Who are “climate skeptics”?
Greg Garrard, Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, thinks he knows. In fact, he believes “environmentalists” generally “know who climate skeptics are: oil company shills, religious fundamentalists and neoliberal cheerleaders.”
With that courteous and respectful opening, Garrard issued a call for papers for the symposium “Who Do They Think They Are? Cultures of Climate Skepticism, Anti-Environmentalism, and Conservative Environmentalism,” scheduled for June 6–8, 2016, at Garrard’s campus in Kelowna, B.C. One knows not whether to laugh or cry at Garrard saying “this symposium seeks to understand ‘the enemy’, challenging reductive stereotypes and homogenizing assumptions in the interests of constructive democratic debate” (emphasis added).
Clearly the conference’s sole purpose is to denigrate those with views contrary to environmentalists’, particularly the so-called global warming consensus. The likelihood that it will lead to “constructive democratic debate” is approximately zero.
As my friend and colleague Jeffrey Foss, former head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, warns:
It’s like reading Malleus Maleficarum, aka The Witches Hammer, a 15th century tract on the detection and destruction of witches and warlocks—and it almost makes my stomach turn to think that I and my friends are among the witches and warlocks of today’s green druids. … Thank goodness we have, at least formally, freedom of thought and expression. That freedom, however, is under attack and is bending under the pressure of this attack….
David K. Johnston, another philosophy professor at the University of Victoria, suggested that the organizer might be amenable to receiving climate skeptics’ papers or “artefacts”, Foss countered:
The first paragraph is a scurrilous manifesto tarring “climate scepticism”. The next paragraph presents some sketches of “climate scepticism”—sketches that seem quite believable to me. But apparently not to their author, who in the third paragraph returns to treating ‘climate skepticism’ as a social phenomenon that needs to be analysed and addressed—rather than a set of beliefs that are supported by reason and evidence.
So climate skepticism is not addressed at all. To do so requires studying the actual climate and asking whether it is accurately described in global warming theories. There is no invitation … to do any such thing. The concepts of truth and falsehood do not arise … presumably because these concepts themselves are seen as tools of suppression used by the “elites” who wield power over us all. Instead, it is the socio-psychological syndrome of “anti-environmental discourses” that are to be analysed.
Foss’s comments are dead on. This type of thing does indeed harken back to witch hunts. Certainly, it is anti-science and deeply rooted in ideology.
One of the ironies of Garrard’s conference is that he himself is a critic of apocalyptic views in his book Ecocriticism (2004), writing: “Just like Christian millennialism, environmental apocalypticism has had to face the embarrassment of failed prophecy even as it has been unable to relinquish the trope altogether” (p. 100). For some reason, Garrard has now embraced this failed trope in the belief that climate apocalypticism, unlike all previous environmental apocalyptisms, is the real deal.
It is by no means clear how we can counter such ideological and anti-scientific views.
Consider two issues today: GMOs and climate change. The science (at least that considered “overwhelming”) says GMOs are safe and climate change is primarily human caused. Environmentalists overwhelmingly accept the climate change “science”, no questions asked, but reject the GMO “science”. Why? The GMO “science” says human intervention in nature can be positive, while the climate change “science” says it is negative. So the position taken by environmentalists is consistent: it has nothing to do with science, but everything to do with their anti-human agendas.
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