12.7: Money Games - Chasing the Symbol

How does our pursuit of money or ‘economic growth,’ and its relationship to the consumption of real things, necessary or not for our human wellbeing, relate to our impact on nature? There are many dimensions to this issue, and multiple ways of conceptualizing the relationship. Sanderson, Walston and Robinson (2018) look to “the market economy” as a savior, of sorts, for biodiversity. As growing human populations, no longer able to support themselves in rural environments, move into cities in a massive process of urbanization, they will—at least, if they’re lucky enough to find a job—become incorporated into the economic system, no longer living off the land but finding one or another way of ‘making money’; and along with this transition, these authors assure us, will come the incentive to seek more education, as a way of moving up the employment ladder, and fewer children, as they discover the ‘costs’ of feeding and caring for them, thus in the long run facilitating a leveling off and eventual stabilization of the human population. They dispute the widespread belief that increased consumption necessarily follows increased income—accumulating savings and more time for leisure activities may prove to be preferred alternatives, they muse—and at least, even though the centralized services of cities in the aggregate use a tremendous amount of ‘resources’ and generate a tremendous amount of waste, on a per capita basis these indices are said to be reduced, while opportunities for cultural activities, technological advances and social movements—including, perhaps, a move to conserve nature—will be enhanced. These authors admit that some regions are currently still caught in a ‘bottleneck,’ where human populations are still growing and rates of “natural-resource extraction” and pollution are still increasing, SubSaharan Africa being a case in point—but that, if we can just get them through the next 30-50 years, which will be a time of “extreme difficulty” for conservation, with more losses expected, then they will finally experience ‘breakthrough,’ with populations stabilizing and indices of concern beginning to decline. Toward this end, they assert that “improving the governance and functioning of African urban areas while simultaneously protecting Africa’s unique wildlife is arguably the most urgent need in conservation today, because it is the fastest path to global population stabilization.”

For the sake of Africa’s wildlife, let us hope they are right; if African people who are currently “making money” in the bushmeat trade, let alone the skyrocketing industry in certain kinds of animal “parts,” can find alternative gainful employment in the city centers, well and good, and perhaps their craving for meat can be satisfied by the excess production of livestock industries in the developed countries, until meat consumption can be brought down on a global scale and vegetable protein and other alternatives consumed in its place. Looking at statistics from a highly developed, already largely urbanized country, the United States, however, wildlife biologist Brian Czech and his colleagues have come to a conclusion opposite to that above. They examined accounts of species endangerment and found the urbanization associated with economic growth generally driving the process, concluding that economic growth “amounts to the competitive exclusion of nonhumans in general” (Czech et al., 2000). Czech suggests that the notion of “economic growth” is an “American ideal” that provides psychological comfort as well as the promise of material comfort, but he declares it to be the “limiting factor” in wildlife conservation, at least in the U.S., and takes his fellow wildlife professionals to task for being “virtually silent” on the topic, “suggesting that the profession has been laboring in futility” (Czech, 2000).

Environmental philosopher Philip Cafaro (2011) also dares to address the negative effects on nature that result from both economic growth and population growth. Like Czech, he observes that, in the United States, economic growth “is the primary goal of our society.” As a corrective, Cafaro offers the views of philosophers from the past about “the proper place of economic activity” in human life. Aristotle maintained that living well entails recognizing limits, observing that some, failing to grasp this truth, mistakenly desire to “increase without limit their property in money” and in “what is productive of unlimited things.” Epicurus spurned “the pleasures of consumption,” and Seneca criticized “luxury” as leading to “the vices”; Thoreau chided those whose life devolved into a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competition, always thinking they must have a house “such as their neighbors have,” while Aldo Leopold urged “a little healthy contempt” for a world “so greedy for more bathtubs.” Cafaro also draws attention to the phenomenon of advertising, reporting that, in the United States, $163 billion were spent in 2006 “to keep Americans consuming at high levels” (Cafaro, 2011).

Aristotle also put his finger on a certain distortion in our thinking that may lie at the heart of some of our most serious problems today: it has to do with our economic notion of “interest.” ^[39] In a passage condemning usury (Politics, 1258b), he charges that the practice is “most unnatural”; it seems that the term for “interest” in Greek, meaning “breed” or “offspring,” incorporates the idea that the offspring resembles the parent, and employing it in an economic context gives the mistaken impression that money can be bred with itself to generate offspring resembling its parents in the same way that living beings like cattle or fruit trees can—but alas, it cannot, since it is not a living thing at all. Aristotle’s example may have concerned the fact that metal coins can’t “breed” in such a fashion, but he is drawing our attention to the basic difference between the abstract and the concrete; as we learned from our reading of Searle, money is an abstract, socially constructed entity—on the one hand, it is mathematically capable of being “increased” without limit, theoretically to infinity, but on the other, it is nothing at all in the real, ontologically objective world, just a symbolic placeholder that cannot fill an empty belly. Unfortunately, however, when we think of a country’s “GDP,” we tend to fall prey to the illusion that, because growth in this numerical sum is theoretically infinite, then the real economy—our consumption of real goods in the real world—can go on without limit too.

Alfred North Whitehead termed this confused form of thinking “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead, 1929), a mistake that Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen identified as “the cardinal sin of economics.” Georgescu-Roegen was the first major contemporary economist to emphasize the importance of grounding economics in physical reality and the finitude of what we call natural resources, and his work was foundational to the subdiscipline of ecological economics. His student, Herman Daly, went on to advocate the steady-state economy, of which both Cafaro and Czech speak approvingly. ^[40] Daly elaborates on this problem of “misplaced concreteness,” finding examples of this in modern economics:

Perhaps the classic instance of this fallacy in economics is “money fetishism.” It consists in taking the characteristics of the abstract symbol and measure of exchange value, money, and applying them to the concrete use value, the commodity itself. Thus, if money flows in an isolated circle then so do commodities; if money balances can grow forever at compound interest, then so can real GNP, and so can pigs and cars and haircuts. (Daly 1987)

This “isolated circle” is described at greater length by Kate Raworth, of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, Doughnut Economics (2017):

The central image in mainstream economics is the circular flow diagram. It depicts a closed flow of income cycling between households, businesses, banks, government and trade, operating in a social and ecological vacuum. Energy, materials, the natural world, human society, power, the wealth we hold in common . . . all are missing from the model. . . . . Like rational economic man, this representation of economic activity bears little relationship to reality. (Monbiot, 2017)

In her alternative “doughnut model,” ^[41] Raworth redraws the economy, embedding it within two larger circles: the outside of the doughnut represents the “ecological ceiling,” the nine “planetary boundaries” we must not cross, and the hole in the doughnut, the space beneath the “floor” of our social foundation, is where people live lives of deprivation; in between, people have enough of the things needed to live a good life–healthful food, clean water, sanitary living conditions, education, and so on. Figuring out how to bring our global population up into the body of this doughnut will be a neat trick, if we can do it; unfortunately, that has not been the goal of modern economics as we know it.

It should be noted, at this point, that economics is NOT a science. Science “bottoms out,” as Searle would say, in the ontologically objective: things that really exist in the world, independently of our representations of them, whether they are molecules or mountains, gigatonnes of carbon in the air or in the ground, individual living organisms or the living webs of relationships that knit them together. Since they have an existence that is independent of us humans, they “push back” when we measure, probe and manipulate them—that’s why groups of scientists can confirm or reject the research conclusions of other scientists—even though different scientists may be situated somewhat differently in the world and so come at their work from somewhat different contexts, there’s a “real thing” out there that they’re trying to describe and on which it is hoped all findings will eventually converge. Economics, on the other hand, at least the ‘mainstream’ neoclassical economics that’s taken over the world today, just bottoms out in ontologically subjective entities like “price” and “discount rate”; even its fundamental element, the “dollar,” is a socially constructed entity through and through.

Understanding that important difference is probably the reason why Alfred Nobel never set up a “Nobel Prize in Economics” as he did Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine, as well as Literature and Peace. Instead, there is the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” a prize funded by the central bank of Sweden. Peter Nobel, “the great, great nephew of Alfred Nobel,” claims his distinguished ancestor “would never have created” such a prize, which he considers to be merely “a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation” (The Local, 2005). Friedrich von Hayek, moreover, who was awarded this Nobel Memorial Prize in 1974, said in his acceptance speech that he would have advised against creating it, because “the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.” “This does not matter in the natural sciences,” he explained, because in the case of scientists such influence is chiefly felt by fellow scientists, who “will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence,” whereas an economist will have influence over politicians, journalists and the general public, before whom he may be tempted to make pronouncements that do exceed his competence (von Hayek 1974). The reason why fellow scientists can “cut down to size” one of their number who “exceeds his competence,” of course, is that there is an independent reality that they all ultimately have to be faithful to, whereas all an economist has is a conceptual framework, unbounded and ungrounded, about which he can expound at length to scientist and citizen alike.

The problem of what happens when these two “worlds collide”—when the real world of living beings comes up against the abstract world of our economic constructs, and in particular its “interest rates”—is brought home graphically in a paper by two researchers trying to develop a plan for sustainable forestry in the Bolivian Amazon in collaboration with a specialist in natural resource economics (Rice et al., 1997). They discovered that timber companies had no financial incentive at all to invest in sustainable forestry, which would entail restraint in cutting trees, allowing smaller trees to grow in volume over time and replanting seedlings after harvests; “unrestricted logging” was found to be two to five times more profitable. It seems the “most rational approach” from a financial perspective was to “liquidate” all the monetarily valuable trees immediately and then invest the proceeds, especially given the notably high rates of return being given in most Latin American countries at the time. The stark economic “facts” of the matter are illustrated in a graph plotting monetary growth in US dollars over time as a function of varying “rates of return.” Sustainable forestry yields a mere 5% growth by letting a hypothetical $1,000 worth of trees grow in size and value to turn into $2,000 worth in 15 years, and is illustrated by a sedately rising linear trajectory; cutting them all down immediately and investing the money at interest rates ranging from 14% to 24%, on the other hand, is illustrated by a series of J-curves turning ever more sharply upward, with money tripling, quadrupling, and even increasing by a factor of 8 within just 10 years. A second illustration displays colorful photos of rainforest plants and animals, with the heading “Vive la Difference.” It should be noted that, within the larger conceptual framework, the “difference” being illuminated by these contrasting images is ontological.

These authors reference an earlier paper that also addresses this collision between the economic and the biological worlds, one that gets into an even more disturbing outcome: economic rationality can drive species extinction. Colin Clark (1974) considers threats to the blue whale and other species, introducing the insidious notion of “discounting.” A species can be driven into extinction by economics by “the maximization of present value, whenever a sufficiently high rate of discount is used.” The discount rate exploiters adopt, he explains, “will be related to the marginal opportunity cost of capital in other investments”—it’s the same problem faced by Rice, Gullison and Reid, but in econospeak. Clark calculates that, for the Antarctic blue whale, if exploiters seek “maximization of the present value of harvests,” an annual discount rate of between 10% and 20% would be sufficient to drive the species into extinction, a discount rate “by no means exceptional in resource development industries.”

What is this so-called discount rate? It’s given two different meanings within the economics literature. The one most people are familiar with is that it’s the rate that the US Federal Reserve charges when lending money to other banks; typically a rate for overnight lending, this discount rate is set by the Fed “internally,” and not released to the public in a general publication (see Investopedia, 2019), though other interest rates will generally reflect this base rate. The second meaning is a little more difficult to grasp; it has to do with the “time value of money.” As put by Rose Cunningham (2009), the mathematics are a matter of running the “’miracle of compound interest’ in reverse.” Again, it points back to the real-world situations described by Rice, Gullison and Reid and by Clark; a hypothetical investor is confronted with a choice between receiving a certain amount of cash immediately or waiting a certain amount of time to receive the same amount of cash at a predetermined point in the future, as presumably would be the case if a certain off-take of some “natural resource” was to be harvested “sustainably” and turned into cash. Since, if the person receives the lump sum now, it can be invested immediately in some financial scheme that will make it grow according to a certain “interest” rate, it can always be expected to be a greater sum at the end of the waiting period—thus it will always seem “better to have money now rather than later.” Therefore, money is considered to be “more valuable in the present,” and because of this perception the deferred amount is “devalued” mathematically–essentially by running the interest calculation in reverse. Heyford (2019) gives an example of comparing these alternatives, starting with $10,000 received now or received after 3 years; if the 10,000 is invested now for 4.5% interest, then–due to the exponential nature of compounding ^[42]—by the end of the 3-year period it will have increased to $11,412, its “future value.” However, if we want to find out how much we would have to invest today in order to receive $10,000 in 3 years, we have to “rearrange the future value equation” to accommodate what becomes a negative exponent ^[43] in order to find the “present value” of that deferred sum—which would be $8763 in this case. In other words, what we are doing is “discounting the future value of an investment” (Heyford, 2019).

This may, unfortunately, make “rational sense” to investors concerned only about maximizing their financial returns, but—even more unfortunately—the same sort of abstract, mathematicized reasoning is being applied to “discounting” the value of just about everything else as well. As Cunningham (2009) explains in simple terms, even human lives can be considered in this way; if one current human life is assigned a monetary “value” of $5 million, for example (she defers any discussion of the ethics of this to another post), at a “sensible seeming” discount rate of 5% per year (well, annual interest rates of 4 to 5% would seem “sensible” to us, so consider the way the interest calculation can be “run in reverse” to devalue things in the future) that human life 200 years in the future would only be worth $304 in today’s dollars, and in 300 years only about $2.30. If this surprises you, her answer to how we arrive at “such a dramatic mark-down” is that it is “simply the exponential nature of discount and interest rates.” (It seems population growth is not the only area in which we humans encounter difficulties because of a poor understanding of the nature of exponential growth.) These rates “embed assumptions about how much value we place on future human lives”; we apparently only value them equally with our own “if the discount rate is zero.” Now, perhaps that’s the answer to the thorny issue of intergenerational equity—if the “time value of money,” from whence this notion of “discounting the future” has sprung, is considered “a basic principle of finance,” then perhaps the present configuration of our economic system should be rethought. But to understand what is happing now at policy-making levels, it is important to grasp how this kind of thinking goes.

Policy decisions, Cunningham tells us, are made on the basis of what is termed a “social discount rate,” not directly linked to market interest rates, that presumably expresses “that rate at which society, not just the market, trades off the future and the present”; it is, essentially, “just a measure of how impatient we are,” ^[44] reflecting “our preference for receiving benefits or consuming today rather than tomorrow.” Apparently what is under consideration in most policy decisions is whether or not, or how much, money to “invest” in policies and projects aimed at mitigating some of the effects of climate change (apparently overlooking altogether the fact that the essential thing that should be done is a matter of not-doing, of cutting back on many kinds of projects), with a keen eye on the “efficiency” with which overall monetary returns can be maximized. Cunningham herself appears torn on the issue of how to make these value judgments; she observes “I think that the overall society does care about the future, and future generations’ wellbeing, but we don’t act as if we value the future as much as we value the present,” and she seems to prefer the use of “declining” discount rates that discount fairly steeply for the near future and very little or nothing at all (after the initial near-term devaluations) beyond several hundred years from now.

A number of criticisms of this overall approach have been launched, which unfortunately cannot be discussed at length here. ^[45] The general pattern of “discounting the future” still appears to dominate economic approaches to climate change, however, and a paper by Erling Moxnes (2014) illustrates how such thinking is shorn up. Moxnes argues for approaching policy decisions using an “alternative welfare function” instead of the standard one to better “capture the preference structure” revealed by two questionnaires he developed, questionnaires which he claims demonstrate that “people are able to choose among policies by inspecting time graphs of policy consequences.” But, while respondents are told “you will see the exact consequences of the policies on national consumption development per person,” they see no pictures of raging wildfires or flooding landscapes; they are given no depictions of the real world at all, in fact, but rather line graphs depicting units of “per capita consumption” and “per capita well-being.” And here’s the hook: they are asked to consider how much of their own consumption they would give up for children and grandchildren “that will enjoy higher consumption than you”; in the first questionnaire, consumption grows steadily in both scenarios presented, consumption in 2110 being given as “4 times higher than in 2010,” while, in the second questionnaire, respondents are told “well-being doubles after 100 years” (Moxnes, 2014, emphasis added).

These sorts of assumptions are by no means unusual in the economic literature, and belief in limitless economic growth and steadily increasing human wellbeing appear to be the lynchpin on the case for substantial discounting in discussions of climate mitigation policy; “economists commonly assume that economic growth will leave future generations richer than the present one, in spite of climate change,” according to Matthew Rendall (2019). Rendall explains that this form of argument–“giving equal weight to future costs and benefits would impose intolerable obligations on the present generation”—“has been one of the most influential arguments for the economic practice of discounting.” He himself seems willing to allow that most people will be better off in the future—or “richer, at any rate”—but he also maintains that, if there’s even a very small chance of permanent world impoverishment instead, we should not take this chance. Moreover, he observes, “we should not take it for granted that the story of industrialization has a happy ending” (Rendall, 2019).

Taking it all for granted is just what still seems to be commonly done, however, as in this blog post by a philosophy graduate student; he argues against the view that “any discount rate other than zero would be incompatible with intergenerational justice,” maintaining that the reason why this conclusion is wrong is “the fact that, as a result of economic growth, people in a century from now will be a lot richer than us” (Lemoine, 2017, emphasis added). He then says something that may convey a deeper message than he intended:

You may be tempted to say that we can’t assume that productivity will continue to increase, but you have to realize that, if it did not, climate change would not even be a problem. Indeed, the models that are used to predict what is going to happen if we keep emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere assume that GDP will continue to grow, which is precisely why they predict that greenhouse gases emissions will continue to increase unless we do something. If economic growth stopped, emissions would not continue to increase and, as a result, there would be no problem to mitigate in the first place. (Lemoine, 2017)

The point of the above claim seems to be well made: the policies we should be considering seriously are not simply about choosing what mitigation strategies we should invest in, as projects to be carried out, but rather ways we can begin cutting back on our consumption and our “economic growth,” which of course is driving our increasing GHG emissions.

That’s precisely what adherents of the emerging idea of “degrowth” have in mind. Samuel Alexander (2011) calls for a policy of “planned economic contraction,” defined as “’an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions,’” pointing to the work of Richard Easterlin and others seemingly showing that, “beyond a certain material standard of living, increases in personal and/or national income have a fast disappearing marginal utility, ^[46]” a finding that reportedly holds for a number of developing and transitioning countries as well as developed ones (Easterlin et al., 2010); he warns, however, that adoption of a policy of degrowth is “highly unlikely” without “a cultural revolution in attitudes toward Western-style consumer lifestyles.” Milena Buchs and Max Koch (2019) note that Easterlin’s conclusion has been challenged, and they argue for a move away from comparing scores of “subjective wellbeing” toward an assessment of wellbeing in terms of objective standards, as done in the “human needs” approach, which can be used to provide a basis for claiming a moral obligation to fulfill the needs of future generations; while wants are regarded as “insatiable” in contemporary economic theory, moreover, needs can be satisfied and are “in principle compatible with an economy based on stable matter and energy throughput.” They also focus on the problem of “growth lock-in” due to its embeddedness in many of our socially constructed institutions and the relationship “between growth and people’s mind-sets and identities.”

To the IPCC, however, making a move in the direction of “degrowth” is apparently inconceivable at this time. The studies that most policymakers are looking at are presented under the guise of being “scientific”—and they do look impressive, with lots of quantitative modeling–but when you look at what’s actually being “modeled,” you find that much of it bottoms out, not in the real world, open to empirical investigation, but rather in abstract concepts that are rooted in the conceptual framework of the kind of standard economic theory we have been discussing here. The IPCC projects “mitigation scenarios” to control emissions on the basis of “Integrated Assessment Models,” which are essentially cost-benefit analyses; those who devise them are more at home measuring quantities of dollars than the thickness of ice sheets, and seem more concerned with achieving a token amount of mitigation at the lowest possible cost than with maintaining conditions on the planet that will be most conducive to supporting biological life. Joachim Spangenberg and Lia Polotzek (2019) take aim at these “IAMs,” climate scenarios that merge the science and the economics that the IPCC relies on “assuming that both disciplines provide adequate descriptions of the parts of reality they are in charge of analyzing and understanding,” asking, “—but do they?”

As they explain, current mainstream economics–technically known as neoclassical economics—is based on “three defining elements”: methodological individualism, utility maximization, and market equilibrium; economic behavior can be modeled on the basis of parameters reflecting these elements and their interactions, but these models are “inherently deterministic,” and thus incapable of grappling with the unpredictable dynamics of the real-world systems and with their ascending levels of complexity. The models have been tweaked, but they are still basically deterministic, and their equilibrium assumptions rule out evolution of the structure of the overall system itself, so any major changes are assumed to be reversible—a “fatal flaw,” they claim.
Moreover, earlier economists, including John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and even Friedrich von Hayek, were interested in understanding broader issues, such as how wealth, markets, and the macro-structure of the economy came into being, but after World War II mainstream economists narrowed down their focus to individual agents making “rational” choices. But the roots of “rational choice theory,” construing “rationality” solely in terms of self-interest and utility maximization, clearly lie squarely within utilitarian ethics, ^[47] which is only one of several schools of moral philosophy in the Western tradition; it can hardly be claimed to be “a universal theory of human behavior,” since, in “stark contrast” with other ethical theories, it is unable to account for “committed” or “pro-social” behavior (see Herfeld 2013). As Spangenberg and Polotzek point out, this means that, while such economic models are being presented as purely descriptive, they are in fact smuggling in a great deal of “normative baggage,” disguising the outcomes of their economic models as the result of “purely rational” human thought, when in fact they incorporate a set of assumptions generated by one particular approach to ethics. It also explains why the IPCC’s models have been unable to generate any scenarios that actually halt the increase in greenhouse gas emissions; built into them from the start is an imperative to maximize the “social utility function,” usually represented by the GDP. In other words, “the ‘optimal’ outcome is more wealth in a national economy, in monetary terms”; consequently, policy steps that might reduce production and consumption and therefore lessen GDP growth would be considered sub-optimal, and “either cannot be depicted or are not used”—even though such cutbacks are needed to reach emissions goals. They conclude, “it is our very standard of evaluation”—inherent in the construction of these models themselves—that leads to “deeply ideologically biased policy recommendations being presented as ‘objective scientific insights,’ which has made economics the favorite legitimation science [but remember, it’s not a science!] of neoliberal decision makers in politics and business.”
The “fatal flaw,” however, was revealed when the IPCC duly cranked out four scenarios aimed at avoiding crossing the 1.5 C-above-preindustrial-levels “safety” threshold, including “one explicitly ambitious sustainability scenario”—lo and behold, all of them still produced an overshoot in emissions and hence temperature. To rectify this, the policy wonks simply proposed that the overshoot will be reversed, principally via the “negative emissions” of their favorite technology, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Among other criticisms of this move, Anderson and Peters (2016) point out that the IPCC’s IAMs “assume that the discounted costs of BECCS in future decades is less than the cost of deep mitigation today”—thereby, as Spangenberg and Polotzek remark, making it “appear plausible to ‘kick the can down the road.’” Since the IPCC offers no scenario that does not assume continuing economic growth, such growth “appears to be an assumption which cannot be questioned”; “thus, assumptions of 80 years of growth and the risk of hothouse climate conditions are considered a realistic option, while deep structural change necessary to limit climate damage isn’t.”

The “fatal flaw” in this thinking, however, according to Spangenberg and Polotzek, is that it fails to grasp the irreversibility of evolutionary paths of complex systems, the fact that “you never cross the same river twice”; it should thus be obvious, they say, “that an overshoot—temporary or permanent—is not acceptable, once the lessons from complex systems theory are taken into account.” The discipline of economics, they observe, “is driven by world views and their ontologies which are more based on Newton’s mechanics than rooted in modern science’s understanding of systems complexity”; to provide intelligent guidance into a livable future, it must change. First of all, economics must change its ontology: it must be recognized that “the economy is a subsystem of society, which in turn is embedded in the environmental systems.” In accord with this, they say, it must also change its epistemology, to accommodate uncertainty and ignorance, and it must change its axiology, recognizing other sorts of value systems beyond the “economic rationality” of self-interested utility maximization. As part of its ontological change, moreover, economics must change its anthropology, coming to see human beings as the symbol-using social and biological beings that they are, engaged in the process of actively constructing their economic systems, as Searle would have it, and fully capable of changing them to meet the challenges we face. As it stands now, however, Spangenberg and Polotzek charge, the IPCC’s climate models “are castles in the clouds, and the conclusions drawn from them are dangerous for humankind and the global environment” (2019).