Amerika

Individualism requires rationalization because to motivate groups of people, you have to show them that a new idea confirms their assumptions and pretenses, therefore you rationalize from those. If you want to sell something to the plebes, tell them it advances education, helps the poor, or gives them money.

They already like the idea of helping the poor because it makes them feel “nice” and lets them forget all their little foibles. It is the modern tithe, helping the poor and third world races. They already like education because to them it is a money lottery, since if you do well, you get money.

As H.L. Mencken once wrote, you have to understand that the voters are toddlers who want money and anarchy and have no further thoughts in their heads:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

People are being asked to make decisions far beyond their capacity. All but a few people are fixated on careers, family, friends, hobbies, and ordinary life and view politics as this kind of weird sideshow that sometimes gives them money. They pull the lever for money, sympathy tears, or anger.

To manipulate that group, whether as a government, business, or shadowy conspiracy that drinks the blood of virgin goats under poplar trees at midnight on the full moon night, you have to rationalize from what they have accepted to what you want them to accept.

“You may not like this war, but it will fund education, help the poor, and restore good relations between the races” is a winner of a statement. Everyone gets good feelings and righteous indignation, which is really just a sense of victimhood projected forward.

Whoever establishes a new assumption wins out. If you can argue for helping the poor, you get a blank cheque to do whatever you can plausibly justify under the banner of helping the poor. If you can convince everyone that the climate is about to “boil” us, then the panic gives you new powers.

Throughout the history of democracy, the slumbering electorate has only been roused by strong emotions. A Pearl Harbor, Three Mile Island, or Lusitania and Zimmerman Telegram might wake them, but usually unless there is free money, they doze on while busy with their everyday lives.

Climate change gives government a huge blank cheque. It can justify not only whatever expenditures, but whatever restrictions on its citizens, that it wants to. It can expand to meet this new threat like it successfully fought drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and rinderpest.

It can do this because once enough people are raving on about something and will not stop, government has enough support to do whatever it wants in order to end the panic. We saw this with COVID-19, but it also applies to the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and the Black church burning panic of the Clinton years.

The thing about mass trends is that they are binaries. That is, there are two options: either you are for it or against it. Thoughts such as “I’m undecided” or “We need more data” are rejected with the same fervor by which Christianity is rejected by atheists and that Christians use to reject atheists.

These trends, born of a moral panic, then become the type of cult-like thinking we expect from tribes throwing spears and using axes. You are either with Ba’al, or against him. This manifests in the same kind of messianic conjectural ideology that propels egalitarianism and the worst examples of religion:

In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of global warming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as the earliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties were so great that probabilities could never be known, so, too the first pronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could be determined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draft report said, “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.” It also said, “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes.” Those statements were removed, and in their place appeared: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate.”

What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outside observer to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigations into global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps to improve the quality of our observational data records, whether we are systematically obtaining the information that will clarify existing uncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism to direct research in this contentious area.

While this mass fad has seized the public eye, it remains non-serious. People are talking about driving electric cars, not redesigning everything so people do not have to drive. They are talking about eating bugs, not cutting population or land use. These are easy answers.

If one issue animates all of my writing, it is a desire to avoid the coming ecocide. It will not be a crisis or come quickly, but rather become a normal state, and will involve lots of “nature” in the forms of parks and gardens of decreasing biodiversity.

We may have the wit to save some nature preserves like Yellowstone or Baikal-Lena, but even there, species will fall below a level of safe breeding and will gradually perish from recessive trait overload and snowballing mutations.

Humans will not see it this way. Instead, humans will finally see an orderly Earth: a worldwide grid of suburbs, staffed by equally grey people, where all the appliances are efficient, all the food is vegan, all the cars are electric, and otherwise life is basically the same as it is now.

People hate change. The Left hates to change its thinking and will adapt to anything to avoid that fate, but the Right hates changes in its environment, although it adapts to them easily. People want what they have now, but with a few token changes, and that attitude will lead to worldwide ecocide.

Species will still exist. Ornamental trees, grasses, and flowers will do fine, as will any crops we need (although in autistically mutated GMO form). There will be generalists like squirrels, rats, sparrows, grackles, and maybe possums. Animals we can farm and bees will also be conserved but gene edited.

“Climate change” is in fact a proxy for the ongoing destruction of our environment. In reality, we are using too much land and building cities on too much of it, have too many people, and ship too much stuff in container ships across the world.

If we wanted a sane environment, we would have most people in suburbs, all products made locally, no welfare or subsidies to keep population low, and no public land; all would belong to someone and be cared for, with huge swathes — half Earth — set side for nature alone.

What we are seeing now in the global climate is the result of us doing the same thing everywhere we go. We build cities, factories, roads, parking lots, hospitals, schools, jails, restaurants, offices, warehouses, and bars. Then we have a giant concrete plate.

The urban heat island effect explains why we see climate problems. The giant concrete plates displace jet streams and radiate heat where it cannot disperse, messing up local climate, but now we are doing this all over the world. We have made lots of little ovens:

A new analysis from Climate Central, a non-profit research group, found that urban development increased temperatures by at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit for a total of 41 million people who live in certain pockets of 44 US cities, making them much more vulnerable to higher cooling costs, heat-related illnesses, hospitalizations and even death.

“Population density alone makes cities hotter than other environments, because so much of our everyday activities, including cooling our homes and workplaces, generate heat,” Jen Brady, a senior data analyst at Climate Central who designed and led the research, told CNN.

The analysis also found even more intense urban hotspots where temperatures are at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the rest of the city. Nearly 3.8 million New Yorkers, for example — 41% of the city’s population — faced temperatures at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the city’s official readings, Climate Central found.

Now look at how we have multiplied the number of cities we have as world urbanization zooms over the halfway mark:

While in 1950, less than 20 percent of Africans and Asians lived in cities, that number had increased to 43 percent and 51 percent, respectively, by 2020 South America also increased urban populations majorly during the same time period, arriving at an urban population share of more than 80 percent – higher than that of Europe.

Urban populations made up the highest share in Northern American countries – 83.6 percent of residents lived in cities in 2020.

Overall, more people in the world live in urban than in rural setting since 2010. In 2020, 56.2 percent of the world population was urban. Half of these people lived in towns of less than 500,000 inhabitants.

This means that since the 1950s, we have done nothing but add more heat producers to the planet, and they tend to be cited in geographically advantageous places that are also necessary for jet streams. On top of that, solar and climate conditions have changed naturally, as they have throughout history.

“Climate change” is pure nonsense, but the environmental damage done by having this many humans beings is not. With a billion human beings, people can live pretty much any reasonable lifestyle they want and have minimal impact because they are offset by billions of acres of natural land.

Worse even, “climate change” is designed to obscure the ecocide in progress, where the many plants and animals that require open space are forced into spaces that are too small, resulting in inbreeding that produces mutation and eventually extinction.

Climate change has proven to be both a great cash-in and a great cope-hope. Now that government has found a new blank cheque, everyone wants to be “green,” producing mountains of landfill in the process. Normies do not have to change their behavior other than buying electric cars and eating bugs.

You can see why people are anti-capitalist simply because capitalism has no rules. Everyone can open his own fast food joint and buy his own suburban home. Almost no one asks who is buying all this stuff and why they are so unconcerned with our natural world, however.

Do we need all of these restaurants? If they are making money, one argument says yes. Another says that humanity might need to wake up and stop considering its desires as needs, which would create a more austere society which produced less waste.

In the big calculus however nothing will change until humanity leaves half of the land for nature, and that requires a halt or reduction of urbanization and population growth, including immigration. This proves to be politically untenable for democracy citizens, so the crisis grows.

Tags: climate change, michael crichton, paul ehrlich, urban heat island effect, urbanization