Thursday, August 16, 2007
Global Warming, What Is It Good For?
[ via Denis Dutton ]
This excerpt from a book by renowned scientist Freeman Dyson is bracing in its clarity and depth. It is about the delusional thinking surrounding global warming. The man is 82 and has the vitality, originality and involvement you associate with engaged youth. Going against the memes is never easy, but Dyson, in the excerpt, does so with a gentle ease.
One example, a profound distinction Dyson identifies in the current discussions about climate change:
The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.
It doesn't take much to extrapolate the "naturalists" into their true selves on the extremist Left. (The paleo-Right, the Pat Buchanan cabal, is equivalent on other issues.) Varying groups on the self-defined progressive Left see as the central problem in the world the actions of the United States and use "Bush" as a proxy for this argument. They don't want the US to touch the "ecology" of the world but to let things play themselves out without US intercession. The hypocrisy is constantly bobbing to the surface. When these same groups speak about Darfur they say "the world is doing nothing." Do they mean Japan, Belgium, France? Although the press buys the claims of these extremist groups -- which are anti-Western culture, anti-US, anti-Israel and in general anti-US allies -- as belonging to the activist Left, in fact these naturalists, as Dyson calls them, are reactionary ideologues.
Sometimes it feels as though some insane viral spirit is running loose, catalyzed by the internet into a giant spreading fog, adhering to any superficially appealing idea, which it then obscures, in the process spawning its opposite with which to then do battle; yet another Manichean struggle of half-understanding in public debates already rife with polarization -- where the noise cancels the thinking. Blessedly, Dyson is immune to the siren call of extremist ideology, honorably considering the alternatives and their claims.