There are two ways of denying that human beings are having an irrevocable effect on the global climate through the massive damage they are inflicting upon the ecosystem. The first one usually tends to defer to science and experts. This is becoming so extinct in the genuine scientific community that it is usually the preserve of journalists and politicians who defer to fringe scientific understandings. James Delingpole goes in for this: he maintains that human beings have not had a huge impact on climate change, and he tends to quote scientists largely out of context in order to maintain this opinion. James Delingpole’s resistance to the idea of “global warming” is based on the misconception that the phenomenon in question is just some sort of generalised “warming”, and not a general array of negative weather patterns. The Professor Myles Allen he quotes is the author of many studies which show the ultimate impact of anthropogenic climate change on several extreme weather events in the world: for example, Myles Allen’s work shows that anthropogenic emissions like aerosol emissions doubled the probability of extreme rainfall events in North Bangladesh. We hear constantly about the magnitude of the climate crisis, which is intimately tied up with the damage human beings have done to it according to scientists: one disaster is occurring every week, according to the UN.
So this strategy of deferring to climate scientists is increasingly flawed based on the fact that every climate scientist’s work shows the absolute pressing urgency with which we need to stop causing unavoidable damage to the Earth. Yet there is another strategy of denying man-made climate change: rage against the whole concept of experts, professionals and global establishment lizards. This is probably a position that makes slightly more sense, and there is definitely a frustrating cult of experts and professionals in 21st century society. We are invited to worship them and see them as more than figures of mere expertise in certain aspects of quantitative data. An endless set of regulations forbid us from natural human activities like science – our lives are defined by the stronghold of institutions, which largely perpetuate their existence rather than improving society. The rage against the cult of the expert has obviously fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, and is fuelling the rise of leaders around the whole world.
Yet raging against the cult of experts and relying on your intuition still leads you firmly to the opinion that something like “man-made climate change” (perhaps not in those words) is happening, although you might not call it that. The work of Ivan Illych helps us with this. In Tools for Conviviality, Illych protests against experts, who safeguard their role as “experts” simply because they are part of an institution and have access to financial resources and pay-walled academic papers. Illych rages against a society ruled by the diktats and priorities of experts. “People get better education, better health, better transportation, better entertainment, and often even better nourishment only if the experts’ goals are taken as the measurement of what ’better’ means.” ‘Education’ , ‘health’, ‘transport’ etc. have become merely institutions gifts bequeathed unto us by a benevolent society. One if Illych’s points is that we are told when we are ‘sick’ – we are not allowed to decide for ourselves what our illness might be. For Illych, everything connected to describing and facilitating human experience has become mass-produced. This has something connected to the modern rebellion of what Anne Widdecombe calls the “ignored majority”.
Yet Illych is also firm that modern forms of transportation, like the car, are clearly divorced from the ecosystem as well as being out of fit with connected and integrated communities. And Illych is plain that it is painfully obvious from intuition and without adherence to scientific professionals that we have messed up the Earth. We can tell from the air quality, or the unnatural speed of motorways. For Illych, “The degradation of the environment is dramatic and highly visible.” Nor is the environmental crisis, for Illych, something that will be solved by purely scientific and investment goals. For Illych, the crisis was started by a kind of belief in the power of institutions and speed to create a better form of humanity. In fact, for Illych, “developed” countries are backward: they create a world in which events like birth and death are screened off from you. “Only the very rich in the United States can now afford what all people in poor countries have: personal attention around the deathbed.” Illych’s thought beautifully complicates the modern “debate” about climate change because it is convicted towards creating a slower, more human and less technologically-dependent society, though maintaining the right wing’s beloved skepticism about people in authority who delight in confusing. Yet it answers them by different means: instead of carry on as we are, perhaps rediscover who we were. Then we can answer how we might solve many of the geopolitical problems which will plague us to an unprecedented degree.
Squidditas 