The decline and fall of the global warming myth

It has not been a good year for global warming alarmists. From last December's catastrophe in Copenhagen to the recently ended comic farce in Cancun, the climate change racket has been rapidly running out of steam. In one of the first post-mortems for the movement that once dreamed green dreams of a carbon-free utopia, Phillip Stott analyzes the factors involved in the "lingering death" of the "global warming grand narrative."

To understand a little of what is happening to the global warming grand narrative, we should turn to psychological theory, to what is generally known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This was first developed by the humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow, in his 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motiviation, and fully expounded later in his 1954 book, Motivation and Personality. Basically, Maslow proposes a hierarchy of five levels of basic human needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of need exist. These include needs for understanding, aesthetic appreciation, and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on. His hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization.

A recent ‘Newsletter’ (‘Only one crisis at a time’, July 23, 2010) from the Scientific Alliance cogently analyses the present situation in Maslowian terms:

“We can also see this partly as another dimension of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As our basic needs are fulfilled and life gets more secure, so we place more emphasis on higher tiers. This rationalises our increasingly rights-based culture and the rise and entrenchment of environmentalism in everyday life. Subsistence farmers or poor labourers have more pressing needs to fulfil. But the obverse of this is that, as short-term, pressing threats are lifted, we have time to focus on longer-term or less urgent ones.

By this reckoning, there would need to be some fairly significant changes for the present obsession with climate catastrophism to be replaced. The economic crisis has already played some part: it is virtually impossible to deliver radical and expensive policies at a time when painful cuts are being made in spending on basics such as welfare and education. A hypothetical contact with an alien civilization could at some stage again shift our focus.

But there is another crisis which is almost upon us. The chances are that energy insecurity will hit us in the next few years. Ignoring the Peak Oil arguments for now, there is a looming gap in electricity generating capacity as ageing coal- and nuclear- powered stations are decommissioned and at least part of the slack is unrealistically expected to be taken up by a large expansion of renewable power generation.”

It appears that, the higher we move up the Maslow pyramid, the greater is our need for theoretical, manufactured, future ‘catastrophes’. ‘Global warming’ thus comprised the classic ‘need’ of the ‘loads-of-money’ generation. But, we are now plunging back to reality, so that we no longer require this particular ‘catastrophe’ for our psychological fulfilment. Of course, new ‘catastrophes’ will surely arise to replace it, and they are already doing so, in the guise of food and energy security, and genetic choices, among many others.

Likewise, climate will continue to change, as it has always done. We must only hope that we have not undermined our ability to adapt to these changes, as and when they arise, and that science has not been too damaged by the Lysenkoistic grand narrative of global warming.

By contrast, I predict that global warming will now suffer a lingering death, as with so many other grand narratives that have gone before it, although there will always be a rump of adepts speaking in its tongues and propounding the faith, especially, I suspect, in the UK and its universities.

Meanwhile, if you need further evidence of the demise of this grandiose hoax, consider the number of left-leaning scientists who are abandoning ship, most notably, Canadian physicist Dennis Rancourt.

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said.

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Summing up the gist of both articles, Melanie Phillips suggests a (seasonal) change in terminology.

A telling point, surely. The modern activist wants jam with everything. Well-heeled Greens rail against capitalism and technological progress while personally benefiting hugely from their unique bounty. In similar vein, militant atheists rail against Judeo-Christian ethics while wanting to retain the human rights these codes have uniquely bestowed upon western society. As such, maybe Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ might be refined for the western intelligentsia to become a ‘hierarchy of humbug’.