Argumentum ad metum

While polemically partisan, there are a couple of excellent base points in If the alarmists can't even treat climate change like a crisis, neither will we by Jon Gabriel.

The main point Gabriel focuses on is the use of fear as a primary argument for global climate warming. I'll come back to that.

A second fundamental point, and perhaps one the chief Achille's heel for the Global Warming Alarmists, is that the alarmists do not behave as if there is an actual crisis. They clearly want us to believe there is a crisis in order to support their strategies, but they don't themselves believe that there is a crisis. The proof of their disbelief is everywhere in their daily decisions. They build gargantuan residences that consume more energy than many neighborhoods (Gore); they buy expensive land at sea level (Obama); they do not curb their excessive airline and private jet travel, the most CO2 generating activity for individuals (Every Mandarin Class member); they consume material goods and services on a disproportionate scale, further exacerbating CO2 emissions; etc.

Everyone sees that they are not behaving like they believe there is a crisis. Everyone sees that the putative crisis policy requirements are beneficial to the alarmists and punitive to everyone else.

The second fundamental point Gabriel makes is that despite the three and more decades of alarmist rhetoric, it has failed to gain traction. Its just not working.

For some reason, voters aren’t eager to feel fear every day. Sure, they claim that climate change is important, but not if it requires changing their lifestyle, even a little.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 69% of Americans want aggressive action to combat climate change.

So far, so good.

How many would support a rate hike of $100 a year to tackle the problem? Only 29%.

The years-long fear campaign hasn’t worked; any Marketing 101 student would change the messaging. Instead, progressive politicians just ramp up the panic.

Gabriel tends to emphasize the hypocrisy of the alarmists. It is a fair point.

But I want to focus on the fear. As Gabriel describes,

Every week, the prophecies become more frightful.

“As Earth faces climate catastrophe, US set to open nearly 200 power plants,” a USA Today headline warns.

In the UK, The Guardian proclaims, “World 'gravely' unprepared for effects of climate crisis.” For the New Yorker, it’s already too late: “What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?”

Activists, politicians and many in the media have stopped heralding the benefits of a cleaner, greener policy. No time to promote clear skies, green hills or a better quality of life. Instead, it’s all fear, all the time.

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, chose fear as a centerpiece of her message.

“I don’t want your hope,” she told the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. “

[snip]

Throughout our lives, eco-fearmongering has been a constant. My first-grade teacher handed out maps showing how a pollution-caused ice age would soon cover our Chicago suburb with a glacier. Mom eased the panic with a reminder we were moving to Phoenix that summer.

After that, acid rain was going to kill us, then the ozone hole, then global warming, then “global weirding,” and now, climate change. Granted, the climate has always changed, but progressives think it started about a century ago.

Despite the wildly different scenarios, from freezing oceans to boiling ones, the solution is always the same: curtail capitalism and let government control more of our lives.

While global warming alarmism is certainly a Class A example of using fear mongering and panic as a rhetorical device to create support for a preferred course of action, in this case abandonment of markets and individual liberty, it is certainly not the only example.

Examples that leap to mind where the public narrative was focused on generating fear far more than it was focused on making a logical and evidence-based argument include:

Soviet dominance of the globe (remember those red shaded maps in Time and Newsweek in the early 1970s?)

Acid Rain (1970s)

Ozone Depletion (1980s)

Dangers of nuclear power generation (1970s onwards)

Dangers of nuclear armaments (Doomsday Clock)

Dangers from NBC weapons (1990s onwards)

Arctic ice and glacier disappearance (2000s onwards)

GMO (2000s onwards)

Cloning (1990s onwards)

Income inequality (2010s)

Race (Particularly from 1970s onwards)

Y2K (1990s)

Zika Virus (2015)

New Ice Age (from the 1970s)

Displacement of people by robots and information systems (2000s)

Silicon breast implant cancers (1990s)

Cholesterol (1990s-200s0s)

Famine (1960s-1970s)

Johnny Can't Read (1950s)

Increasing Crime (Always, even when it is falling)

Gun Control (1980s onwards)

And so on. Those are just ready-to-mind examples of multi-year campaigns of alarmism and fear.

It is absolutely true that all of those issues have the potential, when they are real, to cause grave outcomes.

But in most cases either the claimed danger does not exist at all or the claimed danger is way out of proportion to the actual danger.

In logic this is known as argumentum ad metum, an appeal to fear. From Wikipedia:

A fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for an idea by attempting to increase fear towards an alternative. The appeal to fear is common in marketing and politics.

The latin name indicates how long it has been an effective form of rhetorical argument. It has long been with us and long been effective.

But it is not a form of argument without cost. Fear clouds reason. We end up wasting resources on the wrong solutions to real problems and sometimes just wasting resources on problems that are not in fact real.

What Gabriel's argument brings to my mind is the question: Are we using argumentum ad metum to a greater degree than in the past.

How many demonstrably real issues can you think of which are actually debated in a calm fashion, dealing with logic and evidence, seeking common ground on how to build measurable progress? It seems vanishingly small. Is it less than in the past. My knee-jerk response is that that seems to be the case.

In a world where markets and prosperity are spreading and equalizing, where national conflict is enormously reduced, where totalitarian forms of government (in developed and developing nations) are on the back foot, where mortality rates and morbidity rates are improving, why is argumentum ad metum becoming the dominant, perhaps sole, go-to form of argument?

Global Warming, Gun Control, GMO, Income Inequality, etc. Today's proponents of each of these all seem almost messianic in their manifestation, religiously cultish in their fervor. There are real arguments to be had on the possible dangers related to each, and what might reasonably be done to address those possibly real core problems. But those are not the discussions we have.

Everything is all or nothing. They all seem to come down to - Give up your freedoms to allow someone else to determine the answer and coercively impose their solutions on to you.

I suspect that the answer has to do with revealed preferences and comparative economics. It is exactly when things are going relatively well when people are least willing to upset the apple cart. When arguments based on logic and evidence need to be far more effective than the proponents are able to muster. Under those circumstances, perhaps that is the future we face. In a world of free markets, non-coercive government and dramatically better outcomes, perhaps fear is the only argument that even remotely carries enough weight to change the discussion.

Which is an unpleasant prospect. If we are lucky, the continued ranting of apocalyptic futures that never end up being real might eventually discredit the argumentum ad metum. Till then, we have to suffer through enfevered apostles of fear.