I see parallels between Operation Global Warming and Operation COVID. In this post, I will outline the analytical framework. I will do that mostly by asking questions that I will explore as time goes by.
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How should I understand the global-warming issue? Here are some questions that I’m going to address in upcoming blogs.
Is Earth warming? Are humans responsible? To what degree is Earth either warming or cooling? To what degree are humans responsible for either? How consequential is carbon dioxide to the Earth’s climate? How well do we understand Earth’s climate? Is there actually a climate crisis? How do we know? What factors have we identified as determinant of our climate? How do they interact? Is the greenhouse effect a minor or major factor in determining Earth’s climate? Is it sensible to reduce Earth’s climate to one factor: the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Is there really a climate crisis?
How do we know what we know about Earth’s climate? How is research undertaken on this issue? How is scholarship produced? Where is the science debated? How is it funded? Which research agendas will further your career and ensure funding and which will shut you out of conferences, get you de-platformed, and fast-track you to a life of penury?
How did I come to accept the notion that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gases? Who convinced me of that? (I can’t remember how or when that happened.) However did I come to believe that the Earth’s complex climate was determined by one simple mechanism (the greenhouse effect)? Did the media and educational institutions attempt to educate me or did they bully me into accepting a ludicrous narrative? Was I aware of the difference along the way? To address these questions is to probe my relationship to society, to authority, to power, to Earth itself. This last point is crucial: to love Nature and, hence, life itself, is surely to respect its truths. What does it mean to commit myself to a false narrative about the nature of Nature? Does that not alienate me from Nature?
Why is it that the media accepts the claims of anybody who follows the global-warming crisis narrative, but demands full academic credentials for those who question even one aspect of the orthodoxy? The same is true of COVID and virology. No one can question the COVID orthodoxy without academic degrees to their credit. However, if a doctor or scientist does question the narrative, they are stripped of their license and academic position, rendering them, instantly, unqualified.
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After the fall of the USSR in 1991, I was studying the new geopolitical landscape. I was concerned about the fate of the world subject to the unchecked power of the American Empire. I heard a general with the Canadian Forces ruminating about what might take the place of the Soviet Union as the unifying bogeyman of the Empire. (He didn’t put it quite like that.) He suggested terrorism as a good candidate. At the time, I dismissed his proposal as ridiculous. I didn’t question that Washington would come up with some enemy to rally Americans in support of the continued expansion of the Empire. (What is known as the Cold War was a short phase in the expansion of capitalism globally, begun five centuries earlier.) I just thought that terrorism would never fit the bill. I was wrong. That was brought home to me in spectacular fashion on 9/11. I hadn’t understood how slippery the concept of terrorist could be.
But there was so much else going on at the time whose significance I didn’t understand. I wasn’t making connections in the 1990s even though everything was already taking shape before me. The Empire had other strategies in play. Its goal was expansion. Expansion to the ends of the Earth. (That much I knew.) The American Empire had always identified and suppressed any potential challenge to its rule. There were already a couple of coals in the imperial fire that I hadn’t identified as relevant: contagious disease and global warming. Both could be marshalled as excuses to intervene on a global scale. The right virus could be said to threaten everybody on Earth, requiring access to, and control of, the actual bodies of all humans. Unimaginable power! Schwabian power! And, if a climate emergency could be found for which humans were to blame and all life was in the balance, then the Empire would be morally called upon to act globally. As it happens, global warming was placed on the global agenda in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio, the year after the USSR could no longer be passed off as a threat to the free world.
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Both COVID and global warming reduce complex science to a simple formula. A deadly virus is spreading from victim to victim. Carbon dioxide, released by humans, is causing the Earth to warm to catastrophic levels by means of the greenhouse effect. In both cases, individuals, societies, and the entire global population are called to action as both victims and perpetrators. If you don’t wear a mask, you kill your neighbours. If you drive a car, you contribute to the end of all life on Earth. If you don’t get vaccinated, you allow the virus to spread. If you don’t support the green new deal, you don’t love this planet. As a good Catholic boy, I was early-on initiated into the power of guilt to control others. And that is fundamental to this ultimate, global power play. Just ask the propagandists enlisted to manipulate us. If you can find them.
In both cases – COVID and global warming – international organizations have assumed leadership roles in governing the crises: the United Nations in the case of global warming and the World Health Organization for COVID and the inevitable future pandemics. These are the most influential bodies whose resolutions can be binding on all nations. Moreover, in both cases, the general population accepts the premises of the problems. The science, in the minds of ordinary people, is settled. Orthodoxy has crowded out and suffocated the scientific method. The educational system and popular culture has inculcated the unfounded principles of virology in the population. While there is no evidence that viruses exist – let alone that they can spread and cause illness – the idea is thoroughly embedded in the medical establishment and in daily life. And, for a couple of generations, the media has been relentless in establishing the destructive potential of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Again in this case, the educational system is actually crude indoctrination. Critical thinking is being outlawed throughout societies. In schools!
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This is going to take an indeterminate number of posts to explore. Starting now.