Climate Change is making us stupid: Roger Pielke

Very big indeed.  Via Judith Curry.

Last nite, Roger Pielke Jr tweeted:

Pres Obama SOTU climate comments perfectly illustrate Sarewitz’s piece on how climate change is making us stupid: [link]

Excerpts:

Of course, even if the climate change apocalypse that Kingsnorth accepts as inevitable magically failed to materialize, every one of my dire predictions would still be likely to come true. Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.

It’s actually hard not to sympathize with Kingsnorth. He’s sad about how things are changing; he likes nature the way it is now, not the way it was before humans settled in Ireland, or not the way it will be after another 100 years of human’s muddling through from one crisis to the next, desperately clinging to technology as the eternal antidote to our follies. The real problem is the hysterics  who insist, often in the name of science, that all the suffering to come will have only one true cause, and that redemption can be achieved only by following one true path. No matter that long and sad human experience teaches us where such absolute orthodoxies lead. Indeed, with climate change being blamed for almost everything these days, the one phenomenon that seems to have escaped the notice of scientists, environmentalists and the media alike is that, perhaps above all, climate change is making us stupid.