Shifting from climate change reductionism to nuance - for human thriving.

My ignorance was intentional and strategic - & because of fear, I then couldn't look critically at the policy that was developed on the back of 'the science'.

‘The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.’

Houghton J.T., Ding Y., Griggs D.J., Noguer M. et al. Climate Change: The Scientific Basis. IPCC 2001. Cambridge University Press.

I grew up in the land of droughts and flooding rains. Almost annually we’d poke off along the dirt tracks around Wangaratta, in north-east Victoria to see how high the floods had reached that year. My father headed off as a volunteer fire-fighter in the catastrophic 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. I remember the hazy red sunsets and the smoked filled air over Melbourne at that time. My childhood was filled with warnings about wildfires.

I then witnessed with alarm the decade-long 2000s Australian drought. Our final year in Australia was 2006, the driest on record. We then moved to rainy New Zealand. It wasn’t difficult to read Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, and think, plausibly, that human activities had potential to dramatically alter the climate.

I became an Anthropogenically driven climate change believer for the next 15 years. However, (and I am ashamed to say this) I then ignored information and discarded the arguments and appeals of scientists that contradicted that information. I was too busy, the science was settled, and to my mind, there was a greater existential threat in not ‘believing’ that human factors are the tipping point for the climate changing around us.

The quiet comments by a scientific expert helped me to slowly adjust - and it took time because my beliefs were so locked in.

ON SELECTIVE IGNORANCE

I now consider that my blinkeredness was a mistake. It meant that I tacitly supported information that instrumentally manufactured consent for antidemocratic actions.

This included the development of binding legislation that remains predicated on highly uncertain science; which has then resulted in governments and corporations merging in old-school arrangements that sweep agreements, knowledge and profits into secretive, privatised corporate income models.

My choice to be ignorant was selective. I was cultivating my own ignorance by deliberately electing not to look ‘there’. Inevitably, as the edges of my green-aligned moral superiority crumbled, I knew that if I didn’t question and query, that I was being wilfully blind. I was perpetuating self-made ignorance, the very thing I detested in other people.

I was falling in lock-step with institutional rules and norms - and avoiding forbidden knowledge, a term that refers to knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce. To contradict mainstream ‘consensus’, would be to relegate myself to outsider status. Would I be … unscientific, even as a social scientist?

Yet ignorance isn’t just happenstance; ignorance can be manufactured. As Robert Proctor, in the book Agnotology has discussed:

‘ignorance – or doubt or uncertainty – as something that can be made, maintained and manipulated by means of certain arts and scientists. The idea is one that easily lends itself to doubt or paranoia; namely that certain people don’t want you to know certain things, or will actively work to organize doubt or uncertainty or misinformation to help maintain (your) ignorance.

They know, and may not want you to know they know, but you are not to be privy to the secret. This is an idea insufficiently explored by philosophers, that ignorance should not be viewed as a simple omission or gap, but rather as active production. Ignorance can be actively engineered as part of a deliberate plan.

… There have always been lots of reasons to keep things secret – for love for war, for business, for every conceivable desire or enterprise.

MY ENGINEERED IGNORANCE

Because I was a ‘Believer’ I chose not to look at information that contradicted my perspective. I conflated my awareness of the power and pollution of the oil industry - and the need for better regulation and stewardship - with climate change regulations.

But they are different issues.

Then - I couldn’t think that - perhaps - that temperature might precede CO2, and not the other way around. I presumed hurricanes and floods were increasing not decreasing in the USA. I didn’t click that cold extremes are far more dangerous, and even more likely, than heat extremes. Maybe snow cover wasn’t as bad as I thought and coral reef cloud cover was a factor in coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Perhaps sea levels might not be rising like we think they do, and changes in sea levels might be unrelated to atmospheric CO2.

I wouldn’t have listened to scientists like climate scientist Judith Curry, Pat Frank, climate scientist Dr James Hansen, earth scientist Matthew Wielicki or Nobel Laureate and experimental physicist John F Clauser. I would avoided listening to geologist Ian Pilmer warn against the culling of livestock. I wouldn’t read publications by scientists who ask complex questions about economics and science. I would look at the critical reviews of scientists such as Steve Koonin and dismiss his work as biased poppycock.

Not everyone of these scientists will be right all the time, every time, but they are speaking up. They deserve respect, and they deserve to be covered by legacy media, so that the public may make their own minds up.

I’m now interested in how tectonic plate shifts might alter New Zealand sea levels. I wonder what average flooding is now compared to historic averages.

Yet as a researcher and sociologist looking at how science is produced to manufacture and perpetuate consent for harmful technologies, I should have understood that uncomfortable knowledge can be suppressed. We see this has happened with climate-related research.

However such research is likely to be challenged, and of course, years ago, from my safe space, I would have presumed all retractions were due to authors advancing rubbish. I would not have considered the investment and resources that were dedicated to preserving ‘consensus’, which would include pre-targeting publications by assigning hostile reviewers. Luckily, some scientists persevere. But, as this article says, it doesn’t mean the persevering scientists are correct, but their claims should be heard.

I should have understood how we can be misled by alarmist pathways and scenarios, even the climate scientists themselves can get ‘too hot too fast’ – the ‘hot model’ problem. We’re also susceptible to misreading imagery - the graph below shows a faint purple line, which is the true temperature, and data beyond 2020 is unknown, but the black line infers a persistent rise.

Perhaps events may not be as existential as we presume.

Therefore, in the past, when a big institution like the International Monetary Fund would have cancelled a speaking appointment by Dr John Clauser on climate models, I wouldn’t have blinked. I certainly wouldn’t have looked up Clauser to find out why he was too hot to handle. I would have ignored the politicised role of global banks in climate policy and politics, and how financial funding would be allocated, and who would inevitably gain from that financing.

It also felt too hard to take on the idea that the models were only … models.

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THE DOWNPLAYING OF NON-CLIMATE RELATED DRIVERS OF HARM

I suspect that climate fundamentalist ideologies reach out and capture socio-political issues that society understands are problematic, - to then conflate the problem as one of climate.

How often do you hear that net zero policies may instead contradict the Sustainable Development Goals? In my previous post I discussed how citizens aren’t given flexibility to change CERF response initiatives in New Zealand. Top-down planning might be efficient, can lead to unanticipated effects that lead to greater inequities – that promote harm.

Apparently, !!alarm!! - climate change is a major health risk. Meanwhile, glamourous mainstream media articles on ultraprocessed food and mortality risk aren’t so common.

Will climate policies include limits on pollution in drinking water, and ensure low-income people can access safe, nutritious and affordable food? Not any time soon.

Here in New Zealand, will current policies on climate – resulting in increased taxes, increased meat prices – harm low-income people the most? Likely.

Our climate change legislation, updated to stick methane in in 2019, is remarkably silo-ised.

I now consider that New Zealand law takes a grossly uncertain prediction from an offshore organisation and then forgets and ignores the interdependence of the health and wellbeing of the world around it. It imposes technical obligations without requiring the protection of health and wellbeing.

Take climate-driven biodiversity loss. Legacy media and scientists funded to research biodiversity and climate who wail about biodiversity loss and extinction, fail to question whether persistent pressures from industrial, agrichemical and waste-water emissions has driven far greater species declines for decades than any warming event.

Harmful pollution from chemicals, heavy-metals and wilding modified organisms are out of scope in our heavy-hitting environment and climate policies and laws. Scientists have known for 30 years that chemical pollution drives neurodevelopmental disorders, fertility loss and failure to thrive.

The book Our Stolen Future remains just as riveting and relevant today as the day it was published. Industrial pollutants often aggregate in lipids – this includes the brain, body fat and sperm.

But this is a silent extinction.

It’s not loud, like climate. And the funding streams for research don’t follow. Like climate.

You won’t get 4,000 journalists at a conference on metabolic disease or pollution.

Bill Gates gets front and centre at COP28 claiming climate change will drive 5 million deaths. You won’t find scientists talking about chemical pollution of drought stricken drinking water and corporate control of the science used by the WHO & FAO to claim current levels of pollutants are safe, front and centre.

Vertebrates and invertebrates have tolerated millions of years of climate change. It’s anthropogenic pollution – non-climate change pollutants that arguably have already have, and continue to have the greater impact on biological life.

But that is out of scope.

THE ‘SNIFF TEST’ - WHAT IS NEVER ADDRESSED IN CLIMATE AGENDAS?

As a long-term climate-change fundamentalist I presumed the ‘reduce consumption and so therefore carbon’ idealism, I presumed that a bunch of co-related undesirable anthropogenic activities would be regulated.

But no - this world funds the technical ‘mitigations’. Other stuff is out of scope.

I presumed built-in obsolescence would be targeted and that corporations would be required to use better quality inputs that require goods to last at a minimum, three years, and more frequently, five or seven years. Large devices from computers to cars would be required to have replaceable components.  A uniform charging cord agreement would have been dealt with yesterday.

Then of course, long-life, long-haul junky ultraprocessed food would be taxed, while governments would ensure that locally grown livestock and arable crops would be viable and profitable to sell locally.

We’d manage seasonality better. Importing out-of-season lemons and onions from the USA to New Zealand would be a thing of the past. Researchers would be engaged to assess how to best warehouse and store out-of-season product for the local market. Universities and research institutions would bring in expert skill-sets. ‘That’ scientist I met years ago who analysed that fresh fruit and storage over longer-time periods was fundamentally connected to nutrient availability, but who’d been dismissed because he wasn’t advocating yet more genetics and biotech research would be first in line for funding.

In order to keep food costs low, New Zealand would ensure that local farmland would be unavailable to foreign buyers, including corporate entities and multinational investment companies, and there would be caps on single use ownership. Input suppliers would be closely supervised for monopolistic practice. Universities and research institutions would have dedicated researchers that would scrutinise the latest research on low-input agroecological practices to reduce chemical dependency and pharmaceutical use on farms. This lower costs for farmers and growers support family farms, the most efficient form of farming in the world, to thrive.

In this way we would have less long-haul cargo, less diesel miles.  

These issues are never high on climate change policy agendas.

Instead, it is perfectly normal to impose a ‘mitigation’ a methane tax on meat, even when we know farmers and growers are under major stress due to the fluctuations of international commodity prices, input prices transport costs and so on.

PATH DEPENDENCY IN SCIENCE RESEARCH

Climate fundamentalism enables governments to set scopes for funding in academia, and laws and policy that presumes the climate science is settled. The imagined public good models that promoted local consensus-making around local public-good policy does not happen.

But now I can see that the policies are resulting in the direction of resources to certain interests and that far more funding dollars are being directed to technical inventions (mitigations) rather than on-the-ground, long-term basic science that farmers and growers desperately need to adapt.

In New Zealand top-down directed policy and corporate arrangements pave the way for governments and their private partners to engage in climate change solutionism.

And we know that

‘knowledge switched into one track cannot always return to areas passed over… research lost is not just research delayed, it can be forever marked or never recovered.’ (Proctor 2008)

The current ‘mitigation’ climate policies are being developed after 20 years of short-term tightly managed funding and entrepreneurialism cultures. These cultures persistently fail to prioritise larger health-based societal values, such as principles of stewardship. So they don’t promote environments where basic research can be conducted to understand the environmental drivers of health and disease.

As Stensaker and Benner observed 10 years ago:

The university ideal of becoming entrepreneurial is mainly filled with structural and process-oriented factors related to how such institutions should be governed, how governance should take place, and the cultural characteristics needed to boost innovation and entrepreneurship.

They considered that the effect of these trajectories would result in a form of:

strategic inertia characterized by an institutionalized ‘lock-in’ with few alternative development paths.

Let’s face it, how can we make intelligent decisions as a society if scientists and government bureaucrats can’t - or don’t - understand what is going wrong in the first place?

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Thus, inevitably, the combination of kind prompts from someone who hadn’t closed their mind; the surfacing hypocrisy of my own actions; and the narrow policy aims of our government, has led me to the conclusion that we have much to do that is not predicated upon a 2018 IPCC paper, if we are to promote human flourishing.

Front and centre of this, is to not be afraid to ask curious, tricky questions.

I’ll finish with a quote from a recent Brownstone Institute article by Bill Rice:

It recently occurred to me that if Socrates were alive today, he would be censored, deplatformed, smeared, cancelled, and labeled a grave threat to society. In short, he would be charged with spreading disinformation and would no doubt be Target No. 1 of the massive Censorship Industrial Complex.

Of course, Socrates was charged with all of these crimes in his own life and, in fact, was put to death for practicing the Socratic Method. 

One of the charges political leaders of Athens convicted Socrates of was “corrupting the youth.” In short, Socrates’ questions were perceived as causing “harm” to the citizens of Greece and, thus, he had to be permanently silenced.

Keep thinking, even when it is uncomfortable.