You can search the whole internet for all my posts and you will never find any in which I am “totally denying that there may be long-range negative effects from climate change” or “denying that there is such a thing as climate change”. I have never said that this is just a "neurosis" based on no scientific facts. That is just a Trotskyite smear from Louis Proyect.
What I am in favour of is a rational scientific discussion and debate about climate change, so that we arrive at the best knowledge and conclusions. There is no room in this debate for metaphysical Freudian concepts such as "denial”. - This discussion cannot occur, if part of the scientific community is excommunicated by Green totalitarians, because the scientists are allegedly “climate change deniers” (sort of like heretics that ought to be burnt at the stake). - It cannot occur amidst popular hysteria. - It cannot occur if people are afraid to debate with people with views different from their own. - And most of all, it cannot occur if religious environmental zealots assign to skeptics the status of “infidels” or “unbelievers” who don’t have to be listened to. So for me, the negative effects of climate change are not a religious faith, but a scientific hypothesis which could well be true to an important degree. A scientific statement is always a statement which is fallible, i.e. it could be proved wrong with further tests. This contrasts with the Green religion or thre Marxist religion based on absolute truths about life, the universe and everything. If you know anything about human history, you know that there have been very drastic changes in climate in various epochs, such as the ice age. But actually the human race was never wiped out, it survived the ice age and made a comeback, equipped only with stone tools. Today, we are a million times better equipped to survive climate change than ape-like hunters and collectors who had only tools and weapons carved out of stone. The environmentalist movement has never been a homogenous movement, but rather it has been a heterogenous, mixed class social movement, including a lot of declasse people. There are bona fide scientists in it, but also all kind of nutters with mystical, religious and fanatical beliefs, and all kinds of opportunists. You get these people who think they are saving the world if they are are recycling their potato peels etc. With a lot of environmental issues (though not all), it is very difficult to get sufficient evidence to be able to estimate ecological causes and effects accurately. A recent example is that the state of New York has prohibited the practice of fracking for several years, until there is better research on the geological and ecological effects. We know the effects are very likely to occur, but we don’t really know the magnitude or importance of the effects, and so that is often more a matter of guesswork and speculation. In addition, business interests and community interests will understate or overstate the effects according to their own interest. That has the consequence that even when we jolly well know the importance of particular ecological effects, because they are relatively easy to calculate, these effects are covered up because people don’t want this information to be widely known. What you then get, is greeny-lefty people who extrapolate all kinds of horrific and scary trends for which the evidence is rather flimsy, and they extrapolate political conclusions which attach more priority to the environment than to the people who have to live in it, and earn a living from it. The same greeny-lefty people of course like to drive their SUVs, cook in their designer kitchens, take plane trips to foreign holiday destinations, and buy their consumables manufactured by semi-slave labour, never mind the pollution they are buying into. The same Greeny people who talk about carbon footprints are completely silent about the conditions which workers have to work in, in factories and offices. For them the environment is about the trees and the birds. The greeny-lefty lobby started off fairly optimistically as a grassroots movement, but nowadays it is for the most part philosophically Manichean, politically totalitarian, and ideologically quasi-religious in the sense of metaphysical propaganda and guilt-tripping. The talk is about sustainability but in reality it is more about maintaining privilege. The Greens want to condemn and excommunicate people who dare to question the authority of the environmental lobby. In Europe this tendency is much stronger than in the USA, because in Europe environmentalists have much more political clout. There exists a very large stratum of rich green eurobureaucrats, of rich greeny academics in Europe, and there is a lot of profit in green subsidies and taxes. There is a very large green business, a multibillion dollar business, but a lot of this business is fake, because it doesn’t have any significant positive effect on the environment (while the real problems fail to be tackled). It is merely that people wish to associate with green branding, to promote their own product. The most serious effect of the green lobby propaganda is that people just don’t care much anymore about many environmental effects, when they ought to do so. Greenpeace used to be very big where I live, it was the most successful environmental organization (next to the WWF built up by my uncle), but in recent years Greenpeace has declined and begun to fade away. So anyway if you want to orient yourself about environmental issues, you don’t want to take a crude, undiscerning or moralistic American approach. You have instead to distinguish carefully between science and pseudoscience, between well-supported argument and hysteria, between pro-human debates and anti-human debaters, etc. J.
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