Correlation isn’t causation but it certainly is intriguing. A suspicion about a causal relationship between two factors will arise if a change in one is accompanied by a change in the other (with the caveat of “all other factors being equal”). Take for example increasing secularism – which includes materialism, agnosticism, atheism, and a decline in church attendance – and a rise in the belief of a “climate emergency”. Yes, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy lurks as a cautionary tale for any attempted linkage between happenstances, but that can’t be an excuse to flippantly reject a possible, maybe probable, connection when reason and evidence bolster the case.
Today, pews are empty and John Kerry jets off to China to enlist the communist regime in a jihad against “climate change”. Suburban women and other excitable voting blocs have night-sweats over ubiquitously broadcast fears of extreme weather and rising seas flooding their neighborhoods. The great lords of the donkey party proclaim it to be the central issue of our time, and a singular, stand-alone, and existential threat to such an extent that its amelioration must be pursued even to the detriment of national prosperity and security. Who’s pushing the crusade? Science dunces.
Why would secularists be more likely to be hair-on-fire about climate change? Deductively speaking, and with a little support from inductive reasoning (i.e., evidence), a reasonable connection can be drawn. Secularists have nothing to rely upon for all that happens other than human agency, there being nothing beyond us and the material world. It’s easy for them to fall for crusades that are postulated on man being the principal cause of our ills. They are less inclined to accept that some matters are consigned to fate or beyond our ken. They are irresistibly drawn to man as the cause and the material reform of man as the solution – aka, the Green New Deal and Lenin and his Bolsheviks, et al.
Religionists are more resistant to the compunction. After all, for them, God is the ultimate sovereign of all things, not man and his SUV. In contrast, secularists are alone in the universe in a heightened sense of anxiety, ready recruits for the ballyhoo of the political circus. Researchers Aimee Lopes and Christopher Jones in ScienceDirect found such a connection when they concluded in their survey,
“Secular participants expressed anxiety in relation to environmental issues, especially climate change. Lack of belief in an afterlife or divine intervention led secular participants to focus on human responsibility and the need for action . . . .”
This leads me to the triple bogey of hypothetical thinking: the degree of secularism, the level of science literacy, and the fervency of belief in the secular crusade. Is it possible for a high degree of cultural secularism, combined with a low level of science understanding, to lead to an inability to distinguish climate hysterics from real science and, consequently, a frenzy for climate eschatology? It’s not only possible; it’s probable.
Publicity hounds barking about it as in so many Chicken Littles seem to run in the same lane of questionable scientific literacy. For instance, Al Gore, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ed Markey, Joe Biden, and his political consort, Kamala Harris, aren’t scientists. Far from it. Gore graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, and according to Wikipedia, “he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.” Mmmmmmmmmmm.
AOC is an urchin of government from her education to her internship under Ted Kennedy. Her degree is in one of those academic amalgams in the “arts”: international relations and economics (?). Bear in mind that a BA in a particular field doesn’t guarantee practical competence in it. As for her science acumen, she’s puffed up for her second-place finish in a high school ISEF competition. There’s much in the story that doesn’t pass the smell test. An asteroid – discovered in 1992 when she was 3 – named after her for a SECOND-PLACE finish in a high school science fair? What’s behind that? An alleged science whiz that ends up in Boston U. pursuing “international relations”? What? Mmmmmmmmmmm.
The rest of her résumé, or what has been commonly said of her, is similarly odoriferous. Intel giving her a scholarship to an expensive college to pursue a non-science degree? They don’t do that! Mmmmmm.
Then there’s what doesn’t appear in her résumé, or has gone down the memory hole. The girl was bouncing around after graduation; nothing unusual in that. Without any technical expertise of the kind evident in a science background, she gravitated to the chattering vocations that are typical of the chattering classes. She used a government-subsidized communal workplace to “incubate” a book publishing business (Brook Avenue Press) that failed to produce a single book and jumped on board one of those trendy self-improvement consultancies, GAGEis (Gage Strategies), that ended up as successful as the book publishing enterprise. And to think that this genius is leading the effort to overturn our personal fortunes to address her climate-change hysterics. (this part of her story can be found here )
The rest of the gang isn’t any more scientifically impressive. Ed Markey (D, Mass.) earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and his JD at Boston College. Law and government are his gigs. From there, he’ll spend rest of his life at taxpayer expense.
Another long-in-the-tooth Dem and recent Green New Deal enthusiast, Joe Biden, got his BA in history and political science from the U. of Delaware. He then matriculated to the U. of Syracuse Law School where he met his wife and finished at the bottom of his law school class (76th of 85). (see here)
And then we have Biden’s sidekick, Kamala Harris. Does she bring a trained eye for science to her lofty political platitudes? That’s hard to believe since she graduated from Howard U. with an “arts” degree in political science and – here we go again – economics. And of course, after that, she flies to law school like Gore, Markey, and Biden before her. In the end, what we have is a cohort that proves the relationship between a high level of gullibility for climate-change pablum and a paucity of actual science competence.
To be sure, they can get away with a lack of science acuity if they have a back bench of politicized “experts” to buck them up. In this regard, the corruption of science by politics has reached a crescendo as government, led by its science dunces, has increasingly regulated and subsidized the science industry. The influence of politics is palpable. And add to this the failure of the academic science departments in preventing the lefty lunacies in the broader campus from bleeding into their faculties and research. Increasingly, science is no longer science in places where science is expected to be conducted.
Thus, at this juncture, it is pertinent to ask, what is science? It isn’t critical race theory and its illegitimate offspring. “Follow the science” would require a person to actually follow science, the real science, the scientific method. It begins with a mental disposition to recognize a real scientific proposition, or hypothesis: one that is presented in a testable way, tested by the scientific method. “Systemic white racism” isn’t it. It is presumed to exist, and is accompanied by a trail of verbiage that only works to excite the demagogues’ fellow-travelers. Ditto for the trendy climate-change craze.
For the record, climate change is happening, as it has since shortly after the formation of the planet, and the planet had one. Climate isn’t static. The big question isn’t over the existence of climatic changes but whether we are triggering a climate catastrophe today. It’s provocative idea, but one better suited for Hollywood scriptwriters and not one befitting a scientist.
Those scientists willing to go down that path are letting their political biases cloud their scientific judgment. They, and we, must be reminded of a few pertinent scientific facts. First, since we started having a climate, about 4.6 billion years ago, it has acted as a gaseous membrane. Some of the sun’s energy to the surface gets delayed and absorbed in the atmosphere thus keeping our temperatures from dropping to Martian levels (ranging +70⁰ to -220⁰ F, averaging -80⁰). Clouds, water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide especially do the trick, and all of them predate the human discovery of fire. The global greenhouse was one of God’s best inventions.
Next, global warming is better than global cooling, hands down. But, as with most things in nature, the picture is complex. A warming climate extends the growing season which is great for lifespans, prosperity, and civilizations. Greenland became green over more of it, and hospitable to Norse settlement. A cooling one is a cataclysm for bringing marauding invasions (the fall of the Roman Empire; the Rhine froze over), end-times pandemics (the Black Death in multiple waves), and famines (surplus-destroying fungi; crop-destroying freezes; and a shrunken growing season). Yet, for the early Puritan settlement of Massachusetts, The Little Ice Age (1303-1860 AD) worked to their benefit in certain ways: malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery weren’t as severe as elsewhere; enteritis, the bane for children at the time, wasn’t as big a problem; and the cold New England winters posed an elevated health risk to sub-Saharan Africans so slavery couldn’t take root.
On balance, though, it must be admitted that warm periods presaged good times. As for slavery, the moral stain would be removed by 650,000 deaths on the battlefield.
Politicians exaggerate – nothing new in that – and politicized “experts” adopt the habit. The only difference in the two theatrical acts lies in the fact that politicians start out as activists, and later morph into snout-trough-burying careerists, but our politicized “experts” remain in the initial political larvae stage of activist. The compromised expert is giddy at the prospect to distort the science in support of his activism. For example, CO₂, a gaseous byproduct of job creation, is inflated to the status of an archvillain. So, methane, clouds, water vapor, volcanoes, sunspot activity, and anything else that helps our atmosphere hold onto solar energy for the sake of our long-term health, are ignored in order to get right to “evil” CO₂. Thus, the increase in the gas from .03% to .04% of atmospheric molecules in the past 100 years is crafted into a nightmare.
For the activist in a lab coat, forget about CO₂ being a vitamin for plants in the production of oxygen. For them, CO₂ carries Revelations’ mark of the beast, despite the observation that a doubling of it would only increase temperatures by 1.8⁰F, which is amply verified in the geologic and climactic record. But that piddling amount must be magnified into a “tipping point” and reinforced in the virtual gaming of their computer models. They overdo the principle of “positive feedbacks” – a process that works to increase the effects of a change in a system – and integrates the bias into their models that function as magic lanterns.
They do this to explain away Le Chatelier’s principle: “when a settled system is disturbed, it will adjust to diminish the change that has been made to it.” Over time, a disturbance in a natural system will be mitigated, not magnified as in “positive feedbacks”. So, the influence of a spike in atmospheric CO₂ will be absorbed and blunted by adjustments of the other factors in the system thereby lessening the impact. “Positive feedbacks” is prominent in alarmist algorithms; Le Chatelier is functionally absent. Thus, they can flood the zone with scary predictions of coastal real estate moving inland, unhinged extreme weather predictions that make their way into recent movie scripts, and all sorts of other wild and hypothetical calamities and prognostications.
At the end of the day, we get to endure our political buffoons standing before cameras to ignorantly chastise anyone with a head still on their shoulders. It’s enough to make a person wonder if we’re living in an asylum run by the inmates.
The whole scene brings to mind another word: kakistocracy. It is a noun for a “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.” Not surprisingly, it’s of Greek origin. The prefix, kakistos, means “worst”. Add the suffix, -cracy, or “rule”, and we get an accurate depiction of the Biden administration, the Dem head-honchos in Congress, and the cowards in corporate suites. It’s enough to make one live off-the-grid.
RogerG