In combating the global warming (aka, climate change) movement, we fail to understand that the radical left today lives in a value-relative phenomenology shaped by a mixture of postmodernism blended with neo-Marxism. It misses the mark merely to refute the hoax science behind the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s decision to eliminate the use of hydrocarbon fuels.

The sad truth is that government-funded climate scientists know CO2 is not the control knob of Earth’s temperature. The postmodernist mind lives in the John Lennon world where “reimagining” is required to advance us into their carbon-free utopia. In this bizarre world, post-modernism rejects the Enlightenment’s confidence in a fact-based, rule-driven reality anchored by scientific proof that overrides subjective desires. To them, reality is a “language game” (in Wittgenstein’s terms) or, as they say, a “narrative.”

In his 2006 DVD and book An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore treated us to many upcoming climate disasters, establishing a precedent holding that hysterically predicting those disasters is sufficient to force governments to abandon hydrocarbon fuels. Michael Mann fabricated the “hockey stick theory” [i.e., the fallacious claim that global temperatures rose dramatically only after the dawn of the industrial age] on similar climate fearmongering.

In 2008, Mann published Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming, a beautifully illustrated book of every imaginable IPCC-conjured climate disaster. Two years later, in The Hockey Stick Illusion, Climategate and the Corruption of Science, A.W. Montford debunked it all.

Image by Andrea Widburg, using dream by freepik and earth by macrovector.

Montford demonstrated that, when the “Climategate” emails from the IPCC-affiliated Corinne Le Quéré at the School of Environmental Studies at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. were released, they definitively proved the faulty methodology and outright lying practiced by these IPCC-affiliated hawkers of this junk science. The sad truth is that Mann and his IPCC cronies knew that they were bending geological climate evidence to create a causal link between the industrial era, the burning of hydrocarbon fuels, and a unique, catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperature.

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) is the high priest of nihilist postmodernism. In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard proposed that there is no objective reality behind our subjective perception of reality. Going one step further, he argued that reality itself is nothing more than the images we create such that the images become a reality. The term “simulacrum” (the noun, singular person) derives from the Latin verb simulare, which means “to make like, imitate, copy, represent,” from the stem of the adjective similis, which means “like, resembling, of the same kind.” A simulation imitates a real-life operation, process, or experience that permits the viewer or participant to engage in the experience as if it were real.

Perhaps Baudrillard’s most outrageous book was his 1995 The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a collection of essays he wrote during the first Gulf War of 1991. Baudrillard’s argument “is not that nothing took place, but rather that what took place was not a war.” For Baudrillard, the 1991 Gulf War was a staged media event whose reality was the virtual experience of the technological battlefield and the electronic media experience that was our experience of the “war.” Baudrillard’s postmodernist lesson implies that all narratives are fake news and all realities are simulacra (i.e., virtual and subjective).

Next, we encounter Jürgen Habermas, an acolyte of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, who posited the question: If reality is a simulacrum, why shouldn’t we use what he called “discourse ethics” to realize the self-actualizing identity-affirming values a neo-Marxist utopia presupposes? For him, value judgments remain subjective because each person has individual experiences. But elevating value opinions to societal norms remains a shared experience. Values become objectified only in “discourse ethics” when all participants in society engage in argumentation, with the “valid norms” being those that meet the approval of all. In his book Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Habermas wrote:

Argumentation as an intersubjective procedure is necessary only because in establishing a collective mode of action, we have to coordinate our individual intentions and come to a joint decision. Only when this decision emerges from argumentation, only when it comes about in accordance with pragmatic rules of discourse do we consider the resulting norm justified. One has to make sure everyone concerned has had a chance to freely give his consent.

Later in the book, Habermas expressed the point even more succinctly. He wrote: “For a norm to be valid, the consequences and the side effects of its general observance for the satisfaction of each person’s particular interests must be acceptable to all.”

What do true believers mean by claiming there is a “scientific consensus” that anthropogenic global warming will create climate disasters? The IPCC knows thousands of scientists disagree with the theory that burning hydrocarbon fuels since the industrial revolution has emitted enough carbon dioxide to cause catastrophic climate change. Combining Baudrillard’s simulacra theory with Habermas’s communicative action theory shows that what woke global warmers mean by “scientific consensus” is that, in their utopian view of how climate science should operate, burning hydrocarbon fuels ought to be bad for us and the planet.

In 2018, the IPCC issued a policy statement requiring governments to limit or discontinue the burning of hydrocarbon fuels to reduce the emission of CO2 to keep the planet from exceeding 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. Politically correct global warming/climate change true believers assume all who love Earth must think we have no choice but to abandon hydrocarbon fuels. The IPCC “scientific consensus” is operative on a normative level, not as an Enlightenment science-tested statement of proven fact.

In Baudrillard’s world, all facts are nothing more than value narratives. Habermas provides a methodology for transforming the norms of a neo-Marxist utopian simulacrum into “lifeworld” categorical-imperative values. In reimagining a world without hydrocarbons, even the BBC now admits doing so demands a lower standard of living for the modern industrialized West. But as Kohei Saito, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, argues in his 2022 book Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the chosen path to achieve the neo-Marxist utopia future is “degrowth ecological Marxism.”

Since 2004, Jerome R. Corsi has published over 30 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Volume I, in his Great Awakening Trilogy, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, received highly positive reviews from prominent climate scientists. Volume II, The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation, is scheduled for publication on November 14, 2023. Dr. Corsi has resumed podcasting on his new website TheTruthCentral.com, which is now on the Internet in its first development phase.