Bishop Hill A book review
May 17, 2012 Books Maurizio Morabito points us to this rather interesting review of a book entitled A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.
Adam Smith once noted that we are less troubled by the prospect of a hundred million people dying as a result of an earthquake in some distant location than of losing our little finger, but would nevertheless be horrified by the idea we might allow them to die in order to save it. Climate change effectively transforms the former scenario into the latter, and so places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination. Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities.
Reader Comments (46)
Not sure that Judith Curry will be pleased to be included in the group of "cussed old men".
Well it was pretty turgid... the reviewer's ego spat from every sentence.
And it took him half the review to even get to the book.
If you want a summary (and it is difficult to know where the line is drawn between the opinions of the reviewer and the author), mine would be...
New Morally Directed Religious World Order required to manage the planet, atoning for the sins of the past for the inhabitants of the future. Democracy? Old hat.
And of course these type of morals are enough aren't they? Aren't they? I mean they have worked in the past haven't they?
Quite a mine of alarmist empty posturing philosophising.
Much cognitive shuffling around of ideas in order to slot into his already clearly well-established politics and prejudices, so you see the IPCC are gently chided for underestimating Chinese industrialisation but only for the post hoc selected effect of their aerosols on the awkward current cooling.
The most creepy aspect of his philosophy is some apparent claim that the current living are despots influencing the future generations, I guss Malcolm Bull feels he can speak for the unborn so he comes out with this gem:
So obviously some form of tyranny on the living is being contemplated. However in answer to claims from the likes of Lomborg we should focus on immediate tangible harms like polar bear hunting or the poor today he says:
He is just full of Bull here. He implies that care is being enhance by AGW alarmism when we can all see that AGW alarmism is actually today the primary driver of effete, empty western posturing (like his) - is just so opposite to reality that I can’t ignore his self-serving vacuity.
"Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities."
Yes, but think of the power and prestige!
"What did you do in the Climate Wars, Daddy?"
"I Saved The World, son!"
In this review Malcolm Bull describes climate change sceptics as “an assortment of cussed old men, mostly without relevant scientific training” and wonders whether Lovelock may be right that “it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
Malcolm Bull is lecturer in fine art at the University of Oxford, and the author of “The Mirror of the Gods”, one of the best books of art history I know.
No-one’s perfect.
.
Bull is not interested in the views of us cussed old men (though he does admit that “the possibility that climate variation is not anthropogenic, or that it will not get much worse ... cannot be wholly discounted”). He’s not even very interested in the views of the author of the book he’s reviewing. Burke and Lenin are his chosen interlocutors.
Burke correctly observed that revolution is bloody, and Lenin noted that people are pretty stupid and needed a vanguard party to tell them what their best interests are. Steering between these two political poles, Bull concludes that:
He accepts the validity of Lomborg’s criticisms of long-term mitigation as opposed to immed iate action to alleviate poverty, species loss etc. Then he spoils the effect by stating that and he concludes
Call me a cynical bloody-minded Menshevik, but I see an intellectual élite carving out a place in the sun for themselves. Bull follows fellow Oxford academic Huntingford in questioning democracy. It’s a shame, because he’s a really brilliant man, an erudite and amusing writer. Still, it’s the tumbrils for him now. What a pity.
Martin A
Well said! Two keystrokes more than the review deserved, methinks.
What bugs me about all this comment from philosophers, psychologists etc is their crass acceptance of the climate science orthodoxy, and hence the supposed immorality or delusional nature of sceptics. Philosophers especially should know that practically everything that was once orthodox is now believed to have been wrong.
The history of science has been pretty much polluted by having been written by scientists themselves (so having the less than objective perspective that the current generation are 'right' and previous ones 'wrong' - only to find that they are also wrong when seen from a few decades later), or by bigoted zealots who have an axe to grind, such as Andrew Dickson White, who simply made stuff up and quoted from historical novels when it suited him. But this changed in the 1960s with Thomas Kuhn, and a much better investigation of science has shown that it is to a large extent socially conditioned and socially constructed. Kuhn showed that science is not a linear 'progressive' enterprise - the same data is available to all but it gets interpreted in orthodox 'paradigms' from which one need a revolution to break out of because scientists ignore or discount evidence that falsifies their paradigm. There is pal review and criticizers of the orthodox interpretation are shunned, hampered or even demonized.
What has happened to the fruitful work that was done from the 1960s to the 1990s showing this constructionist mentality and practice at work? I am certain that a few decades from now with see this climate science nonsense as a classic case of a socially constructed enterprise. It has all the makings and marks of it.
Seems like intellectual masturbation to me, trying to rationalise "any" intellectual position in order to hide the truth from ones self, i.e. one has been had by those who instigated the "problem" for nefarious reasons.
Moral superiority seeps through the review...
Yet whenever a moral orthodoxy has taken hold (any of the isms or major religions), society regresses. And in many cases millions of people die or are oppressed as a result of its maintenance.
Morals are relative not absolute... and as an historian he should understand this.
ScientistForTruth (May 17, 2012 at 10:42 AM)
Well said. The fact that you wouldn’t be allowed to say it in Nature or New Scientist proves your point.
To be fair to Bull, his acceptance of the climate science orthodoxy is a lot less crass and a bit more circumspect than we’ve been used to. He admits that we have a point a couple of times, and even seems to accept Lomborg’s position. But the temptation of a scientific basis for an ethical and political overhaul of society is just too great; particularly an overhaul to be conducted by an intellectual élite, in which philosophers who can quote Burke and Lenin will be up there in the vanguard alongside palaeo-dendrologists who can average tree ring thicknesses.
It’s a Brave New World for some.
I wonder how Bull would feel if he were to be excluded from the required "technocracy"?
Sweet how these autocratic people are happy to say "trust us, we know what we're doing" but somehow think that when our current democratic politicians say exactly the same thing – they can't be trusted!
Bull summarises Lomberg’s position nicely:
“If we were concerned about polar bears we would start by not shooting them, rather than worrying about how much ice they had left to stand on, and if we were really worried about the global poor, we could help them now rather than helping their descendants at the end of the century, who will probably be a lot better off anyway.”
Although he goes on to say that without CC we might not be paying so much attention, I notice that he doesn’t demur.
Regardless of anything else, that paragraph is quite brilliantly stated.
I'm not aware of any studies of the matter, but I'd bet dollars against dog poo that those who argue most shrilly for CO2 reduction to benefit future generations, and those who argue stridently in favour of abortion on demand, are largely the same people.
Today's silver lining...it appears that as long as you speak badly of "skeptics", the CAGWers will let you get away with murder, in this case with elucidating a long list of skeptical points (a capital offence if done by a "skeptic").
If only we'd known! All I or the Bish or Watts or Steven Goddard or etc etc had to do to keep the CAGW hordes calm and maybe even appear on SkS as members of the Good Guys Club, was to start every post with "Skeptics are bad".
Geoff - I presume you aren't familiar with the works of Slavoj Žižek?
That's the New New Left for you...
No surprise to find that Malcolm Bull is a regular contributor to the New Left Review, another group of people who think they know everything there is to be known.
Bull is on the right track, though he may not subscribe to it.
The West feels guilty for its material progress causing potential harm to others, and has a sneaky suspicion that it would be buying itself an easy indulgence card if it interprets the available non-alarmist evidence, correctly, to relieve itself of its guilt.
One man's utopia is another's dystopia. That tree of knowledge thing in the Bible is pretty tricky.
Shub it is only a certain sort of western mind that is consumed by guilt. For me its a matter of pride that we have given the Africans roads, schools, hospitals, law and all other good things, the fruits of our civilization. They were most certainly not noble savages at ease in an Edenic idyll when we first showed up. We have not ruined their happy little world at all. We have improved their lot immeasurably, on any reckoning. What have we to be guilty about? And mostly all these things we did for them were altruistic: the Exchequer never once made a profit out of Ghana in our 70 years rule of that country - at the British taxpayers expense limitless largesse was conferred on Africa. The 'guilt' is confected in western progressives and other half-wits by Africans on the look-out for another handout. They should be kissing our boots instead of trying to lift our wallets.
omnologos
Yes, you can be as sceptical as you like, as long as you start every paragraph with “I’m no sceptic, but...”. In other words, your belief or disbelief in the science is of secondary importance to your acceptance of the politico -philosophical conclusions which supposedly flow from the science - a point that Ben Pile has been making tirelessly at Climate Resistance.
Yes, I’m slightly familiar with Zizek, who burbles a kind of post-modern Marxism at London Review of Books. What’s that got to do with Bull? who, at least as an art historian, is a totally different type of intellectual, as empirical and British as - well - Mario Praz.
Shub has an interesting point. The only thing that will make the London Review of Books crowd take us sceptical crumblies seriously is not the questionable quality of the science, but the fact that we’re more interesting intellectual company than Mann and Jones.
This excerpt implies strongly this book is yet another in the shelves of books that take a false premise and extend it into the realm of bad science fiction.
On at least one point, Bull has got things precisely back to front (the CO2 in the ice core?). He says of his summary of Lomborg:
This is almost certainly untrue, since people have been concerned for the poor for thousands of years, and for disappearing fauna for a at least a century. One might argue that it is precisely people who lack a moral compass or an aesthetic sense of the beauty of nature who need climate change in order to spare a thought for the poor or the polar bears. His solemn quoting of the WHO’s nonsense about 150,000 deaths per year suggests someone who can’t see a problem if it doesn’t have a statistic attached.Meh.
Not sure why the Bish elevated this mush to a post.
Johanna
It may be mush, but it’s top class British intellectual mush, read by the kind of nobs and eggheads who have the ears of the deciders. Malcolm Bull wrote a brilliant book about mythology in art - the kind of book I’d press on anyone who ever wandered into an art gallery by mistake and wondered what it was all about. Stephen Gardiner, author of the book under review, is a Professor at Cornell.
I pass for a crazed lefty here, but I’ve never quite accepted the idea that everyone’s opinion is of equal worth. Mann, Jones and Schmidt need dealing with on their own terms in their own way, and Lord knows, there are plenty here and elsewhere who give them a hard time. But it’s just as important to counter the arguments of the philosophers and humanities professors, who have more clout among the chattering classes. They’re as wrong as the Team, but in a different way.
I could easily get tired of people who admit to having little science education, yet consider themselves knowledgeable enough to pontificate about "sceptics" in general, simultaneously denigrating their scientific credentials.
Malcolm Bull, should you wish to improve your scientific education, then you know where to find me.
There are more complex reasons for taking seriously the views of philosophers and academics on climate change.
If you’re an environmental journalist or a reader of thermometers or measurer of tree rings, it makes perfect sense to talk up the danger of climate change. Whatever you think of Professor Mann’s ability as a statistician, you can’t fault his rationality in hitting out at critics with the best editors and lawyers he can get.
If you’re an NGO or a politician who wants to improve the lot of the poor, action to reduce carbon is quite clearly insane. A six-year-old child can see that renouncing air travel or insulating your home will do nothing for the starving African. Not only a six-year-old, even a Guardian reader or an Oxford philosophy lecturer can understand this.
Climate scientists have complex models backing up their projections of temperature rise and consequent misery. There are no models in social science showing how reducing your carbon footprint will do anything at all. This is why Lomborg, Heartland and the GWPF are the targets of so much hate, while the science-based sceptics like Watts, McIntyre Montford and Nova are largely ignored.
Bull (and no doubt Gardiner) can understand this. Rational thought is their business. Unlike climate scientists, they can’t hide behind their models. All they can do is retreat into abstruse ethical reasoning, hoping that only the docile and impressionable will follow them. But they’ve got no data to hide, no peer-review process which keeps us out and lets Socrates and Nietzsche in. All they can do, as omnologos points out above, is a clever balancing act, pointing out how right sceptics are - up to a point.
And by one of those strange coincidences which Maurizio / omnologos knows well, the point we’re right up to is the point at which democracy (and all that goes with it, like access to the media) has to be questioned by those with a superior understanding of complex stuff like ethics and tree ring thickness.
We all understand what a nasty bunch of bastards the 10:10 activists were, with their big red button ready to eliminate us cussed old men. Bull and Gardiner are much more interesting, and much more worthy opponents.
I may return to say something about the issues raised by the book and the review, but I simply want to point out the curious nature of a "book review" that takes ten paragraphs to approach actually saying something about the book to be reviewed, beginning in the eleventh paragraph. I know it's the style for pretentious review essays in LRB and the New York Review of Books, et al, but I will always find it odd.
Skiphil -it might just be an elegant way to say "I've been given a rubbish book to review"
Why all this handwringing about the weather?
I don't know if Richard Betts will venture onto this thread.
But in comments on "Stern's nut graph" he had the audacity to claim that Heartland was predominantly about propaganda.
Well, say what you like about Heartland (you do anyway, Richard).
but what do you make of:-
"Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities."
No propaganda there, then!
We are beset by this kind of tosh at every pair of rail ends, from any number of sources (not least the likes of Julia Sligo at the MET Office). But I guess we should just be happy to swallow the latest lie and dutifully keep paying out taxes and energy bills like the happy little bunnies we ought to be.
omnologos-
Perhaps we should ask the question "Who gave him that book to review, and why?". Journalists, editors and publishers may run with a story/subject because they think it is what someone wants to hear. [Or that someone is willing to pay for it.]
I'll give them plenty of credit for knowing their own trade in that respect. I think I can probably help them now with some advice about book titles they should be ready to write, review or commission in coming years. Titles such as:
"How did they manage to get it so wrong?", or, more likely,
"How did the Scientists manage to get it so wrong?"
The media will exempt itself from too much critical self-evaluation, and many unrelated scientists may find themselves tarnished by association.
The literati that geoffchambers well describes may be willing to start thinking a bit more deeply about some of these issues now:
-Peer review. How it works and how it doesn't work.
-The role of the established professional bodies, the 'learned societies', and their role in the course of events needs to be scrutinised. As does the relationship of their leaders with their political paymasters.
-Ought scientists to have a continuous re-accreditation scheme like medical practitioners?
-Do people [in any profession] significantly revise their opinions after retirement, and do people become more honest and outspoken as they pass retirement age?
-Why do scientists publicly appear so trusting of other scientists [almost to the point of naivety] and unwilling to be publicly critical in a system that allegedly lives by peer review?
And so on.
Some of the possible consequences for the future of publicly funded science worry me more than a little bit. The only thing I believe about 97% of scientists is that they are more interested in their own science, their own careers, and their own families, to be spending much time examining “climate-change” science.
I quite liked it really. Can't blame him for an inevitable level of gullibility in his particular academic environment because I have first hand experience of an Oxford Arts Don equally ill-equipped in Earth Science and likewise steeped in the ubiquitous Oxfordian ideological marinade of faux-liberal morality.
Yet from all this immersion, he still has it in him to come up for air with the observation
'Is this because the emergence of concern about global warming coincided with the failure of Communism? As some climate change sceptics have noted, there was something suspicious about the way that Communism departed stage right moments before climate change entered stage left as the new nemesis of consumer capitalism.'
A "Low Carbon Economy" = "Anti Life Stupidity" = "Antihumanism"
As a working artist/educator, my experience of the arts intelligentsia in the UK scared me more than a little. Most of them are excellent in their own field but rather inclined to know all about everything and honk it loudly to anyone caught within hearing. One of their less charming personality traits is the firm belief that London is the centre of the universe. One of them said to me, very earnestly and without a trace of irony
"You wouldn't have seen any really good art until you arrived in the UK, would you?"
Alexander K (May 18, 2012 at 4:48 AM)
Absolutely. We, the Chattering Classes, are the first mass movement in history to have had a university education. When we were 1% of the population, we were called the Professional Classes, and as doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers and engineers, we merged fairly seemlessly into the rest of middle class society. Now we’re going on 20-30%, and we form a caste apart. Many of us (in marketing, the media, and large chunks of education), have little to offer but our opinions. Environmentalism, (and global warming, which forms its hard core), is the planet-changing ideology which came along to give our dinner party conversation an ideological base and to help us make sense of our lives.There’s a sociologist called Robert Phelan who comments here and at WUWT sometimes who makes much the same comment. It’s an analysis which comes I think originally from the American Christopher Lasch. It’s important to get the sociology right. Political namecalling of the “watermelon” sort only takes you so far.
Anybody listening to Italian radio knows pretty well Milan (or Rome) is the centre of the universe!
Seriously, I don't fully agree with Geoff on this. IMNSHO (honked it loudly to anyone caught within hearing, of course) we are experiencing some after-effects of a little learning.
We should rejoice though, as the first effects of the aforementioned amount of knowledge acquisition were pogroms, the Armenian genocide, two World Wars, the Holocaust and a variety of African civil wars. Nowadays, we risk at most only an idiotic Energy Bill.
ps I have written a geeky letter to the LRB but can't tell anybody its contents for now, lest they disallow it from print.
michael hart - we have a saying in Italy...."nobody's an idiot" (unless they work from a journalistic desk, apparently). Everybody knows very well what you describe.
The issue is, how many people have the courage to speak only about it, even to themselves.
omnologos
(I’m a big fan of Italian radio. RAI3 is like the BBC Home Service of my childhood, but with discussions between opera critics which are like football match replays).
I don’t think we disagree fundamentally. I’ve taken my formulation largely from the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd, who had the original idea of formulating testable hypotheses in social science. (These involve statistics rather than flatulent phraseology, so naturally he’s not taken seriously in France).
The pogroms, civil wars etc that you mention tend to occur when literacy reaches 90% among young males in a given society, causing revolutionary movements which vary according to the particular society: Luther in Germany in the 16th century; a gentlemanly civil war in England in the 17th; egalitarian revolution in France in the 18th, risorgimento, Arab Spring, etc.
Universal literacy has it’s drawbacks in terms of blood spilt, but has the advantage of being largely egalitarian in it’s effects. University education for a large minority (20-30% - too big for an élite, too small and disparate for a mass movement) tends to have perverse anti-egalitarian effects: eg May 68, Red Brigades, and tofu-knitting Guardian readers saving the planet by cycling to the recycling centre.
When we were hippies and Trots we did little harm except to our own minds; now we have a Plan for the Planet, and a network of freaky wayout NGOs like the Royal Society, the BBC and Oxford University converted to our ideology. This is bad. Which is why I disagree strongly with Joanna’s “meuh”. People take more notice of the Royal Society (or the London Review of Books) than they do of you or me.
at the very heart of our institutes should be enshrined open access and fluidity
Just like it was in Cato's Rome, and at the high days of 19th centruy university life
now we have self servers seflservicing their very own selfservice cosy protected lives and that of their selfserving offspring and buddies. the sopranoes but less sincere.
Nobody at a a salary higher than 25k should be in the institutes except at 3-6months assignments. nobody. self service has to come to a stop. No more 3rd generation BBC coordinators and vice chancellors. Oust !
an economic relanche will only happen by dismantling the inherent injustice of all that lame "collective bargaining" that has subverted society.
Everybody equal access
Everybody equal rights
No more Nick Robinsons and Timblbees finding out for us how to think about the BNP and windmills etc
No more Jeremy Paxmans at 2million a year asking "pertinent questions" which any graduate easily could do as well.
This is an interesting article, and a great thread as a result!
I found the article to be full of really interesting little sections, many of which have been highlighted by previous commenters, so I won't repeat them. Overall, it has that very academic style of fence-sitting so that it can be quite difficult to see whether the author has any firm views on the topic or just enjoys talking about it in a cultured way. But lots of nuggets of independent thought.
Going back to ScientistforTruth's comment at 10:42 AM yesterday:
I wonder whether this is a result of the Science Wars? In the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, there was lots of interesting philosophy of science, from Kuhn among others, that showed how strong social effects could be on things like which topics in science get investigated at a particular time, or why some theories live on for longer than others after they have effectively been falsified, and so on. Then, this kind of degenerated into rather extreme social constructivist theories of science whereby (to exaggerate a bit) there is no external reality corresponding to scientific theories, but scientists just pretend to make one up. Sokal's hoax seems to have been part of a culture of fight-back against these extremes, and I wonder if that fight-back has chastened humanities thinking into being a bit less prompt to doubt what scientists claim?
Ben Pile and his spiked colleagues have lots of thought-provoking posts on the current fashion for using "Science Says" statements as argument-closers. There are lots of cases where science impinges on everyday life where healthy scepticism towards the "Science Says" statements would be healthy.
Jeremy Harvey
I was talking to a professor of semiotics last night. She’d never heard of Sokal, and she described her own work as “scientific” several times. Then the conversation turned to genetically modified crops, which she described as “crap” and “dangerous”, stating that she’d seen dozens of tv documentaries on the subject.On gm crops the media have provided a counterbalancing expertise of environmentalists opposed to that of the scientists, and the irrationality of the average voter (or semiotician) in choosing one camp or the other has no irreversible effect.
The decision as to whether to take the expert’s word on trust or to think for ourselves on a particular subject is no doubt socially determined in complex ways which social scientists haven’t begun to look at seriously. Most of the time it doesn’t matter. Only on climate change is almost all the expertise and media coverage in one direction.
Geoff,
Lucky you! ;-) Anyway, the Sokal affair obviously had very little impact outside academia, but I'm not so sure it had zero impact within - maybe your semiotician is not so typical? Even if she's never heard of him, it is not impossible that she was somewhat influenced by the event. But that's just speculation, and you may well be right. I would say, though, that there may be a slight difference between GMOs and climate. In the former case, the public may feel emboldened to doubt scientist's assessments of danger - because it is obvious that a judgement call is involved, and also that there is cost/benefit/risk element to the question. Also, it is biology and ecology, and those are perhaps known to be soft science. For AGW, it looks to the outsider, perhaps, like a clear-cut case of physical scientists finding out How Things Are. OK, so that is speculation too. And Bull does clearly doubt some of the things said about AGW.