Science or ideology?
How we can know, with 100% confidence, for certain, absolutely, and without doubt that climate change is bullshit, even if it's real. Thanks to the @metoffice.
Met Office forecasts a Britain of militia war, bartering and child labour
It is 2070 and Britain as we once knew it has vanished. The government has collapsed, the police and justice system no longer exists. Militias control feudal microstates within the UK, with people accepting severe restrictions on freedom in exchange for work and protection.
This is not the beginning of a sci-fi film but a report commissioned by the Met Office into how the UK might evolve over the next century.
Let me be clear on the point. We can *know* that climate change is bullshit, even if it's real, because of the work of the @metoffice's climate scientists and other researchers. We thank them. Full text via Don...
Let's take it apart. The climate debate has been divided on imaginary lines, into those who hold with a 'consensus' position on the physical properties and action of CO2 in the atmosphere and those who seemingly deny it. But this has always been a false delineation of positions.
The *real* proposition at the centre of the debate is the claim that society -- history itself -- is so dependent on the weather, that it is weather that produces social, economic and political phenomenon, such as poverty, conflict, and the viability of public institutions.
That is to say that the proposition is ideological -- the claims are environmentalism's precepts, not the product of science or research. And we can be 100% sure that they are wrong, not merely because the evidence does not support their claims -- it contradicts it.
Once you have presupposed an ideology's central claims -- of society's close dependence on climate -- and called it 'science', then Lo and Behold, 'science' produces your presuppositions as conclusions.
It is a circular argument... It begs the question. And other sins of logic.
It is the same in this demonstration, which shows the Met Office disappearing into its own ideological backside.
We can *know* that the Met Office's claims are ideological bullshit because we know that social development -- things like adult suffrage and the abolition of child labour, and healthcare provision -- did not arise out of a change in the UK's climate.
(And, as an aside, we can *know* that government and its agencies produce terrifying reports with little or no scientific credibility, precisely to attempt to control debates and public opinion. We can know it because they said so.)
So, the @metoffice claim that your choice is between apocalyptic dystopia, or ecological Utopia. They flatter this moral blackmail with superficial scientific rationale: "understand[ing] climate risk and resilience". But it's blackmail, all the same.
But unless you hold with green ideology's presuppositions, there is no basis for the use of fantasy in risk analysis. The UK could suffer, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 or 6 degrees of climate change, and yet prosper both materially and socially.
It is only on the green ideological view that society's sensitivity to climate is equivalent to climate's sensitivity to CO2.
There is no necessary relationship between these things. They are almost completely independent. And we can know that for a fact.
We can know it for a fact because human society thrives across a huge range of conditions, from cold to hot, from stormy to still, from dry to wet. What counts is not the beneficence of the weather, but the level of social organisation.
It is society's inherent adaptability -- its wealth -- that provides its... erm... climate resistance.
The claim that climate, anywhere, ever, has been anything but hostile to life itself as much as civilisation is an inversion of reality and fact. A mystical mythology.
In this sense, then, the scientists and bullshit merchants engaged by the @metoffice do not shed light -- science -- on the world. They literally *mystify* the climate. They are a religious movement.
What they have produced is not a risk analysis. They have produced a mystical prognostication. A prophecy. A commandment. A fatwa. And they should be seen as having done this.
One thing that is sure to cause social chaos is a political order degenerating from a democratic, liberal, industrial society into something that casts itself as a rational technocracy designed to save us from crisis, but which is a dark, authoritarian oligarchy.
But am I fighting alarmism with alarmsim? No. As Amartya Sen argued, famine does not occur in democracy. The claim is not without criticism. But it demonstrates that famine is a political phenomenon.
That is to say that, though, of course, you can have famine without politics, there is a relationship between degenerate regimes and famine.
We have been arguing for several decades now about the significance of affordable, abundant, and reliable energy supply.
Greens have long argued that affordable energy is bad for society and that material abundance is bad for the planet. Society is better -- more reliable -- without them.
We see now a supply crisis emerging, which will cause hardship for millions of people as energy prices rise. And it seems likely that this crisis will have consequences for food production and transport in the near future as fertiliser and fuel prices increase.
High prices, and control of production and consumption (behaviour) through the price mechanism are the green dream. But we see now that it is not so simple as 'small is beautiful', or that lessening 'impact' is a categorically good thing.
The @metoffice's dystopian tract omits consideration of the consequences of the ideology driving its own work. What if *any* degree of global warming is preferable to ecological Utopia?
No UK government department is going to be commissioning reports on that question. No civil servant will be tasked with bringing it into government thinking. No research funding body will be providing support to academics who want to answer it.
No university will open its doors or set up a research department to consider it. No think tanks, NGOs or charities will be funded by billionaire or corporate "philanthropic" foundations to put the question in front of MPs.
No flashy "economic research" consultancies, set up by former civil servants and academic economists will be commissioned to reflect on it. No self-serving peer will given free reign to roam the institutions of the UK to make sure that every agency of the state considers it.
There will be no BBC or Sky documentaries about it. There will be no "Citizens Assembly" about it. There will be no celebrity endorsement. There will be no ESG product about it.
But it is the null hypothesis. Environmentalism is the radical religion that has colonised the British political establishment in its torpor. It is capable of serious harm here and throughout the world.
The @metoffice's ridiculous report, and the failures of the other agencies and panjandrums behind it, should serve as a loud and clear warning that they intend to create dystopia to prevent dystopia. They are fantasists, with a design for society that is hostile to society.
The @metoffice and the parties of government will squander trust in scientific authority on an anti-democratic political project, that is based on nothing but ideological fantasy and their insatiable desire for power.