Climate change can be viewed as a handy, planetary scale, natural experiment whose outcome will cast new light on the politics of left and right.
In amongst the gathering climate disaster and impending catastrophe of unchecked climate change there is an uncounted blessing. Small comfort though it is, we might finally have a test that shows which out of left or right political thinking is overall worse for humanity.
This is possible because the assertion, in the face of what appears to be overwhelming scientific evidence, that climate change is not human-induced is falsifiable.
This is important, because for today’s deniers and soothsayers to be taken seriously their arguments and theses must be amenable to continual verification, as well as the possibility of eventual falsification.
To put it simply, if not now then in coming decades [1] the arguments advanced by climate change deniers will either emerge as being irrefutably true or they will become too obviously ridiculous to maintain (one argument is that current global heating is caused by a long-term cycle in the Sun’s power output, now at or near a maximum. If global heating continues unabated after maximum, then this theory can be discounted after allowing for any mitigations by humans). In other words, climate change deniers will be seen to have been either right or wrong in their stance, and if wrong, as they are currently held to be by science, to have also imperilled humanity through reckless or perhaps outright dishonest denial.
The counter argument is of course also valid. If shown to be ineluctably wrong, those maintaining the science as correct on anthropogenic heating will be seen to have inconvenienced humanity by being over cautious. Although certainly not to have imperilled humanity, and rather to have aided it, given that the actions proposed by those who accept the science herald other benefits, such as cleaner, healthier air and wiser use of fossil fuels [2].
But aside from showing us who was in the end right or wrong, this inadvertent natural experiment also provides a means for showing what type of political thinking underlies a particular stance. And this in turn will provide a way of strongly linking political stance to real world effect.
Here’s how the reasoning goes: the people who deny anthropogenic climate change and claim it a hoax seem to be mostly conservative, right-leaning, and in many cases far right in their politics. As one example, take Donald Trump and some sections of his voter base, with possibly many flat-earthers among them also (though as Gareth Dorrian and Ian Whittaker writing in The Conversation note, this may not be so straightforward an association because “proponents of one of these theories are not necessarily proponents of the other”).
In contrast, people who seemingly take the trouble to understand and subsequently accept the scientific view of climate change seem to be overwhelmingly progressive and left.
So, on my estimation at least, deniers can generally be characterised as right-leaning, acceptors as left-leaning.
This means there will be an outcome to the experiment beyond simply knowing who is right or wrong about climate change based on the acceptance or denial of scientifically obtained data. It further provides information with regard to the political thinking underlying that acceptance or denial, and ultimately which stance is good or bad for the planet.
(Supporting studies and statistics are needed to affirm my estimation of the correlation between political leaning and climate change stance. I characterise deniers as being overwhelmingly right and acceptors as being left. However, irrespective of what that correlation is in reality, the experiment is valid as an objective test of the effect of political thinking on the real world.)
Likely Outcome, based on current scientific data
If one accepts the scientific data as true, and my estimation of the correlation of left and right is correct, then the falsification of climate change denial (i.e., the eventual impossibility of sanely refuting anthropogenic climate change) will show right-leaning politics to have had a bad effect on the course of human history.
When “alternative facts”, astonishing claims of “modelling errors” as put forth by the psychologist Jordan Peterson, as well as other denial arguments finally become too difficult or embarrassing to defend by even the most obtuse or profit-driven sceptic, climate denial will have been exposed for the pernicious propaganda that many of us, looking at the science, suspect it is. This could serve us well (seeing we are already on that road) in that we will have identified a way of political thinking that to some has already undeniably led us to disaster, providing us with at least one historical instance of global, pan-national and catastrophic science denial and misconstrual associated with right-leaning, conservative thinking such as that of Peterson’s.
Progressively inclined people already strongly suspect conservative thinkers tend towards trashing the planet in their effort to keep a small minority rich at the expense of everyone else. A planetary scale natural experiment that clearly demonstrates this tendency will provide robust evidence that the political thinking that underlies it is the wrong kind for a civilisation at our stage in its history and with our kinds of problems. Whilst it is impossible to claim that conservative thinking is unfit during all stages in a civilisation’s ascent (because it may actually be useful when life is unavoidably “nasty, brutish and short’ and necessarily a “war of all against all”), it does now seem we can with confidence claim such circumstances no longer necessarily prevail; that there are more than ample means to allow everyone the opportunity to flourish without fighting each other over resources, and, absurdly, consuming and wasting those very resources in this war of all against all, not least against the planet itself.
[1] Going by the unfortunate confusion displayed by Jordan Peterson, whom we might term a DIY climatologist, we may need to wait centuries before such ill informed views are entirely laid to rest.
[2] This is also another argument in favour of caution when facing something as momentous as climate change, even when one is skeptical or does not understand the science. The consequences of denial and inaction are many orders of magnitude graver than the consequences of misplaced prudence, added to which there are in fact long-term benefits to being cautious whereas denial and inaction bear only short term benefits, and then only to a few.