Source: A Parliament of Things
by Philip Stott
In any discussion of climate change, it is essential to distinguish between the complex science of climate and the myth, in the sense of Roland Barthes, or the ‘hybrid’, following Bruno Latour, of ‘global warming’.
The latter is a politico-(pseudo)scientific construct, developed since the late-1980s, in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’, such as carbon dioxide and methane, is unquestioningly taken as the prime-driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years and which will inevitably lead to catastrophe for both humanity and the Earth. This, in turn, has morphed, since 1992 and the Rio Conference, into a legitimising myth for a gamut of interconnected political agendas, above all for a range of European sensibilities with regards to America, oil, the car, transport, economic growth, trade, and international corporations. The language employed tends to be authoritarian and religious in character, involving the use of what the physicist, P. H. Borcherds, has termed the ‘hysterical subjunctive’. Indeed, for many, the myth has become an article of a secular faith that exhibits all the characteristics of a pre-modern religion, above all demanding sacrifice to the Earth. (more…)