Why this blog?
Well, it came into my thoughts last weekend. Someone I love asked me why I was a sceptic, the question happened to be specifically in relation to Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW, and she has the effect on me that momentarily I was able to elucidate, to list, to taxonomise the various reasons and categories of reasons, and also the questions, the suppositions, the claims, of the doomsters.
Then this morning I was browsing through a friend's blog, she was at the time of writing in self-confessed apocalyptic mood due to RSI in her thumb, but still. Two quotes from her blog:
"Why do people keep saying the planet is in danger? The planet is inert, it doesn’t give a shit, it’ll just adjust to no ozone, more carbon or whatever. It is not in danger [unless Mercury comes at it like a billiard ball} it is man who is in danger. We are facing the end of humanity & frankly we probably deserve to go."
And, about her children
".......these poor darlings have reached young adulthood in a world of filth, poverty, corruption, Ricky Gervais as a bone fide Hollywood movie star and the threat of another world war fought between two opposing ideologies based on identical superstitions."
These two excerpts are shining examples of what makes me wonder where people get their data and prejudices from. The blog is to explore this, and why people can hold views with zero basis in any kind of fact or reason.
My blogger friend's view could be summed up as the old favourite, and you can see from the above that I am not joking:
“The End Of The World Is Nigh!”
(Or rather, as she correctly says, the end of Humanity, but World sounds better.)
And the religious/moral context is relevant, because, as you can see, she thinks we deserve to go, for making such a fucking awful mess of the world that it is not fit to pass on to her children.
So my blog mission is, and it needs some form of plan at the beginning, the following:
- Establish that these views/feelings and similar exist, which I might generally characterise as doomster views,
- Show that they are simply wrong in fact, or highly probably wrong in fact
- Wonder what the effect of widespread patently wrong views on things that are measurable and debatable is, and what the effect is on issues that are not so tractable, like AGW
- Wonder why doomster canards are quite so prevalent and strong
What are these feelings of despair and self-loathing and hair-shirt misery that affect so many people all around, and lead them to look at the world not just through half-empty glasses, but glasses that seem to show the opposite of what is there, and what conclusions do they lead to?
Let's start with a reasonably easy feeling and conclusion, the second quoted para above, effectively:
“Our children are getting a very shitty world handed on to them”
You what? Are you NUTS? I'm 49, and all my life people have despaired at the state of the world. A friend 10 years older once said he wished he hadn't bred his two daughters, the world was such shit. I can understand why people worry about what will happen to their children, it's a topic of examination for sure. But when I think about it I rejoice that mine exist in a world where they can:
- travel
- be socially mobile
- not die of illness
- not die of war
- choose what career they want
- be well-off enough that they can have leisure, time to think
- be fed, watered and clothed
I'm happy to contrast my childrens' lives and prospects with almost any period almost anywhere in the world EVER. I have my hair cut in the
Can you think of any time when people have been 'better off'?
We need a quick and dirty definition for 'better off', just in case someone tries to sneak a spiritual, and hence unmeasurable, dimension in. Let's use one the UN and Oxfam might approve of, life expectancy. They use it for being badly off, so it must work. It would seem to incorporate a useful cocktail taking account of food, shelter, war, disease, medicine, water and so on.
Do you know what the life expectancy in Kensington & Chelsea is? John Prescott told me on the television the other day. 88. Whoopee! (Yes I know one number doesn't capture it, but the point is made. NOTHING is going to get me in K&C. And not much in Tottenham, although theirs is, startlingly, 71.)
(It doesn't measure torture very well, or Ricky Gervais for that matter, but these are outlying phenomena.)
So that's my first observation – it is so transparently untrue that the world is in a shitty state, I would argue it is the BEST (or as good as) world that you could possibly want to bring children into. That someone can be SO WRONG in that observation ON ANY SENSIBLE MEASURABLE BASIS raises the question, even the probability, that they are seeing things that aren’t there, and measuring things that are there wildly inaccurately.
(I also hold that these mis-views are very widely held, raising the probability of group-think. – my blogger friend is certainly NOT stupid, nor is she alone in her views)
Let's jump ahead a little, an example of confusion and blurring, which links back to my opening para, mentioning AGW. A hypothetical conversation:
A: I believe in AGW
B: I am skeptical
A: How can you be, the science is known and agreed
B: I’m not so sure
Blah blah blah blah for quite a long time, perfectly logically and politely …… then .....……
A: But surely you agree we are ruining the planet, we will run out of food, oil is finite, our behaviour is disgusting …….
(and so on, choose any such statement, you know what they are)
B: Er, those are very different issues. AGW is specifically about man’s effect on climate. It has nothing directly to do with landfill sites, food supplies, the morality of packaging, resource consumption, running out of oil, the fatness of Americans, the arms trade, colonialism, forms of government, Guantanamo Bay or inequality. So why are you bringing them up in this conversation?
You get the point? There's a correlation between people holding ‘the world is going to shit’ and ‘man is to blame’ and ‘the end is nigh’ type of views, and those who want to believe (although the science is beyond me, them, and most of the scientists) in catastrophic AGW.
THEY WANT IT TO BE TRUE. (That’s a deliberately provocative way of putting it, but you get my drift – put it another way, they would be unhappy if it was convincingly claimed that man’s carbon emissions were utterly irrelevant to climate, because that would mean we could carry on in what they view as our doomed irresponsible way.)
End of page 1.
Next post will be scares (yes, I know they've been done to death) and equilibrium, and how these two constant misunderstandings together have combined to give the AGW brigade, my poster boy for both, a cockstand of such rigidity and dimension that they can't think of anything else.
But before that I might muse on the connection between the rise in religion in the last few decades, and the rise in 'The End is Nigh' brigade. It's the same thing, would be my argument, but now I need to go away and work out why.
