On The Cooling Of Global Warming

When I read former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on global warming, I do not instantly recoil as I do when former Vice President Al Gore blows hot air on the subject.

This may have something to do with an indelible memory I received as a boy. The Bush v Gore election was the second presidential contest to have entered my consciousness, the first being the 1996 presidential race where the predominate question in my mind was whether Bob Dole was somehow responsible for the production of the delicious juices my mother poured for me at the breakfast table (if he was, I figured he probably deserved the youth vote). As we know, the Bush v Gore runoff was not so peachy. And hardly anyone could blame Mr Gore for being severely disappointed at his loss, especially with so close an election.

But then there was the Inaugural Address a few months later. I remember watching Mr Bush’s speech on the Capitol from the distance of the family television in Chicago. The cameras would pan the audience and occasionally zoom-in on particularly famous or incongruous faces.

Al Gore’s face was both of these.

Unbelievably to my tender eyes, the man had gained an enormous amount of weight and was sporting a scraggly, ugly, beard, looking like all he wanted in the world was to hurt someone. I recoiled at the spectacle in an instant; it was the sort of image that came to mind when my parents warned me to avoid strangers, especially strangers cruising in windowless vans.

I understand now that my response was a bit over the top; I’ve never been one for underreacting. Yet the memory stays.

In college, when Mr Gore began travelling the world in his profusely polluting jet, I found it hard to take his apocalyptic message seriously. On top of that my Geology professor, a sceptic of anthropogenic warming, shared the reasons for his scepticism. Naturally, I took him seriously. Then came the report that researchers at one of the leading centres of climate change study, the University of East Anglia, had circulated a string of eyebrow-raising emails casting doubt on the integrity of their work product. The global warming lobby was not wooing this young conservative's vote.

I continue to wonder whether the rhetoric of calamity has more to do with the Left’s penchant for magnanimity than the gravity of the situation. What I am confident in is the Left’s desire for increasingly centralised control of human affairs; and a global catastrophe provides exactly the sort of emergency where concentrating power to the few becomes plausible to the many.

I also recognise that it was Lady Thatcher and the Tory party in Britain in the 1980s who encouraged concern over global warming. They very much wanted nuclear power plants after their surly shutdown of coal.  

For all that, I still have ears to hear what Dr Williams has to say. For, I happen to hold a prejudice that he does, a scepticism that threatens to nudge me closer to those who voice their concern for the environment as 'global warming'. It is a scepticism of the industrialised and plasticised way we Westerners handle . . . everything. You can read some of Dr Williams's remarks at the Telegraph.

It is a remarkable thing how much we extract from our earth to turn around and process into non-degradable matter. It is remarkable how drastically we few billion humans affect our soils, rivers, and oceans. And children's future.

A young JRR Tolkien, a deep lover of nature, witnessed with horror the blackening of his beloved countryside before his move to the even blacker and smaugy Birmingham. Tolkien possessed the notion that the universe is alive; not in the discredited sense of pantheism (and its weird offspring the Gaia and Green movements) but in an imaginative sense. Here is an example of what he felt:

You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are 'trees', and growing is 'to grow');
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

- Mythopoeia

Tolkien penned these words the night (early morning, to be exact) after he tried convincing C.S. Lewis that myths and mythical thinking have a reasonable place in the human repertoire. More on that another time. Suffice it to say Tolkien, and Dr Williams, share a view that nature should not be reduced to a commodity; trees are not merely paper-and-2x4s-to-be.

Where does this take us? I submit not to the apocalyptic vision and resulting usurpation of Mr Gore and his excitable hotheads. Roger Scruton, though, offers some reasonable and humane advice.

Rather than add to the hysteria of modern discourse, we should resurrect old notions of what Scruton calls 'oikophilia', that is, the love of home. The Left tends to argue in the abstract; conservatives should be more down-to-earth. The Left concentrates on phrases like 'environment', 'habitat', 'ecosystem'. One would think it was the baboon display at the zoo up for discussion.

Conservatives, on the other hand, ought to concentrate on local matters. Conservative vocabularies should include words like 'River Thames' and 'Lake Michigan'. Perhaps the ominously named 'Fresh Kills Landfill, New York' deserves attention. Scruton writes: 'The propensity for settlement and stewardship is at the heart of conservative philosophy, I argue, and ought to be at the heart of Conservative politics, too.' You can read his book Green Philosophy, watch his intriguing videos on Youtube, or read his own summary of the argument at the Guardian.

Let's end with a few sympathetic words from Milton, of whom our Hilaire wrote a biography.

And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Dark Satanic Mills indeed. The kind that produce the plastic nearly each piece of food we purchase at the grocers is wrapped in.

By the by, if you haven't heard Milton's poem set to tune, stop everything and have a listen.

Until next time,

PJS