The following, is a slight revision of an original text written in February 2019. It was an excessively long insert in a blog of mine, and it is to be read with consideration for my disclaimer about my later research.

By the year 2018-2019 climate change and global warming had come to be considered by the world's mass and social media as well as by "big science" and in the political discourse as being the main and most urgent problem of mankind because of apocalyptic visions about the future of humanity.

Scientific competence

I do not claim scientific competence in discussing whether these judgments on "the most urgent problem of mankind" are beyond any doubt but I wish to advance my doubts at the cost of being relegated to the role of "climate change denier" in the "global warming controversy" (as illustrated in particular in Sweden by individual cases of "dissidents", exemplified in English here, here, (and playfully here about Two Cheers for Heresy on Global Warming). Also in Swedish sites such as here. I must emphasize, however, that I see myself as competent for understanding what "scientific" means, and that I am wholly positive and supportive for the attempt to care for and improve environmental conditions and sustainability, only they are not made into the absolute most urgent universal priority among all ongoing suffering in the world. In this respect I am of the same opinion of the well-known physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson who, as summarized in Wikipedia, "is skeptical about the simulation models used to predict climate change, arguing that political efforts to reduce causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority."

Moralism

I do oppose the "moralistic" tone with which the supposedly established truth of global warming is presented as if it were no longer debatable, classifying dissidents as conspiracy theorists or worse. With due regard for the differences I sense that "climate change denial" is being regarded in a way that recalls former suspected God's denial or atheism, and in modern times Holocaust denial as much worse than atheism. In fact I suggest that climate moralism when it refers to the “Anthropocene” means simply that it sees Humans as substitutes for God in their unbridled exploitation of the world. It recalls in my mind, once more, Chesterton's controversial quotation that "A man who won't believe in God will believe anything". (Applied here as "who won't believe in God's Apocalypse must create his own".) And I would add that today who won't believe in God will substitute it with "science", something that becomes obvious when the one of the two main Swedish morning newspapers' editor in chief (Dagens Nyheter, November 1st 2020) inveighs in an editorial against the other newspaper for its "denial" of the climate crisis, where denial consisted in its affirming the need and right of questioning scientific findings established by the would be "scientific community" seen as represented the United Nations', UN's, climate panel IPCC. The second newspaper (Svenska Dagbladet), despite the famous democratic freedom of the press would not have the same (moral?) right as e.g. Wikipedia's accounting of criticism of IPCC. It is interesting to note the controversiality of anything that questions anything about climate change, and the risk of being classified as “denial”. An example is all the scientific fuss reported in a recent paper in Science (May 6, 2021) on “Does acidification alter fish behavior?” dealing with fraud allegations about evidence that ocean acidification - a knock-on effect of the rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) level in Earth’s atmosphere - has a range of striking effects on fish behavior, such as making them bolder and steering them toward chemicals produced by their predators.

Democracy or identity politics

In fact I believe that scientifically incompetent editors in chief, and many other people's vociferous commitment to save-the-climate movement, is less a commitment to godly democratic 18th century's "general will" or today's UN than an expression of "identity politics". I did already consider this in the section on "Censorship of talk about religion" of my article on Information and Theology. Even people who have not contributed in any way to determine and counter the dangers of global warming can cheaply feel proud by boasting about their understanding and approval of the "overwhelming scientific evidence" of an impending climatic catastrophe, and feel self-righteous for caring about the salvation of the whole humanity, with their own grandchildren to start with. As I write in a text on Information and Theology, "all this happens while they claim to worry for climate change that may affect their grandchildren but ignore present, ongoing massive suffering of neighbours or the poor all over the world (illustrated or exemplified by shocking videos and photos)." My scientific advisor West Churchman (1913-2004) who dedicates the whole first chapter of his last book (Thought and Wisdom, 1982) to "Future generations", kept repeating in his late life that about 40.000 children in the world died every day (not equivalent to child mortality) because of starvation and related causes. And this despite of worldwide availability of food, the problem being its distribution. A question arises about how long will we have to wait until additional 40.000 children die daily because of climate change: a change that is claimed to be a worldwide priority while world politics during more than a half a century could not agree to care of neither starving children nor for disarmament of nuclear weapons, which could wipe out climate and humanity in a few hours.

Asperger autism or technocracy

To begin with I wish to pay my recognition to the young schoolgirl Greta Thunberg for the final insight that fixed my present convictions and doubts. Her influence on my insight was accomplished after her becoming suddenly world famous at the age of 15, for her commitment to the struggle of combating global warming. It reminds the historical similar case of another girl, noted as her spiritual precursor who at age 12 also "silenced the world" at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, long before Internet social media that could have made her equally famous. Her name: Severn Cullis-Suzuki. Disregarding whether it is true that Thunberg's becoming famous was promoted by her involvement in a public-relations PR scandal or not the account is that in one of her interventions during a 15 minutes interview at the Swedish public television she acknowledged more specifically that her interest and commitment were related to her diagnosis of Asperger-autism. As I note elsewhere, her behavior also recalls the behavior attributed to supposed, so called indigo-children and displayed by cases of child prodigy at the edge of both infantile omnipotence and savant syndrome. It all means complex psychic trouble. She explained that she sees the world in a different perspective from the "outside", in black-and-white, and has difficulties to understand other people who get distracted by what she sees as empty talk in "social games". So, she acknowledges that the problem is exceedingly complicated but seen in black-and-white the solution is so simple that even a 5-years old child can understand it. Indeed I know of adults, not the least engineers, who seem to reason in these matters as a 5-years old child: "We" ("They") must simply make "them" ("us") stop emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It is also interesting to suspect the same psychic frame in highly if not excessively and exclusively gifted mathematical minds such as Alexander Grothendieck “considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the 20th century”. On the net can be found (as per 7 April 2021) an obituary asked by the prestigious Nature magazine where is mentioned (here below) his joining a political-ecological group Survivre et vivre [Survive and live], which recalls both the message of this present text of mine, as well the psychic problems associated with the mathematical mind as suggested by Jan Brouwer in my essay on computers as embodiment of mathematics and logic:

"In 1969, for reasons not entirely clear to anyone, he left the IHES where he had done all this work and plunged into an ecological/political campaign that he called Survivre. With a breathtakingly naive spirit (that had served him well doing math) he believed he could start a movement that would change the world. But when he saw this was not succeeding, he returned to math, teaching at the University of Montpellier."

I see some ultimate implications recalling William Akin's conceptualization of Technocracy and the American Dream where engineers are also managers and politicians. They may be able to determine behavior in their civil society but probably will not be able to limit ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide in poor needy countries and by armed forces in recurring wars and exercises on land, in air, water and ice all over the world. Least of all will they be able to counter the horrors of any war going on in the world right now, or ultimately the risk for a nuclear holocaust.

All this while Greta Thunberg engages in climate-change advocacy, such for a "lecture tour" from Europe to the USA in a supposedly climate-saving sailboat, a trip that despite all care, has been criticized for being more polluting than if she had taken an airline's round trip (see, in German, here in Die Welt 16 August 2019, and here). It is a premonition of what good old national and world politics and professionally planned PR efforts will make out of scared good naive children and good intentions: "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", which is one main tenet of the "system" idea. A hint: "Greta Thunberg and the plot to forge a climate warrior: The teenage activist wants nothing more than to change the world. The shadowy cabal behind her has other goals." (by Dominic Green, The Times, October 10 2019)

We, they, and the Church

In other words: discussions about who are "We", and the why there have been evil, wars, religion, philosophy, and diplomacy in the history of humanity, including the last two world wars, are relegated to "social games" and to "Them". It is an attitude that emotionally attracts the secularized general public that is tired of the of the complicacies of world's evil, corruption and suffering and feels the need of a natural innocence of childhood (that also may be a background for the ignored causes of pedophilia), all in oblivion of the theological meaning of Infant Jesus and of teachings of the Lord of the Flies. At the same time "we" show that we are morally superior, and in particular morally superior if we are children who teach adults to be more altruistic and to think about their children and future generations (instead of the fifth commandment "Honor your father and your mother", Exodus 20:12). As if adults did not do that already, think about at least their own grandchildren but must be taught by them to think about them. A child's reproach is then "Everybody thinks only about himself but I am the only one who thinks about me". Or "People only care about themselves; I'm the only one who cares about myself". It is related to "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." Compare with the Matthew 7:5 "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Children's plea for the adults to think more about them and their future instead of about other ongoing tragedies is then the only egoistic plea that serendipitously, with rhetorical power, can claim to be altruistic. This despite children not having had even the time to acknowledge the ongoing suffering and evil inte the world, the less so when autism implies difficulty to feel empathy.

The Berlin's bishop even experienced a Greta-inspired children's demonstration in April 2019 as reminding Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, while a deaconess in the Christian Protestant Uniting Church in Sweden declares (in Swedish) the very same schoolgirl to be God's prophet. Others criticize comparisons with a modern Joan of Arc. It is also a felicitous case of successful self-victimization and identity politics (children as a group) with its well-researched but often ignored smart advantages (cf. the last paragraph of my text on censorship of talk about religion). When adults allow themselves to remain or become childish it is children who teach and take the leadership (cf. the Bible, Isaiah 3:4,12). The title of one of the few sober reflections upon the Greta-phenomenon was as article about When children protest, adults should tell them the truth. Instead, it is a school child who happens to be invited to talk at the United Nations in order to tell the truth to the world and challenge the audience with “How dare you” to ignore science and the future of all children like me. One can wonder how such a speech would have been received at the League of Nations before the second world war, with a child warning about the calamities to come by listening to science and technology (of advanced weapons, c.f. the World Disarmament Conference), leading to the partial destruction of the world and death of millions of children, women and young men (and older men). The question is how would the child’s appeals and warnings have influenced the conduct of appeasement 1937-1939, the Chamberlain-Hitler negotiations and the Munich Agreement.

One main problem, however, appears when children, childish adults and adults cannot or do not want to listen to other adults. A psychologist may easily guess that especially an autistic school child will be tempted to substitute the authority of a cold emotional neutral “science” and “facts of science” for the authority of emotionally loaded own parents and her close teachers in school. For this to happen the child will certainly neither need to know anything about what a fact is or should be, nor which are the methods of science, whether they follow the tradition of logical positivism of whatever other unknown or controversial tradition. That is, the child will not know what science is or should be, for being listened to and by whom. It will be enough for the child to be sponsored by benevolent parents who hope that autism is superseded by passion for the cause, and by passionate specialized scientists in a new trendy specialty who do not feel responsible for couplings to any other science, and even less to new or old debates about the politics of science, not to mention morality and religion.

Environmentalism and the age gap

Concerning children and youngsters who are supposed to teach parents and elders: this is a text by and unknown author, which was sent to me from colleagues in Brazil and was also extracted from my blog. I translated it from the Portuguese and include it here because it portrays and denounces a perceived cultural decline that expresses itself in a supposed clash of values between the oldest generation and the younger ones. I do not know whether the text in Portuguese was an original. It is related to two earlier blog items of mine (below) written in Swedish, one about "Gamla och unga" [Elders and youngsters] and the other about "Fjäska inte för pensionärerna" [Do not butter up senior citizens], as well as to one item summarizing the whole matter, written in English with the title "Parents, adult children, childish adults - Inverted identities?". Their content ultimately suggests a meditation over the Bible's eschathological content in chapter Mark 13 and Matthew 10:21, such as "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death."

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In the supermarket queue, the cashier says to an old lady: "You should bring your own shopping bags, since plastic bags are not environmentally friendly.

The lady apologized and said, "There was no green wave in my time. The clerk replied, "That is exactly our problem today, ma'am. Your generation did not care enough about our environment.

"You're right," said the lady. Our generation did not care adequately about the environment. At that time, bottles of milk, bottles of soda and beer were returned to the store. The store sent them back to the factory, where they were washed and sterilized before each reuse, and they, the beverage makers, used the bottles, a few other times. We did not really care about the environment in our time. We went up the stairs because there were no escalators in the stores and offices. We walked to the store, instead of using our car, every time we needed to go two blocks from home. We did not worry about the environment. Even baby diapers were washed because there were no disposable diapers. The drying was done by ourselves, not in these machines electric dryers. Solar and wind energy really dried our clothes. The younger children wore the clothes that had been their older brothers', not new clothes. But it's true: there was no concern for the environment in those days. At that time we had only one TV or radio at home, not one TV in each room. And the TV had a 14-inch screen, not a stadium-sized screen which later will be discarded, as I do not know how. In the kitchen, we had to beat everything with our hands because there were no electric mixers, they do everything for us. When we sent something fragile in the mail, we used old paper as protection, not plastic bubble or plastic pellets that last five centuries to begin to degrade. In those days no gasoline engine was used to mow the lawn, a lawn mower was used that required muscles. The exercise was extraordinary, and you did not have to go to a gym and use treadmills that also work on electricity. But you're right: there was no concern for the environment at that time. We drank straight from the fountain when we were thirsty instead of using plastic cups and pet bottles that now flood the oceans. We reloaded our pens in ink countless times rather than buying another. We sharpened the razors, instead of throwing away disposable devices, when the blade missed the cut. Actually, we had a green wave at that time. At that time people would take the trolley car or buses and the boys would ride their bikes or walk to school, instead of using their parents as a 24 hour taxi service. There was only one outlet in each room, not a wall outlet on each wall to power a dozen appliances. And we did not need GPS to receive signals from satellites in space to find the nearest pizzeria. So it is not incredible that the current generation speaks so much in "environment", but does not want to give up anything and does not think of living a little like in my time!

Now that you have read this outburst, send it to your friends who are over 50 years old, and to the young people who have everything in their hands and only know how to criticize their elders !!!

A free class taught by an elderly woman considered outdated.

Consensus vs. we-they

My main point is that this illustrates what I did perceive also from engineering colleagues who are very committed to the struggle against global warming: as engineering researchers they gather scientific and mass media information about the empirical means by which a majority of climate scientists gather empirical data that are supposed to prove beyond any doubt the reality of global warming. Most important for them is to refer to (the Lockean) "consensus or tacit consent" of the majority of the world's relevant authorities", that is, one of reasons that determined the rejection of Galileo's findings. (This despite of the rejection of such "Galileo hypothesis" in the establishment's opposition to one main "skeptical" environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg). In doing this they also ignore more moderate views about the climate change as expressed (e.g. in Swedish, on Youtube) by authorities such as Lennart Bengtsson. and harassed scientifically lesser authorities such as (in Sweden) Lars Bern. After that they claim that "we" but ultimately "they", managers-politicians all over the world should "listen to researchers" (never the other way round except for getting research funds), and do something about it in order to limit the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If they don't it is a management failure or a failure of democracy that entitles to a sort of enlightened dictatorship by a strong and wise man or elite group, as suggested by philosophy professor Torbjörn Tännsjö in a Swedish TV program on global warming (Ekdal och Ekdal - Avsnitt 5: Klimat) 12 February 2019. This position of "we-they" ignores the controversy about fact-value distinction and assumes implicitly a positivistic view of the world inasmuch the engineers get relieved from any responsibility for the use and consequences of application of the technology they develop as long as they are paid by the managers-politicians to do that, while politicians and policy-makers are free to finance the development of whatever technology and gathering or creation of any facts that fosters their power and political goals, starting with their own political careers. This conundrum is well explained and developed in a classical publication by C.W. Churchman and A.H. Schainblatt: "The researcher and the manager: A dialectic of implementation" (Management Science, vol. 11, No. 4, Feb. 1965, pp. B69-B87, followed by extensive commentaries in "A dialectic of Implementation. Commentary", vol. 12, No. 2, Oct. 1965, pp. B1-B42).

But the girl mentioned above gets applauses from the emotionally moved masses who long for and welcome the strong leadership of a rhetorically powerful ("spiritual"?) leader, a need and hope expressed by the masses in times of perceived extreme crisis as in Germany before the second world war, where science, politics and people had reached consensus that the problem was (not climate but) living space, Lebensraum. No further comparison. See the contrast with the above mentioned famous biblical Isaiah 3:12 "As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them", notwithstanding its interpretational difficulties. They include the embarrassing observation that Isaiah reproaches the adults whose faults are penalized by such inversion of roles. And the energy of the leader-girl is powered now by both Asperger and by the trust in the power of established science, which I elsewhere show also powered the famous Lucifer effect of the Stanford prison experiment (cf. also the Milgram experiment). They are applauses for the girl's sincere rhetorical power, candid way of seeing reported facts, and for something that should be done by "them", democratic (Nietzschean?) supermen, politicians, and political systems around the world, supported by technology and economic means. Implied: "more of the same", more international regulations with sanctions guaranteed by supposed democratic powers, more engineering, social engineering and technology will save us from the environmental effects of technology, ignoring not only politics and most of the philosophy of technology, a field that often with wishful thinking announces the need for a (impossible) "moratorium" in the development of technology. Not even war imposes a moratorium on technology. On the contrary it has always stimulated its endemically misdirected development.

Political correctness and politics

The success of the campaign for stopping global warming has unleashed a worldwide storm in mass media and social media, whose structure is analog to the phenomenon #MeToo movement, and the hypothesis I advance on the subject, as in my review of a book by Howard S. Schwartz on political correctness. There, on #MeToo, i write the storm is a collective hysteria" or "mass psychosis" or "witch hunt" but must be regarded scientifically as a socio-psychological mass phenomenon of the type addressed originally by Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) including ideas in the books on the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841), lately by Douglas Murray's (2019), and incorporated by Carl Jung in psychological theory, and superficially resumed under Wikipedia's label of "Crowd psychology". Other particular hypotheses or attacks have been launched in media, exemplified by Ross Clark in The Spectator April 23rd 2019, Cory Morningstar (five parts or "acts") in The Art of Annihilation Jan-March 2019, Brendan O'Neill in Spiked April 22nd 2019, and the virulent "Emotional appeals for the Social Engineering" by Russ Winter in Winter Watch, September 25, 2019. All this was violently countered in other arenas such as The Huffington Post, April 26th 2019, indicating the infected field of emotional tensions and political exploitation from which children like Greta should have been protected and treated by adults who instead indulge in alleviating their burden and responsibility by giving free rein to troubled children's imagination. This should be so in order to counter the risk for ultimate serious and possibly mortal mental wounds: it is dangerous for a child to awaken and live through powerful "archetypal" roles such as Joan of Arc. The risk appears already when (especially privileged, informed) children get in panic about their announced calamitous future while experiencing their ignorance, impotence and hopelessness in an apparently indifferent adult world, to the point of wanting to sterilize themselves to spare catastrophes for their future children (cf. interviews in the Swedish Radio's "Konflikt" 30 nov. 2019) and paradoxically blaming the earlier generations): how far is such self-sterilization from the idea of suicide? Or when children feel downgraded when meeting accusations of serving political conspiracies or when confronted by serious, sharp criticism of the type that Swedish readers can read critical articles so far away as in Russia Today(11 Dec and 17 Dec 2019) and others analyzing democracy vs science (by Lena Andersson in Dagens Nyheter 28 September 2019) where politics meets ethics, if yet in deficient exclusively secular terms that are typical for Swedish intellectual life.

Other worries: poverty and weapons

The hype of the climate issue is probably in part due to that it creates a false but cheap impression of worldwide consensus on the basis of worldwide popular concern if not panic stimulated by various historical initiatives, some of them illustrated by the former USA's vice-president Al Gore's widely advertised "environmentalism". It enables politicians to divert public attention from efforts to solve highly sensitive and divisive, daily political issues about welfare, economics and justice. Such daily important permanent issues of poverty and famine can continue to be treated according to the old devise of "Divide and rule", while sacrifices are being required from both rich and (especially) poor for the indisputable sake of the climatic "survival of humanity". In the meantime "the truth about big oil and climate change" could be that "Even as concerns about global warming grow, energy firms are planning to increase fossil-fuel production. None more than ExxonMobil" (The Economist, Feb 9th 2019). It is interesting to see that such panic for the survival of humanity could not mobilize the world's political opinion for a nuclear weapons' disarmament of a few "advanced" nations of our planet. This to the point that a Daniel Ellsberg in an interview at the Swedish public television network, had to remind as in his book The Doomsday Machine (2017) that a nuclear weapon's conflagration has been and still must be considered as an impending immediate reality and a threat - to begin with - of deaths, destruction of the climate, and famines. This even disregarding the dangers and environmental consequences of past and now declassified nuclear weapon's incidents reported by James Oskins as co-author of numerous books on the subject. To the billions, including refugees, who ask for immediate relief from poverty, wars, famine and illness, the answer is that priorities in our world-wide debates are for money and worldwide efforts that must be spent on climate research and interventions for the sake of their grandchildren and whole humanity. Let it go that Ellsberg's sense of urgency was translated into his enthusiasm for Greta Thunberg's view of the world in "black and white" and wish for more people having the Asperger's syndrome, instead of their restraining their greed and having a respect for truth, justice and love of their neighbour as predicated by major religions. In the meantime, official statistics reports that half of Swedish marriages end in divorce.

Greenhouse, orbital forcing and accuracy

"Our time's perhaps most crucial research project " (part 1) was published by the Swedish public television network on 4 February 2019 under the title Vetenskapens värld - Världen i växthuset del 1, available for display until 3 August 2019 (In the TVDB: "The world of science: The world in the greenhouse, part 1",). It started explicitly and symptomatically with the premise that the truth of global warming would not be debated and promised to go to "the root of the matter" about global warming, with the strongest argument of science. It would teach about the respiration of the forests, the cold waters of Antarctic, and the Keeling curve (graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements started on the island of Hawaii from 1958, up to about 100 sites around the globe the present day). The TV program's host also promises to furnish the spectator with an image of "how everything hands together: oceans, land, air, and ice". In academia "how hang together" is systems theory, but people prefer to forget about theory and focus on logically related empirical findings.

A curiosity, (beyond a beneficial reflection upon the famous "Little ice age"): In an article on "Greenhouse and icehouse Earth" we read: "Without the human influence on the greenhouse gas concentration, the Earth would be heading toward a glacial period. Predicted changes in orbital forcing suggest that in absence of human-made global warming the next glacial period would begin at least 50,000 years from now [...] But due to the ongoing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth is instead heading toward a greenhouse Earth period". What is the difference between an apocalypse within 100 or 50.000 or according to the sun's life expectancy of "5 billion more years when all life on the surface of the Earth will already be long gone"? Is it our grandchildren? Or is it that "more and better of the same", science and technology, may save the Earth and humanity? It reminds me of West Churchman's quotation (in his Design of Inquiring Systems, p. 203) of James Hillman's rhetorical image (in his essay on "Senex and Puer", in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1967, and 2005): "fat science proclaiming it will save the world while it odoriferously defecates in public". Maybe this is what all climate change is about, and it has to do with the philosophy of technology, which I did mention earlier and which i have considered in an earlier essay.

Returning to The world in the greenhouse, part 1 I am not going to summarize the arguments advanced in the one-hour's program-DVD except for noting that, as usual in this context, they deal with global direct and indirect measurements of temperatures and carbon dioxide percentages (and averages!) on land, in waters, ice, and air. In my own work I learned to appreciate all the pitfalls of measurement and statistics (cf. statistical "averages") in economics by studying Oscar Morgensten's On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (1965). More relevant for natural science is T.N. Whitehead The Design and Use of Instruments and Accurate Mechanism (1934). It contains complex guidelines that one wonders whether have been considered in mass production of climate telemetering instruments. The computer is also an instrument, rather than a tool (cf. Bo Sundin, ed. Is the Computer a Tool?, 1980, and there is much more to say about it.) And meteorology is not precise and accurate physics but can, rather, be compared to economics. Not to mention the misunderstanding and misuse of statistics when its presuppositions are not valid, as indicated in C.W. Churchman's Prediction and Optimal Decision, (1961, chaps. 5 and 6) on measurement and probability when there are apparent facts but no theory. It is, by the way object of a whole chapter III om "Probability as applied to errors" in the mentioned Whitehead's book. Misunderstandings and misuses of probability stands also at the basis for not understanding and for not having seriously considered chance in the interpolations and extrapolations of levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is, chance or randomness or "the occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious intention or cause", which in Prediction and Optimal Decision (pp. 143-170, 259-261) is rightly understood as not having any correlation with any known phenomenon and, and as such could be a humble reminder of our (un?)pretentious ignorance. In face of all this it is easily felt as an extremely bold statement to claim in panic that plus/minus one or two degrees centigrade, with unclear tolerances and relations between accuracy and precision, juggling with "averages" over time and the whole world, not to mention the "philosophical" balance between statistical errors of type I and II, will spell doomsday or survival within, say, 100 years. Not to mention the problem of computer simulation from the point of view of numerical analysis where “only God” knows whether and how political democracy controls the technicalities of computer runs of climate simulations, regarding all the mathematical difficulties of relation between mathematical reality and physical reality exposed in prof. Paolo Zellini’s book The Mathematics of Gods and Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History (2020/2016). More on this in especially one chapter of my essay on Computers as Embodied Mathematics and Logic.

Most educated laymen and most scientists may have not yet grasped the exent of "mythological" capabilities affirmed in the name of science, such in artificial intelligence's "technological singularity", and "neuralinks". Most educated people have no idea about details of the accuracy or precision in fields such as meteorology, weather and climate or extreme weather. There is no democratic control of narrow specialized new research. Or, more generally, because of the lack of an established overarching discipline of "climate change and global warming" there should be a recourse to the design of inquiring systems of metrology (elaborated in chap. 9 of a later book). For now I would not be surprised if the failure of predictions of causes of future climate changes reveals itself as a sort of worldwide hoax imposed in the name of politicized big science where theory is reduced to computer simulations of a network of logically related, selected empirical findings. Alternately I can guess already now that if the predictions do not turn to be true, it will be explained by claiming that it is because whatever measures have been implemented had a stronger beneficial effect than expected. All this while the opposed climate warming “deniers” will continue explaining possible continued warming as being the result of natural causes other than human activity in the anthropocene.

Computer simulations, prediction, extraterrestrial life

The statistics of adduced measurements is based on diverse "causal chains" of the type that motivated the environmentally very concerned mathematician Jan Brouwer to distrust non-systemic science, as I exposed in parts of my essay on computers as embodied logic and mathematics. That is, the very same hype of computers that are adduced in "computer simulations" in order to impress especially laymen about the climate crisis, without any major mention to the problem of validating models and simulations, which cannot be validated only against past measurements. And they meet seldom the mentioned difficulties, considered in C.W. Churchman's "An analysis of the concept of simulation" (in Hoggatt & Balderston, eds. Symposium on Simulation Models, South-Western Publishing Co., Cincinnati, Ohio, 1963, today more available in the author's summary in The Systems Approach and its Enemies, 1979, pp. 51-53). If it is a simulation of reality, what is the future reality after all, when we doubt the present one? For instance, in the Dec. 28, 2007 New York Times' article Science and Soothsaying, environmental scientist Daniel Botkin writes "My own experience makes me skeptical of how environmental forecasting is being used." It is echoed by an exhaustingly detailed review of the forecasting of global warming in a tour de force of seven articles (in Swedish) by academically trained polymath Krister Renard, especially the fifth one on climate models.

At this point it could be fruitful to sit down and analyze other historically predicted "catastrophes" such as the Malthusian one or more relevantly The Limits to Growth. A careful reading of the latter as well as the story of the contribution by the computer engineer and systems scientist Jay Forrester, not to mention C.W. Churchman's The Design of Inquiring Systems, should make the further development of this blog contribution superfluous, or then revert the whole question to my reflections on the impossibility of serious debates as presented in my article on information and debate. Ultimately it all may be a question of the western attitude to death and its negation (see here on donation of organs for transplants) in view of acknowledgment or ignorance of religious apocalyptic archetypes and historical examples as of the Classic Maya Collapse. Sorry for at my age not having the time for hoping to be able to develop these thoughts in a book, and for entering in a hopeless debate about it. If you want a taste of such debates you may start to browse for instance the "pushing of dangerous myths about climate change". If you wish you can see me as inspired to humility by the biblical verse Sirach 3:21: "Seek not what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power." It may be appropriate for others too, not only those who look for a climatic apocalypse instead of the biblical one, but also for those who look for extraterrestrial life instead of problems of ongoing suffering in terrestrial life, which is symptomatically ignored even in Nobel prizes in physics such as in year 2019 celebrating physical cosmology and recalling "Since ancient times, humans have speculated whether there are worlds like our own". It is to be contrasted to Alfred Nobel's will, that the prize be given "to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". Who cares, if "physical cosmology" may enhance the "science" of climate change and global warming, which is supposed to be the greatest threat to humankind?

Conclusion

I like to terminate in a playfully controversial mood by imagining that the title of this whole text could have been "The Denial of Empiricism". Despite of an apparent overwhelming scientific consensus on the dangers of climate change, political and social reality show the primacy of psychological, spiritual, and religious (mis)understanding among people and among peoples of the world. Climate change and global warming may be working as if they were set up for attacking a straw man while avoiding the real problems. The problems of climate change are attributed to human greed and egoism, grabbing and depletion of natural resources, falsity, ignorance of the limits of nature and of the consequences for others and for the future. The desperation following from such insights reveals that people do not realize that the struggle against all this, as against all oppression, conflicts and wars, has been the purpose of great religions and in particular of Christianity. Secularized and spiritually orphaned children and childish adults who know nothing about their cultural heritage appeal to the daddy of science of which they have even lesser understanding since they do not know how much they do not know, navigating in an unknown universe, or ocean with the hubris of a proud high-tech Titanic. Desperation and fear of suffering and death, by adults, childish adults, and even more by children, are a mirror of the lack of understanding of the meaning of faith, except for faith in technoscience and democracy.

In such a perspective, the debate about climate illustrates how humans expect and require regularity and forecasting in the whole of a nature that they claim to understand, and then their Egos expect to be able to control. All this while the very same humans cannot understand, forecast, refrain or control themselves and their counterparts, as shown by conflicts within and between families and nations in the middle of ongoing conflicts, wars and suicides. All this while they try to convince and control others to change their behavior for the sake of climate, following archetypal role models of climate-conscious illuminati while they forget Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha. All this going on while science and research is advancing (toward nowhere?) exploring outer space and galaxies, cosmology and cosmogony, trying to guess whether there may exist other exoplanets inhabited by other living beings.

Postscript

Long after writing the text above I knew about a young man in his twenties who was convinced by a friend to start practicing veganism and even to try to induce others into it. I am grateful for his having stimulated me to think further about the meaning of activism about global climate warming, as related to friendship, dialog and discussion. It motivated me to a make a further effort related to this essay, to write a text that is published in my blog under the title The case of veganism.

An additional insight was offered by the outbreak on February 24, 2022, of the armed military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which motivated my writing of a new essay on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine Information Crisis. It recalls what I had written above, about engineers, managers, politicians, and now also climate researchers and people at large in the Western world that:

they may be able to determine behavior in their civil society but probably will not be able to limit ongoing emissions of carbon dioxide in poor needy countries and by armed forces in recurring wars and exercises on land, in air, water and ice all over the world. Least of all will they be able to counter the horrors of any war going on in the world right now, or ultimately the risk for a nuclear holocaust

Now, in August 2022, I can add that I have not seen, read or heard anyone in climate-conscious Western mass media and social media who comments the climate effects of the ongoing conflict and to its prolongation by means of Western help with shipping of military equipment, ammunition, tanks, etc. Meanwhile Russia is probably the main contributor to pollution with its air strikes and bombings with consequent explosions and fires even in ammunition deposits. Nothing is said about such climate effects while people all over the world are exhorted to use collective transportation, avoid touristic flights, buy electric cars, decrease public energy consumption and be ready for lower degree of residential warming in order to counter the rising costs of energy that follow from sanctions against Russia, which are countered by stop of its deliveries of fossil fuel to an inflationary Europe. Meanwhile the issue of climate is downplayed in political fights and periodic elections. All this is a sad recall of the primacy of politics, ethics and religion, disregarding the moralistic appeals to “climate science” by children and youngsters. Meanwhile the main world powers which highly regard and respect “science” embodied in climate science have lots of their scientists successfully working in the lucrative industrial-military complex for development and manufacturing of weapons that will replace the ones that kill, destroy and pollute the environment.

Appendix

Long after I completed the text above, I listened on 29 June 2023, a summer-program of one hour and a half, at the Swedish public radio (“Sveriges Radio”) by Bo Landin exposing mainly the problem of environmental pollution and water quality with implications for climate warming. Very engaging och touching, but towards the end of the program he exclaims that “we must build our coexistence and our life on humanity, and words like "social, humanitarian", having in view the build-up of an "ecological folkhemmet”. Folkhemmet (literally “the people’s home”) is a special Swedish word referring to a political concept that played an important role in the history of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and the Swedish welfare state. He also believes that future scientific progress may repair and solve the lesion to people’s health caused by environmental pollution.

This is what I elsewhere did call reduction of religion to politics and science, or “more of the same”, ignoring the paradoxes exposed by the philosophy of technology and science, which I expose in another context. In other words, politically and philosophically I see him and his message as a more sophisticated and adult version of the figure of Greta Thunberg that was considered in this essay. I see the Christian God being substituted by Mother Earth in terms of the Earth goddess, Mother goddess or Mother nature, which in turn can be seen as humans being unconsciously and archetypally (“The Great Mother”) attracted by Pantheism. In view of Sweden being often considered as the most secularized country in the world, we should complete all such analyses by meditating upon works like Theology and Technology, Volume 1: Essays in Christian Analysis and Theology and Technology, Volume 2: Essays in Christian Exegesis and Historical Theology, both presented as spiritual successors to Carl Mitcham’s Philosophy and Technology.

An additional analysis of the lack of understanding the well-meaning problem of climate warming was offered by a program at the Swedish public radio on September 27, 2024, long after my writing the above text. It had the title Kinas hemliga drag i batterikriget mot Sverige, (archived here), which can be translated as China's secret moves in the battery war against Sweden. It is an analysis that reveals how an unconscious technocratic thought separates logical-mathematical physical reality from social, emotional, and ethical-theological aspects of the question. This happens when considering “trade barriers” in export restrictions for artificial graphite products by China. This touches in particular exports to Sweden for its own manufacturing of batteries for “climate-friendly” electric batteries to be used for, among other applications, in the country’s own manufacturing of climate-friendly electric vehicles.

Sweden as a member of the European Union does not seem to understand, like other EU-member would not understand, the realities of international trade, as they can be inferred by e.g. the France24 news on May 6, 2024 about Macron, von der Leyen press China’s Xi on Ukraine, trade at Paris summit. The result is that the stop of manufacturing of EU’s internal combustion engines by year 2030, may turn-out as only a well-meaning climate dream where friendly political relations (as those between e.g. Hungary, China and Russia) foster better trade and more rapid implementations of “green” national politics, including cheaper electric cars imported from China or from Chinese factories in the European Union.

On May 15, 2024, The Economist announced, regarding electric vehicles (EV), “America’s 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs: bad policy, worse leadership”. On July 4, 2024, The New York Times, publishes “Europe Tells China's Carmakers: Get Ready to Pay Tariffs” because of alleged Chinese government’s support in terms of subsidies to Chinese carmakers. All this implying both America’s and Europe’s delays in the populations’ purchase and use of Chinese “green vehicles”. Europe and America defend their own car industries, despite the official panics in an early decrease of the use internal combustion motors. All this while requiring sacrifices from the population in implementing green way of living, and while The Global Energy Monitor in October 9, 2023 announces “100 miners a day face job cuts as industry winds down coal”. This “anedoctal” information and imperfect picture is only presented here in order to give a feeling of ignored geopolitical, social, and economic realities. Not to speak of the forgotten ethical ones.