Chuck Grimes
> Oh, goodie. Now we have some attainable environmental goals, thanks to
> Bjorn. After all, if the global environment isn't that bad, then why
> make it any better, when we can still make it a whole worse and get
> away with it?
>
> I am heading out to change my oil and pour it down the storm
> drain. Hell the Bay can take, Bjorn the chipper environmentalist says
> so.
Max Sawicky:
> It is an empirical question, after all.
In a Usenet "debate" a few years ago about global warming, I thought I'd do as I have often done with other issues: look up a few web pages with the science on them and blow my right-wing opponents out of the water. To my surprise I discovered that there was no science in the sense of conclusions derived from phenomena -- only simulations and hypotheses. But science is about conclusions derived from phenomena; simulations are about theories, and are of not more than entertainment (or pomo lit-crit) interest unless they match up to phenomena. I thought this was remarkable.
It seems that this sort of thing has also occurred with the question of population. Nobody knows how many humans there are in the world, but wildly varying figures have been pulled out of hats and presented as fact, often with warnings of imminent dire consequences which have failed to appear. The fact is, the population of the world could be declining. No one knows.
Again, in the case of resources, the exhaustion of numerous critical raw materials and the subsequent crash of Western Civ were widely advertised beginning in the 1960s. Nothing like this has occurred. Rush Limbaugh was derided for going on the radio and saying there was more forest cover in 1990 than in 1890, but he was correct and his critics were not.
If I were to discuss labor, money, living standards, political relations, crime, the "justice" system, war, the interests of non-human animals, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, the practices of various religions, diet, poverty, police brutality, the death penalty, real estate, homelessness and so forth, I could get reliable facts supporting a leftist position. But environmentalism, except for its religious elements, has apparently been dominated by people who feel it is all right to make stuff up and claim that it's factual. I believe this practice is going to create enormous difficulty for advancing very reasonable concerns about environment in the future, and I wonder why it happened. The first thing that comes to mind is that, unlike other leftish concerns, environmentalism is cool with upper- and middle-class people, so the bourgeois practice of constantly lying about everything may have come into play.