Every social movement bottoms out and falls apart sooner or later.
Some of them, like communism, fail because they don't take human nature into account. Some fail because they are simply unworkable or out of touch with reality, like the "transgender" social contagion that seems to be slowly fading away. And some fail because people start to see through the arguments of the social movement's proponents - especially when those proponents are raging hypocrites.
Which brings us back to the climate scolds. In an editorial Monday in the Wall Street Journal, writer Barton Swaim describes how the climate-change hysteria is losing adherents and may be falling apart.
Momentous social movements begin to die the moment adherents figure out their leaders don’t believe what they say. Liberal Protestantism’s long decline started in the 1950s, when congregants began to wonder if their ministers still believed the old creeds (they didn’t). Communism dies wherever it’s tried because sooner or later the proletariat realize their self-appointed champions aren’t particularly interested in equality. Many sects and cults dwindle the moment their supposedly ascetic leaders are revealed to be libertines.
Something similar is happening to climate ideology.
For three decades you were labeled a crank, a “climate denier,” someone who pigheadedly rejects “settled science,” if you didn’t embrace the belief that life on earth faces imminent extinction from “global warming” and, later, “climate change.” The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.
This isn't the first, and far from the only, time a social contagion has grasped an entire field of inquiry. What's more, this time it isn't from simple ignorance, as was the case in some instances in the past - when was the last time you saw a phrenologist or had a doctor talk to you about adjusting your humors? But the latter-day climate scolds can't claim such ignorance.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there's so much the climate scolds know that just isn't so. One of the chief things they don't know is the scale of the Earth's systems, the systems that they think humans can control.
Were scientists really so confident they understood what was happening with sunbeams in the upper atmosphere, or that they knew how to gauge accurately the temperature of roughly 200 million square miles of the Earth’s surface, or that they knew how to compare present-day temperatures with those that obtained 50, 100, 1,000 or 5,000 years ago? Or, more important still, that they knew what political and economic measures would mitigate the theoretical apocalypse they inferred from these mountains of data?
I'll take exception with one word Mr. Swaim uses here. These aren't scientists. Scientists don't work that way. They may have been educated in the sciences at one point (as was I), but they have abandoned the necessary skepticism and scrutiny that the scientific method requires. They are now activists, and that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
The facts are these: This planet is huge beyond our comprehension. There are millions of influences on local weather and global climate, and we can't hope to fully understand them all. Does human activity have an effect? Yes, but it's impossible to measure every effect, and a warming climate doesn't justify destroying our modern, technological lifestyle. Does the planet have a thermostat? No, not as such. Can we humans set that thermostat? No. Should we try? No, not unless we want to take the chance of screwing things up. We can't screw up the earth, mind you - but we can screw ourselves up.
It's as I've been writing and saying for decades: The earth's climate has, through its long history, changed. Through most of that history, it's been warmer than it is now. As recently as the Miocene there were no polar ice caps. It is the height of human arrogance to assume that we know what the planet's correct temperature range is, or that we can set that thermostat.
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Worse, the climate scolds can't defend their hypocrisy. That's what a lot of people are starting to take notice of. Mr. Swaim writes:
But what has finally convinced ordinary people that the doomsayers are wrong isn’t any interpretation of climate figures. It is the palpable sense that very few of the doomsayers believe what they say.
Why aren’t the moguls and corporate executives who claim to be unnerved by the predictions of climate science giving up their carbon-heavy lifestyles and living in caves—or at least in simpler dwellings than mansions? If progressive VIPs in media, politics and entertainment believe sea levels are ready to rise precipitously, why do they keep buying properties in Martha’s Vineyard, Bar Harbor, Provincetown, Santa Monica and Malibu?
Ay, that's the rub. The hypocrisy of monied elites jetting off in private aircraft to the various climate summits, there to dine on Wagyu beef and truffles while they wag their fingers at regular folk who drive gas-powered cars and keep their houses warm or cool - that's what voters are finding intolerable, and it may well be that arrogant condescension, that rank hypocrisy, that dooms the climate panic-mongers.
As I've said and written many times: I will start to take the proponents of climate change more seriously when they start acting as though they were actually worried about climate change.
