Part One
Reality & Alternatives
Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare â but in groups, parties, peoples, ages, it is the rule.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1
1
The Reality of Global Heating
The situation is so absurd that neither Camus nor Ionesco could have made it up. Weâre driving the earthâs climate to the point where itâs already becoming inimical to human life, and our political leaders donât seem to care and remain impotent with respect to changing course. Earlier drafts of this chapter laid out the basic methods and findings of the climate sciences for the benefit of readers who werenât well acquainted with the topics, and showed how we know that human activities, and especially burning fossil fuels, are the main driver of global heating. I doubt whether anyone who seriously doubts this would be reading this book, but thereâs a reliable literature on the topic, and a fuller account is available in the appendixes (at www.bloomsbury.com/how-to-think-about-the-climate-crisis).
I was thinking that students would find the exposition helpful, especially when it came to trying to persuade conservative grandparents that thereâs cause for considerable concern. But then I recalled with dismay the research that shows that people who deny the reality of global heating â âclimate deniersâ for short â are unmoved by presentations of the actual facts backed up by rational argument. For someone who has devoted a career to philosophy, thatâs a major disappointment. The power of the fixed ideas that grip the minds of the deniers is capable of making large parts of the real world disappear. Philosophy can nonetheless help us with unfixing ideas and opening up new ways of thinking â so donât give up on those stubborn grandparents quite yet.
Along with the ingestion of alcohol, narcotics or hallucinogens, human beings have developed a variety of strategies for ignoring reality when they find it not to their liking. According to an extant fragment from the profoundest among the Westâs early thinkers, Heraclitus of Ephesus (fifth century BCE): âPeople are oblivious of what they do while awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do while asleep.â No wonder philosophers have a reputation for being arrogant: heâs saying that people have no idea what their dream lives are like, and donât have much of a clue about their waking lives either. âMost men do not recognize what they experience, but believe their own opinions.â They just make it up as they go along, âAbsent while present.â1
Thereâs a variety of reasons, from psychological to sociological, for peopleâs lack of concern about climate change, but over the years Iâve been working on this book the general public has become more concerned, and so the main thing now is to get our political leaders to do their jobs. The degree of that concern depends on who you think you are. In the US, for example, 57 per cent of respondents in a Pew Research Center poll from mid-2019 thought that climate change is âa major threat to the well-being of the USâ. Among those who identified as Democrats the figure was 84 per cent, while only 27 per cent of Republicans thought climate change is a major threat.2 Republican beliefs appear to provide a thick shield against the reality of our situation. As George Marshall writes in Donât Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: âClimate change ⌠exposes the deepest workings of our minds, and shows our extraordinary and innate talent for seeing only what we want to see and disregarding what we would prefer not to know.â3
Cultural and psychological biases let us ignore reality, or simply make it up as we see fit â but that doesnât work for long when the reality is the forces of nature. Think of the inexorable power of a hurricane, a tsunami, a flood or drought. Or the non-alternative fact that when the wet-bulb (high humidity) temperature goes over 35°C, the human body overheats â even at rest, and in the shade â and eventually expires from hypothermia.4 But since weâre reluctant to face the reality of our own mortality, we tend to think that death by heat âcouldnât possibly happen to meâ. But of course it could.
How we know
Letâs think about how we know whatâs happening in the world, beyond what we perceive of our immediate surroundings. Basically, other people tell you; and if they are reliable reporters and you believe them, you probably do know what you think you know. And if youâre asked how you know, you cite sources, give justification, or provide evidence â rather than say, âI just knowâ. Itâs a sad sign of the times that the Trump administration dispenses with this convention: they simply say âThis is whatâs happeningâ, even though it isnât, without even pretending to provide evidence.
In the old days, the task of knowing what was going on seemed simple enough. When I was young, we got our news through the newspapers, The Glasgow Herald and Manchester Guardian, and radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Guardian (its current name) was considered a reliable source because it was old and venerable, and owned by a trust thatâs dedicated to keep the newspaper free of commercial and political interference (which it still is). You could depend on the BBC in those days because it was a public service broadcaster and similarly non-commercial. In general, news sources that are independent of commercial considerations will be more reliable, less biased by the views of owners eager to make a profit.
Readers of endnotes will notice I rely heavily on the journalism of The Guardian, as well as The New York Times, in the belief that the reporting in these newspapers is generally trustworthy, and because theyâre especially good on environmental topics. I always check the studies cited in the articles to ensure that they say what the reporter says they say, and try to consult at least one other reliable source on each topic. Iâve also made considerable use of the Internet, including consulting the Fox News website and other sites on the right, just to ensure that my media intake stays âfair and balancedâ. But most of what you find over there are alternative facts, and so Iâve seldom found such sources to be worth citing.
When it comes to discovering whatâs going on in the physical world, it used to be that research done by scientists at good universities was more reliable than studies by scientists working for industry, who might tend to come up with results that please their employers. When faced with the claim âScientific studies have shown âŚâ, itâs always good to ask who funded the research. Support from the National Institutes for Health is relatively unproblematic; but if studies that show smoking isnât so bad for you after all turn out to be funded by the American Tobacco Company, perhaps a little scepticism is called for.5
One reason why the general public â and most students Iâve taught â arenât so well informed about the climate crisis is that some people have a stake in keeping other people in a state of ignorance. A central field in most traditions of philosophy is epistemology, the study of how we come to know what we know â an area that in todayâs world of alternative facts has become more interesting. And of comparable interest is the new field of âagnotologyâ, which studies what we donât know, and how ignorance comes about.
Ignorance comes in many forms: thereâs one kind thatâs a ânativeâ or âoriginaryâ state, where knowledge hasnât yet happened; and another thatâs a âlost realmâ or âselective choiceâ, where knowledge has somehow faded, or attention has moved elsewhere. But thereâs also an ignorance thatâs deliberately produced as a âstrategic ployâ, and this is the most interesting kind.6 Why would you want to promote ignorance â unless you had legitimate trade or military secrets to keep? Well, perhaps because youâre making a fortune by activities that cause harm to others, and youâd rather nobody knew about it. (Weâll encounter some good examples in Part Two.)
If we turn to the climate and ask how we know that weâre overheating the planet by burning fossil fuels, the answer is that the climate scientists say so (or some 99 per cent of them do). They understand the connections on a basis of sound evidence. The climate deniers deny that the scientists know â but they deny this on the basis of zero evidence. The problem is that many people have come to distrust experts, and the mistrust is spreading. Some experts can of course turn out to be not so expert after all, but in most cases there are reliable ways of gauging expertise in a particular profession or discipline. (Itâs not, as they say, rocket science.)
The issue of knowledge and understanding in the natural sciences isnât so problematic, thanks to the cooperative, competitive, and self-regulating nature of the enterprise. [1.1] Scientists all over the world are working on various topics in many different areas, and theyâre constantly communicating and evaluating the results of their research through the medium of peer-reviewed journals, international conferences and so forth. Within what has been called âthe republic of scienceâ, itâs not hard to gauge levels of expertise: the top scientists tend to win Nobel Prizes and other awards, publish in the best journals in their fields and are usually hired by the most prestigious institutes and universities â while the hacks do none of this, and instead gravitate toward think tanks funded by climate deniers.7 [1.1]
Scientists (like many philosophers) are contentious types who like to disagree and prove one another wrong. So when seven separate studies between 2004 and 2015 show that around 97 per cent of cl...