The Kiwi bloke is an environmental hazard

It’s winter where I live, and it’s a doozy. We’ve had snow to sea level and frosts like I remember from the 1990s, and this year New Zealand’s annual 100-year flood happened to hit my town – I have the good fortune of living on a slight rise, but less than a block away people were wading. Naturally people are arguing this shows global warming isn’t happening. Of course that gets it all backwards. If you’re standing outside a tramping hut in the mountains on a sunny morning, and a shovelful of snow falls off the roof and goes down your neck, you end up colder, but it’s because the roof is warming up (and melting the snow). The roof in this analogy stands for the South Polar Vortex, where the air around Antarctica gets so cold in the winter that it slams down, walling off the polar weather from the rest of us. Usually. Up until now.

Recently, we found out that New Zealand is a world front-runner in climate change denial. The good news is it only takes 13% to be a world front-runner. But I guess this is where we finally kiss our vaunted “clean, green image” goodbye. Though admitting how we’re actually doing on the environmental front would instantly lose us our world market for dairy products, tourism, and filming locations, which put together are nearly our entire national income, so maybe not. Actually shaping up is, of course, out of the question. That would cost rich people money.

I’m not going to rehearse all the evidence that human industry is driving climate change; that would take far more time and energy than I have, it would be too wordy to hold any denier’s attention long enough to convince them, and there are plenty of other sites that do it better than I could – here are three. I will spare a brief word for the idea that humans are too puny and insignificant to affect the cycles of Nature. That’s an intuitive percept rather than an evidential argument, so it needs an intuitive answer.

I’ll confidently bet that practically all my readers are reading this in a built-up environment of some kind, or at least a farm, not out in the wilderness. Well, Earth was all wilderness until humans came along. The last thing that changed the surface of the planet as much as humans have was the emergence of the first land plants and animals back in the Carboniferous Period. For hundreds of millions of years the world was forests, deserts, plains, savannah. Then suddenly, in less than a ten-thousandth of that time – farms, buildings, quarries, mines, roads, towns, reservoirs, aqueducts, cities, railways, landfills, sewage outfalls. Is it really so hard to believe our activities might have had unintended environmental effects as profound as the intended ones? No, we aren’t big enough to chop down the entire tree of life on Earth, but we could easily break off the branches holding up our own treehouse.

But I don’t think that’s the main reason why New Zealanders don’t believe in climate change. I think the main reason looks like this:

No, I’m not accusing Cameron Slater of running New Zealand’s denialist platform singlehandedly, though he does have disproportionate influence for a blogger (which is why I’m not linking to his blog; Google “whale oil” if you want to find him). It’s the expression I’m talking about, and the attitude underneath it. I am quite familiar with it; this is the look on a playground bully’s face right before he hits you. This face is what comes to my mind when people wax poetic about the good old sports-loving, beer-drinking, do-it-yourselfing, supposedly-maligned Kiwi Bloke. Because this is also the face of a New Zealand male when someone tries to alert him to a problem that doesn’t, as far as he can see, affect him personally.

It’s not just climate change. The Bloke Sneer is the standard response to a precaution recommended against any harm that hasn’t so far materialized in the Bloke’s own life. Boating safety measures, for instance. Hence (I surmise) why New Zealand men drown at such high rates. That might be considered grist for the Darwin Awards, but often it’s other people’s safety that gets sneered away – we have a higher rate of workplace injury than most OECD countries, as employers Bloke-Sneer at the health and safety regulations. And it’s not just a matter of harming people negligently; New Zealand schools have a chronic bullying problem. I think that’s a root of the Bloke Sneer problem as well as a fruit of it, insofar as surviving in that environment forces you to develop a highly-tuned scorn reflex. Anything you are seen to genuinely care about can be used to hurt you.

I suspect the Bloke Sneer is also the main reason why New Zealand isn’t as religious as the United States. I must admit, it does bear a certain superficial resemblance to scientific scepticism. However, the Bloke Sneer yawns at evidence and snickers at reason. Being primarily an emotional reflex, it’s not going to form a completely consistent philosophy; but if you were to write down its underlying logic, the epistemic component would read “Anyone coming at you with an agenda – of any kind – can be dismissed without a hearing”.

It’s perfectly sensible to be wary of people with axes to grind, of course. We humans instinctively set the evidentiary bar lower for propositions that suit us than for propositions that don’t, and a prudent sceptic will adjust for their informants’ biases. But the sceptic should know to take especial care to adjust for their own biases, and the Bloke Sneer does the opposite. An “agenda” just means something you want or hope for, and are prepared to work for. And if you see a real problem looming in the future, you’re going to want to change it, aren’t you?

Logically, therefore, “All agendas should be dismissed” is functionally equivalent to “There is no such thing as a problem”. The Bloke Sneer is a sign not of tough-mindedness or scepticism, but of the woolliest kind of wishful thinking.