Up here in Seattle we have smoky haze this morning, resulting from the California wildfires. According to the science, the wildfires are a consequence of global warming. Says former President Obama.
The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does. pic.twitter.com/gKGegXWxQu
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2020
Yes. And here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
“Mother Earth is angry,” the San Francisco Democrat said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC. “She’s telling us -- whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is … that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”
Notice how the Catholic Pelosi uses religious language -- actually pre-Christian religious language -- to make her point.
Of course, climate deniers like this nobody say that the California wildfires are due to the environmentalists.
I live here. Have a seat and learn something, sir. In the state of California the environmentalist lobby sets policy. Controlled burns? Bad for air. Logging to reduce forest density? Bad for the owls. Focus on replacing ancient transmission lines? Nah, we're building wind farms.
So who are you going to believe? The former President of the United States backed by the scientists or a nobody?
And, if you are a climate denier, that still doesn't believe, no matter what a former President of the United States says, what do you do about it? Particularly when all the best scientists agree with the former President of the United States.
I guess there are two available strategies.
The first strategy is to appeal to peoples' selfish interests. If you are campaigning in Pennsylvania, which has benefited enormously from the fracking revolution, you say that the Green New Deal will cost Pennsylvania jobs.
This is, after all, the strategy of the anti-capitalists for the last 150 years. Doesn't matter that the economics says that capitalism is great, that real per-capita income is up by 30 times in 200 years. When a factory closes down or a CEO makes a fortune, a Robert Reich will show up to blame "robber barons." And it works.
But pro-Green New Deal Joe Biden goes to Pennsylvania and declares that he won't ban fracking. Yep, and I gotta bridge to sell you.
The second strategy is to capitalize on failures of prophecy. Science is science: it is merely a technique for trying to understand how the world works. It has achieved amazing results, particularly in the last 500 years, particularly in the last century. But whenever science makes predictions about the future, it is still prophecy, just as in the old days. That is because science is not the final word on how the universe works; it is just the latest human attempt to figure out what is going on. Thus Kant: we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.
Only, modern science is a lot better at predictions than the old methods of divination and examination of intestines. Still, weather forecasting, despite the biggest computers in the business, is still a pretty chancy affair. So is hurricane prediction. So is stock-market prediction. So is climate modeling.
Ultimately a failure of prophecy is what will kill off the climate change religion. But not yet. For the climate-change enthusiasts have cunningly arranged that just about everything is a confirmation of climate change.
And it doesn't matter that Karl Popper declared that science isn't science unless it opens itself to "falsification." He meant that if everything is interpreted as confirmation of your theory you do not have science, you have prophecy.
The way real science works is the confirmation of general relativity in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington. Einstein's relativity predicted that light passing close to a heavy body like the sun would be slightly bent. Because space is curved by gravitation. And it was.
So, using the bones and the entrails of general relativity math, Einstein prophesied that light from a star would be bent as it grazed the surface of our Sun. And he was right.
The best way to understand prophecy is the helpful book When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. It's about a UFO cult in the late 1940s predicting that a UFO would come and rescue them before the Earth was destroyed. It didn't, and the Earth was not destroyed. Oops.
But a cult doesn't collapse the day after the predicted end-of-the-world. It takes a while. So even if the global temperatures stop increasing -- say, due to a new grand solar minimum -- it won't change minds, not right away. But a while after the failure of prophecy, the cult starts to break up, to make room for the next great prophetic cult.
Meanwhile, you can blame electrical blackouts on climate crazies. You can blame soaring electrical rates on climate activists. You can resist restrictions on automobile use. You can let billion-dollar light-rail projects wither on the vine. And you can vote against politicians that want to raise your taxes and kill your job.
What you cannot expect to do is discredit the ruling-class narrative. Not yet.
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