Airbrushing History

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Narrative

How I Met Your Targets

Early in my career I caught the tail-end of a research project that was celebrating its successful conclusion. I was impressed.

Two years later when clearing out an archive I found the original “kick-off meeting" slide-deck (plastic overheads... this was 30+ yrs ago  😊 ) which had the 10 objectives of the project listed. Nine of them had been totally missed. How was this a success?

On another occasion I was in a Joint-Venture meeting and was surprised and suspicious to hear in a year-end meeting that the project’s budget had been achieved with a 98% match. Stunning!

Corporate culture, where there is a high turn-over of people moving departments and /or being promoted is ripe for such outcomes. In the first case - the project goals had simply been changed to match the achieved results - culminating in a glorious success for those who had inherited the project.

In the second case - it transpired the same had happened - the 98% match was with the year’s “revised budget” - the one that had been revised in November. No mention of the budget that we had started with twelve months earlier.

Airbrushing of history has a long and inglorious, er, history.

Nikolai Yezhov earned the nickname 'The Vanishing Commissar' for his disappearance from photographs after his execution in 1940. (source). Something that became common practice - long before photoshop - when the truth didn’t matter and maintaining authority did.

The Counterfactuals

One problem of the march of time, apart from getting old and grumpy, is that we cannot know what the world would have been like if “X” had or had not happened. The Y2K bug is a case in point. In one narrative, disaster was averted due to the media frenzy about the doomsday that the Y2K bug would unleash - which caused the IT world to spring into life and fix the problem before it happened. The counter-factual is that maybe this just wasn’t a big problem after all, and that yes, some fixing went on, but ultimately there never was a doomsday scenario. In this example I am not sure anyone really knows the “truth” - it was probably a bit of both.

In other cases we can be more certain that the outcome was the result of action - I believe that for the Acid Rain and the Ozone-Hole scares of the 1980s and 1990s the worst was averted by direct action on the known causes. In both cases there was a relatively simple cause-effect that could be fixed.

The Habitable Earth

In 2017 a little known writer at the New Yorker magazine wrote an article about doomsday climate scenarios - it went viral and in his words “It had about 6m page views. Within a couple of days, it was the most-read article we had ever published. It was a true phenomenon. That was thrilling…” (source) So the obvious next step was to write a book - not to make money or get the thrill of success, you understand, but to drive public opinion.

Is this Armaggeddonising a way to reach new audiences and break down barriers?

Yes, and to activate people who are only casually engaged. To me, that is the most important messaging mission. It is important to mobilise people who at the moment are concerned, but basically complacent, and turn them into people who are much more activated and essentially voting about climate as a first-order political priority rather than a third- or fourth-order priority – judging politicians on the basis of their climate policy. (source 2019)

Never mind that between the publication of the article and the book, the scientific though-leader Hans Rolsing had just published Factfullness and argued strongly that “Fear and Urgency” lead to poor decision making.

Waterstones bookshop entreance, London 2019. “oh no, we are all gonna die, please buy my book”

The Airbrushing Starts

Having rung the alarm bell as long and as hard as possible, it is interesting to note that David Wallace-Wells (the author of “The Uninhabitable World”) is reviewing his narrative. It is laudable that someone whose livelihood and status has come to be associated with catastrophism should publicly revise their position. Kudos.

This is good, indeed it is far better than many of the die-hard overly-invested scaremongers who simply double-down.

Indeed, the scientific community has acknowledged that the extreme scenarios (RCP8.5) were never realistic (requiring a 600% increase in coal burning by 2100 as an example) , and the media is slowly catching on. It is worth mentioning that this (and equivalent) scenarios were always designed as outliers - but were frequently represented by the IPCC, in the “scientific” literature and the MSM as “business-as-usual” scenarios - which was disingenuous or plain dishonest.

RCP8.5—the most commonly used RCP scenario and the one said to best represent what the world would look like if no climate policies were enacted—represents not just an implausible future in 2100, but a present that already deviates significantly from reality (excellent summary: How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality)

This kind of fear-mongering was often deliberate as per the quote above, and as per an anecdote Rosling recounts in Factfulness concerning Al Gore. The Fear and Urgency was designed to cause mobilization. However, it is becoming apparent that there is also an unintended consqeuence (and one that many Climate Scientits have worried about for years) - a backlash against the catastrophism, devaluing the real science.

New American: Poll: 60 percent of Likely Voters Agree “Climate Change Has Become a Religion” (Rasmussen poll, one source here)

I have no insight into why we are seeing back-peddling on the climate catastrophism - but I suspect that it is just realpolitik in action.

So Now the Airbrushing

We no longer have to consider Apocalyptic visions of the future because…

Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years. (Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View By David Wallace-Wells, Oct 2022)

That’s right - the marginal increase in energy from renewables - taking fossil fuel usage from 85% to say 83% of global primary energy - has already cut expected warming by half! Fancy that. Pats on the back all round.

And there I was thinking that expectations of lower warming were simply because we had started to exclude the ridiculous RCP8.5 models from the realm of reasonable debate. Silly me.

The article takes a long detour around the usual tropes of how renewables have become “90% cheaper”, and how “concerted policy has created a dynamic”. At no point does it try to square the circle that the modelling is now way less catastrophic but emissions have not declined at all. The nearest we get is:

At this point, they are mostly paper pledges, few of them binding enough in the short term to look like real action plans…

Now the Bad News

This bit reads like “OK we are busted on the unrealistic Armageddon scenarios - but now we’ll say that the lower temperature bounds will be just as bad”. Yeah, all back on the gravy-train.

“The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.” (Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View By David Wallace-Wells, Oct 2022)

My guess is we will see the narrative continue to change such that the “transition” is a success no matter what the end game looks like. Too much money and political status is invested in the “right-thought”.

• Climate change is catastrophic - we told you so!

• Climate change is moderate - we helped fix it!

• Climate change doesn’t materialize - hey we fixed it completely!

• The economy has collapased - we told you climate change would do that!

I'm just looking forward to the creative nonsense that we will see to justify this.

My try for starters: Coal gets labelled as "Green" because the particulate matter it emits is shown to help "global dimming" and has a net cooling effect...

Happy days.

"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested." – George Orwell, 1984