Religion of today

All potential disasters should get their fair share of attention

Wooden toy Noah's Ark with carved wooden animals made in Germany, between 1800 and 1900. Wikimedia Commons. 

I recently shared a concern with Anders: Most people, also very intelligent people, who believe that carbon dioxide emissions are our most serious environmental problem believe so because they have heard that statement being repeated over and over again. Not because they have investigated the issue themselves. Not because they have scrutinized the proof. They believe it because "everybody" is saying it.

"Don't you also find it uncanny?", I asked.

"Duh, have you never heard of religion?", he replied. 

Of course he was right. That is more or less the definition of religion: Something being said over and over again by many people, and people believing in it just because every decent person seems to believe in it. That is how religion works.

Unsettled

That is of course not an argument that the climate disaster is not real. Facts don't get less factual because some people believe in them for the wrong reason. The important question is what good reasons there are to believe in the climate disaster theory.

Two years ago I read a book called Unsettled (2021) by Steven Koonin. Koonin says that the public is being misled about how much scientists actually know about the link between carbon emissions and climate change. His message is, more or less:

1. Humans are causing climate change. 

2. The climate also changes for natural reasons. The mechanisms for natural climate change are not well understood. 

3. Science can't reliably separate between the two. We mostly don't know when the climate changes for natural reasons and when climate changes are caused by human activity. 

4. Global average temperature has increased a bit during the last 100 years, although very unevenly in different places. There are more observations of decreases of extremely cold nights than increases in extremely hot days.

5. The effects of higher temperatures, beyond the most obvious, are unknown. It is in no way obvious that hurricanes and wildfires and droughts are increasing. Sea levels are rising at a rather even pace since measurements began in the late 19th century.

6. Halting human carbon dioxide emissions completely or even significantly is not realistic considering developing nations’ urge to modernize. Humanity has no choice but to adapt to the effects of higher levels of carbon dioxide, whichever they are.

Koonin's critics basically say that Koonin chooses the wrong data and makes the wrong conclusions out of that data. I don't know enough to say that Koonin picked the right data and his critics picked the wrong data. But I think that if there are such vast amounts of data to pick from, differences of opinion should be inevitable in the scientific community. That is, if the community is scientific and not religious.

The problem is that on a political level, people are supposed to act religiously for policies to be effective. Koonin accuses scientists of withholding information from the public because the public might otherwise not feel alarmed enough to take collective action. Scientists and journalists consciously make the climate disaster hypothesis sound more scientific and more dangerous than it actually is, because they think that is the only way to make people press for political action. This kind of deceptive behavior will backfire, Koonin warns: The skepticism against Covid-19 precautions and vaccines showed that many people already distrust the scientific community and science reporting. If scientists cry wolf just to make people act, they might lose their power to make people act when they actually have convincing data, Koonin warns.¹

Death by a single cut

Being honest to the public is one important point. Another is to give every potential disaster its fair share of attention. I don't know exactly how dangerous carbon dioxide is. But I know that carbon dioxide is not the only threat to the world and the human race. It could be that betting on carbon emissions being the number one threat is entirely correct and that efforts to curb emissions are saving us from diverse disasters. It could also be that our future selves and descendants will face entirely different problems: A solar storm? A meteorite? A major war? 

The more we panic over carbon emissions, the less time and resources we have to prepare for other adverse scenarios. If carbon emissions doubtlessly are that much more of a problem than everything else that can happen, then fine. Then it's right to focus on them. If nobody actually knows how much of a problem carbon emissions are, then not fine at all. Then we ought to spread our focus to different concerns, carbon emissions being one of them. But only one among others.

Sinners repent!

There is one possible excellent reason to why the climate threat has become more and more of an issue: That the scientific evidence supporting the idea is solid a d growing. If Steven Koonin is even remotely right, it is not. In that case there must be another reason why the carbon dioxide question has become increasingly popular during the last decade or two.

That reason could be that the carbon dioxide problem fits very well with Western religious traditions. It actually has quite a few similarities to the Christian traditions that are currently being abandoned by an increasing number of people:

*The We Sinners component. Christianity has it, and Christianity made the Western world unusually successful. Talking about general sinfulness probably has a sobering effect that makes people more community oriented. People in formerly Christian societies seem ready to adopt the concept.

*The notion that everyone, even the smallest child, can make contributions to salvation.

*Similarities to previous virtues like simplicity and frugality. People can go on with what they have learned from tradition and dress it in new rhetoric.

*An anti-family message. Just like Christianity transferred loyalty from families to the wider community, the anti-carbon religion is doing the same. Environmentalists often say the same things as the early Christians did: Marriage and children are for those who can't resist temptation. But devoting oneself to the community at large is the noblest thing. Being an anti-carbon environmentalist today mostly implies valuing community over family.

Compare that to past environmental problems, like the ozone layer depletion, lead poisoning or the acidification of rain. They didn't have those wide social implications. They were all problems with numerous victims, but with few perpetrators. Many suffered, but few could do anything about it. When those few scientists, industrialists and politicians who could do anything did anything about it, the rest of us could continue living as usual, but without worrying about lead on every bush, an increasingly burning sun or dead trees in every corner.

With carbon dioxide it is different. The carbon footprint idea makes us all sinners. It makes human life itself a sin. It makes procreation a sin. Everyone, everywhere is supposed to work towards becoming a little less of a sinner, while the community as a whole works towards grandiose anti-sin projects. We don't build cathedrals anymore. We build subsidized wind parks.

Finally a full time job (for those who like) 

I haven't always been like this. When I was a teenager, I was convinced that climate change was extremely important. Whenever my family went somewhere by car, I imagined us and the other motorists dragging the whole world toward disaster. Once I turned off the thermostat in my room in the winter so the temperature went down to 13 degrees Celsius. After a few weeks my mother turned it back to normal with the pretext that such temperature differences would cause cracks in the walls. In reality she was probably more concerned about my unwholesome exercises. 

I was an early adapter. By that time, around the year 2000, climate change was only beginning to sail up as the number one environmental issue. In the 1990s, environmental problems were very high up on the agenda. But no one really knew how to make ordinary citizens, children and adults alike, feel that they were personally involved. On several occasions, school taught me to make "recycled paper" through shredding newspapers into a bucket of water and spreading it out on a tray and let it dry. Recycling was very environmentally friendly, we learned. Littering was very bad, because wild animals could get seriously hurt by getting chewing gum on their paws. A young woman came to our school and taught us about the rainforest and how the oxygen in the atmosphere would disappear without it. We were asked to tell our parents not to buy things made of tropical wood.

Leave your paper and bottles for recycling. Buy cleaning products with environmental labels. Don't buy stuff made of tropical wood. Don't litter. Buy juice concentrate and mix it with water at home instead of full-size ready-to-drink juice packages (yes, seriously, in the 1990s people actually thought such small measures were important ways to be environmentally friendly.) It didn't take me too long to pester my mother to make the right choice of detergent and soap. Not buying brand new teak furniture wasn't exactly a problem because we couldn't afford it anyway. I felt extremely restless. What was I supposed to do with all my time to help to get the world and the human race on the right path?

For today's children, that is not a problem. They don't need to pester their parents over one or two potentially toxic products at the supermarket. They can pester their parents over every single item. Turn the packages of bread, cereals and milk around, and the backsides of them are filled with bragging about climate compensation. Being an environmentally virtuous person has finally become a full-time job for those who want to.

Admittedly, most people are not as zealous as the teenage version of me, or as my younger compatriot Saint Greta. For most people, religion is more about talking and socializing than about doing, and the climate religion is no exception. But as a former wannabe activist, I remember the sense of void before the climate question rose on the agenda. 

I lost my activist ambitions as I grew up. But for others, the climate question became that big question to unite around. And it seems to work just as well for more modest people who prefer to just talk with other concerned citizens. Better than the diverse environmental problems people talked about in the 1990s. One by one, these problems either got solved or forgotten about. Now that our civilization has discovered a poison that everybody produces everywhere, literally with every breath we take, we don't really need those scattered small problems to take collective action over.

The perils of monotheism

The impulse to act virtuously and devotedly towards the environment is much older than the climate change hype. Also before climate change was named the most important environmental issue of all time, people wanted to do the right things. It was just that before we got one single issue to agonize over, doing the right thing was much less simple and straightforward. 

The question is: Why did one question take over the whole game? Because the proof got overwhelming? Or because people simply liked that question better? Because it had much better potential to unify people, over all borders, compared to the more mundane and local issues it replaced? Climate change is an environmental disaster for the globalized age. No matter who you are or where you are, it still affects you. Or so we are told. 

In religious matters, everybody knows the benefits of monotheism. But in scientific matters, it can be highly damaging. Some of the previous environmental problems, like lead poisoning and the ozone hole, disappeared from the agenda because they were solved, more or less. But far from all of them were. Many of them are still lingering in the shadows of the climate threat.

For example, middle income countries like India are emitting huge amounts of sulfur dioxide that causes acidification. It is exactly the same problem that was solved, or at least handled in the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s. The technology to solve the problem exists, but the political will is lacking.

The sulfur dioxide that causes acidification is part of air pollution. Air pollution is still a problem, also in the West. Especially in metropolitan areas. That is also a problem that could be significantly reduced through collective action, since a lot of the pollution is caused by traffic. But again, interest in discussing possible solutions is not very high. 

Then we have all those environmental problems that do not include any obvious poison, but that still affect human health negatively: Noise and ugliness. Many people wouldn't call them environmental problems, since they are used to seeing environmental problems as problems that disturb eco-systems containing other species, not problems that humans cause each other. But the word environment really implies all human surroundings. If bad air makes humans sick, that is an environmental problem. If noise make humans sick, that is an environmental problem too. Compared to a complete doomsday when the whole world is destroyed, such problems seem trivial. But if human-unfriendly habitats make people depressed and unproductive, that in itself decreases our ability to handle potential disasters.

Stay prepared for disaster

The coronavirus crisis showed that when current human societies stand before what looks like a disaster, they can adapt, and they can do so quickly. When the coronavirus spread, people talked, and then acted decisively and quickly. In the face of the climate crisis, people talk very much and act rather little in comparison.

Admittedly, the coronavirus adaptations were meant to be temporary. It is easy to change one's lifestyle for a few months. Still, the coronavirus crisis showed that a carbon-reducing measure like remote working could actually function rather well. However, after the pandemic, companies could demand that their workers get back to their offices without there being an uproar against their anti-climate stance. If people actually believed that carbon emissions are rapidly and decisively taking us towards disaster, shouldn't they be prepared to change society more in order to stem the disaster? Remote working might somewhat decrease productivity. But what is decreased productivity compared to a ruined planet? The perceptible lack of lifestyle changes makes me doubt how much people actually believe what they are saying about the ongoing climate destruction. 

I'm currently reading a book about the Neanderthal humans, Kindred by Rebecka Wragg Sykes (2020). It tells about the changes in climate the Neanderthals endured. About 118 000 years ago, the climate became drastically colder and drier during only a couple of generations, at a speed that must have been perceptible for humans who lived by then.² When people are studying past climates for the sake of it, there is never any doubt that the climate has changed before, also in ways that affected humans very negatively. 

Why couldn't such a natural climate change happen to us, in present time? If it happened to the Neanderthals, it can happen to us too. The climate change we are currently seeing (if what we are seeing is climate change) could also be of the same kind as the climate change the Neanderthals experienced. That is, even if we would stop all use of fossil fuels today, it would go ahead. For that reason, investing everything we have in stopping carbon emissions and nothing in adapting to the climate change we see would be foolish. The climate can change however correctly we behave. 

The only reason why we are here today is that our ancestors adapted to climate change and other disasters they faced. They were flexible enough to meet the challenges that occurred. We modern humans need to continue that tradition. The best thing we can do is to prepare a little for every possible disaster. Carbon based and others. All disasters are my disasters. 

When I peered at Anders' computer recently, I saw that while I was writing the text above, he was writing about the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs and how the human race could handle such a disaster. We will publish that text next week. Stay tuned!

1. Steven E Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, 63 percent, 64 percent

2. Rebecka Wragg Sykes, Kindred, 2020, 21 percent