Liturgical Repetition in Climate "Science"

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This post is available only in English.

Following up on this and this piece (both only in German available), here is more scientific evidence in support of the thesis that CO2 emissions from wood are worse than those from coal. Yet the EU says wood is "carbon neutral".

Governments promote biofuels as renewable, carbon-neutral resources that serve to reduce CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, scientists have determined that biomass burning generates more CO2 emissions per kWh than burning coal does, and the projected rapid growth in biofuel use will only serve to ‘increase atmospheric CO2 for at least a century’.

The following are not quite orderly notes, fragments really, in which I meander toward an insight of which I do not know yet wether or not it is of some substance. I suppose, I am trying to trace  something that is very hard to pinpoint, namely how even propositions and theories of respectable appearance (scientific papers, governmental publications and the like) may rely on a network of cues holding a fairy tale together.

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If the cues are evocative enough even scientist may start to chase mere fantasies, weaving a tapestry of plausible nonsense—perhaps in a fashion akin to Newton's lifelong alchemical research.

Science like anything else in life starts with beliefs. Peculiarly, science turns against the beliefs that it initially consists of. Science tries to overthrow its most substantial convictions. Religions does exactly the opposite. It tries to preserve its most substantial convictions.

All religions depend on liturgical repetition. Repeating the tenets of the faith over and over again is what drives the bolts of dogma irretrievably into the mind. As with every religion, the hallmark of the new culturally dominant "green" religion in Germany is that cognitive authority of many of its central propositions is derived from mere repetition of a claim or description. In this way repetitive phrasing builds up a tower of presumptions that create a new imaginary reality, which may well be perceived with greater acuity than the reality of ordinary life. 

In this way mere words—as opposed to carefully corroborated reasoning— are capable of creating very powerful conceits which may be interlinked by further merely imaginary causal relators. "Bio" is good, "wood" is "bio", therefore "wood" is good. Add more links of doubtful validity and you might end up with the conclusion: "Therefore burning wood is good."

What I'm saying is that all it takes to arrive at utterly wrong, yet deeply held, conclusions is a set of unquestioned terms and propositions and equally dogmatic connecting relationships between these.

When certain factual or scientific issues become sacralised or suffer superimposition by a parallel sacralising vocabulary as is the case with many fundamental issues in climate science, it is quite possible that "science" takes on the nature of what philosophers call "idealism", a system of suppositions that create an entity unsupported and unchallenged by (i. e. immunised against) empirical accountability. The believers become unaware that the conclusions that they seem to plausibly draw within their ideological framework contradict evidence from the empirical world and, therefore, are false.

The faithful manage to persuade themselves of a "reality" that squares most satisfactorily with their convictions.

To build a viable network of elements that erroneously appear to combine into a complete argument with a correct conclusion liturgical repetition is of the utmost importance, of which there is more than enough in the universe of public talk about climate change.

Popular associations, however flimsy and superficial, can become powerful biases in more or less specialised discussions and even in research concerned with factual or scientific issues.

If you have established a sufficient number of stereotypes that are intensely believed in, it is possible to create entire false worlds with arbitrary causal relationships that are perfectly in sync with one's preferred convictions.

Philosophically speaking, this is idealism, a way of thinking that does not admit the entire spectrum of means of corroboration, including rigorous empirical testing.

Careful empirically oriented vetting is thought to be redundant as the faith-based intuition seems to establish indubitability.

I suspect, burning wood to putatively save CO2 is a case in point. It can be made to sound green (see above) and it makes some people rather a lot of money.

What makes the green turn so discomforting is its reliance on runaway idealism that always finds new applications when old ones have been refuted, an attitude capable of terrible tyranny.