411. The gentle (VI)

The other day I realised that I no longer think man-made climate change is real. I have little to no interest in this subject, but if it buzzed into my consciousness my general thought was along the lines: exaggerated, though probably real. Yet suddenly, the other day, I found I had no belief in it at all; it had just collapsed and it was impossible for me to even pretend it was real anymore. Where this collapse came from I am not sure, it just emerged.

The issue has been persistent throughout my life: at school, when we were taught it in geography, I accepted it along with the other course material; in my last year at school I read the just released The Sceptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, and I roughly adopted his line—being a Marxist-Leninist with enthusiasm for nuclear power, I enjoyed the excuse to crush the wet liberals. The problem was real, but we just needed to engineer our way around it; the Bangladeshis would have to dam like the Dutch, and we would build nuclear power plants. My interest in the whole topic then trailed off. I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and felt nothing particular—it was another film to absorb, more information.

Occasionally, I would encounter an older female Boomer who would swear that the weather was different this winter or summer and would then attribute it to climate change; in the end, I realised that it is so easy to forget what one season to the next is like that all you need is a little prod from the news to conclude that, oh, it must all be attributable to climate change. Employed on a geography magazine, I rehashed press releases about the issue and encountered a girlfriend’s father—a Rhodesian-born engineer—who flicked through the magazine and said: “Do you believe in that?” when he reached the section on climate change. “It’s all based on models, and you can show what you want with a model,” I said—so I suppose at heart I already did not believe it; since that is a complicated way to say, “No.”

I have no knowledge as regards physics to make an informed judgement, but I think a watershed moment came when the left put forward the propaganda point “climate refugees”—at some level, I started to reject it all then; the purpose was just too transparent, the issue must have been confected to carry out moral blackmail—just like the bellyaches over racism. If you pick at the language around the issue more doubts emerge, from greenhouse effect to global warming to climate change—the language becomes more obfuscatory. “Oh, so you don’t think the climate is changing; it’s well-established science that the climate changes.” The whole presentation, “man-made climate change”, looks too much like a finger trap. When language shifts in this way it usually means someone lies; when we talk about real things language tends to remain stable—and it never becomes slippy, not so as to facilitate rhetorical jabs to bully the unwary.

The issue is meant to be existential—the official line says it is so; and yet nuclear power is rejected as a solution. Yet when people really feel their lives are on the line then they act; and yet nobody, even the people who claim this is an issue, endorses the simplest solution. Remember, this is meant to be existential; nobody acts as if it is.

We have to dismantle industrial civilisation completely or settle for wind power and the like—apparently. No other options allowed. I think this comes from a feminised society: man makes technology—itself feminine—and so the feminine becomes jealous; technology must be dismantled, it is an existential threat—not to the material planet, but to femininity (Mother Earth). So I doubt man-made climate change is real at all—or if it is real then it has a tiny impact, and all the cacophony around it is lies.