Why "Climate Change" is a really bad idea

Because hyperobjects are easier to capture than carbon

Part 3/3 in a semi-continuous thread on “helpful ways to reframe thinking on the climate and overall polycrisis with arguments you can share with Lefty kids or crusty grandparents.”

See Part One here and Part Two here if you missed ‘em. They’re designed to go together (more or less). I only broke them up in the firstplace cuz this brain dump was running wayy long. ;)

***

In Part One, I shared the disorienting story of chatting with a friend who is a well known celebrity climate activist and filmmaker and his recent turn to climate skepticism and withdrawal from the Progressive battlefield.

Just a few days ago, that same dear friend (maybe I need to call him a "former environmental activist?") just sent me a contrarian documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is more or less to climate change what Plandemic was to epidemiology.

I winced when I clicked on the link because I was faced with two choices, neither of them any good.  

Option 1 was to dismiss it out of hand because I already knew what it was going to say, suspected with a fairly high degree of certainty that it was a bad-faith argument, cherry picking evidence, misrepresenting scientific consensus, engaging in false equivalency and generally muddying the waters. 

Quick, easy. Self-satisfying. Oh, the salty text I would write back! 

But that didn't do me any good refining my own understandings of folks persuaded by these arguments (I'd be stuck in my own confirmation bias), and didn't honor my friend's request to be in a mutually respectful dialogue.

Option 2 was the one I was least stoked on. It meant clearing aside a few hours to watch the goddamn thing.

Then promptly Googling "Great Global Warming Swindle pros cons critique review evidence" and spending several more hours sorting through knee-jerk Lefty dismissals (also not helpful, coulda just gone with Option 1 and saved myself some time), to find considered, evidence based, point by point rebuttals of the film. 

And then, if I was really being thorough, I'd check Twitter archives and other forums to read the skeptical rebuttals of the rebuttals, again, biasing towards those subject matter experts citing data, (and biasing against who was just stanning for the documentary makers in the first place).

And finally, going back to all the peer reviewed journals cited pro and con, read past the abstracts and into the actual methodologies, and try to determine if a) they were reliable studies in the first place and b) do they even say what the filmmakers insist they do?

But fuck me, that takes a while!

So then I figured, how about Option 3?

Abandon the battlefield altogether.

Just concede that in this particular meme war for "Climate Change: Pressing Existential Crisis or Cynical Hysterical Hoax?" that the misinformation has won already. 

There's too much fear, uncertainty and doubt being sown (overwhelmingly by fossil fuel interests on the Koch-Murdoch Axis, it needs to said) But if you've been hoodwinked by these arguments, the last thing you want to hear is that you got pwned. 

After all, so much of the psyop is tuned to make you feel like a contrarian free thinker and a rebel for daring to question the Big Green propaganda in the first place!

#mesearchisresearch

So let's just void the discussion on so-called “Climate Change” so we can get to the heart of the matter of our current clusterf*ck.

As a show of good faith, I'll even throw in another reason to put a bullet in the concept of "Climate Change."

It's not even a real thing.

(in the sense that you can look at it, touch it, see it.)

It's more of a "hyper-object." A concept. An amalgamation of biology, physics, statistics, culture and politics that we've spun up as a giant, imprecise placeholder for a whole bunch of very real things.

***

Just imagine…

Somewhere over the past twenty years, in shadowy smoke filled back rooms in Davos, Captains of Capitalism (all secret communists dedicated to enacting the New World Order) gathered to mandate a propaganda campaign. 

"Let's agree to never mention rainforests, pandas or polar bears again! That's so WWF, bleeding-heart 90's.

Let's commit to a degree of messaging consistency that others will likely find sinister and premeditated in hindsight!

Henceforth, we shall only speak of parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere! 

It's so abstract and boring, no one will be able to see through our ingenious smoke screen to uncover what our real agenda is!

Let's make this the singular rallying cry for all those do-gooder Lefties.

Let's put it on all of the teleprompters for our Build Back Better political puppets across the world.

We’ll make billions with bogus carbon offsets and capture schemes!

And we absolutely cannot wait until we can lock people down in their cities on bad air days or when they've busted their carbon budgets!

It’ll be so much better than our thwarted Covid lockdown scheme. We'll RULE THE WORLD with this dastardly design.  MWWAHAHAHA!"

I mean, not really, but kind of? 

(but not really).

It's precisely "Global Warming's" nature as a hyperobject that cynical fossil fuel/big business interests have exploited to sow the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

And they're using that squishiness to confuse and numb millions of voters.

(Bizarrely, the anti-vax conspirituality crowd got cross-infected with this strand of paranoid disinfo. After they ran out of ivermectin, all the Next Top Shamans and Telegram Queens got trauma-bonded to the Great Climate Hoax. They ended up claiming it as their own notion in a sort of memetic Stockholm syndrome.

The conservative persecutors of their normally Woke spiritual sensibilities now became their saviors against the even darker forces of Klaus Schwab and the New World Order. When in reality, the entire memeplex was scripted by Oil and Gas lobbyists years ago).

Conspiritualists might fancy themselves as “warriors of light” in the Culture Wars, but really they’re just being weaponized and neutralized by cynical disinfo from the actual multinational plutocrats pulling the actual strings of global politics and economics.

#hidinginplainsight

(side rant concluded, back to main argument)

***

Since Climate Change is a concept more than an actual reality, then probing its edges, questioning terms and definitions, insinuating motives, doubting and debating projections like that documentary did, is a never endingly effective stall tactic.

The Cynical Doubters don’t even have to be right!

Most of us just get bored at some point, give up knowing anything for certain, and go back to thumbscrolling.

And business and politics as usual gets to keep buying the votes, calling the shots and raking the bucks.

Not only is "Climate Change" a vague and squishy hyper-object, it's not even the biggest of our environmental concerns.

Picture this thought experiment: Gaia's Fairy Godmother comes down tomorrow morning and waves her magic carbon offset wand, and the world's atmosphere bibbity-bobbity-boos down to 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere.  

That's the magic threshold that activists like Bill McKibben have locked onto as our sustainable Eden state.

Then what? Would we be good? Fixed? Free at last?

Not even close. 

The forests would still be burning.

We'd still have eradicated all but 4% of wildlife on the planet (96% of animal mass on this earth is now humans and our domesticated critters).

The oceans' fisheries and reefs would still be in collapse. (and with them 30% of the protein supply of the world’s population)

We'd still be up to our ears in toxic forever chemicals.

We'd still have famines, refugees and civil wars...

I could go on (and on), but we all know the drill by this point. 

In other words, we'd still be faced with all the actual, very real markers of ecological overshoot that are the measurable consequence of a runaway techno-industrial civilization trying to support 8 billion humans on a planet with finite resources.

for a solid overview of planetary boundaries beyond carbon, check this recent piece (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-have-crossed-6-of-9-planetary-boundaries/)

So how bout we play a game?

Let's set aside carbon, let's promise to never mention ice sheets or ice ages.

Let's set aside whether more or less things are greening or burning than in decades past (technically, it’s more greening but with less biodiversity, and it's less burning of African grasslands and more burning of mature forests and built environments). 

Mums the word on that recent study questioning whether climate change is definitively making fires or floods better or worse.

We won't even worry about rising sea levels or flailing forests. (which have a well known tree-hugger bias)

Let's just slowly back away from that entire confusing, ambiguous set of talking points that have been so thoroughly weaponized and focus on three things that we can all agree on.

Food's important.

Water's important.

Shelter's important.

See, not a hyperobject in the bunch!

As engineer Thomas Murphy recently observed, "We live in a physical world governed by physical law. We do not need to create a physics police force or build physics jails or plead cases in front of some physics court. Nature provides perfect, automatic enforcement for free."

#Physicstrumpsmetaphysics.

Same goes for the basic essentials of civilized life. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, it matters less why fires, floods, droughts, storms or migrant crises are happening, than that they are happening. And at an increasing clip.

Philosophizing about hyperobjects, at this late stage, is more distracting than helpful.

So in the week ahead, keep your eyes peeled in the news for headlines and articles that give updates on those three things. Food security. Water supplies. Habitability.

Give yourself permission to ignore or turn down the volume on more complex modeling and conjecturing about what caused what, and which percentage of current droughts, floods and heatwaves can be chalked up to which prime agent.

Just notice how we’re doing (in our towns, as a country as a global community), on those three things–food, water and shelter. And see what that does to shift your perspective from confused and overwhelmed to clear-headed tracking of the gauges that actually matter.

(next week we will finish this thing, that’s now a four part series, and hopefully offer folks a trans-political lens to stay engaged).

Stay tuned and thanks for reading!