Blog

How Not to Save the Planet

With an unseasonably cold spring comes a new wave of alarmism regarding global warming, of all things. The science of climate change is rife with political interest on both sides of the issue, so it should be useful to cut through the veneer of “science” (which is often just the ideologically charged opinions of scientists) to the actual facts that are known, and we will arrive at a picture that is quite different from either of the standard views on global warming.

First, we should observe that global climate and weather is a complex, non-linear system with far too many feedback parameters to solve analytically. All models of climate and weather involve probabilistic guesses and estimates of parameters based on past observations in similar conditions. This is why long-range weather forecasting is mathematically impossible, and even short-range forecasts are often wildly inaccurate. Estimating something like “global” climate can be a misleading construct, as the “global climate” is just a mathematical synthesis or average of quite disparate regional climates. A polar climate may become warmer while the climate of a temperate zone becomes cooler. Net global increase or decrease in temperature may or may not affect items of interest such as sea level rise or the greenhouse effect. Geographic distribution of climate is every bit as important as the overall average, arguably more so.

Since climate and weather models depend on previous data in order to estimate parameters, the science of global climate is essentially limited to data from the last half century. Earlier data is not truly global, and anything older than 200 years is almost certainly confined to Eurasia and America. Our estimates of long-scale historical trends are largely based on qualitative European accounts of rivers freezing, malaria outbreaks, and other indications of climate. On the geological scale, we can measure the carbon dioxide content of the ancient atmosphere, and though this is correlated to temperature, it is not the sole determinant of temperature.

Our knowledge of the historical and ancient past provides some apparently conflicting information, which often gets lost in the all-or-none approach to anthropogenic climate change. On the one hand, the carbon dioxide level of our atmosphere is higher than it is been in ages, almost since the time of the dinosaurs. Yet, despite this fact, the current global temperature is not dramatically hotter than that of recorded history; indeed the temperature of Europe was probably warmer during the medieval period. Even in the past century and a half of accelerated industrialization, global temperature has crept up slowly, in fact decreasing in the mid-twentieth century, before increasing only a fraction of a degree Celsius per decade. Indeed, it is debatable whether global temperature has risen so much as a full degree this century, such is the measurement error involved in a global average.

The synthesis of these observations points to a strange conclusion. Although human industrial activity is certainly correlated to a dramatic rise in carbon dioxide levels, this has not sufficed to raise global temperature as much as we might expect. This suggests that, were it not for human activity, we might still be in the “Little Ice Age” that extended from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Global warming, what little there may be, is actually helping to keep the temperature reasonable. This is not necessarily a reason to be blase about future environmental change.

Thre remain serious concerns about ozone depletion and polar cap melting, which in theory could have catastrophic effects. Ozone depletion has already been addressed by a ban on cholofluorocarbons and freon, which are chemically capable of depleting ozone, assuming they actually rise to the ozone layer in sufficient quantities. Polar cap melting is projected to cause a rise in ocean levels by tens of centimeters, not meters, over the next century. This can cause serious crises in some regions, but there will not be any global cataclysm.

Built into the notion of “saving the planet” from some fictional calamity, be it a rogue asteroid or a global tsunami, is the fantasy that man can be his own savior, along with the equally vain belief that man is capable of destroying the planet. Global industrial activities have negligible climactic effects compared to, say, Krakatoa-scale eruptions that can cover a third of the world in darkness and cold. Man is but a caretaker of this planet, not its savior, and if he really wishes to improve the environment, he should try a different approach than the policy-wonking regulation of carbon emissions. Such regulations have only yielded the farce of exchanging carbon credits, and the ridiculously energy-wasteful enterprise of corn-based biofuels, which has driven up the cost of agricultural products in the United States.

Instead of creating a new industry of planet-saving, people should recall their role as caretakers and conservators and learn to consume less, not because they will “save the planet,” but because they ought to make good use of natural goods rather than waste them on frivolities. Yet as long as consumerism and frivolity are considered virtues, environmental do-gooders might as well try to empty the ocean a bucket at a time. Our wastefulness may bring no danger of destroying the planet, but it does threaten our existence as serious human beings.

Sharia and the Weberian State

The brouhaha raised in Britain over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s suggestion that sharia law be partially legitimized has exposed the statism at the core of secularism and the fragility of the truce that traditional cultures have made with one another through liberalism. Secularist peace comes at the price of ethnic and religious identity; man is freed from his church and neighbor only to be enslaved by the state, which claims unlimited jurisdiction over civil society.

Several forces combined to create the excessive reaction to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ comments. First, sharia itself is popularly demonized as being brutal or barbaric, in the sense of endorsing draconian violence and not respecting liberal ideals regarding gender equality, apparently forgetting that these are less than a century old, and we can hardly expect all rational people to share our arbitrary mores. This line of criticism ignores the fact that Dr. Williams only proposed applying sharia in the way that Jewish courts are applied to financial and marital contracts, as a civil arbitration agreed to by both parties, so there is no question of coercion. Further, as Dr. Williams points out, sharia is not a monolithic system of law, but a method of jurisprudence applicable only to Muslims who voluntarily submit to the law, so it is not incompatible with pluralism.

Another point of criticism is found in the Archbishop’s astonishing statement that for citizens “to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state” with all other commitments being private in character “is a very unsatisfactory account of political reality in modern societies.” He attacks the heart of liberal political theory, which takes pride in equality before the law, without regard for personality. Before the so-called Enlightenment, political philosophy was more sophisticated on this point, recognizing that laws ought to be tailored to local circumstances and customs, and that there is no one-size-fits-all system of government or law. This political wisdom was retained in the federal system of the United States in the nineteenth century, though this was gradually undermined in favor of a European model of increased centralization. The centralized state had expanded at the expense of local government and civil society long before the French Revolution; indeed, the revolutionaries simply inherited the marvelous administrative apparatus of the ancien regime. As liberal democracy spread, clerical and aristocratic privileges were abolished, so all political power was consolidated in the state. In the process, the state acquired powers historically foreign to it, including the regulation of marriage and private financial matters.

These historical developments have led to a profoundly statist European culture that views any attempt by businesses, churches, or other institutions to assert their legal independence as cause for alarm. In the case of churches, a panic over theocracy arises whenever a church refuses to submit to the generic morality of the state. Such fears are thoroughly irrational, as the state, being far more powerful than any church, is a far greater threat to liberty than any ecclesiastical bogeymen. The masses flee the supposed tyranny of traditional institutions to labor under the much heavier yoke of modern government, which levies higher taxes than any ancient tyrant ever dared, and claims unlimited jurisdiction over all human affairs. This idolatrous concept of the state, circumscribed by neither natural nor divine law, was candidly described by Max Weber as the monopolization of the legitimate use of force, and of lawmaking. Today, the Weberian state so jealously guards its monopoly over violence, that it would pretend to have authority to decide whether parents may spank their children. Where one stands on such an issue is only of secondary importance; what matters is that the state actually claims the right to decide the issue, as for all human affairs. The state alone can coerce; the state alone can demand obedience, while other institutions only meekly request it of their members.

In the United States and much of the Americas, statist tendencies are checked by a robust cultural heritage of limited government, but in most of Western Europe, including Britain, statism is conventional wisdom. Indeed, the more stridently secularist parties tend to have the firmest conviction that the state ought to have plenary jurisdiction over civil society. The fatal mistake of statist liberalism is to mistake democracy as the basis of liberty, when the real basis of liberty is limited government. A state with absolute sovereignty is just as tyrannical whether it is monarchically or democratically constituted.

Rowan Williams has touched a sore nerve by pointing out that liberal democracy contradicts its promise of tolerance and multiculturalism by insisting on a uniform rule of law, without regard for what is reasonable in specific cultural contexts. By doing so, liberal governments deny many groups “the right to speak in their own voice”, as when they pass laws and rulings that admit no exception for religious conscience, defining their secularist views (often a minority opinion!) as the basis for what is reasonable, coherent and acceptable. It would seem they do not despise tyranny so much as they prefer their own sort of tyranny.

Archbishop Williams did not dare to suggest that the state’s sovereignty be circumscribed, but only proposed that people may voluntarily submit to other sources of authority. He is not ready to abandon the Weberian state, but even the concession that there should be any human authority besides the state is too much for many secularists to bear, even though in fact Britain already allows civil arbitration by religious courts. Hatred of religion is strong enough in some to make them forget their contempt of bureaucrats and strenuously endorse the monopoly of the state.

Just as the Romans subverted all local cultures and religions by including foreign gods in the Roman pantheon and requiring only that Caesar be worshipped universally, so too does liberalism undermine the freedom of local culture, as witnessed by the devastation of French and Italian rural cultures, replacing them with an increasingly amorphous, bland consumerism. The great paradox of the Enlightenment is that supposed political liberty has led to cultural homogenization, masked by a bewildering diversity of consumer goods. This is because the only social mores that are enforceable are those of the state. With the magnitude of modern states, an individual’s vote counts for practically nothing, and in fact he can do little to alter the bureaucratic system in which he is enmeshed. He is nominally a citizen, but practically a subject, and if he calls himself an atheist, he should be humbled to learn he is no less a slave of Caesar than the most superstitious pagan.

In addition to the issues raised by Dr. Williams, sharia presents a special challenge to the West in that it does not recognize a neat distinction between religious and civil law (a medieval European development), much less a Weberian concept of the state and civil society. In Islam, society is an integrated whole. One does not need to share this holistic view of society to present a stumbling block to the liberal model; one only needs social principles at odds with those of the liberal state. The social peace of liberalism is a sort of devil’s peace where all one’s enemies are dead or enslaved, as all institutions are silent before the overwhelming force of the state (or more realistically, the state and its friends in the private sector). The Weberian state can make life materially pleasant, but woe to the one who conscientiously prefers a distinct set of social principles, not to be relegated to the ghetto of “private” activity.

Reactionary Progressives

In a scene straight from the nineteenth century, some leftist intellectuals declared a “settimana anticlericale” in protest of Pope Benedict’s proposed visit to La Sapienza university. Seemingly unaware of any anachronism, the proponents of this “anticlerical week” resorted to tired agitprop tactics, trotting out the same rhetoric against ecclesiastical tyranny that is so woefully out of touch with the benign papacy of Benedict XVI.

As the extreme left has been reduced to fabricating controversy in order to justify their anti-Catholic prejudice, the putative cause of outrage in this instance is an earlier comment by the Pope, dredged up from years earlier, to the effect that the Galileo trial was “reasonable and just.” These men of science, mostly physicists, who claim to advocate critical thinking, neglected to note that then-Cardinal Ratzinger was quoting an agnostic philosopher, the Austrian Paul Feyerband, in the context of examining several different philosopher’s perspectives on Galileo. The erudite Ratzinger is capable of far more sophisticated treatment of differing opinions than these self-appointed apostles of enlightenment, who react with knee-jerk advocacy, and laughably still espouse a “warfare hypothesis” interpretation of the Galileo trial that all serious historians have long abandoned.

The Enlightenment exhausted its philosophical possibilities decades ago, as evidenced by the strange paradox of eminent scientists immersed in nineteenth-century materialist philosophy, anticlericalism, and a puerile understanding of history as a conflict between “religion” and “science,” as though these were discrete, exclusive entities. How ironic that this ignorance should manifest itself in a university founded by a pope seven hundred years ago, when the Church was the sole institution that took any interest in fostering science. Aside from preserving practically everything we know of our classical heritage, and supporting most scholarly endeavors in Europe through the seventeenth century, the Church did nothing for science. The leftist faculty and students at La Sapienza could hardly be more decrepit if they called themselves Marxists and wore unkempt beards, as they are still fighting battles of a hundred years ago, apparently unaware of how the Church has long since risen above them. I have always found it curious how the term “reactionary” is reserved for conservative elements, when it is abundantly clear that much of the thinking on the far left is purely a reaction out of knee-jerk antipathy toward ecclesiastical institutions. The Enlightenment was supposed to raise mankind to adulthood, but instead it has yielded a culture that is thoroughly adolescent.