While the current Luxembourgish government is wasting precious amounts of time with internal disputes to adequately address the climate crisis and the much-needed energy transition, other actors in the Grand-Duchy, such as Guy Kaiser, Gaston Vogel, Laurent Mosar, Robert Goebbels, Mario Dichter and members of the Alternative Democratic Reform Party (adr) and the Party for Full Democracy (PID), to name just a few, don’t lose a second to belittle those that call for action, such as the young Fridays for Future activists, or to attack and discredit the science itself, leading to statements, as we will see, that cover the complete spectrum from entertainment and absurdity to moral bankruptcy. With increasing frequency, they clutter people’s minds with large amounts of misinformation about climate change and its consequences. In doing so, they follow a global trend that can also be observed in many other countries.
Admittedly, these actors are a minority in Luxembourg and consequently shouldn’t have much weight in the public debate, which is corroborated by the fact that a majority of people trust the science and acknowledge that human-made climate change is a reality, but a recent poll by Atoz has nevertheless shown that 18% of Luxembourg residents, i.e. almost one person out of five (!) is “either totally sceptical or somewhat sceptical that climate change has a man-made cause“. Where does this scepticism come from? As in many other domains in which facts and scientific truth are under attack, Internet, and in particular social media, certainly play a major role in these trends. The climate change discussion is of course largely dominated by international media outlets, but the aforementioned Luxembourgish actors definitely play their part in the game, even though they do not contribute anything new to the denialist discussion.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Let’s start with Guy Kaiser: former editor-in-chief of RTL, now retired, he writes under his own name on his personal blog called Guy Kaiser Online and also shares posts from other contributors. Ironically, the climate change related non-sense he divulges on his blog makes its motto literally true: “Informatioun, Analysen an Hannergrond Informatiounen déi der soss wäit siche gitt.” It is indeed hardly possible to find one single climate related statement on this blog that is corroborated by scientific facts. But before having a closer look at his and his friends’ “theories” about climate change, let’s briefly try to understand his views on the current world-wide protests for climate action.
In one of his posts reacting to an open letter by some young Luxembourgish politicians addressed to climate change sceptics such as himself, he addresses the mostly young Luxembourgish Fridays for Future protesters directly: “Ouni Ierch eppes wollen ze ënnerstellen, hunn ech do munnechmol meng Zweiwel, well ech koum a mengem Beruff vill a Kontakt mat Jugendlecher a wor méi wéi engkéier entsaat, wéi wéineg si bereet sinn, kontrovers ze denken.“ He then continues with a rather condescending remark: “Dir sidd nach jonk, ma elo schon fonktionnéiert Dir mam Eenheetsbräi: ween eng aner Meenung huet, ass domm, am Beschten, Fascho oder Populist, wat dacks soll op dat Nämmlecht erauskommen.“
In a similar fashion some politicians, like for example Laurent Mosar from the CSV (Christian Social People’s Party), the largest political party in Luxembourg, are focused on discrediting anyone who warns about the negative consequences of climate change, and in particular if these warnings come from young people. Mosar spends a large part of his time on Twitter bashing Greta Thunberg and her fellow campaigners which is in stark contrast to the official line of his party which during the past national elections stressed its concerns about global warming (even though not very convincingly). He seems in particular to have a strong aversion to any kind of potential interdictions related to climate change (e.g. he continually and in a rather puerile and obstinate way emphasizes that he does not intend to stop using his Diesel car despite any environmental concerns), which is rather funny, not only because on the one hand interdictions form an integral part of a modern society (think speed limit on the motorway for safety reasons, interdiction to dump waste into the forest for environmental reasons, etc.), but also because on the other hand his party is affiliated with a religion that wants to uphold interdictions that are rather out of place in a modern society.
There is no reason to believe that there is a lack of critical thinking or a lack of tolerance in young people today. Indeed, they criticise climate change sceptics not primarily because they tolerate no differing opinions. This misses the actual point, because nobody is questioning the sceptics’ right to free speech. It is rather because what sceptics provide as arguments is mostly complete scientific non-sense. Even though they might want to make you believe otherwise, human-caused climate change is not a controversial issue anymore, because it is based on verifiable scientific facts. So it is rather the sceptics who seem to have problems with critical thinking and with discerning truth from falsehood. In that sense arguing with climate change deniers is a bit like arguing with someone about the result of 2 + 2: can you really be accused of a lack of “controversial reasoning” if you tell a person that he/she is stupid because he/she keeps repeating over and over that 2 plus 2 equals 5, even though there is overwhelming and freely accessible evidence that the result is actually 4? Most likely not…
As illustrated by his tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, Hans Christian Andersen had already understood more than one hundred and fifty years ago that children are often the only ones that have the courage to speak truth when adults do not dare to state the obvious in a climate of denial.
Moral Glitches
In a particularly disturbing statement, Kaiser tries to draw a parallel between climate change and sex tourism: “Virun iwwer 40 Joer krut ech an engem Examen fir eng Plaz op der Gemeng iwwer de Sujet ze schreiwen: Vir- an Nodeeler vum Sextourismus an der Drëtter Welt. Dervunner ofgesinn, datt esou ee Sujet haut als politesch onkorrekt ofgestempelt gëtt – wouduerger de Sextourismus awer net ofhëllt! – ass et jo normal, datt een aus moralesche Grënn sech op d’Nodeeler fokusséiert.“ Does he in all seriousness want to suggest that in fact sex tourism has many advantages (for whom by the way?), but that due to today’s “exaggerated” moral standards they are not given enough prominence? Are moral aspects not rather one of the main reasons why sex tourism is a bad thing in the first place? Does this bad-taste analogy mean that in the context of climate change young people, in order to demonstrate that they are capable of critical thinking, should abandon their moral concerns and, like climate change sceptics, start trying to spread arguments in favour of climate change, even if these are proven to be wrong or largely outnumbered by those against?
In another post, Kaiser argues that the recent trend in sea level rise, which started approximately at the end of the 19th century and has been constantly accelerating since and which is driven by thermal expansion of seawater and the melting of land-based ice sheets and glaciers (both demonstrably due to human-caused global warming), is unproblematic: “... eise Planéit läit weiderhinn absolutt an der Norm: déi lescht 18.000 Joer ass d’Mier pro Joerhonnert ëm exakt 66 Zantimeter eropgaangen!“ He claims that because the current speed of the sea level rise is not higher than the average rate of change over the last 18’000 years (125 meters in total), there is nothing to worry about. Gaston Vogel argues along similar lines by citing Sylvie Brunel, a French geologist, who writes “De tout temps, l’humanité a dû, pour faire face à l’adversité du chaud, du froid, de la fonte, inventer le polder, l’irrigation, la culture en terrasses, les digues, le pastoralisme” and “Et quid si le changement climatique n’était pas forcément une mauvaise nouvelle ?”
It is certainly true that the ongoing climate change will have both advantages and disadvantages, but they need to be balanced against each other. The problem is that disadvantages will exceed the advantages by far, because ecosystems and societies are adapted to the climate of the past centuries and because the man-made global warming happens at an unprecedented speed. Advantages will mainly happen in colder industrialized nations like Canada and Russia; agricultural losses on the other hand, to take just one example amongst many, will mainly hit in tropical and subtropical regions. It is therefore very likely that climate change will lead to an aggravation of the disparities between the industrialized and developing countries, with an increased risk of famines in poor countries. Already today famines are not created by a global lack of food, but rather by a local shortage in poor regions, whose populations are unable to buy provisions on the global market. Therein lies the moral burden of climate change: the poorest, who have contributed the least to the problem of global warming, have to shoulder the main part of the burden, whereas the people in the rich countries will be least impacted.
The above point is what could be called the intra-generational moral problem of climate change in the sense that it creates disparities between co-existing generations of humans. But climate change creates also an inter-generational moral problem because current generations are using up resources that have accumulated over millions of years (fossil fuels) and leave the resulting waste (CO2, nuclear residues, etc.) and its consequences (e.g. rising sea level) to future generations. For example, the 125 meters rise in sea level Kaiser is referring to above took place almost exclusively during a period from 18’000 to 8’000 years ago, after the last glacial maximum some 20’000 years ago. Since then, i.e. for almost the complete duration of the Holocene (the current geological epoch), the sea level was close to constant. The Holocene so far has been characterized by a very stable climate which is considered to have enabled the rapid proliferation, growth and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present, with millions of people now living close to the sea. It is precisely this particular fact that makes the ongoing sea rise not comparable with the one that took place before the Holocene: the few Homo Sapiens that roamed our planet some ten thousands of years ago were barely affected by its effects such as widespread coastal flooding, higher storm-surges and more dangerous tsunamis. Displacements of large populations, loss and degradation of agricultural land and damage in coastal cities were not possible at that time, simply because neither of those existed.
This line of reasoning by Kaiser and Vogel that climate change is not an issue because the climate has always been changing is one of the preferred ones of climate sceptics. In both the intra- and inter-generational cases, there is however no consolation to those who will suffer from it to know that the climate has continuously been changing since pre-historical times. This is what makes the sceptics’ behaviour so revolting and why it needs to be criticised.
Three Men Make a Tiger
An esou sinn ech erféiert, datt et Universitéite gëtt, déi refuséieren, och dat ze enseignéieren, wat d’Klimaskeptiker esou denken.“ What sounds like a bad joke is indeed a sincere statement by Kaiser complaining that climate change sceptics are not taken seriously enough. To be honest, I would be considerably alarmed if universities actually started teaching such things in a context other than exposing their untenability. It’s a bit like the request by some people in Anglo-Saxon countries that schools and universities should teach Creationism alongside Darwinism as an equally valid scientific theory. Naomi Oreskes perfectly summarizes the situation in her book Merchants of Doubt: “While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research – experiments, experience, and observation – research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process – or have gone through it and failed – are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate. ”
But despite the evidence it is common practise to deny the facts. Politicians like Fernand Kartheiser and others from the Alternative Democratic Reform Party (adr) fervently share posts of associations like the Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie (EIKE), a group of German climate sceptics which maintains a website with appalling untruths about the climate and which has good contacts to US think-tanks such as CFACT whose goal is to systematically discredit climate change related science. Groups like EIKE help to fuel the unscientific theses of right-wing populist parties such as the German AFD, or the Luxembourgish adr. By this, these parties paradoxically fight against the protection of their domestic nature, agriculture and industry and contribute to migration from poorer countries affected by climate change, which is something they typically strongly oppose.
So, apart from the discrediting of young activists, the refusal to take action and the ignoring of any moral concerns, there is also a tendency to directly question the facts. What Kaiser, Vogel and Kartheiser have in common is that they are primarily impact sceptics, which means that they do not negate the existence of climate change but they believe that climate change is harmless or even beneficial, and that therefore the current efforts to limit global warming are unnecessary. Mosar’s approach is similar but he is primarily focussed on discrediting any efforts to address climate change.
But there are also trend sceptics (who deny the existence of global warming and climate change) and attribution sceptics (who doubt that human activities are responsible for the observed trends), like the PID or Mario Dichter, whose letters to the editor, which can be found on rtl.lu and his personal blog and which are reposted more than happily by Guy Kaiser on his blog, are an impressive accumulation of false facts and misleading statements. It may therefore come as no surprise that he is also active in the vaccine hesitancy movement in Luxembourg, a community which promotes the same kind of abuse of scientific truth than the climate sceptics movement.
In one of his posts Dichter claims that melting ice would not raise the sea level by using a floating ice cube as proof. Even first-graders would probably not take more than 30 seconds to find the error in his line of reasoning: while his statement is certainly true for the arctic ice sheets, it is completely wrong for the ice masses of Greenland and Antarctica, who are land-based and whose combined melting could ultimately lead to a sea level rise of more than 50 meters. What makes the situation particularly funny is that Dichter’s statement is plainly and probably inadvertently contradicted by his host Kaiser: “Déi lescht kleng Äiszäit hat et gutt gefruer, soudatt d’Waasser sech verzunn hat. Zanterhir schmëlzt et. (…) Wëssenschaftlech bewisen ass, datt zanter dem Schmëlzen vun der leschter Äiszäit den Niveau vum Mier ëm 120 Meter eropgoung (…)“. But who cares?
In another post, Dichter states that we are currently living in an ice age, as if this would in any way disprove global warming. He then claims that higher CO2 concentrations have no negative impact on the climate and that plants rather benefit from it. This can be true for moderate increases in CO2 concentration, but does not take into account that many effects of climate change are highly non-linear: small increases in CO2 concentrations indeed foster tree growth, but more severe climate change effects will actually lead to massive forest decline with all its negative repercussions (actually creating a positive feedback loop). The same kind of non-linear effect is applicable to glaciers, which regulate the water flow of many rivers: first the water flow of the rivers will be increasing due to the melting ice but when the glacier has disappeared the flow will completely die off.
In a particularly long article, Dichter basically covers all ground ever covered by climate change sceptics and even goes as far as denying the greenhouse effect altogether. David Wallace-Wells is dead on in his book The Uninhabitable Earth when he writes: “Throughout, the intellectual style is paranoid – the impressive mass of data sometimes standing in for, and sometimes obscuring, the skeleton of causal logic that should give the mass a meaningful analytical shape. This kind of reasoning lives abundantly on the internet, feeding our golden age of conspiracy theory, that insatiable beast, which has only just begun to feast on climate.“
It is obvious that all of Dichter’s claims are copied from external sources, but at least he makes the effort of writing his own articles, not like the PID which bluntly provides a set of Youtube videos and links to dubious websites on its homepage.
A Consensus, a Conspiracy and a Warning
There is no doubt about global warming, there is no doubt that it is man-made and there is no doubt that it will create harm if not addressed appropriately. Michael E. Mann writes in The Madhouse Effect: “The science on climate is solid. It has been studied from every angle and over a long period of time. It is not merely a matter of climate scientists having reached a consensus (the famous 97%). The overwhelming preponderance of facts is in consensus. (…) it’s time to move on talking about the solutions.” Accusing the young activists of hypocrisy and fear-mongering is just plain foul play; they only try to be vocal about facts that scientists have been warning about relentlessly for over 30 years. Spreading lies about the science, as Dichter does, or discrediting people warning about the consequences, as Kaiser and Mosar love to do, is morally inappropriate and consumes intellectual energy that could have been used in other, nobler ways, such as debating about the best ways of tackling the political and social challenges that lie ahead. “That climate change demands expertise, and faith in it, at precisely the moment when public confidence in expertise is collapsing, is another of its historical ironies.” This general lack of trust in scientific know-how Wallace-Wells is referring to here is further fuelled by sceptics whose – at least for the ones mentioned in this article – motivations are not always entirely clear.
As one particularly interesting article about the psychology of climate change denial puts it: “It is tempting to attribute outright denial to individual malice or stupidity, and that may occasionally be the case” but this view is most probably too simplistic to fully explain the phenomenon. So why would educated people have such a weakness for outright nonsense? One part of the answer is definitely that “there is plenty of evidence of clandestine, orchestrated lying by vested interests in industry. If anyone is looking for a conspiracy in climate change, this is it – not a collusion of thousands of scientists and major science organizations.” There are of course no indications that this article’s protagonists are directly involved with the fossil fuel industry whose “merchants of doubt” are responsible for most of the climate denial content that can be found in the media but it is fair to assume that they are at least somehow influenced by it. Some of their writings could possibly be classified as innocent parroting of these falsehoods as a result of disorientation and indoctrination, but it is fair to assume that most of them, if not all of them – Kaiser, Vogel, Goebbels, Dichter, Kartheiser, Mosar – are intelligent enough to be fully aware of their responsibility and the harm that they are causing by their conduct and their articles should therefore be considered as malevolent interference in politics and public opinion and should be denounced accordingly whenever possible. They are doing it either because (mainly in the case of the adr) there is a general tendency by populist right-wing parties to oppose any progressive societal transformations by default or, as Joël Adami theoretizises in a woxx article, they feel threatened by the fact that their world view and lifestyle (which in Luxembourg is strongly dependent on fossil fuels) are endangered.
But those others who acknowledge the science behind climate change should not become too complacent. “While it is tempting, and even cathartic, to mock the shrill responses to Thunberg from literal and interpretive deniers, we would do well to ponder our own inherent biases and irrational responses to climate change.” It is certainly desirable to confront sceptics with the facts whenever and wherever possible (thus this article), but this does not give everyone else the permission to rest on their laurels. “Instead of congratulating ourselves on agreeing with the basic scientific facts of climate change, we need to push ourselves to action.“
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