I've been trying for some time to understand the psychology of apparently intelligent people who seem to accept so readily that the very small percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere, currently around 404 parts per million, could be a serious threat to the climate and our future well-being.
Those who have a basic understanding of science must surely appreciate that the enormous complexity and chaotic nature of our ecosystems, weather patterns and climate, and particularly the long periods of time involved before climate-change trends become apparent, make any sound predictions of future climate, outside the scope of the scientific methodology.
However, I'm not advocating that we shouldn't at least try to understand the processes that affect climate, even though it's too difficult to be certain about the role of one particular factor, such as a small increase in atmospheric CO2.
I recently came across the following scholarly paper which discusses the issue from a cultural perspective. Access is free.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00266.xI'll quote a few selected paragraphs to give you an idea of the issues addressed.
"Abstract
We are living in a climate of fear about our future climate. The language of the public discourse around global warming routinely uses a repertoire which includes words such as ‘catastrophe’, ‘terror’, ‘danger’, ‘extinction’ and ‘collapse’. To help make sense of this phenomenon, the story of the complex relationships between climates and cultures in different times and in different places is in urgent need of telling. If we can understand from the past something of this complex interweaving of our ideas of climate with their physical and cultural settings, we may be better placed to prepare for different configurations of this relationship in the future."
"Conventional attempts at conquering the climatic future all rely, implicitly or explicitly, upon ideas of control and mastery, whether of the planet, of global governance or of individual and collective behaviour. These attempts at ‘engineering’ future climate seem a degree utopian and brash. Understanding the cultural dimensions of climate discourses offers a different way of thinking about how we navigate the climatic future."
"Climate has always carried a precarious and ambiguous meaning for humans. Our physical evolution was forged through amplitudes of climate change – through dangerous encounters with climate – unknown to modern humans, while our cultural evolution has involved a variety of ways of mythologizing and taming the out‐workings of Nature's climate. The trail of the flood myth, for example, can be traced through many early cultures, most notably in the mono‐theistic tradition of the Biblical Flood of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The intimacy of relationship between culture and climate is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Egypt and the Nile. The climatic pulsing of the river through annual and seven‐yearly cycles gave – and still gives – life, sustenance, shape and meaning to Nilotic cultures."
"Climate as judgement
Experiences of extreme weather have long been interpreted by individuals and cultures as signifiers of divine blessing or judgement (Glacken 1967; Boia 2005). The relationship between God and climate, especially drought, portrayed in the early Jewish scriptures makes very clear this particular reading of weather extremes, an interpretation of the capriciousness of climate that remained dominant in Western Europe through the later Middle Ages and well into the early modern period."
"Climate as pathology
The sustained European encounter with the tropics started in the sixteenth century and grew steadily during the imperial adventures of the nineteenth century. The experience of climates novel to Europeans was central to this encounter. Whilst these experiences laid to rest the classical fears of the torrid zone inducing human mutations, a new climatic pathology – a sense of the abnormal – was substituted. This pathology has been most clearly articulated using the lens of Victorian Britain and Empire by the cultural geographer David Livingstone in a series of articles over the last 20 years. Livingstone argues that the novel tropical climates encountered through European exploration and settlement, exactly because of their novelty and ‘otherness’, took on a pathological form. Attachments of fear, danger and foreboding to these climates easily followed, sentiments which had both physical and moral dimensions. In contrast to earlier pre‐Enlightenment narratives of fear about climate which arose from unknown causes, this new mentality was promoted through a fear of unknown climatic places."
"Climate as catastrophe
This brings us to an examination of our third discourse of fear and danger surrounding climate – the increasingly dominant portrayal of anthropogenic global climate change, or its avatar ‘global warming’, as global catastrophe. The early identification of the prospective human warming of global climate through releases of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere was rarely viewed as dangerous but, predominantly, as benign or beneficial. Thus, Arrhenius, writing in 1906, was able to state that global warming would allow future populations: 'to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind."
"The contemporary discourse of climate catastrophe may also be tapping into a deeper and non‐negotiable human anxiety about the future, an anxiety which is merely attaching itself at the current time to the portended climates of the future – future climates offered up to society by the predictive claims of science. Science has never before offered such putative knowledge of the far future, complete with uncertainty ranges, tipping points and probabilities, and so our fragile and nervous human psyche has latched onto such pronouncements with vigour. ‘Today our expertise and our worries turn towards the weather because our industrious know‐how is acting, perhaps catastrophically, on global nature. Climate change provides a conduit, a lightening rod, for materialising our immaterial angst. Yearley (2006) explores these ‘phenomenology of nature’ worries as exemplified in Bill McKibbin's classic book The end of nature (McKibbin 1989), and as more recently articulated in Jules Pretty's series of essays, The Earth Only Endures."
I hope this post will help to clarify the issue for many readers.
