The ugly climate brawl between deniers and alarmists
The climate apocalypse is here!! Or it it?
According to Extinction Rebellion, the Guardian, and Greta Thunberg, the climate apocalypse is here and will probably lead the end of life on Earth. Exciting times!
According to the vast majority of climate scientists, climate change is real and dangerous but likely not quite so existential.
According to a growing coalition of heretical commentators often self-described as climate ‘realists’, the whole thing is overhyped.
According to Nigel Farage it is all simply completely made up by the darn globalists.
Wow. What are we to make of this mess? A sensible future depends on us being able to put tribalism aside to address all of the valid points whilst throwing stupid ones in the ideological trash heap of history.
Let’s start by pointing out the major flaws and tiny glints of truth in the more extreme voices. The left is correct that growth-centred economics can come at expense of the environment with concomitant loss of animal species. The right is correct that some on the left hollering the loudest about climate change are really just Marxists using yet another crisis to advocate for their ideology.
I won’t spend much time on right-wingers. It is of course patently absurd when right-wingers laugh off the whole idea of climate change as a whole. Happy to elaborate in the comments but I think we are likely all well aware of the argument here.
On the left, we have groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, which have taken it upon themselves to go far beyond what the scientific evidence shows to claim impending apocalypse (and argue for Marxism/socialism as the solution, as is always the case with these types).
The politics here are unhelpful for both scientific discourse and public science communication. For example, I regularly encounter folks at science communication events who tell me that they regret having children because their lives will be ruined by climate change. A cursory look on X will also reveal (genuinely) passionate eco-minded people spouting nonsense across a wide range of issues, as well as activists (cynically?) fanning the flames with little evidence on show to support their bold claims.
I also recently had a very short-lived back-and-forth on X with Robin Boardman – one of the co-founders of XR – after he promoted the claims that climate change will likely end human civilisation completely. When pressed on the matter, Robin backed down a bit to say that “climate change impacts might not directly cause human extinction, but it could lead to events that seriously risk it. Runaway greenhouse gas emissions (esp methane), tipping points and resultant nuclear wars over resources are the greatest threats.”
Robin later clarified his concern about methane to be melting permafrost. This is a source that scientists largely have not yet modelled properly. It could be significant but, if it is, it will not be world-ending. It cannot be world ending.
There are also fascinating conversations to be had with doom-mongers who don’t actually do any climate science yet also consider the entire university system itself to be IN DENIAL of climate apocalypse. Truly. Unhinged. See below: this author also advocates for ‘transforming yourself by living in climate truth’. This is the talk of cult leaders. No credible scientist talks in this way about ‘truth’ – never mind when discussing massively controversial topics.
To wrap up, it is pretty clear that many climate activists are pushing a vision of reality that is very far from science. Moreover, despite what JSO and XR et al believe/claim, even some of the most activist actual Earth Scientists consider them to be off the wall. For example, the famous and in his own right controversial climate scientist Michael Mann nowadays dismisses such people as ‘climate doomers’. Sadly, the evidence is that these groups are creating a block of iron-clad resistance to climate action in general. That backfiring is no issue for Marxists uninterested in actually solving climate change, though: discord is the aim. The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.
Overall, if we take the best points from all the groups shouting at one another, we can conclude 1) that the world isn’t ending, but there is a problem and 2) the discourse as it stands is not particularly helping to obtain an informed consensus about what to do about it.
Talking of what to do about it, there is a super controversial option called climate geoengineering. There is broad interest in this amongst so-called climate ‘realists’, versus scepticism about even trying to research it amongst quite a few climate scientists. Stay tuned for my forthcoming essay on this on Heterodox STEM.
 | A guest post by
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You might want to look at my substack posts on climate for a view that you don't consider — that climate change is real and probably anthropogenic but that it has both good and bad effects of uncertain size, making it unclear whether the net effect is good or bad.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate
The right wing are correct to laugh it off. All claims of climate change being a problem (and human caused) trace back to pseudo-scientific methodologies. It's presented as science but it's not; the scientific method has gone AWOL and what's left is wishful thinking by academics who wouldn't matter at all if it weren't for their theory of climate-related doom. Far from being absurd, the points the right make tend to be very firmly rooted in science, which is why you have to take some Twitter rando instead of someone more famous like Tony Heller, who has spent years showing the ways in which climate academics mislead people. The latter's tweets are not so easy to mock though.