How “Climate” Became God

From the Lisbon earthquake to the LA fire

I lived in California for about five years, and have spent a good deal of time there visiting friends and family over the years. When I am there, I often can’t imagine why I live anywhere else. The climate seems so optimal for human habitation that it gives me a visceral sense of what a “promised land” would be. I have also been there during a couple of intense fire seasons, and at those moments I had roughly the opposite feeling. I couldn’t help but experience the days on which acrid smoke burned my eyes and seared my lungs as some sort of recompense for all the excessive pleasantness, and I couldn’t imagine what would possess one to settle in a place so afflicted.

I took the photograph above in Oakland at around 10 in the morning on Sept. 9, 2020, which came to be known as “Orange Skies Day”—a day the sun, as if finally vindicating Hume, failed to rise. It was the day I came closest to feeling the terror I imagine ancient peoples might have felt when a solar eclipse abruptly blacked out their sole source of warmth and life. So when reading about the fires ripping across Los Angeles this week, I could recognize what former LA city councilman Zev Yaroslavsky meant when he told The New York Times: “It was biblical.” The also “biblical” floods that devastated the south late last year were more discriminating than the one that spared only Noah and his family; what is terrifying about fire is the universality of its judgment. Those fleeing a flood can seek higher ground, but like God’s wrath, which spares no one, wildfire smoke gets everywhere. As Yaroslavsky put it: “This thing is all over the place … It’s impacting everybody who breathes the air.”

All of this is to say the tendency to detect some sort of divine retribution in natural cataclysm is an impulse I understand, and think is probably difficult to avoid feeling sometimes, especially when confronted with the sheer terror of events like the LA fire. When I was younger, it was common for evangelicals like Pat Robertson and John Hagee to stoke controversies describing catastrophes as comeuppance for our sins (more precisely, those of homosexuals, abortionists, and the like). Today, the go-to response on the right seems to be that disasters—or at least, the inept responses to them—are the result of DEI policies. In some cases, there seems to be something to this, but what’s striking here is the right’s shift from the theological, metaphysical, and moral accounting of a Robertson or Hagee to a secular one.

To find a persistent enterprise of metaphysical and moral accounting, we must instead turn to the left. When a flood or fire occurs, the predicatble response from Democratic Party notables and mainstream pundits is to intone, yet again, that “Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax,’” as Bernie Sanders put it. On one level, this is just partisan politics, an attempt to chalk up catastrophes to the failings of one’s political opponents—much like the right’s “blame DEI” approach. On another level—again, as with the right’s approach—there’s something to it. I accept that higher average temperatures are a factor that increases the likelihood and impact of wildfires, although there are others (decades of misguided fire suppression policies, the expansion of human settlement, etc.). Nonetheless, I also think the “climate” narrative that dominates respectable discussion about natural disasters is symptomatic of a broad intellectual regression into a quasi-pagan fatalism.

A viral post on X by a University of Ottawa professor captured the spirit of this narrative well:

The immolation of a McDonald’s, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, serves here as a condemnation of the entire civilization for which it is a stand-in. The implication is that this civilization will and must fall because of reliance on fossil fuels, and more broadly, its consumerist excesses. The moral implication of all this is the need for collective repentance and sacrifice; the political implication is the need for the government to cajole or coerce the citizenry into engaging in this repentance and sacrifice.

A more limited version of this argument might point out, for instance, that settling fire-vulnerable areas like LA’s Pacific Palisades was hubristic given the impossibility of permanently suppressing wildfires; hence, scaling back human settlement away from some disaster-prone regions might be a necessary response. But this is not the climate narrative, which tends to sidestep the inevitability of at least some natural disasters in certain locations, even in the absence of human impact on global mean temperatures, and condemn the entirety of our civilization. Climate activists often refer to a “burning world”: The fire must be seen to spare nothing and no one, because it must function as a condemnation of the entire system and all complicit in it.

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In 1755, an earthquake and tsunami laid waste to Lisbon, killing nearly 40,000, around a fifth of the population. The disaster became famous not just for its deadly impact, but for provoking a European-wide debate about the validity of theodicy, the idea that the “ways of God”—including natural disasters, for which an omnipotent God must be seen as responsible—could be morally justified. There were two main versions of theodicy in circulation at the time. The first, coming from the Catholic authorities, saw it—not unlike Pat Robertson with the 2010 Haitian earthquake—as a manifestation of divine wrath against sinners. The second, from the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, was the more abstract argument that despite appearances, our world must be “the best of all possible worlds,” famously the object of Voltaire’s ridicule in his satirical novella Candide.

For Voltaire, trying to find a moral meaning in a natural disaster was ludicrous. He wasn’t alone in this judgment. The Lisbon earthquake is also famous for giving rise to an entirely different type of inquiry that began by bracketing the moral questions debated by theologians and philosophers and focusing on the objective facts of the matter. The first minister to Portuguese King Joseph I, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal, distributed a survey throughout the kingdom, which generated copious data about the duration and impacts of the quake in a variety of locations. Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the young Immanuel Kant wrote a treatise positing a theory of the natural causes of earthquakes. By most accounts, these developments constitute the origin of modern seismology and contributed to engineering techniques that were eventually used to mitigate destruction and fatalities from future quakes.

This separating out of moral and natural causes into separate, non-overlapping realms of inquiry illustrates what the philosopher of science Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, called “the modern constitution.” Under the modern constitution, unlike most systems of thought that preceded it, an absolute distinction is drawn between the human and natural realms. To inquire into the moral cause of a natural disaster is to make a category mistake, because morality belongs to the realm of subjects, of human agency, while nature belongs to the realm of objects, of mere facts.

For Latour, the rise of the modern constitution is an ambiguous development. It enables scientific advances of the sort initiated by figures like Pombal and Kant in the 18th century. At the same time, the extent of these advances has led to the blurring of the very categories that were supposed to be kept separate. With the invention of atomic weapons, the most abstract questions about the nature of the physical universe became inextricable from perhaps the greatest moral crisis in history thus far. For Latour, anthropogenic global warming was likewise a “hybrid,” in which the categories the modern constitution tried to keep separate had become hopelessly blurred. But for him, this simply showed that they had never been quite so simply separate in the first place, and that philosophy needed to reckon with that reality.

In his 1989 book The End of Nature, one of the earliest general-audience books on global warming, journalist Bill McKibben lamented climate change because it “ended” nature as a realm independent of human influence. “If the waves crash up against the beach,” he wrote, “eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of Mother Nature as altered by the awesome power of man.” This still captures what the climate narrative tells us we should perceive every time a natural disaster strikes: an illicit manifestation of corrupting human intervention in nature. What it demands is less to mitigate its impacts than to “make nature nature again,” to somehow end the contamination of the natural with the human that is the moral cause of the catastrophe.

McKibben’s conception of nature is itself a modern invention. Throughout most of history, human beings have looked at the natural world and seen a realm which reflected and responded to their moral and social crises—an approach that only came to be challenged around the time of the Lisbon earthquake. The other problem with McKibben’s narrative is that humans have been altering the natural world since our origins. He and the climate movement after him have hypostasized the particular image of nature derived from the modern constitution and made it the object of their lamentation and longing. The ultimate end of their politics isn’t a nature without wildfires or floods—which they will acknowledge to be an absurdity—but one in which humans can be relieved of moral responsibility for such occurrences. The result is a politics in pursuit of moral penance that diverts discussion away from more immediate efforts to manage and respond to disasters, which necessarily requires accepting the inseparability of the human and natural world and demands active intervention in the latter—a taboo.

I hope California can be saved, both from its terrible leadership and from the fires and earthquakes that will continue to afflict it with some degree of frequency, regardless of our future emissions trajectory. I love its weather, its landscapes, its produce, and many of its people. I suspect, however, that its elites’ capture by the apocalyptic, fatalistic climate narrative makes the repetition of catastrophes like this one likely. It has eroded the will to manage resources like water effectively, as California used to do remarkably well, in favor of micromanaging consumption to coerce citizens into expiating their sins. And when disaster does strike, these leaders can simply point upward and say “climate”—which is to say, if they are responsible, so are we all.

This week in Compact

As we approach Donald Trump’s second inauguration and as Democrats continue to lick their wounds, our coverage has continued to focus on the major shifts in US politics, with just one foray north of what Trump recently called our “artificial border”:

• Kenneth Rapoza argued that lame-duck President Biden made the right call when he sided with the United Steelworkers and blocked the sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel.

• Justin Vassallo did a deep dive into the trends that may stymie the realignment away from neoliberal policies in both parties. “The emerging standoff” between them, he writes, “promises to empower anti-populist factions in both parties.”

• Darel Paul argued that liberal academics—those who still adhere to principles like merit and institutional neutrality—need to take the GOP’s triumph as an opportunity to reassert their values against the long-reigning woke faction.

• In light of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, Leila Mechoui highlighted his Liberal government’s most impactful—and deadliest—legacy: the installation and expansion of the assisted-suicide program known as MAID.

• Chris Cutrone interpreted Trump’s bid for Greenland as a potential means of reinitiating America’s revolutionary mission in the world: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

• Brannon Miller digs into why Democrats lost the Catholic vote, a key factor in their loss in November.

Thanks as always for reading!