The New Denialism
The old denialism denied the reality of climate change. Funded by the fossil fuel industry it spouted disinformation and lies and fostered doubt. It changed climate change from an objectively observable fact into a political “opinion”. The old denialism is dead. Not even the fossil fuel industry denies climate change anymore. A new denialism has replaced it, however. The new denialism doesn’t deny climate change. In the contrary, it emphatically affirms it. The new denialism doesn’t deny that climate change is a serious problem either – it admits that too. What the new denialists deny is how big the crisis...
Facing the Anthropocene – Attitudes towards Climate Change
In a review of a number of books about the Anthropocene, British sociologist Leslie Sklair wrote that: Three main narratives have emerged: (1) While posing problems, the Anthropocene is a ‘great opportunity’ for business, science and technology, geoengineering, and so on. (2) The planet and humanity itself are in danger, we cannot ignore the warning signs but if we are clever enough we can save ourselves and the planet with technological fixes (as in 1). (3) We are in great danger, humanity cannot go on living and consuming as we do now, we must change our ways of life radically...
Michael Mann versus the “Doomists”
Last month, Breakthrough Australia published a paper by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop that claims that “climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilisation”. Climate scientist Michael Mann was quick to put down the paper as “overblown rhetoric”. He was quoted as saying that “I respect the authors and appreciate that their intentions are good, but as I have written before, overblown rhetoric, exaggeration, and unsupportable doomist framing can be counteractive to climate action.” The quote by Mann raises a number of questions. Is the report by Spratt and Dunlop “overblown rhetoric” indeed? Does Mann...
Fictionalism – or: Vaihinger, Scheffler, and Kübler-Ross at the End of the World
In 1911 the now almost forgotten German philosopher Hans Vaihinger published Die Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of ‘As if’) in which he argued for something approaching global fictionalism. In the preface to the second English edition of his book he wrote: The principle of Fictionalism . . . is as follows: “An idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity may have great practical importance.” Fictionalism is the view that claims in some area of...