https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-change-is-making-us-stupid
By ROGER PIELKE JR.
Excerpt:
I take the title of today’s post from the closing line of a fantastic 2014 article by Dan Sarewitz in Slate. Sarewitz wrote:
“Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.”
The notion of climate change has collapsed our discussions of complex environmental-social-political issues into a cartoonish characterization of “climate change” as an all-purpose causal agent responsible for just about everything that people don’t like — Wildfires? Climate change. Immigration? Climate change. Jellyfish? Climate change.
The climate does change and humans influence the climate. Neither Sarewitz nor I here at THB challenge these basic realities — they are not the problem.
Back to Sarewitz on what is the problem:
“The real problem is . . . the hysterics . . . who insist, often in the name of science, that all the suffering to come will have only one true cause, and that redemption can be achieved only by following one true path. No matter that long and sad human experience teaches us where such absolute orthodoxies lead. Indeed, with climate change being blamed for almost everything these days, the one phenomenon that seems to have escaped the notice of scientists, environmentalists and the media alike is that, perhaps above all, climate change is making us stupid.”
One constant over my career — dating to my postdoc at NCAR in the mid-1990s — has been a focus on extreme weather and its impacts. Over the decades, when it comes to extreme weather, I have observed the dynamics described by Sarewitz move from advocacy into journalism and eventually into climate research itself.
How we talk, and apparently think, about climate change has become stupider.
