One of the reasons I’ve written a whole book
dedicated to the physics and economics of climate change is because the
mainstream scientific and political interpretations are so misjudged, I can’t
actually believe they see the light of day, much less become the mainstream
narrative swallowed up wholesale by large swathes of the population. And here I
really don’t just mean “Alas, they’ve got a few things wrong”, I mean “Heck,
this is one of the most absurd failures of analytical reasoning ever wrought on
a developed society, and one of the costliest ideological mistakes in recent
history!” (see my blog post here
for more on this)
The basic errors being made in the climate change alarmism are so elementary that I'm in a constant state of surprise that they are taken seriously enough to make it into mainstream discussion. Note, I don’t mean on the matter of whether there will be problems to solve - I mean the schoolboy-like heuristics being applied to how the whole situation is evaluated. Take the most blatant of all errors: literally the vast majority of the projections of future climate issues I’ve seen are implicitly assuming no technological, scientific, economic, or general standards-of-living progress during the period being measured. It is so absurd, it’s hard to describe it as anything other than recklessly negligent.
Once we see the naïve analytical failure in the assumption that human systems will simply remain static in the face of changing conditions, it becomes plainer to see the folly in the tendency to treat worst-case scenarios as if they were the most likely outcomes. This is a classic misunderstanding of risk modelling, which I blogged about here: extreme projections exist to bracket the outer limits of possibility, not to define the central forecast - which is a bad enough error if you are factoring in dynamic human change within the timeframe, but positively ridiculous if you are treating the timeframe as static. Presenting tail-risk outcomes as standard expectations in a mistakenly static model creates such a distorted sense of perspective that it has vanishingly little to do with the actual distribution of probabilities. It’s the kind of mistake you’d expect from a child who hasn’t yet learned that he won’t always have the problem of relying on stabilisers to ride his bike, or the issue of not being able to reach items on adult-size shelves.
These are the principal reasons behind the negligent attempts to smuggle moral or ideological conclusions under the pretext of scientific claims. And here I’m only talking about some of the least bad attempts to frame this - I haven’t even sunk to the level of the average political folly coming from the mouths of mainstream politicians like the Green Party and Ed Miliband.
When it comes to the climate, there is no such thing as ‘the’ scientific community (see my blogs here and here) – the institution has become so fraught with crony capitalism, political meddling and institutional malfeasance that many of its exponents (though not all) no longer distinguish clearly between empirical findings, value judgments, and policy preferences - they simply blend them into a single, confused, ideological narrative, as though the data itself mandates the particular political agenda they are being paid or coerced into supporting.
This conflation of facts and prescriptions is such a basic category error that it’s one that even any first-year student of critical reasoning should spot a mile off. The fact that it has become the rule and not the exception is a shocking indictment of our times - especially as the same thing has happened with fiscal and monetary policy, labour markets, housing policy, price theory, basic biology of the sexes, and education policy.