Global Warming and the Rise of the West

Fred Allebach      2/26/10

Thesis: The Rise of the West and its effects on the world economic system is comparable to the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the world climate system. Large dynamic changes in static systems have substantial effects.

Causation in the world climate and world economy is too complex to treat as a simple mechanism. There aren’t easy 1 to 1 causes and effects. At the same time it is obvious that big changes have occurred respectively because of significant inputs of CO2 and because of the Rise of the West. Hence my metaphor: global weather is like economics.

The bottom line: the major causes/ elements are obvious and irrefutable. What my metaphor illustrates is that you introduce substantial changes into a closed system (the world climate/ economy) and these changes have big effects. Just because you can’t demonstrate 1 to 1 causation doesn’t mean there aren’t big influences at play. Global warming and the Rise of the West are strong cases in point.

Yet the question of causation becomes a political fight between competing paradigms which have a priori agendas. People have a way of finding what they’re looking for and ignoring all else. It’s called partialization, parochialism and it can go from the benign to ridiculous to outright harmful. In this way there are Holocaust deniers, global warming deniers, anti-Western academics etc, people who insist on a line that goes against the bulk of all evidence.

My take is that when phenomena are complex, there is a natural tendency to want to reduce things to simple general terms. We get a tendency for black and white thinking. It is too much work and emotionally unsatisfying to connect all the dots and have a middle path-type understanding. If it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, most folks can’t use it.

People obfuscate the human causation of global warming yet it is unarguable that putting that much CO2 in a closed system will create a greenhouse effect. It is an unavoidable conclusion. Historians also obfuscate the causative influences for the Rise of the West when the unavoidable conclusion is that the cumulative, aggregate changes undergone by the West have had major deterministic influences on the world today.

I propose making a pie diagram and assigning a percentage basis to the main factors: culture, technology, environment, economics, politics and military. These influences change over time. Then a succession of relative pie diagrams could be developed showing what causations were greater at particular times, how it all developed, rather then trying to reduce everything to one primary cause for all time.

To conclude, diffuse yet substantial inputs create substantial outputs in closed systems.  When the pot gets stirred, when the heat is on and you add the right ingredients, you just might create something totally new and more than could be predicted.