{"id":23220,"date":"2020-08-20T20:18:14","date_gmt":"2020-08-21T01:18:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/?p=23220"},"modified":"2020-08-20T20:18:17","modified_gmt":"2020-08-21T01:18:17","slug":"denial-and-alarmism-in-the-near-term-extinction-and-collapse-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2020\/08\/denial-and-alarmism-in-the-near-term-extinction-and-collapse-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Denial and Alarmism in the Near-Term Extinction and Collapse Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Guest article by Alastair McIntosh,\u00a0<\/a> honorary professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. This is an excerpt from his new book, Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\"coverMostly, we only know what we think we know about climate science because of the climate science. I have had many run-ins with denialists, contrarians or climate change dismissives as they are variously called. Over the past two years especially, concern has also moved to the other end of the spectrum, to alarmism. Both ends, while the latter has been more thinly tapered, can represent forms of denial. In this abridged adaptation I will start with denialism, but round on the more recent friendly fire on science that has emerged in alarmism.\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Climate change dismissives<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my more peculiar run-ins with a dismissive voice was through an online debate in 2010 that ECOS, the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists, organised between me and an English wildlife ecologist, Peter Taylor. Taylor\u2019s 2009 book, Chill, argued that far from living in a world that\u2019s heating up, \u2018the period 2002\u201307 marks a turning point, then glaciers will begin to grow and ice mass begin to accumulate again, thus levelling off the sea level rises\u2019. He saw the cold winter of 2008\u20139 as heralding the coming ice age(1). Being an ecologist, this made him a hero of climate change denialism, an avid convert from the other church; and for a time, Chill ranked as number one in Amazon UK\u2019s bestselling league for \u2018global warming\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invariably I have found myself asking of such figures, who have no credibly peer-reviewed publications in climate science: what makes them think that they know better than experts with a reputation worth not losing? I also ask myself what drives their attitudes. Often, these are a class of people heavily invested in consumerist lifestyles. Their material markers of identity and prestige, and their masks of distraction from what is challenging in life may be at stake. Some just don\u2019t care. I define consumerism as consumption that is in excess of what is needed for a dignified sufficiency of living. However, a handful of the most effective dismissives don\u2019t fit obvious characterisation, being more altruistic in holding their position. Peter Taylor is one such, and my late friend the botanist and TV celebrity Professor David Bellamy was another. Taylor concedes that the heavy impact of climate mitigation measures on nature and landscapes \u2013 terrestrial wind farms in particular \u2013 has influenced his views. Bellamy, likewise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of our ECOS exchange, Taylor praised it, saying: \u2018I know of no other consistent debate on this important issue.\u2019 Not having been in touch for years, I dropped him a line while writing this book. I asked: given that his forecast \u2018chill\u2019 has not materialised, did he think that it was coming yet, for all that? His reply was characteristically warm and cheerful. It left my question feeling almost mean-spirited. He made no reference back to his previous predictions. Instead, to my astonishment, he wrote of \u2018record warmth \u2013 just as we could expect\u2019, that the current warm period \u2018may have two or three centuries to run\u2019, and the next ice age is not just around the corner but \u2018three to four hundred years away\u2019(2). It seemed that the denial had full astern gone retrograde. I scratched my head and gave a weary nod to all those hours spent on the ECOS great debate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heavy ad hominem artillery<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other run-ins have had a less avuncular if, paradoxically, a more jaunty feel to them. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is Britain\u2019s foremost \u2018climate sceptic\u2019 lobby group. Set up by Lord (Nigel) Lawson of Blaby, Mrs Thatcher\u2019s former chancellor of the exchequer, its website is literally a \u2018dark\u2019 web in its presenting colour scheme. Its board comprises a formidable array of heavyweight political figures, contrarian scientists and erstwhile captains of commerce, the media and the civil service. To see power at work \u2013 elevated, concentrated and networked \u2013 go no further than to take a look online, and gape(3). Most such lobby bodies no longer say that global warming isn\u2019t happening. Instead, they\u2019ll take issue with abstruse elements of the scientific data, with the extrapolated rate of heating, with the attribution of its causes or with the expected impact and anticipated costs \u2013 not least the \u2018socialist\u2019 taxation and regulatory implications \u2013 of actually doing something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lord Lawson refuses to disclose the sources of the GWPF\u2019s funding, conceding only that he relies on friends who \u2018tend to be richer than the average person and much more intelligent than the average person\u2019(4). Since 2017 its deputy-director has been Andrew Montford, a chemist by original training, turned chartered accountant(5). My encounter with Montford came in 2010 when The Scottish Review of Books<\/em> asked me to review his investigative work, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science<\/em>, which claims to be a \u2018demolition of the veracity\u2019 of Michael Mann\u2019s hockey stick curve(6). Like Taylor\u2019s Chill a year earlier, the book quickly achieved cult status amongst climate change deniers. I concluded that at best it might help to keep already-overstretched scientists on their toes. At worst, it was a yapping terrier worrying the bull, one that cripples action, potentially costing lives and livelihoods(7).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Montford runs a blog from which, under the pseudonym of \u2018Bishop Hill\u2019, he lampoons the high priests (as he sees them) of climate science and all such hooey as green taxes, subsidies, legislation and self-righteous preaching from the likes of, well, yours faithfully. His Grace, as his congregation deferentially refer to him, responded to my piece with two blogs that had me tossed into the dungeons of the Inquisition for heretical impertinence, an abomination unto the sensibilities of the Lord. A crusade was launched, a jihad ensued, and fusillades were fired from keyboards poised in every corner of his parish. In all, some 150 comments linger as remaining landmines on the good bishop\u2019s website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018He is an enemy of the people and the state and is declared anathema,\u2019 said one. I took the humour as a badge of office. Even better, said another: \u2018Deploy heavy ad hominem<\/em> artillery to characterize [him] as a coprophagic protocranial.\u2019 Verily, it\u2019s a sorry day when a literary reviewer has to go and look up even simple dictionary words. \u2018Adopt a lordly disdain and ignore him.\u2019 \u2018He and his eco-chums are in it for the money.\u2019 \u2018Another one of these weird Highlanders who seem to dominate Scotland.\u2019 \u2018Alastair, just keep tossing off your caber.\u2019 \u2018Yer Grace, show no quarter, none will be given.\u2019 \u2018He deserves a kicking.\u2019(8)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I came out of such a Punch and Judy show well able to brush off the laugh. But it was all right for me. I make use of climate science coming from an early background of just a general earth sciences degree. I pitch no claim to be a climate scientist. Others, at the heart of science \u2013 whether Mann in the USA, or the English scientists such as Phil Jones caught up at the heart of \u2018Climategate\u2019 at the University of East Anglia – suffer for their work. No quarter is the order of their day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alarmism, doomism and Roger Hallam<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What most scientists had not foreseen with an eye so fixated on the artillery of denialism, was the sustained and one would presume well-intentioned misuse of science from the other end of the spectrum, by those who do accept the reality of climate change. When Extinction Rebellion began in England, it conveyed a sense of being witnesses to the cascade of plant and animal extinctions that are escalating around the world as many habitats become less habitable. There is no scientific quibble with that. However, the narrative soon escalated to human death on a massive and imminent scale. As the prominent co-founder Roger Hallam saw it, the burning question had become: \u2018How do we avoid extinction?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His 2019 manifesto, Common Sense for the 21st Century(9), was written in his own name but widely hailed as representing the views of Extinction Rebellion and heavily promoted by the organisation\u2019s London HQ. Referencing his claim to \u2018one recent scientific opinion\u2019, he warns of 6 to 7 billion people dead as a result of climate change \u2018within the next generation or two\u2019. The paper cited as his authority in the footnotes makes no such claim(10). It is purely Hallam\u2019s extrapolation of a 5\u00b0C world, given what Common Sense calls \u2018the central role of methane in a climate emergency . . . with the system spiralling out of our control and the likelihood of global collapse within a decade or two\u2019. He reiterated the mass dieback claim in a BBC News interview feature, trenchantly insisting: \u2018I am talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of 6 billion people this century \u2013 that\u2019s what the science predicts.\u2019(11)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Climate Feedback<\/em>, a website more used to taking on deniers than alarmists, invited an expert panel to give their opinions on this prediction. The responses ranged from \u2018an illustration of a worst-case scenario\u2019 to \u2018wild speculation\u2019. Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, put it bluntly: \u2018I know of no climate model simulation or analysis in the quality peer-reviewed literature that provides any indication\u2019 that there is a substantial probability, above zero, of 6 billion deaths this century.(12)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jem Bendell and \u2018Deep Adaptation\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, a variation of the theme was coming in from Jem Bendell, a business school professor at the University of Cumbria in the north of England. An expert in digital currencies, his staff web page playfully describes how it earned him the moniker \u2018Professor Bitcoin\u2019(13). Bendell\u2019s contribution to Extinction Rebellion\u2019s manifesto, This is Not a Drill<\/em>, tells that he \u2018grieved how I may not grow old\u2019(14). The manifesto thesis for which he is now known, Deep Adaptation<\/em>, anticipates \u2018inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change\u2019 resulting in \u2018probable catastrophe and possible extinction\u2019(15). This, as he wrote on his blog, could be expected \u2018in many, perhaps most, countries of the world . . . within 10 years\u2019(16). He spelt out both the imminence and what it would look like in a roundup of where he considered the climate science stood as of 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn\u2019t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won\u2019t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.\u2019(17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Deep Adaptation<\/em> was originally an academic paper that had failed peer review for lack of scholarly rigour. Bendell posted it to the web in 2018, achieving an astonishing half a million downloads within the first year. Part of his rationale leans on what he describes as \u2018data published by scientists from the Arctic News\u2019. However, Arctic News is no scholarly tome. It is a blog site that, amidst lurid illustrations, invokes the methane bomb and projects a possible global temperature rise of 10\u00b0C, by 2026, based on \u2018adjusted NASA data\u2019 heralding the \u2018mass extinction of man\u2019(18). Again, the pushback comes from within the scientific community itself. A journalist asked Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world\u2019s leading climate experts what he made of Bendell\u2019s paper. Schmidt said, and further pressed the point on his Twitter account, that it mixes \u2018both valid points and unjustified statements throughout\u2019, but is \u2018not based on anything real\u2019(19).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2019 blog, Bendell responded to criticisms of his slant on the science. He describes his grief at having chosen not to have children, partly because they are \u2018the greatest contribution to carbon emissions that you could make\u2019 and partly out of \u2018the realization of the world they will have to live and die within\u2019. He concludes that in future he will not be replying to, but rather, stepping away from, such controversies around his scientific claims to focus instead on building up the community around Deep Adaptation<\/em>(20), the activities of which include workshops, trainings, residencies in Bali, and an annual retreat at a yoga centre in Greece to \u2018support peaceful empowered surrender to our predicament, where action can arise from an engaged love of humanity and nature, rather than redundant stories of worth and purpose\u2019(21).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, within a year of his withdrawal from scientific debate, he wrote a further blog having requested Schmidt to render his criticism specific. Schmidt obliged, providing a raft of reproofs including his assessment that Deep Adaptation<\/em>\u2019s take on Arctic methane was \u2018totally misleading\u2019, and that its pitch on runaway climate change was \u2018nonsense\u2019. The professor, whose day job was to teach \u2018a sustainability-themed MBA programme\u2019, was unwilling to concede any significant ground to NASA\u2019s top climate scientist. Digging in his heels, the blog concluded: \u2018I have identified two minor corrections and two clarifications I will make on the paper. However, none of those are material to the situation we are in and none of the main points are revoked.\u2019(22)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly afterwards, BBC News ran a feature that profiled Bendell and his most ardent \u2018followers\u2019 as \u2018climate doomers\u2019. It quoted Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, as saying that he considers Deep Adaptation<\/em> to display \u2018the level of science of the anti-vax campaign\u2019(23). In counterpoint, it also cited Will Steffen, a retired scientist who had served on the Australian Climate Commission, suggesting that Bendell may be \u2018ahead of the game in warning us about what we might need to prepare for\u2019. The pity of it all is that Bendell\u2019s core agenda \u2013 about the need for resilience, relinquishment, restoration<\/em>, and recently he has added reconciliation<\/em> \u2013 is both necessary and inspiring. That is why he has gathered such a following amongst people who are hungry for deeper meaning. We need people like him and Hallam who, at their most effective, and if they discipline themselves to the settled science, can take an overview of things, drawing out what most matters, contextualising it and presenting it to the public in ways more digestible than the raw IPCC reports. There is for each of us so much that is good and right to do anyway, without having to overreach our fields of expertise, conflate climate change with other causes and play fast and loose with signs seen in the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arctic News, McPherson and doomsday 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Arctic News\u2019 chosen doomsday date of 2026 doubles as the apocalyptic year of choice of Guy McPherson, a retired professor of evolutionary and resource ecology at the University of Arizona, and Bendell\u2019s referenced source in Deep Adaptation<\/em> where discussing fears of an \u2018inevitable methane release . . . leading to the extinction of the human race\u2019(24). McPherson, in turn and in a way that starts to feel rather circular, references his claims back to material from Arctic News, as well as to extrapolation from a range of scientific papers and other sources that, he says, \u2018even 10-year-olds understand . . . and [that] Wikipedia accepts [as] the evidence for near-term human extinction\u2019. The phrase used there, Near Term Human Extinction, has gathered a considerable ecopopulist cult following, complete with the social media hashtag #NTHE and online mental health support groups for the depressed and suicidal. The professor crisply reiterated and summed up his position in an interview given in 2018: \u2018Specifically, I predict that there will be no humans on Earth by 2026, based on projections of near-term planetary temperature rise and the demise of myriad species that support our own existence.\u2019(25)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His website, Nature Bats Last, prominently offers suicide advice on its home page [Ed. which we are not linking to]<\/em>. While advising against such a move, he counsels that it can nevertheless \u2018be a thoughtful decision\u2019, and with this endorsement he bizarrely links to the post-mortem website of Martin Manley of Kansas, who intricately blogged the preparations for his own departure by self-inflicted gunshot in a parking lot(26). For those who believe in the severity and particularly the imminence of their prognostications, such alarmism arguably crosses over into the realm of fantasy. If conflated with reality, this risks its own potentially tragic consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breakdown to break through?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are other sides to the position that I have taken here against alarmism. An activist friend put it to me that what Bendell\u2019s work does is that it pushes a point to make a point. It usefully brings people to the state of breakdown, from where they can break through into the new social norms that are demanded by deep adaptation. It also expresses the precautionary principle. My view, is that if a case can\u2019t be made without it being over-egged, either the case is not valid or those to whom it is being pitched are being spun. Exaggeration or invoking fear and panic only entrenches positions and sets up a backlash. The unembellished science is quite bad enough to be good enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I get people coming up at my talks, or sending in an email, then being disappointed when I tell them that I only partly buy into the fears stimulated by prominent alarmists. Because I say I\u2019m sticking to consensus science \u2013 even knowing that it can never be bang up to date and that its expression will be sure but probably cautious \u2013 I suspect they sometimes think that I\u2019m the denier. A climate model researcher in Sweden dropped me a line, saying that he gets the same disappointed reactions, adding that \u2018some teenagers are distraught on this, so the alarmism of such actors is taking a heavy and unjustifiable psychological toll on others.\u2019 Those who work with young people warn of the consequences of growing \u2018climate anxiety\u2019(27).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to suggest that what is happening to the planet ought not provoke anxiety. I said to the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, that I often find myself racked between the deniers and the alarmists, trying to hold on to the humanity of both, recognising their fears or differing priorities, and yet insisting on consensus science. She answered, \u2018It is a narrow and lonely place so it\u2019s great to have company!\u2019(28). Michael Mann concurs. He sees \u2018doomism and despair\u2019 that exceeds the science as being \u2018extremely destructive and extremely influential\u2019. It has built up \u2018a huge number of followers and it has been exploited and co-opted by the forces of denial and delay\u2019. \u2018Good scientists aren\u2019t alarmists,\u2019 he insists. \u2018Our message may be \u2013 and in fact is \u2013 alarming . . . The distinction is so very, very critical and cannot be brushed under the rug.\u2019(30)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither Hayhoe nor Mann are the kind of scientists who take distance from campaigning as \u2018climate advocates\u2019, as the former puts it. Both openly support and encourage protest that rests on a firm evidence base. In April 2019, they were amongst the twenty-two lead authors of a letter to Science<\/em>, headed \u2018Concerns of young protesters are justified<\/a>.\u2019 Along with more than 3,000 other experts who added their names as co-signatories, it stated: \u2018We call for our colleagues across all disciplines and from the entire world to support these young climate protesters. We declare: Their concerns are justified and supported by the best available science.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tension, then, is not between science and protest. The tension is between science and multiplying up its extreme ends of likelihood in ways that are tantamount to pseudoscience: \u2018If the worst imaginable happens it is this. And if the worst of that happens, it is this.\u2019 The ancient Celts were justified in their greatest fear that the sky would fall in. The asteroid may be on its way right now. But real science balances up the probabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millennialism or future possibilities?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like denialism, alarmism distorts our temporal horizons of what is possible. As the veteran Greenpeace campaigner Chris Rose suggests, its \u2018gloom picking\u2019 leads to \u2018solutions denial\u2019 that ramps up \u2018climate grief\u2019 that exploits the poorly informed(31). In their panic, many of its key proponents advocate potentially disastrous fixes, the magic bullet of geoengineering especially, and that, in the form of solar radiation modification. I agree with those who say: \u2018There isn\u2019t enough time.\u2019 And yet, the opposite of one great truth is very often another great truth. As an Arabic proverb puts it: \u2018Haste is the key to sorrow.\u2019 If our politics are deep green, we must pay attention to the fact that, already, nativist forms of ecofascism have drawn blood on growing alt-right fringes of drawbridge environmentalism. The \u2018Unabomber\u2019 and the Christchurch mosque gunman both appealed to certain types of \u2018green\u2019 narrative in their manifestos(32).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this is why I walk along the ridge of Katharine Hayhoe\u2019s \u2018narrow and lonely place\u2019. To over-egg the cake is like those terrorist alerts that remain forever high. Alarmists who extrapolate beyond sound evidence may be right, but if so, by the wrong process. The upside, is that they may perversely hit it lucky and warn of something of which others had been too cautious. The downside, is that in the long run they undermine the very principles of truth that they purport to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alarmism feeds upon the natural fears and decent trust of the understandably uninformed. It allows the enemies of climate action to paint climate science as the domain of wacky prophets and their followers, who have to keep on revising upwards their forecast date of doomsday. It draws those who have been caught up in such thinking into the cognitive dissonance reduction of looking for, and in a strange way maybe even hoping, that the signs on which they have staked so much are being fulfilled. This chimera of narratorial control affords an illusory sense of agency, and perhaps prestige, to individuals who may lack the humility, or be too captivated by their personal fears, to accept the limitations of their knowing as well as the wider ambiguities of emergent knowledge. Where pronounced, such alarmism can echo a \u2018conspiracy mentality\u2019 zeal, such as the philosopher Quassim Cassam characterises in figures who might be \u2018quick to denounce mainstream academia for rejecting their theories [yet] crave academic respectability \u2026 and trumpet their PhDs, whatever their subject.\u2019(33)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, in an age of perhaps renewed spiritual searching this can pander to climate change millennialism in a \u2018phony holy\u2019 cultic psychology. Certainly, it might correctly second guess the future. But if so, probably only as an artifact of flawed or grandiose reasoning. More probably, it will merely escalate the psychological defensive mechanisms used to maintain \u2018cognitive consistency\u2019, and these, much as Festinger and colleagues memorably described in their 1950s doomsday study, When Prophecy Fails<\/em>.(34)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only remedy is that in our understandable despair and burning yearning for change, we must keep head engaged, as well as heart and hand. We have no mandate to collapse the possibilities of the future, to contract and restrict our latitude for agency and action. Climate change denial is a waste of time. But climate change alarmism is a theft of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Peter Taylor, Chill: A reassessment of global warming theory, Clairview, East Sussex, 2009, pp. 232, 268\u20139, 301. The ECOS debate in 2010 has since been lost in a website revamp. I retain the email thread.<\/li>
  2. Emails from Peter Taylor drawn upon here are 31 October 2010 and 18\u201319 November 2019.<\/li>
  3. \u2018Board of Trustees<\/a>\u2019, Global Warming Policy Foundation, 3 February 2020.<\/li>
  4. Bob Ward, \u2018Secret funding of climate sceptics is not restricted to the US<\/a>\u2019, The Guardian, 15 February 2013.<\/li>
  5. \u2018Andrew W. Montford<\/a>\u2019, Desmog, 2017.<\/li>
  6. Montford, A.W., published by Stacey International, London, 2010. See also Tamino, \u2018The Montford Delusion\u2019, RealClimate, 22 July 2010<\/a>.<\/li>
  7. Alastair McIntosh, \u2018Review of The Hockey Stick Illusion<\/a>\u2019, Scottish Review of Books, 6:3, August 2010.<\/li>
  8. Bishop Hill, \u2018Scottish Review of Books<\/a>\u2019, 14 August 2010; and \u2018Did he read it?<\/a>\u2019 17 August 2010.<\/li>
  9. Roger Hallam, Common Sense for the 21st Century<\/a>, PDF version 0.3.<\/li>
  10. Xu paper used by Hallam: Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, \u2018Well below 2\u00b0C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes<\/a>\u2019, PNAS, 114:39, 2017, pp. 10,315\u201323.<\/li>
  11. BBC News, Roger Hallam interviewed by Stephen Sackur<\/a>, BBC HardTalk, 17 August 2019.<\/li>
  12. Scott Johnson (ed.), \u2018Prediction by Extinction Rebellion\u2019s Roger Hallam that climate change will kill 6 billion people by 2100 is unsupported<\/a>\u2019, Climate Feedback, 22 August 2019.<\/li>
  13. University of Cumbria, \u2018Professor Jem Bendell, PhD<\/a>\u2019, Institute for Leadership Sustainability, Business.<\/li>
  14. Jem Bendell, \u2018Doom and Bloom: Adapting to Collapse\u2019, This is Not a Drill, op. cit., pp. 73\u20137.<\/li>
  15. Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation: a Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, IFLAS Occasional Paper 2<\/a> (Postscript: The link to the original 27 July 2018 version of the paper on this landing site, the version from which I have quoted, was taken down and replaced with a Revised 2nd Edition on 27 July 2020. The original can still be accessed online<\/a>. The new version came a fortnight after a challenging and much-remarked upon criticism of the science of Deep Adaptation from three scientist members of Extinction Rebellion: Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall and Colleen Schmidt, \u2018The faulty science, doomism and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation<\/a>\u2019, Open Democracy, 14 July 2020. Amongst the changes made, are that a section about Arctic methane has been removed, meaning that Arctic News is no longer cited within the body text although it remains in the references. Most revealing is a welcome change made in the abstract. The original opened: \u2018The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near term social collapse due to climate change.\u2019 The revised, shifts from a statement of fact to one of opinion (my italics): \u2018The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of what I believe to be an inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change.\u2019 Bendell has pushed back strongly against the Open Democracy critique, commencing with his riposte: \u2018Letter to Deep Adaptation Advocate Volunteers about Misrepresentation of the Agenda and Movement<\/a>‘, Professor Jem Bendell blog, 15 July 2020. An extensive debate followed on Twitter, for example, multiple threads<\/a> down from Tom Nicholas).<\/li>
  16. Jem Bendell, \u2018A Year of Deep Adaptation<\/a>\u2019, Professor Jem Bendell blog, 7 July 2019. This is also the source of the half-million downloads statistic. Note that the coronavirus is not (in any obvious way) caused by climate change.<\/li>
  17. Jem Bendell, \u2018A Summary of Some Climate Science in\u00a02018<\/a>\u2019, Professor Jem Bendell blog, 22 March 2018.<\/li>
  18. Arctic News page linked by Bendell: Sam Carana, \u2018Warning Climate Warning!! Alert: Signs of Extinction<\/a>\u2019, Arctic News, 3 March 2018. I\u2019ve also cited from pages linked thereto. A number of the writers featured in Arctic News, including John Nissen, were associated a decade ago with AMEG, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group.<\/li>
  19. Mann and Schmidt, Twitter thread<\/a>, 22 November 2019. Schmidt, first quote in the tweet, second in the Nafeez Ahmed Vice article linked by Mann to whom Schmidt was responding.<\/li>
  20. Jem Bendell, \u2018Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation<\/a>\u2019, Resilience, 15 April 2019.<\/li>
  21. \u2018Deep Adaptation Retreat with Jem Bendell and Katie Karr: Inner resilience for tending a sacred unravelling<\/a>\u2019, Kalikalos Holistic Network, 2020. Also, with comments at the bottom<\/a> around the dilemmas <\/a>of flying to such a location in 2018 retreat) and (2019 retreat). <\/li>
  22. Jem Bendell: \u2018The Worst Argument to Try to Win: Response to Criticism of the Climate Science in Deep Adaptation\u2019<\/a>, Professor Jem Bendell blog, 27 February 2020.<\/li>
  23. Jack Hunter, \u2018The \u201cclimate doomers\u201d preparing for society to fall apart<\/a>\u2019, BBC News, 16 March 2020.<\/li>
  24. Bendell, Deep Adaptation, op. cit., with citation to Guy McPherson\u2019s \u2018Climate Change Summary and Update\u2019, Nature Bats Last, update 2 August 2016.<\/li>
  25. Rajani Kanth, \u2018On Imminent Human Extinction<\/a>: [Guy McPherson] Interviewed by Rajani Kanth\u2019, Nature Bats Last, 12 October 2018. Also, Guy McPherson<\/a>, Twitter, 25 September 2019: (tweet now unavailable, account now deleted).<\/li>
  26. Guy McPherson, \u2018Contemplating Suicide? Please Read This\u2019, Nature Bats Last, 8 July 2014.<\/li>
  27. Matthew Taylor and Jessica Murray, \u2018\u201cOverwhelming and terrifying\u201d: the rise of climate anxiety<\/a>\u2019, The Guardian, 10 February 2020.<\/li>
  28. Katharine Hayhoe<\/a>, Twitter, 19 December 2019.<\/li>
  29. Michael Mann (on Guy McPherson)<\/a>, Twitter, 13 August 2019.<\/li>
  30. Michael Mann, Twitter, 16 February 2019: http:\/\/bit.ly\/2VJtmqX.<\/li>
  31. Chris Rose, \u2018Tragedy or Scandal? Strategies Of GT, XR and the New Climate Movement<\/a>\u2019, Three Worlds blog, 13 February 2020. Full paper<\/a>.<\/li>
  32. Likewise, the debate around green Nazism. See Franz-Josef Br\u00fcggemeier, Marc Cioc and Thomas Zeller (eds), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, Ohio University Press, 2005.<\/li>
  33. Quassim Cassam, Conspiracy Theories, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2019, p. 25.<\/li>
  34. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, Harper, New York, 1964.<\/li><\/ol><\/small>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n\n<\/div> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Guest article by Alastair McIntosh,\u00a0 honorary professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. This is an excerpt from his new book, Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being Mostly, we only know what we think we know about climate science because of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":23232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,1,35,47],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-23220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arctic-and-antarctic","8":"category-climate-modelling","9":"category-climate-science","10":"category-communicating-climate","11":"category-solutions","12":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23220"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23239,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23220\/revisions\/23239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}