Our Obsession With Control over nature

Paul Abela below seems to think it is self-evident that mankind has no right to control nature. He bolsters that view by saying that changes in the natural world could be disastrous to us and implies the non-sequitur that therefore we should not make changes to the natural world. So he thinks there is both a moral and a utilitarian case for us to meddle as little as possible with nature.

The utilitarian case is easy to refute: Civilization exists BECAUSE we have modified nature extensively. Modifying nature has been very GOOD for us and there is no reason to think that the control over nature that we have is suddenly going to harm us. It could conceivably do so but we are more than ever able to foresee problems coming our way and are more able to prevent those problems from actually arriving or to adapting to them in various ways if they do arrive

The moral case is simply a bald assertion with no supporting argumentation. It runs up against the old philosophical conundrum of how do we find out what is right and wrong? Most analytical philosophers claim that there is no objective instance of right or wrong. It exists in the mind of men but different minds have different ideas of what it is. Is killing babies wrong? The ancient Greeks did not think so and they were highly civilized. So we cannot doubt Paul Abela's enthusiasm for nature but we are perfectly entitled not to share that enthusiasm. Mankind DOES have dominion over nature and there are no philosophical or utilitarian reasons to overturn or limit that

It will cost you anywhere between $32,000 and $200,000. If you can afford it, you’re knowingly signing up for something that has a high risk of death. If you overcome any lingering fears you’ll see plenty of the 322 victims entombed in ice as you struggle slowly towards your destination. Climbing Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, is not for the faint-hearted. But that doesn’t stop 800 people attempting to summit the mountain each year, with plenty of others waiting in line. It’s a dream for thousands, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why.

The desire to summit Everest is a product of an obsession that has come to define our relationship with nature. We are addicted to overcoming its boundaries. To tame it. To defeat it. To beat it. The world constantly pits ‘man vs nature’. We compete against it and are obsessed with ‘beating’ it — even though it has no idea it’s competing. And in ‘defeating’ it, we believe we have somehow overcome it.

This obsession with control is deep-rooted in the human psyche. It stems from the idea that nature exists in service of humanity, a belief that has its roots in religion. In Genesis 1:28, God commanded the human race to have dominion over every living thing. A belief shared by the ancient Greeks and best exemplified by Aristotle, who argued, “plants are evidently for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of Man; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, has made all things for the sake of Man.”

Little has changed in our attitude to living animals in the last 2000 years. There is a definitive hierarchy of which man is at the pinnacle. Wild animals, which are now remarkably few in number, are slaughtered by poachers to sell their ivory, fur coats, or other body parts. If wild animals aren’t slaughtered, they are placed in zoos for us to gawk at.

Unbelievably, as late as 1969, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defined conservation as the “rational use of the environment to achieve the highest quality of living for mankind.”

Driven by ego

Our ambivalence to nature and the attitude that it exists in service of man has led to an exploitative relationship developing. Man is driven by ego, we are separate from nature and behave as if it exists for us to do as we please.

Take our framing of the climate crisis as an existential risk that could destroy Earth. It will do nothing of the sort. The climate crisis is a crisis because it will destroy the conditions humanity needs to thrive on Earth. If those conditions change it will remain a haven to life, but that life will take a different form. One that is conducive to thriving in the new environmental conditions that are set to prevail.

It’s humanity that has a problem. Not Earth. Yet, our ego-driven, human-centric view of the Earth means the idea Earth could exist without humanity is incomprehensible.

We have formed a relationship with nature based on being some arrogant controller. How different things would be if humanity had an ‘eco’ perspective, and we used our intelligence and ability to work in symbiosis with nature for the common good. If we felt responsible and duty-bound to look after the Earth and act as its guardian.

Forget about all of that. The benefits to us are all that matters — any negatives to the environment are dismissed as inconsequential — externalities that don’t exist when money and profits, the things that are prized above all else, are there to be made.

The idea that nature may have some intrinsic value is nonsense. Its only role is to create value for humans if and when we choose to use it. That’s why 100 million sharks are killed each year for their meat and to make delicacies such as shark fin soup. It’s why over the last 50 years 17 percent of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested. It’s why the African Elephant is mercilessly poached so we can slice off their tusks and use the ivory to make jewellery. The tragic ongoing ‘elephant holocaust’ means the African elephant faces extinction.

Our obsession with control needs to be placed into context. Throughout human history, arguably up to the beginning of the twentieth century, we’ve had anything but control. Most people lived on the edge of existence, one failed crop away from famine and starvation. The natural world was dangerous, inauspicious, and brutal. There was little understanding of the processes and rules governing nature.

The image of mother nature being some kind of nurturing force is a product of modern society. As the political scientist Robert Inglehart puts it in The Silent Revolution, for our ancestors, “one’s life expectancy is approximately thirty years. A woman spends most of her adult life in pregnancy and child-bearing, burying most of her offspring before they have grown out of childhood.” To sum it up, life was brutal and full of suffering.

Our ancestors may have believed God gave us dominion over the natural world, but it is only in modern society that we have truly begun to control nature. This ability is the result of the powerful combination of science and technology.

Knowledge is power

Scientific breakthroughs best exemplify the axiom that knowledge is power. Science helps to understand the natural world; technology is the application of this understanding. The combination released humanity from the limits set on pre-industrial societies and led to vast improvements in human well-being. One of the most profound is the eradication of viruses that plagued humanity.

Smallpox, the deadliest disease in human history, is estimated to have killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. Having launched a vaccination campaign against the virus in 1967, the World Health Organization declared its successful eradication in 1977. This triumph is a marvel of modern science.

The ultimate visual expression of our control over nature is the city. These human ecosystems have become enormous in scale. Greater Tokyo, home to 38 million people stretches to 22,000 km². There are 34 megacities with populations of over ten million people.

When you look at a city, you look at a cityscape, not a landscape. The human ecosystem exists outside of nature and separates man from it. It is the ultimate expression of how we have tamed nature and moulded it to suit our needs.

The problem we have now is that technology provides us with too much control. Technology has made us so powerful we’re changing the environmental conditions we need to sustain civilization. This fact would have been incomprehensible to those living a few generations ago. It’s still a little incomprehensible now.

We’ve always existed in a technological age so we take our reality and the high living standards it provides for granted. If the outcomes of our technological age weren’t so apocalyptic, this ability to control the world would be astonishingly impressive.

The way we interact with the environment has transformed beyond recognition and yet we still maintain a deep-rooted desire for control. If we have any chance of overcoming the ecological crisis our relationship with the natural world must transform.

As awareness of our impacts on the Earth has increased, environmentalism has flourished. There have never been more people who not only have an appreciation for the wonders of the natural world, but are seeking to restore it and live in harmony with it.

Environmentalists call for a shift to an eco perspective. This call stems from a place of humility and is grounded in an awareness that nature doesn’t need us to survive, but we depend on it for every conceivable thing.

If the environment changes, we risk suffering social collapse. There must be some kind of acknowledgement that this isn’t a mutual relationship. Earth isn’t benevolent, it doesn’t exist to serve humanity.

The thing is, you can't just wipe the slate clean and reimagine our relationship with nature. While the numbers of environmentalists swell, the human relationship with nature remains dominated by the arrogant controller. As long as it is, we will continue to disregard our influence on the natural world and hurtle towards a future of profound suffering. Seeing how deeply rooted our relationship with nature is, maybe that’s precisely what’s needed to create an epiphany. To shed the shell of the egotistical controller and embrace the humble eco guardian.

https://medium.com/the-new-climate/our-obsession-with-control-0416fb7b0d68

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CFACT Says Offshore Wind Violates Clean Air and Clean Water Acts

In formal comments, CFACT has asked EPA to assess the adverse impact of the giant Virginia offshore wind project on air and water quality. The issue is far-reaching because all big offshore wind facilities could have these adverse effects.

CFACT points to three specific impacts, two of which come from what are called the “wake effects” of operational offshore wind facilities. Both effects have been observed and modeled in large European offshore operations. I discuss these wake effects in my article HERE.

The first effect CFACT calls the reduced energy air plume. They explain it this way:

“The wake effect is the well-established fact that the air flow downwind of an operating wind turbine has significantly less energy than the air flow upwind. This is because the turbine’s job is to remove energy from the air flow, converting it into electricity. By some estimates, 50% of the energy is removed.”

The Virginia offshore wind facility is removing energy from a 150-square-mile area, thus creating a massive reduced energy plume. The adverse impact is that this plume could increase the ozone levels in nearby urban areas. Ozone flourishes in low energy air.

Immediately onshore from the Virginia wind facility lies the city of Virginia Beach. This sounds like a little tourist town, but it is, in fact, Virginia’s biggest city. It is half again bigger than Pittsburgh.

Virginia Beach is presently in compliance with the EPA ozone standard, but not by much, so the adverse impact of the offshore wind-reduced energy plume is a serious concern. This will be a concern for other coastal urban areas that are onshore of big wind facilities. EPA should be required to take a hard look at this potential impact of reduced energy air on ozone compliance.

The second wake effect is, in a way, the opposite in that there is too much energy. Each wind tower causes turbulence in both the air flow and the water currents as they pass by. This turbulent energy disturbs the sea floor so much that it creates a suspended sediments plume that flows with the current.

Here again, we are talking about a 150-square-mile plume generator, so the result could be massive. There is a large body of scientific literature on the potential adverse impact of these sediment plumes on marine life.

CFACT points out that EPA appears to be ignoring this serious impact in violation of the Clean Water Act. An impact of this magnitude should require a permit under the CWA, but no such permit has been made public.

Perhaps it has not occurred to EPA to apply the CWA to offshore wind facilities. But it should. The law applies to the “navigable waters” of the US. The Virginia facility is certainly in navigable waters, as several shipping lanes have to be rerouted around it. All the offshore wind facilities presently in development had better be in US waters as the Feds are collecting billions in lease payments for them.

At this point CFACT is merely raising the question, why isn’t the Clean Water Act employed in offshore wind industrialization?

The third issue CFACT raises is technological. EPA is considering issuing an air quality permit for the construction and operation of the Virginia facility. Their primary concern is the exhaust emissions from the huge number of boat trips involved.

CFACT points out that other countries are starting to use electric boats in order to avoid these emissions. In fact, there are service boats specifically designed to be charged directly from the wind facility’s output.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to call for the best available control technology. Electric boats would seem to fit this requirement, and the firms employed in carrying out this construction should be required to deploy them.

Given these facts, it appears the EPA has not been doing a proper job of offshore wind impact assessment and permitting under both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

https://heartland.org/opinion/cfact-says-offshore-wind-violates-clean-air-and-clean-water-acts/

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The Guardian Should Know That One Mild Winter Is Not Climate Change, Nor Is It Alarming

A recent article in The Guardian, “Vanishing ice and snow: record warm winter wreaks havoc across US Midwest,” describes the very mild winter much of the American Midwest has experienced this year, claiming that it is due to climate change. While a declining trend towards less-severe winters may in part reflect modest warming, the intensity of this winter’s warmth is more likely explained by El Niño.

The Guardian asserts that ice cover across the Great Lakes has been declining since the early 1970s, writing that while the historic average for mid-February is around 40%, “this year it was about 4%.” Grand Forks, North Dakota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, are listed as having recorded their warmest winter, and the Guardian links to evidence in the form of an article from weather.com. Interestingly, directly beneath the states listed in the weather.com post referenced in the article is this statement, “[t]he Twin Cities’ warmest winter, by the way, was 146 years ago in 1877-78, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.” The Guardian neglected to mention that.

Climate change is the culprit, claims The Guardian, but their own weather.com source lists two natural causes for this year’s mildness, including El Niño and a lack of “persistent blocking patterns – such as the Greenland block – that pull cold air from Canada and lock it into the U.S. for longer than a few days.”

Regarding El Niño, weather.com says “[w]armer winters are typical across the northern tier of states during a strong El Niño.”

Continuing, weather.com reports:

Despite a few recent storms, this season’s winter storm pace across the country is the slowest in 10 years. That’s left just 14% of the Lower 48 covered by snow as of Feb. 26. The warmth also left Great Lakes ice cover at a 51-year low for mid-February, including an ice-free Lake Erie and just a few small bays of Lake Superior with any ice.

In case you missed the point, the ice was this low 51 years of global warming ago, when the Earth was not only cooler, but it was in a cooling trend. A recent post at Climate Realism covers this specific subject in more detail, with H. Sterling Burnett writing “the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age.”

In fact, ice coverage data for the Great Lakes show that coverage is highly variable from year to year. Plotted annual maximum data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory show as much. (See figure below)

The data across all the Great Lakes do indicate that recent years have seen more below-average years, but high years are still found, and it depends on the individual lake. On Lake Superior, Erie, and Huron, for example, most winters touch the 90% ice coverage range. On Lake Michigan, which has lower ice coverage averages, the record ice coverage is tied between two years; 1977 and 2014. Lake Ontario likewise traditionally has less coverage, and has its record high in 1979, and second-highest ice coverage in 2015.

The Guardian also says that a “report published in January found that the number of -35F (-37.2C) readings in northern Minnesota have fallen by up to 90%,” they point out that low temperatures play a role in weed and pest control, which is true enough, however they neglect to mention that extreme cold kills human beings as well, and at much higher rates than extreme heat does. They also fail to mention that longer, colder winters result in fewer crop rotations and production.

In Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, multiple studies back up the fact that cold is deadlier than heat all around the world. One study, published in the Lancet in 2021, found that while 600,000 people die globally from heat, over 6 million die from cold. (see the figure, below) Further, cold related deaths have declined at more than double the rate that heat related deaths have increased.

The number of severely cold winters may be modestly trending downwards around the Great Lakes and across portions of the American Midwest, but almost everyone would agree that fewer -35℉ days is a blessing not a curse. This year’s winter is particularly mild not because of climate change but because of natural weather patterns, and a long-term trend in declining extreme cold is actually better for human survival. Contrary to The Guardian’s reporting, climate doomsaying is not an appropriate response to the available data.

https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/the-guardian-should-know-that-one-mild-winter-is-not-climate-change-nor-is-it-alarming/

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Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper ever to come out of the field of ecology. Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.

Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.

Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny

A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.

Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”

Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.

Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.

The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times. Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:

An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.

No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.

The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”

With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables. What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”? Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene! The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.

It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.

Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/environmentalism-from-concern-about-clean-air-to-throwing-soup-at-the-mona-lisa/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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