global warming" hysterics have silently abandoned their case for the pre-late 70s climate, and they are ignoring or blocking the now-obvious post-1997 climate trends, the entire empirical case for "global warming" rests on the 20-year warming period (which no one disputes) from the late 70s to the mid-90s. All contrary data have been or soon will be "corrected" by being "recalibrated" to the bogus "hockey stick" extrapolations - all extrapolated from that limited period of warming.

Nobel committee lays another egg

Someone once called the era we live in the "age of inflation." For example, a million dollars isn't worth what it once was. Neither apparently is the Nobel Peace Prize. A science prize can't be awarded to something that pretends to be science but actually isn't - at least, not without completely destroying the worth of the prize. For the Peace Prize, the standards are evidently lower - much lower, we now learn.

By awarding Al Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize committee has done it again, marking another large cut in the prestige, meaning, and value of what they're handing out. Not that they haven't done it before: they awarded part of the 1994 Peace Prize to Arafat. That decision was motivated by a mix of wishful thinking and opportunism, as was the awarding of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. What we've just seen with Gore and the IPCC is a case of political correctness run amok. It's not that different from the grade inflation and speech codes common on campus these days: administrators looking for a bandwagon to jump on or lacking the spine to stand up to fanatics. In a few years, it won't matter, since the "global warming" craze seems to be dissipating; the Nobel committee will simply look like idiots again.

This Nobel committee has also strikingly passed up in recent years far more worthy people who take large risks for peace and stay away from the temptation to violence: the Iraqi Shi'ite clerics (like Sistani) or the Burmese monks, for example.

But with all that said, it's still a scientific outrage - a blatant attempt to replace science with junk, following the pattern laid down for the last twenty years, short-circuiting scientific reasoning with credulity and obsession. It forces bad methodology and results on everyone else that, for any other scientific issue or topic, would be dismissed out of hand. Apparently, not when it comes to this issue.

The basic problem with the "global warming" crackpottery from the start has been preconceived dogma armed with political clout and media megaphones browbeating everyone else and demonizing rational critics and criticism. A Nobel Peace Prize just means another year or so of it. But many people are wise to official B.S. now: far from enhancing the stature of Gore and the IPCC, it simply cheapens the prize further.*

The timing of the prize is significant as well. A prize given in late 2007 is probably meant to influence the US presidential elections next year. It might mean a final attempt by Gore to run for president with his zany pet cause. If you're registered Democrat, you can vote in Democratic primaries. If you're not, you can change your registration. (Many states have open primaries in any case.) If you can, be sure to vote against Gore. We don't need a monomaniac of bad science or a Cardinal Bellarmino running for president or being president.

POSTSCRIPT: I was unaware of this, but the Nobel Peace Prize was not part of Nobel's original will. It was added somewhat later (in 1901) and is issued by the Norwegian parliament in Oslo, not by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.
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* An appropriate response from the US government should be the complete withdrawal of government money, science, and recognition from the IPCC. The US can't by itself disband the IPCC, but it can press other countries to do so. It's the price to pay to free ourselves from the dangerous concepts of "official" and "consensus" science.

The strange case of Al Gore

There was a time when I liked Al Gore, although I never voted for him. (I did vote for Clinton-Gore in '92.) His strange career, with its unexpected twists, reminds me of Michael Jackson. Like the pop singer, Gore was once a normal kid, before Something Bad happened. In 1988, he was a moderate Southern Democrat, a once-familiar political type. By 1992, he had already become the humorless RoboGore of later years. A French magazine that year referred to him as le Bon Élève (the Good Student) - sort of like Lisa Simpson, only with less charm and musical talent. He grew to resemble the denizens of postmodern academia and characteristic of all that is worst in his generation: censorious, obsessed with proving his higher virtue through pet causes, impatient with reason and evidence, burning with the need to impose righteousness on others. After all, this is the generation that gave us "advocacy journalism" and political correctness, taking over and abusing - for illiberal purposes - the liberal institutions their parents and grandparents had built to serve the larger public good.

That he underwent some obscure personal transformation in those four years is not in doubt. It's dangerous to psychoanalyze someone from a distance, but Gore himself has left an open trail of biographical crumbs in his Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. His son nearly died in an automobile accident, and his sister died of lung cancer. (The Gore family fortune was largely built on tobacco.) Gore would hardly be unique if crusading became for him an expression of complex and all-too-human feelings in the double aftermath.*

When we look at what's become of Gore since then, the only sensible response is to shake one's head in irritated befuddlement. The insistent demonization of rational critics and criticism of a mass hysteria is a hallmark of crusading fanatics, as noted by Ted Koppel on his Nightline program several times during Gore's tenure as Vice President:

The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that works. (ABC News Nightline, February 24, 1994)

Koppel is one of the very few journalists in the conventional media to call Gore and others on their "global warming" fanaticism and militant desire to crush anyone who disagrees with them. In a saner and better educated age than ours, these very tendencies would be widely and correctly viewed as clear warning signs that such people are not to be trusted and perhaps even need to have their heads examined. Instead, people swoon over their "idealism," not remembering that idealism is not the same as saintliness or virtue.

So what are we to make of Gore's recent movie and books? All of them are full of little irritating gestures of "seriousness" (read: fanaticism) that seem both pathetic and highly revealing. On an intellectual level, these pale in comparison to the giant, looming scientific fallacies. The science is wrong on multiple counts, in some cases so wrong it seems like deliberate misrepresentation. I won't rehash what has been hashed out elsewhere. Apparently Gore (like many others) thinks he's doing G-d's work here, promoting a "higher cause," no matter how questionable the means. Like other crusading fanatics, he doesn't seem to realize that this technique of agitating the masses through hysteria and deception just makes everyone disillusioned and cynical in the end. If the "higher cause" itself turns out to be a bust, then the damage done is major and has no compensating upside.

Gore has further arguments, however, that invoke something other than the faulty science behind the "global warming" craze. He insists that the decline of education, bookreading, analytical thinking, rational public culture, and the news media have prevented ordinary folk from seeing the deep truth of his pet cause. These are real and worrisome developments. But Gore wildly and breathtakingly inverts the truth here: the "global warming" hysteria could not have gotten anywhere near as far as it has without just those helping trends.

At the center of the issue, the decline of science literacy enables the hysteria in a direct way. Science education in the US hasn't just declined, of course. It's been actively corrupted by an illiberal vision that replaces education based on skills, knowledge, and learning to think for oneself with the indoctrination and propaganda of crusades and causes. (For an example, see here.) This development parallels the decline of fact-based and investigative journalism, increasingly replaced in the last couple decades by "advocacy journalism," by which "activist" journalists push their usually ill-founded viewpoint in dishonest ways by manipulating their public with the older conventions of objective journalism. Only most sentient people have now seen through this maze of tricks and have lost patience with the conventional news media: fewer and fewer are fooled any longer.

Along with this half-baked argument comes bizarre claims that the news media have become increasingly "right-wing" (!) in their slant. Come on: a "right-wing" news media - really? With a few major exceptions (Wall Street Journal, Fox), the US news media (and even more so, the global news media) is overwhelmingly liberal to left-liberal in its reporting slant and the proclivities of its personnel. That's a massively overdocumented fact; there's no quibbling about it.

And really: doesn't the "global warming" hysteria, which the news media have played a decisive role in promoting, fit the news media's needs perfectly? Both in the commercial sense of getting people chronically anxious and constantly tuning in (to see if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has finally melted - spectacular, exclusive, thoroughly misleading footage from National Geographic Channel! CNN! MSNBC! Fox, even! with ominous music playing in the background!) and in the deeper sense of feeding the news media's delusions of being a profession and a fourth branch of government?

Al Gore is a sorry case. It's fine and all to denounce the partisan fanaticism of our present politics and the semiliteracy of the televisual global village. But he, his books, and his movie are very much part of the problem, not the solution.
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* This phenomenon is explored and explained at length in that great modern classic, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

Ah ...

... the Gore effect strikes again.

But I can type and laugh at the same time. Some people can't, you know.

And it makes me wonder: how do these famous people keep a straight face?

Science versus science fiction

Remember a long time ago, we said: science is about answering the answerable, not imagining the imaginable.

Much of the global warming literature is the latter, not the former. The executive summaries of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are a good example. They use the trappings of science without the substance and, each time they're released, show wide differences from the larger scientific reports that accompany them but which few non-scientists ever look at. These differences are a major scandal. That is, they violate all the basic canons of scientific honesty, twisting and mutilating the science until it fits the political preconceptions. And the IPCC has become ever more clever and manipulative in how they're pushed out to the public. The latest report (No. 4, 2007) separated the release of the scientific report from the summary by several months. Naturally, the summary material is all you ever hear in the media.

Hysterical literature of this type typically mixes the imaginable, the hypothetical, and the unlikely with the probable, the banal, and the obvious. A good example is the attempt in the IPCC's summary of impacts of global warming to simultaneously inflate probable changes in the polar regions and conflate those with unlikely major changes near the equator - all in an attempt, I suppose, to stir our sympathy simultaneously for stranded polar bears and the typically impoverished humans living in the tropics. As a previous posting explained, the polar bears have the better case here, although the absolute size of the changes in question is unlikely to be large.

A better way to think of these reports is that the members of the IPCC are trying to break into The Industry, as it's called, and the reports are preliminary drafts for a Hollywood blockbuster, The Warming After: The Movie. It'll star Angelina Jolie (she of the luscious lips and furrowed brows) as an NGO/humanitarian aid worker living in the tropics and trapped in 14 hurricanes, one after another - all late one summer. Alec Baldwin co-stars as an amorous and distinguished professor of climatology who splits his time between seducing graduate students and testifying on impending climate doom before Congress, where he's repeatedly confronted by a hostile Republican senator and global warming skeptic. Al Gore makes a cameo appearance as himself, brandishing a hockey stick and riding that platform contraption from Inconvenient Truth.

The story climaxes dramatically when Baldwin rescues the secretly-environmentalist daughter (Scarlett Johansson) of the hostile senator from her father's house as it slides into the ocean during a mudslide, taking the senator with it. They live happily ever after (in a very convenient ménage-à-trois) in a beautiful but ruined tropical villa that Jolie has discovered, where they curl up together every night to learn about thermodynamics and the evils of carbon dioxide and feed displaced polar bears. No farting allowed.