May 10, 2023

In combating the global warming (aka, climate change) movement, we fail to understand that the radical left today lives in a value-relative phenomenology shaped by a mixture of postmodernism blended with neo-Marxism. It misses the mark merely to refute the hoax science behind the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s decision to eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels.

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The sad truth is that government-funded climate scientists know CO2 is not the control knob of Earth’s temperature. The postmodernist mind lives in the John Lennon world where “reimagining” is required to advance us into their carbon-free utopia. In this bizarre world, post-modernism rejects the Enlightenment’s confidence in a fact-based, rule-driven reality anchored by scientific proof that overrides subjective desires. To them, reality is a “language game” (in Wittgenstein’s terms) or, as they say, a “narrative.”

In his 2006 DVD and book An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore treated us to many upcoming climate disasters, establishing a precedent holding that hysterically predicting those disasters is sufficient to force governments to abandon hydrocarbon fuels. Michael Mann fabricated the “hockey stick theory” [i.e., the fallacious claim that global temperatures rose dramatically only after the dawn of the industrial age] on similar climate fearmongering.

In 2008, Mann published Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming, a beautifully illustrated book of every imaginable IPCC-conjured climate disaster. Two years later, in The Hockey Stick Illusion, Climategate and the Corruption of Science, A.W. Montford debunked it all.

Image by Andrea Widburg, using dream by freepik and earth by macrovector.

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Montford demonstrated that, when the “Climategate” emails from the IPCC-affiliated Corinne Le Quéré at the School of Environmental Studies at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. were released, they definitively proved the faulty methodology and outright lying practiced by these IPCC-affiliated hawkers of this junk science. The sad truth is that Mann and his IPCC cronies knew that they were bending geological climate evidence to create a causal link between the industrial era, the burning of hydrocarbon fuels, and a unique, catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperature.

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) is the high priest of nihilist postmodernism. In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard proposed that there is no objective reality behind our subjective perception of reality. Going one step further, he argued that reality itself is nothing more than the images we create such that the images become a reality. The term “simulacrum” (the noun, singular person) derives from the Latin verb simulare, which means “to make like, imitate, copy, represent,” from the stem of the adjective similis, which means “like, resembling, of the same kind.” A simulation imitates a real-life operation, process, or experience that permits the viewer or participant to engage in the experience as if it were real.

Perhaps Baudrillard’s most outrageous book was his 1995 The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a collection of essays he wrote during the first Gulf War of 1991. Baudrillard’s argument “is not that nothing took place, but rather that what took place was not a war.” For Baudrillard, the 1991 Gulf War was a staged media event whose reality was the virtual experience of the technological battlefield and the electronic media experience that was our experience of the “war.” Baudrillard’s postmodernist lesson implies that all narratives are fake news and all realities are simulacra (i.e., virtual and subjective).

Next, we encounter Jürgen Habermas, an acolyte of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, who posited the question: If reality is a simulacrum, why shouldn’t we use what he called “discourse ethics” to realize the self-actualizing identity-affirming values a neo-Marxist utopia presupposes? For him, value judgments remain subjective because each person has individual experiences. But elevating value opinions to societal norms remains a shared experience. Values become objectified only in “discourse ethics” when all participants in society engage in argumentation, with the “valid norms” being those that meet the approval of all. In his book Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Habermas wrote:

Argumentation as an intersubjective procedure is necessary only because in establishing a collective mode of action, we have to coordinate our individual intentions and come to a joint decision. Only when this decision emerges from argumentation, only when it comes about in accordance with pragmatic rules of discourse do we consider the resulting norm justified. One has to make sure everyone concerned has had a chance to freely give his consent.

Later in the book, Habermas expressed the point even more succinctly. He wrote: “For a norm to be valid, the consequences and the side effects of its general observance for the satisfaction of each person’s particular interests must be acceptable to all.”