{"id":19918,"date":"2013-04-19T09:17:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T14:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19918"},"modified":"2013-04-19T09:17:28","modified_gmt":"2013-04-19T14:17:28","slug":"enviro-apocalypse-now-or-real-soon-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/19\/enviro-apocalypse-now-or-real-soon-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"Enviro-Apocalypse Now (or real soon, anyway)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked<\/em>, Tim Black<\/a> reviews the latest environmental doom-mongering tome from Andrew Simms:<\/p>\n

All of this ought to leave Simms & Co looking like the boys who cried climate catastrophe. Yet somehow, as Cancel the Apocalypse<\/em> shows, they are continuing, unabashed, to preach environmental doom despite its palpable absence. In fact, the hyper-pessimism has even been ramped up a bit. \u2018The horsemen are galloping and there are more than four of them\u2019, Simms chirrups. \u2018Climate change, financial meltdown, the global peak and decline of oil production, a mass extinction event of plant and animal species, overuse of fresh water supplies, soil loss, economic infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to external shocks — it\u2019s the age of the complex super disaster.\u2019 It seems devastating climate change is no longer enough for Simms; he wants to solicit a whole host of other unrelated, and highly debatable, phenomena for his narrative of woe. Cancelled? No way, Simms chortles: the apocalypse is back on.<\/p>\n

So how is Simms able to maintain his unshakeable belief in our imminent destruction? What makes him and his tweedy, right-on puritan mates different to, say, William Miller, founder of the Second Adventists (later to become the Seventh Day Adventists), who, as Simms tells us, believed the day of reckoning would fall in 1843, 1845, 1846, 1849, 1851, 1874 and 1999?<\/p>\n

The ostensible answer is that whereas previous doomsayers derived their predictions from \u2018gobbledygook floating up from patterns of words and numbers dimly discerned in books about faith and belief\u2019, Simms and his followers rely upon \u2018verifiable scientific experiment\u2019. Of course, The Science.<\/p>\n

Which is funny, because Cancel the Apocalypse<\/em> does not contain much in the way of \u2018verifiable scientific experiment\u2019. What it does feature, though, is a scientistic use of the authority of science to justify a whole range of dubious assertions. In Simms\u2019 hands, science is no longer science. It is a metaphor, an authority-bolstering gloss, allowing him to talk, for example, of socio-historical phenomena such as the economy in terms of the laws of nature: \u2018Just as physical laws constrain the maximum efficiency of a heat engine\u2019, he writes, so \u2018economic growth is constrained by the finite nature of our planet\u2019s natural resources, the variable but ultimately bounded biocapacity of its oceans, fields, geology and atmosphere\u2019; and later on, \u2018the laws of physics mean it is not possible to create the order of such [economic] exchanges without a little something being lost [Simms is referring to the biosphere]\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked, Tim Black reviews the latest environmental doom-mongering tome from Andrew Simms: All of this ought to leave Simms & Co looking like the boys who cried climate catastrophe. Yet somehow, as Cancel the Apocalypse shows, they are continuing, unabashed, to preach environmental doom despite its palpable absence. In fact, the hyper-pessimism has even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,65,28],"tags":[245,86,39],"class_list":["post-19918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-environment","category-media","tag-climatechange","tag-criticism","tag-junkscience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5bg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19919,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19918\/revisions\/19919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}