The ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ and Their Make-believe Claims
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Recently, I came across the Copenhagen Consensus, which is sponsored by The Economist. It seems to be one of those “think tanks” with an agenda to dilute the public opinion on global warming.
Essentially what they’re saying is that it’s not that bad, it’s not a catastrophe. But saying this is almost as pernicious as flat out denying that climate change is happening at all, as David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth.
The ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ is not to be confused with the Copenhagen Interpretation and I think the similarity is what got me triggered in the first place.
Copenhagen Interpretation stands for something much greater and beautiful — one of the most agreed-upon interpretation of quantum mechanics.
I suspect that Prof. Jim Al-Khalili would also be troubled by how the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ can be mingled with something like the ‘Copenhagen Consensus’.
The use of the term consensus it’s also unfortunate, if you consider what one of the leaders of the IPCC report has to say:
And the problem is that as an organisation, the Copenhagen Consensus can seem legitimate in their claims and also very convincing with their arguments. Some of the stuff they’re saying is probably valid. And their premise isn’t that of denial, it is that of being moderate.
But being a moderate is also very dangerous as the time for moderate action has passed long ago. Now their job seems to be that of labelling activists like Greta Thunberg as ‘alarmists’.
And rather than pressuring the oil&gas industry, they advocate geo-engineering the climate.
It’s also quite difficult to find some strong criticism against them. There isn’t much about them on The Guardian so I’m not sure what their actual influence is, other than Fox News.
I haven’t heard people like George Monbiot, a prominent climate activist from the UK, critiquing them either.
Maybe they’re having a much bigger influence than we can tell simply because their message is a lot more pleasant, like “don’t listen to the alarmists, it’s not that bad” or “we’re going to be so wealthy in 50 years and so advanced that we’re going to find a solution”.
They are casting doubt on our understanding of climate change, suggesting we don’t have the solutions yet. We do have them, in fact. What we need are policies. Political will.
By the way: the phrase “climate emergency” has been around before Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have started to use it.
The ‘How to Solve the Climate Crisis’ conference at the Nobel Institute in Oslo was held in December 2018, having Al Gore as a keynote speaker. He did use the term “climate emergency”, and rightfully so.
So it would be foolish to say that it’s now only because of Greta Thunberg that we’re saying ‘climate crisis’. The crisis has been going on for a while. It’s just now that’s getting into the mainstream.
And maybe we don’t need to agree on all the solutions, but we should at least agree on the urgency and the scale of the crisis. That should at the very least be the baseline.
