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| This Saguaro is pretty doomed. |
Full piece here, but Taylor really needed an editor, so below are excerpts. If you want a historical context for the climate Doomers, the AI Doomers, etc., check out the book Everything Must Go. Two quotes: "In 1981 ... a startling 80 per cent of Harvard students said ... they would die [in a nuclear war]." "[In 1971] Since World War II over one billion human beings who worried about A-bombs and H-bombs died of other causes. They worried for nothing."
Doomers have always existed.
Doom gives life meaning. Every new batch of Doomers insists “This time for real!”
On October 22, 1844, tens of thousands of Americans left their homes and climbed their local hilltops. There they waited through the night, expecting Christ’s return. These were the Millerites, followers of a 19th century preacher named William Miller. He believed that he had pinned down the date of the second Advent—albeit after a few erroneous predictions. His adherents spent the year forgiving debts, dispensing with personal belongings, and neglecting to sow their fields. On that fateful October evening, they dressed themselves in simple handmade garments and went out in the cold to await the end of the world. Only it never came.
I have never spent a cold October evening sitting on a hilltop in anticipation of the end times. Yet, sometimes I feel like a recovered Millerite. The only difference is that I sat on a mountain of anxiety, worrying about climate change. This was back in the 2010s, when many of us also believed that the world was about to pass the peak of global fossil fuel production. We awaited a future that not only featured unimaginable climatic horrors but also lacked any remaining energy resources to be able to deal with them. ...
The politician and diplomat George Perkins Marsh once wrote, “the earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence…would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.” Although that might sound like a timely point of view, Marsh actually wrote those words back in 1864.
The past century has witnessed a litany of apocalyptic environmental proclamations. The 1970s were dominated by predictions of overpopulation leading to widespread famine. [Yup.] Some scientists even claimed that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.” In 2007, then-IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri claimed that we had five years to get our acts together, lest we suffer a global catastrophe with submerged islands states and declining GDP. Yet, a United Nations report managed to find an additional seven years of grace time for humanity, albeit eleven years later in 2018. ...
Environmentalism’s chronic apocalyptic refrain isn’t really emblematic of the Millerites, who mostly went back to their normal lives after the Great Disappointment in 1844. No, today’s apocalyptic environmentalists are more like the Adventist sects that superseded them, the diehards that believed that the Millerites had simply misread the signs—those who even today continue to await the End Times. ...
What explains the persistence of apocalyptic beliefs? The seemingly commonsensical answer would be, “The end of world, duh.” Yet the sheer weight of falsified predictions should disabuse us of that argument. As British literary critic Frank Kermode observed, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited.” There is something striking about the resilience of environmental apocalypticism in the face of the fact that it never seems to actually arrive. ...
Even advocates of the most dismal vision of ecological calamity take pains to comb through the scientific literature. ...
Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene elaborately reconstructs humanity’s climatic history before concluding that “we’re fucked.” It is a conclusion that he arrives at only by presuming that a long outdated and unrealistically extreme climate scenario (RCP 8.5) represented a conservative prediction of Earth’s climatic future.
David Wallace-Wells’ [a lying POS] The Uninhabitable Earth likewise provides an avalanche of citations to scientific studies. He assembles what seems to be a full compendium of all the scary possibilities of climate change to reach a conclusion not unlike Scranton’s. Wallace-Wells insists that “whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of this century,” even as he hedges scientific claims with words like “would” and “might.” The intended effect of thousands of alarmist “maybes” is a kind of cataclysmic certainty.
Wallace-Well’s perspective was heavily criticized by scientists and climate scholars. [And others.] Indeed, it’s not difficult to pick a random cited study in The Uninhabitable Earth and find that the actual state of the science is less certain and more complex that Wallace-Wells depicts it. For example, he blames a warming climate for an epidemic of kidney diseases among El Salvadorian men who work sugarcane fields. Yet, scientists have found that sugarcane workers are almost uniquely prone to the disease, when compared to similar professions. The likely culprit may be sugarcane ash. When the residues from the sugarcane extraction process are burned, workers inhale kidney-damaging silica particles. No doubt that heat and humidity don’t help, but Wallace-Wells’ implication that a warming world was coming for all of our kidneys was just him leveraging partial and uncertain scientific results in service of an apocalyptic narrative. ...
[F]or those who have correctly received Wallace-Wells’ revelation, they are now ready to act. To Guenther, we need climate apocalypticism, for only then can we have “the groundswell of fear and desire that forces the necessity of action. The scientists must let the writers do their jobs. On their work, on all our work, the world depends.”
Such logic uncovers the workings of apocalypticism, in environmentalism as much as elsewhere. Scenarios and forecasts function less as predictions and more as prophecies. Predictions are fallible, an effort to try to understand tomorrow based on our limited knowledge of today. And failed predictions should lead us to reevaluate our theories about reality. Prophecies, on the other hand, are never falsified, just reinterpreted. And they are primarily about moral guidance. Repent and change your ways. Or else. ...
The apocalypse perhaps meets a deep seated need to see the world in terms of angels and demons, and to daydream about restoring Eden. As environmental scholar Eric Zencey put it, we can’t seem to shake “the legacy of a resentment that longs for a revenge through a final, accounts-balancing judgement upon those who do us wrong.”
At its most extreme, apocalypticism has served as a backdrop for genocide. [It still does.]
... Each flavor of eco-apocalyptic thinking has its own bogeyman. Planetary doomists wring their hands over the average human’s environmental irrationality. Only the righteous few fight a hopeless battle against people’s willful ignorance.
For advocates of economic degrowth, of turning back the clock on technological societies, the champions and beneficiaries of capitalism are the planet’s nemesis. A podcast about Donella and Dennis Meadows, authors of the infamous Limits to Growth report published by the Club of Rome in 1972, called Tipping Point, tells of the tragically influential disagreement between the report authors and economists, such as William Nordhaus. Without those pesky economists, the podcast implies, the Club of Rome’s warnings about worldwide collapse back in the 1970s would have been heeded. Governments would have begun negotiating “an orderly transition to a stable world.” [LOL. Is there anything that someone, somewhere won’t believe?]
As much as degrowth’s supporters try to frame the issue in terms of models and datasets, ultimately its underlying story points to the moral decay of growth-based, technological society. ...
Today’s worries about ecological collapse motivates calls for “transformative change.” According to the recent values assessment from the Intergovernmental Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, this entails a “fundamental, systemwide reorganization” of society in order to mobilize “broad values that are consistent with living in harmony with nature.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change researchers now wonder if they should be given the ability to prescribe national policy, and oversee their implementation. James Lovelock said the quiet part loud back in 2010, when he argued that climate change necessitated putting “democracy on hold for a while.” ...
[F]or climate change and other environmental challenges, prophesies of catastrophe and revelations of ecological decadence have long run out their usefulness. Given that the more doomist environmentalists may never be persuaded to dispense with their apocalypticism, the best we might hope for is partially redirecting alarmism toward more productive political ends. A more inclusive practice of environmental politics could impart the sense that, whatever the actual odds of cataclysm, we’re at least in it together.
