Philosophy, climate change scepticism and the avant-garde intelligentsia

The logical positivism that was used in the 1950s and 1960s for nefarious ends, in the context of the cold war, was quite a distorted logical positivism and based upon a false interpretation. Interesting scholarship, from both philosophical (Michael Freidman) and political angles (George Reisch), has emerged that quite rightly emphasises this.

Critical dispositions toward science exploded onto the intellectual scene from the late 1960s to early 1970s, and thereupon became quite influential across the social sciences and humanities. The left-liberal intelligentsia developed a particular fondness for such views and upon this basis became totally concerned with obscurantist discourse and the politics of identity.

It is no accident that just as the era of neoliberalism kicked off the critical faculties of our universities put aside the economics and politics of class. The main function of the obscurantist rhetoric was to disarm a hotbed of radicalism in western society, namely the university, precisely when the top 0.1% of the population began to accumulate great wealth and power.

Critical theory, and all the rest, has been described, by Leszek Kolakowski, as being "Marxism without the proletariat." Though I quite like this refrain, I can see now that the appellation is fallacious. Critical theory, rather than merely forgetting about the proletariat, actively serves the interests of the masters of the universe. That is why it has been tolerated everywhere, even in authoritarian states such as China and Mubarak's Egypt.

This little excursion into intellectual history is important because it goes to the heart of a rarely discussed feature of the climate change debate. The conservative sceptics of climate change science adopt the same underlying argument about climatology that left wing academics have been making for decades about science in toto.

Only the left wing academics are shamefully silent about this as they poo-poo their supposedly simpleton conservative cousins.

Climate change scepticism has rested on a number of claims about the science of climate change. These range from the claim that the atmosphere has not been warming, that the amount of warming, to the extent that it has occurred, has been insignificant, or that warming is due to natural variation rather than induced by the activities of man.

Given all this it is only right and proper to adopt a typically sceptical stance about the knowledge claims made by established Earth science; there is not sufficient evidence to assert that we know that global temperatures have been rising due to human action.

It is important that we realise that this scepticism is empirically based. It does not adopt a sceptical stance toward science as such, although unsophisticated sceptics tend to unwittingly flirt with it when engaged in disputation.

Despite this we observe, nonetheless, that there is a broad consensus amongst Earth scientists that in fact quite the opposite is true; global temperatures have been rising and that rise has been caused by that "annoying lump of grey matter," as Betrand Russell, perhaps accurately, labelled us.

What exercises the mind is the explanation that conservative sceptics have used to explain all this.

When a claim, or set of claims, to knowledge is widely adopted, but such claims cannot really be justified, we must turn to sociological explanations to account for consensus. With climate change science widespread consensus cannot obtain because the claims of the science are objectively and empirically valid. That cannot be so for climate change science is unable to overcome scepticism about the proper status of the justifications used to buttress the case for global warming.