The Two Faces of Environmentalist Whackos

Oddball

Unobtanium Member
Jan 3, 2009
101,421
103,209
3,615
Drinking wine, eating cheese, catching rays
Couldn't have said it better myself:

The greens have forgotten where they come from. Modern environmentalism was born in the reaction against Big Science, Big Government and Experts. The Army Corps of Engineers built dams that devastated wetlands and ruined ecosystems; environmentalists used to be people who fought the Corps because they understood the limits of science, engineering, and simple big interventions in complex ecosystems.

The case environmentalists used to make was that modern science was too crude and too incomplete to take into account the myriad features that could turn a giant hydroelectric dam from a blessing into a curse. Yes, the dam would generate power — for a while. But green critics would note that the dam had side effects: silt would back up in the reservoir, soil downstream would be impoverished, parasites and malaria bearing mosquitoes would flourish in the still waters and so on and so forth. Meanwhile the destruction of wetlands and river bottoms imposed enormous costs to wildlife diversity and the productivity of river systems. Salmon runs would disappear. Often, the development associated with hydroelectric dams led to deforestation, offsetting gains in flood control.

Environmentalists were skeptics of the One Big Fix. Science could never capture all the side effects and the unintended consequences. DDT looked like a magic bullet against malaria, but it threatened to wipe out important bird species. Books like Silent Spring, the environmental classic, attacked the engineers of big interventions as hopelessly out of touch crude thinkers, who tried to reduce complex social and biological issues and processes to simple science. Intellectually and culturally, environmentalists came out of the same movement as critics of crude urban development like Jane Jacob (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). They celebrated the diverse local, small-scale adaptations that reflected the knowledge of communities as opposed to the grandiose plans of the social engineers.

Essentially, the core environmentalist argument against big projects and big development is the same argument that libertarians use against economic regulations and state planning. The ‘economic ecology’ of a healthy free market system is so complex, libertarians argue, that bureaucratic interventions, however well intentioned and however thoroughly supported by peer reviewed science of various kinds, will produce unintended consequences
— and in any case the interventions and regulations are too crude and too simple to provide an adequate substitute for the marvelously complex economic order that develops from free competition. Environmentalists turned this logic against Big Science projects like dams and more generally built a case that humanity should work to have a light footprint in the world. Natural systems are so complicated, so interlinked in non-obvious ways, that any human intervention in nature has unanticipated costs. The less we intervene, the better.

<snip>


The rise of the environmental movement reflected the increasing independence of thought and judgment of a public that was becoming less and less impressed with credentials and degrees. The public wanted to take power back from experts and appointed government agencies and put up new obstacles in the way of technocratic engineers with big projects in mind.

But when it comes to global warming, the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is suddenly the environmentalists &#8212; who&#8217;ve often spent lifetimes raging against experts and scientists who debunk organic food and insist that GMOs and nuclear power plants are safe &#8212; who are the pious advocates of science and experts. Suddenly, it&#8217;s a sin to question the wisdom of the Scientific Consensus. Scientists are, after all, experts; their work is peer-reviewed and we uneducated rubes must sit back and shut up when the experts tell us what&#8217;s right.

More, environmentalists have found a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix. It is not just wrong to doubt that a fix is needed, it is wrong to doubt that the Chosen Fix will work. Never mind that the leading green political strategy (to stop global warming by a treaty that gains unanimous consent among 190 plus countries and is then ratified by 67 votes in a Senate that rejected Kyoto 95-0) is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree; we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.

The Greening of Godzilla - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest
 
nice post oddball. it points out the paradigm shift that has been happening.

another paradigm shift that has been happening in science is the trend to overspecialization and the exclusion of polymath thinkers.
With the advent of the modern research university, work on a given research problem gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands as academics over-over-over-specialize. Before, they were generalist enough to understand most problems, have something to say or carry out work about them, and interpret and judge other people's thoughts and findings on them. Academics may always be prone to unintentionally seeing their data with biased eyes, to maliciously faking the data, and to having their equipment crap out and give them a faulty reading.

But before, there were, say, 100 academics working on some problem, so that if any one of them made a serious error, the others could correct it at a small cost -- by trying to replicate the results themselves, asking for the data to re-analyze it themselves, proposing rival explanations, pointing out logical flaws (that would still require enough knowledge of the problem to see), and so on. So, if the system is moving in the direction of greater-truth-discovering, and we perturb it away by having one of these 100 academics make an error, the system goes back to where it was and the error doesn't spiral out of control. Also, the errors from various academics don't compound each other -- that would require belonging to some larger framework or vision or coordination that wove them together, making them interact.

However, in the modern setting of hyper-specialization, there are very few qualified to correct the errors of the one academic (or maybe a small handful) who are working on the problem. They mostly have to take the raw data and the interpretations on faith -- deferring to expert consensus is out since, again, so very few are qualified that the law of large numbers cannot work to yield an unbiased consensus. Thus, when a crucial error is made, there are few external checks to dampen it, and its harm grows and grows as it becomes taken for granted among the broader academic fields that cite the erroneous article.

Moreover, these errors compound each other because they all come from the same academic, not a group of unrelated researchers. In his vision, his big ideas all mesh together and reinforce each other; most academics don't toy with a bunch of totally unrelated ideas, but instead seek to build an interlocking tower of ideas.
Dusk in Autumnaug30/10

this has been especially true in climate science where data and methodology have been sequestered away from prying eyes by claims of concensus and peer review.
 

New Topics

Forum List

Back
Top