Prometheus has published a translation from the original German of an essay by Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr, a climatologist and a sociologist, that first appeared in Der Speigel. It examines the bizarre obsession with climate catastrophe that has captured the minds of many.

It begins by pointing out the recent extraction of climatologists from obscurity by political interests which has thrust them into a media spotlight. The dry scientific arguments, not being telegenic enough, are fluffed by P.R. teams in an ever escalating sequence of exaggerations in the attempt to hold the attention of the public. It uses a contrast between TDAT and State of Fear to make some points.

Despite a good deal of factually untrue - and thus all the more striking - compression, Crichton has quite correctly observed the dynamic of the paths of communication among scientists, environmentalist organizations, the state and the civilian population. For there is indeed a serious problem for the natural sciences: namely, the public depiction and perception of climate change. Research has landed in a crisis because its public actors assert themselves on the saturated market of discussion by overselling the topic...

In order to keep the topic of "climate catastrophe" - a concept nonexistent outside the German-speaking world, by the way - continually in the public eye, the media feel obligated, exactly like the protagonists in Crichton's thriller, to keep framing the topic "a bit more attractively." At the beginning of the 1990s - severe hurricanes had just swept through the country - one could read and hear in the German media that storms were due to become ever more severe. Since then, storms have become rarer in northern Europe. But no notice is taken of this. The fact that barometric fluctuations in Stockholm have shown no systematic change in the frequency and severity of storms since Napoleon's time is passed over in silence. Instead, there is now talk of heat waves and floods. Very much in the style of Crichton's instigators of fear, the story is now that all manner of extreme events are on the increase. Thus even drought in Brandenburg and deluge on the Oder fit the picture without apparent contradiction.

Add to this - besides normal floods and storms - other, more dramatically threatening, scenarios: the reversal of the Gulf Stream and the resultant cooling of large areas of Europe, for instance, or even the rapid melting of the Greenland ice pack. The question has already been publicly raised whether perhaps even the Asian tsunami can be attributed to the disastrous effects of human activity.

The pattern that they illuminate - dogmatic belief in dubious propositions, thinly supported by speculative science, marketed in hysterical tones in an attempt to stampede the public - is present in other issues too. The climate change bogey is a major focus of a more general behavior pattern that pervades the doom market at this time but it is the current poster girl not the defining problem. Before that population growth did a star turn and there have been others. It's politicization of science for quasi-religious political benefit.

The deceitful methods aren't self-consciously practiced in secret since the practitioners seem to have lost every sense of intellectual and moral integrity as well as embracing an ugly aesthetic. Parallel debates about the death of environmentalism and the laughable debates about Lakoffian framing to dupe the public into supporting otherwise repellent political platforms are part of the larger rot that has overtaken activist culture. They are no longer about anything at all. Like a cancer they are their own justification, existing only to exist, growing without constructive purpose.

This connection may seem tenuous but I see the same pattern in the degeneration of the political left in general as illuminated in Norm Geras' recent Dissent essay:

A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

Norm's specific subject is far removed from climate hysteria but the pattern of intellectual failure he notes is identical, a correlation that suggests common roots, and not surprisingly we find that a great number of those who suffer from climate hysteria also suffer from the cognitive failures noted by Norm.

But why bother to think and write about these problems? Why not simply work tirelessly to defeat such obviously wrong-headed behavior? Kill them all (metaphorically) and let blog sort them out. As I see it Norm uses gentler, more surgical, methods because he IS a socio-political leftist dismayed that his intellectual home is being vandalized, and so soldiers on doing what one man can do to tidy up and preserve a core of dignity for a stance he finds compelling. And I AM a socio-ecological progressive making what can be understood as a congruent effort in another domain that is not entirely distinct since it applies to the same society.

There is work to do. The problems are real. But the policies and methods advocated by the deceitful hysterics are not useful, will not improve the situation. It isn't just a contest between those who agitate about current threats and those who deny them, it is also a struggle among those who clearly see the threats to make effective responses. In the end this is the more important struggle since it makes little difference whether you deny the threats and take no steps to defend against them, or hysterically announce the threats and take ineffective steps. We lose either way.

» Incremental Dramatization from Crumb Trail
Prometheus has published a translation from the original German of an essay by Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr, a climatologist and a sociologist, that first appeared in Der Speigel. It laments the harm being done to science and......[read more]
Tracked: February 7, 2005 12:45 PM