Science, Language, and Hot Summer Days, Part 1
If climate change is real, it seems strange to call the term "newspeak."
From time to time, I come across a piece of popular political writing that I find myself unable to resist responding to, point by point. Today I’m responding to a piece by a fellow Substack author, Auron MacIntyre, who publishes the informative blog The Total State. I disagree with MacIntyre pretty often, but I read him regularly because he’s a good writer and presents crisp and cogent versions of opinions I associate with the modern right, which I increasingly need help understanding. MacIntyre helps me slow down and reconsider some of these opinions.
Recently he expressed his frustration with the leftist “consensus-manufacturing apparatus in America” for exploiting the unusually hot weather across much of the globe this summer in order to agitate the body politic with the highly charged term, “climate change.”
MacIntyre’s thesis is that “environmentalists” or more broadly, The Left, employ Big Brotherly linguistic techniques to co-opt our thinking and shape our reality into one that suits their sinister purposes. Like many on the right, MacIntyre laces his analysis with references to Orwellian dystopia, using terms like “newspeak” to describe the tactics of mainstream journalists, who, it goes without saying, are agents of The Left. For those who didn’t read 1984 in high school, “newspeak” is a reference to a mind-altering linguistic technique employed by the ruling Party in Orwell’s nightmarish techno-despotism. (Some other time I plan to write more about this trend on the right of reducing mainstream ideas to “Orwellian” thought control, which I find to be both crude and ironic.)
MacIntyre concedes that the GOP has an ugly history of resisting conservation efforts and environmental protection, but this does not slow him down or interfere with his high level of confidence that this time the Republicans have it right; this time the environmentalists really are just seeking power. The evidence for this despotic project is their insidious manipulation of language.
The phrase “climate change” is itself an obvious piece of newspeak. When I was growing up, environmentalists would talk about greenhouse gas emissions and the possible dangers of global warming. Whether one believes that the current levels of industrial pollution were having a significant impact on the climate or not, at least there was a rational discussion to be had. Global warming predicted a specific chain of events that could be observed, and the assertion could be proven true or false through reason and evidence.
But as dramatic predictions of peak oil, global famine, and submerged cities failed to materialize, environmentalists realized they needed to rebrand. Every time there was a cold snap or a blizzard, the public’s faith in global warming was called into question, so a more durable term was chosen.
It’s difficult to know where to start. It might make the most sense to begin by distinguishing four different voices in the monolithic entity MacIntyre calls “the environmentalists.”
1. Scientists
2. Environmental activists
3. Journalists
4. Politicians
Activists and politicians, we may assume, use terms based on rhetorical considerations, and journalists generally repeat their language. This may indeed align with MacIntyre’s claim, but in a very different way than he implies.
MacIntyre implies that the predictions of climate scientists did not materialize. I am not aware of scientific predictions of submerged cities and global famine by 2023, but MacIntyre does not cite his sources, so he may be referring to climatological papers I haven’t been able to find. A survey of the scientific literature does turn up a number of predictions from the last nine decades, many of which you can read here. None of them mentions submerged cities or global famine. All of them have been alarmingly correct so far.
I should acknowledge that MacIntyre could insulate himself from my critique by pointing out that he’s only talking about “environmentalists,” while I’m countering by pointing to climate scientists. If he did insist on this, however, it would pretty much render his analysis irrelevant. Which environmentalists? All of them? That would be untrue. Is the actual science not important in MacIntyre’s analysis, particularly since he’s remembering back to his youth, when reason and evidence were de rigueur?
If MacIntyre can truthfully point to a subset of “environmentalists” who are guilty of the sins he accuses them of, does this mean we should not be interested in the truth of climate change, and that when journalists refer to it they must be employing newspeak? He would seem to be saying, “Yes, the environmentalists may be correct about climate change, but it doesn’t matter because they’re only talking about it for reasons other than the threats posed by climate change.” This seems unserious. The policy implications of climate change are pretty much the sort of thing the right tends to oppose as “progressive” or “woke.” It’s disingenuous to use environmental policy efforts as evidence of a sinister agenda, when those efforts follow rationally from the supposed “newspeak.” If climate change is real, of course some people will advocate for policies that aim to mitigate it. It seems weird to look for some other way to frame these “progressive” policies.
In any case, to address MacIntyre’s pointed claim about The Left’s linguistic shenanigans on this topic: Climate scientists did not abruptly switch from speaking about “global warming” to “climate change.” Climate change is the broader term, and has been in use among scientists since the mid 1950s. Global warming is a narrower term that refers to the primary driver of climate change and has been in use among scientists since the 1970s. You can read about this history here. I’ve written a more focused account here, where I provide links to reputable sources for each claim.
Climate scientists did not change their language at any point for popular or political reasons. There was, however, a dramatic increase in the use of the term “climate change” among politicians, journalists, and the public, after George W. Bush used the term in a 2001 speech. Perhaps Bush is one of the environmentalists MacIntyre has in mind.
Whether he intends it or not, MacIntyre implies climate scientists no longer appeal to facts and reason. He tells his readers that back in the good old days of global warming, environmentalists made reference to measurable phenomena, which could be verified, unlike environmentalism nowadays. MacIntyre is very wrong about this if he is imagining that researchers altered their methods and vernacular in response to public views about global warming. The scientists studying climate phenomena across various academic disciplines are all bound by the same empirical criteria that natural science has been bound by for the past four centuries.
MacIntyre judges that cold snaps and blizzards shook public faith in global warming. I’m not sure what data he is referring to; it may very well be true. It is definitely not true, however, that scientists adopted the term “climate change” to make the public more accepting of . . . of what? Climate change? Global warming? Is MacIntyre saying that global warming is real, but people are too stupid to understand its complexities, and so the scientists invented a term that makes it easier for people to understand? That happens not to be true, but even if it were, it doesn’t exactly sound sinister. Or is he saying that global warming is not a fact, and it’s really easy to see that it’s not; just look at all those blizzards and cold days. And so, since the scientists were caught in their dumb lie, they invented a new term, “climate change,” which was a better lie, one harder to see through. Is this it?
What exactly does MacIntyre believe is true here? Are all these scientists, the world over, simply spinning a myth so that they can topple the oil and gas industry? Why would they want to do this? Or is it that scientists, for all their pretense to be engaging in actual scientific work, are in reality just political operatives seeking to enact a leftist agenda that has nothing to do with climate change – which is only a hoax. And just to be clear, this “leftist agenda” is a project to establish European-style socialism, or communism, or even a world government, yes? Perhaps global warming is just a ploy to provide an excuse for dismantling the oil and gas industry, because obviously, that’s what you need to do if you want to establish global tyranny.
Whatever MacIntyre imagines climate scientists are up to, the premise that the goal is anything besides understanding the world we live in and providing scientifically verified facts to policy-makers, ignores the reality of scientific methodologies and consensus.
Once one encounters the depth and breadth of the relevant scientific research, it becomes implausible to imagine that all of this is a ruse. To do so would be to imagine a conspiracy theory vast indeed. As we shall see, MacIntyre himself does not believe the scientists are lying about global warming or climate change. So, what exactly is the underlying problem he’s trying to get us to see? If climate change is in fact real, why call references to it “newspeak”? What kind of three-dimensional chess are his environmentalists playing? I’ll consider this in the next essay.