the method to malthusian madness

this is not climate science, it's horror fiction

there is an old expression that states “when people tell you who they are, believe them” and i think this axiom is can be quite sound especially for the denizens of echo chambers when they forget themselves and “say the quiet part out loud.” perhaps one of the most potent amplifiers of this tendency is when they then realize what they have done and seek to “take it back” or “take it down.”

but you guys know how certain internet felines can get about “receipts” and the joy of social media and the reputation economy resides in the fact that consigning your inapposite revelations to the memory hole simply ain’t what it used to be.

i’ll just be taking that, thank you very much.

so let’s take a look at mister bill mcguire, professor of “geophysical and climate hazards” at university college in london, who has been such a topic of conversation in certain circles, shall we?

as many know, i always like to let people speak in their own words that we may judge them fairly and not by hearsay.

so here is bill from his own website:

keep that “speculative fiction” gobbet in mind as we range onward because i have some questions about just where to draw a line on that and whether or not mr bill can (or chooses to) discern the difference between such fiction and that which he seems wont to present as “fact” like ideas that “climate change causes earthquakes” and this all too predictable gem in the mode of “world ending climate catastrophe always 5-10 years away, since 1963” entitled “seven years to save the planet.”

(published in 2008. oops.)

this has certainly been a popular horror fiction genre since the early days of the club of rome and one useful for generating tenure and book sales, but it’s also been pure chicken little screed without basis then or now. team malthus with its scare quote claims of “too many people, geometric growth, limited resources, we’re all royally screwed any minute now” have a 0.000 lifetime batting average. and people seem to be tiring of it and the increasingly non-representative and adulterated data being used to attempt to back it up.

like a great many others in this oddly expansive literary niche, bill is not so much a climate or earth scientist as an aspiring ecological stephen king looking for ever more frightening clowns with which to menace the populace and keep them up at night. it gets grants and it sells books.

it also means you always need a crisis and a call to action. that’s the business model and this business is getting harder as people get more skeptical, especially now as the same politicians demanding reductions in lifestyle because “too many people” fret about low birthrates and advocate large scale immigration to solve it.

past a certain point, the fiction loses narrative integrity and the readers become jaded and accustomed to reruns of plotlines.

so you need new scarier subject matter to terrify and titillate.

if one is to understand this body of writing and thought, that’s really the only lens through which it’s going to make much sense.

pennywise, clowned foolish

turning back to mcguire, this snaps into focus if we read his list of publications.

he terms them “popular science” but the fact is that its presumptive sensationalist hyperbole masquerading as pop-sci.

the man really does have a genre. it’s quite telling that his whole university posting is teaching ‘hazards” not science, no? consider the incentives: no hazard, no job.

so i wonder what sort of things william would seek to publish?

you guessed it: fear porn.

so far, so prosaic. sure, he’s a shrill academic talking up his books and mongering fear for tenure and profit, but these are a dime a dozen. WEF affiliation? yeah, yawn. what grant grubbing professor isn’t these days?

but then you accidentally say a few things and the hot lights land on you because it was supposed to be the quiet part but it has suddenly gotten very, very loud.

let’s play “reverse reveal” shall we? (it’s more fun this way)

obviously, bill would like a do over. but it’s not, mind you, because he was wrong or because he regrets it but because we all were too stupid to grok his meaning and took his brilliance the wrong way, perhaps on purpose, because we’re such bad or foolish people and our aims are perhaps dishonest or disingenuous.

and who doesn’t love a good “non-apology apology”?

quite the dramatic setup, no? whatever could this mysterious tweet be? (i told you it would be more fun this way)

more clues:

well, that starts to shed some light. bill wants economic activity to “fall suddenly” but not for “people to die.”

alas, the inconvenient truth is that it never, ever works like that and these sudden drops in economic output tend, from mao to stalin to castro to chavez, to lead to some of the greatest genocides and inflictions of mass misery in human history and that they would have been magnitudes worse if there had not been outside aid. at best this is perhaps stupid, but it does not seem deliberately monstrous quite yet.

perhaps people are taking bill out of context or misrepresenting his intent.

once upon a time, we might have had to guess, but in the fine traditions of the reputation economy, no longer must this be so because social media foibles, like herpes, are forever.

at the risk of plagiarizing johnnie cochran:

you may delete the tweet, but meet the receipt!

this seems quite a lot less ambiguous or “open to misinterpretation” deliberate or unwitting than professor bill would seem to be professing. one might even go so far as to say that the only honest or accurate thing the man has said of late was the “brutally honest” part. it was certainly that. no doubtski aboutski.

now, to be fair, he’s not quite “advocating” for such a thing but perhaps just saying “it’s what it would take” but the gap between the two is not exactly a warm and fuzzy comfort zone in which one would wish to reside and the choice of the word “realistic” does not reassure especially in conjunction with “need to” coming from a man whose entire body of authorship is about the desperate need to subjugate all other aims and outcomes to preventing ecological armageddon.

that said, i’m not quite sure it’s just to fully tar bill with the “wants a global pandemic” brush either as he did not quite say so. we can connect those dots, but if one were trying to be maximally charitable, one might say that if one accepts the (always dubious and increasingly threadbare) AGW/CO2 hypothesis then his statement could be (if you squint a bit) presented as just a form of resigned realpolitik because all the CO2 increase is coming from china anyhow and they are not going to back off growth aspirations and stay poor just because a few in the west get the vapors about some trace gasses.

bill may well be another aspiring malthusian supervillain, but this tweet alone, however ill advised and conceived, does not quite convict him on this. the issue would appear to be open but the fact that he said it in the context of a guardian article about when we should “pull the trigger” on that old chestnut “bird flu” does land him in some questionable company. but again is not quite dispositive.

the WHO and the other little chickens of the internet have been out shrieking about 30-50% case fatality rates and perhaps some seem almost rapturous or anxious in their glee about it, but the fact is that h5n1 is just the latest of a zillion of these and it seems to me that most cheering for is just want a news cycle, an election issue, a power grab, or perhaps another lockdown or forever change in human action where we stop traveling and get pinned in 15 minute city wards for climate and pandemic justice. they want to cull chickens and cows, but most seem unwilling to say the same for humans. (at least in public)

so it’s all a bit unsavory, but does not quite convict this bill (perhaps unlike certain others of his namesake) of “wanting to kill most of us.” but this is not exoneration either and clearly, some of the more avid among the eco advocates do explicitly champion precisely such things and have been doing so in misbegotten malthusian fallacy for 50 years or more. the jury may still be at least a bit out on just what bill would prefer to see here, but given the astonishing and relentless shrillness of his anti-capitalist gaia style twitter ejaculations (the man reads like the eric ding of climate) there would certainly seem to be grounds for interested inquiry.

what we may, however, convict billy mcguire on is being a bad scientist, a sensationalist, and misusing data to push spurious claims. to wit, let us examine his “rewording” in which once more the horror hobgoblin of “all pervasive climate breakdown” in the remarkably specific next “66 months” (seemingly we’re now down to 5.5 years from the 7 claimed in 2008) is supported with a bunch of poorly measured and damn near unmeasurable assumptive claptrap about “global fossil CO2 emissions” as though this were some measured or measurable value as opposed to an imputed figure rooted in presumptive models.

this is just more of the anti fossil fuel obsession in which no matter whether the world if warming or cooling or going sideways the answer is always “stop burning oil!” there is a name for people who see the same thing in every inkblot. that name is not “scientist.” alas, it does often seem to be “author.”

fortunately for those of us who would like a bit more rigor around our doomsaying and doomsolutions, we do have some actual hard data in accurate, measured format: we can see what happened to CO2.

this chart is from another substack i published back in july 2023 and as can be readily seen, this big drop in CO2 output from burning fossil fuels that señor bill puts forward as a path to salvation from impending climate immolation did not bend the curve on CO2 levels even an iota. the vast shutdown of the world and all the cost and damage it did did NOTHING, literally nothing, to CO2 trends which stubbornly remained about as perfectly linear as you will ever see in a complex system.

so bill is just plain talking nonsense. either his “measure” of fossil CO2 output is inaccurate or the primary driver of global CO2 has little to do with human additions thereto. probably both concerns are correct and it’s no small irony that bill (a volcanologist) is somehow in denial on this and/or the idea that it’s less CO2 driving warming than warming driving CO2 as warmer oceans outgas (just like in every other climate cycle before man was burning anything).

the whole of the article in which i published the above can be seen HERE and my intent in writing it was to drive home precisely why i take such umbrage to the hijacking of environmentalism by guys like mcguire: it’s not harmless. they are purveying dire damage to the world as solutions for saving it and they have sucked all the air out of the room by chasing and advocating nonsense that not only misdirects or but actively opposes the goal of actual environmental protection.

progress is not a trade off with environment. progress IS environmentalism. rich countries are good environmental stewards and poor countries ravage ecosystems. it’s unavoidable. when your concern is “how am i going to feed the kids?” what you dump in the river is a secondary concern if you even worry about it at all which probably, you don’t. those are rich people concerns and making poor people poorer by forcing expensive first world society solutions and preferences upon them just makes the problem worse.

i laid out my position on this as a simple positive in the link above and excerpt it here because i believe this is important and the misguided or manipulative attempts to make carbon control into a form of global governance pose a serious threat not just to human freedom and flourishing but to the environment itself.

the whole enterprise has become a bit of a farce that edges toward calamity as, like so many government and transnational agenda items of late, the true danger lies not in the professed malady but in the proposed cure.

this trade off of economic activity and environment is not just spurious but inverted and and “speculative fiction” of adulterated data and ridiculous claims about “stop burning oil or earthquakes will get worse” constitutes some sort of quasi-religious revival that has mistaken an ostentatiously repetitive hobgoblin horror genre endlessly seeking new monsters and subplots for a body of scientific endeavor possessed of cultural and ecological relevance.

sacrifice to the sea god for a safe voyage and to the sun gods to make sure the sun comes up tomorrow.

the history of humanity has long been rife with the coalescing of atavistic fears into some form of doctrine by which to demand deference and behavior and to feel like we are “doing something” to render us safe.

and abuse of such by demagogues has always gone right along with it.

it’s a tactic as old as time and it’s time we all wised up.