John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY NICOLE MORTILLARO IN CBC NEWS
“The psychology of climate change: Why people deny the evidence
“'This is not a time to be passive and allow this calamity to happen to us,' says one psychologist”
I am always troubled when anyone quotes a psychologist, as is done here, or a psychiatrist, on matters of policy which should deal only with hard-nosed science. Unavoidably, whether intended or not, there is a suggestion of the old Soviet method of discrediting critics by having them committed to mental hospitals.
It is a perfectly reasonable position to accept that climate change is occurring while not accepting that human activity is driving it or, even if you do become convinced humans are responsible, while not believing we yet have the ability to correct the situation.
The change is observable, and it is being observed now intensively.
But the same is not true of the presumed human causation.
We do know humans cause a lot of negative things, again observable things - like plastics in the seas and war, and I don't know why it is but practically all articles from people concerned about climate change never mention war, war with all its manufactured poisons and destructive capacity, war that is going on in a dozen places causing countless miseries.
War and its production facilities pump immense amounts of poisons into our environment, from depleted uranium dust and Agent Orange to dumps of material from nuclear-weapons manufacturing. It also wastes immense amounts of money that could be doing other, good things.
As far as climate goes, the truth is that it has always undergone change, much the same as the earth’s crust has always shifted and changed, as we see happening with earthquakes and volcanoes, events which over time vary from minute to gigantic. There is nothing static about our planet despite our illusion that there is.
We’ve seen everything from desertification to ice ages and the passing of whole civilizations, but we are not in possession of complete understanding about why and how these things happen. Certainly, for most such events, only known to us from examining historical materials and archeology, humans had no involvement.
Given this lack in our understanding and given our reckless behavior as societies, as in war, is it at all realistic to think we are in a position to halt or ameliorate climate change? I really do not think so. We should always be ready to clean-up our own messes – as with plastics or deadly chemicals – but I think proposed extreme programs of change concerning things we do not completely understand are themselves reckless.
I always reflect back on the old Soviet Union and its gigantic programs for changing the landscape. Soviet leaders thought they were being very scientific and working towards the benefit of people with projects for vast river diversions and putting huge swathes of land under new purposes, but experience has proved they were often wrong.
Is our understanding today so much better? Do we really know the full consequences of massive changes in the production of power, for instance? Recent scientific work has raised serious questions about, for example, wind farms and heavy batteries for transportation, but we just keep assuming everything will be fine. The assumption is okay on moderate-sized efforts that can be viewed as controlled experiments, but it is not okay on a massive world scale.
Also, I simply cannot believe that we are even capable of turning around huge natural events like desertification or the passing of species whose environmental niche has disappeared.
The largest and most certain contribution we can make towards the future is cleaning up our known messes and getting human population under control. There’s no guessing in these. Reduce the numbers of people and you automatically reduce the growth of everything from demands for noxious products to the amount of every kind of waste.
And does anyone really believe humanity is capable of undertaking such a certain, helpful measure? Or I might ask the same for stopping wars. Then why do people believe we are capable of vast schemes like those advocated by some environmentalists, schemes which, even if implemented, may not serve the purpose?
