Now, to that other new thing up in the upper left corner…
“Exploring the Unseen.” How can we explore something we can’t see?
Glad you asked!
I’ve recently read several interesting articles that have placed my mental feet on this particular path:
Secession from the Broadcast: The Internet and the Crisis of Social Control, by Gene Youngblood
The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade, from the Société de Calcul Mathématique SA, translated from the French original
Cultural Hegemony, by Stephen Duncombe in Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution
I’ve been studying climate variation for 25 years now, as an archaeologist, a dendroclimatologist, and, most recently, as an interested amateur observer. Over the years, the debate over the source of observed increases in global average surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration has resolved into a struggle between proponents of anthropogenic climate change (aka Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)) and so-called “climate skeptics” or “deniers,” as they are characterized by the more vehement AGW proponents.
AGW followers loudly protest perceived funding of skeptics and deniers by fossil fuel interests threatened by demands to “leave fossil fuels in the ground,” shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and shift to organic agriculture to reduce petroleum based fertilizers and equipment fueling. They accuse corporations such as Exxon/Mobil of employing public relations firms to support their cause and foster doubt about global warming by questioning the science, which, they vociferously proclaim, is settled. There are even public relations firms that have vowed to never represent climate deniers and skeptics, as AGW has more and more become a moral issue.
This got me to thinking, a dangerous proposition, I know, but inevitable. If the anti-AGW crowd employs cadres of dedicated Edward Bernays acolytes to sow seeds of doubt about AGW, how is it that the dominant perception is that of human caused global warming and the necessity for humans to do something NOW! to stop it? Where did that idea come from and how has it become ubiquitous in global western culture?
In steps the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is viewed by many as a science organization involved in studying climate change. It’s not. The IPCC is a policy organization that analyzes climate science (and other non-science) research to recommend national and international policies on how to deal with human caused climate change. AGW is the base assumption in their mission statement.
The IPCC is a daughter organization of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization, which are all a part of and beholding to the United Nations Development Programme. And you’ll no be surprised to learn that the United Nations has its own Department of Public Information, which contracts with numerous prestigious public relations firms to spread its message of “Sustainable (sic) Development.”
The Department of Public Information “fosters dialogue with global constituencies such as academia, civil society, the entertainment industry, educators and students to encourage support for the ideals and activities of the United Nations.”
There you have it. An international organization with billions of dollars of funding to dangle before academia, Hollywood, and the public and private education system to build support for “Sustainable (sic) Development.”
Development (aka growth) of “less developed” countries is now hobbled by environmental pressure to stop economic growth and the negative effects of unlimited growth in a finite world. AGW is used as a big economic guilt stick to beat about the heads of “more developed” countries, by accusing them (us) of being the proximate cause of climate change with an obligation to fund development in “less developed” countries so they can better survive the effects of climate change to come.
Have you ever pulled a loose thread on your sock, only to have it unravel into a loose pile of threads on the floor? That’s what it’s like to attempt to follow the connections woven into the AGW propaganda machine, connections that remain unseen, looking like a whole sock, until one starts to take them apart.
The concept of human caused climate change looks more and more like cultural hegemony, “the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.”
What then do we do now? How do we explore the unseen and bring it into the seen? How do we escape from cultural hegemony?
I’ll toy with these ideas, and many others, in future editions of Words Arranged.
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