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Record W4407422231 · doi:10.1111/japp.12797

Climate Absurdism

2025· article· en· W4407422231 on OpenAlex
Daniel Dick

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Applied Philosophy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicClimate Change Communication and Perception
Canadian institutionsMcMaster UniversityUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAbsurdismAbsurdityEnvironmental ethicsArgument (complex analysis)Meaning (existential)Climate changeSeriousnessEpistemologyRhetorical questionAction (physics)LawSociologyAestheticsPhilosophyPolitical scienceEcology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Many arguments in the popular discourse around climate change seem intended to give the impression that climate action is an absurd endeavor. These ‘climate absurdist’ arguments are reflected in the question: ‘if the climate is going to change anyway, why should we care about anthropogenic climate change?’ Classic absurdist philosophy suggests that absurdity (also called ‘the absurd’) arises due to a conflict between our desire for meaning and a universe that seems devoid of meaning. Others argue the absurd is not a consequence of specific facts about the universe but is rather a matter of perspective – we live our lives with a seriousness that can always be undercut by ‘stepping back’ and viewing our goals and aspirations with indifference. Although climate absurdist claims are structured similarly to classic absurdist claims (positing a conflict between our climate stabilizing efforts and specific physical facts like a constantly changing climate), I argue that climate absurdist arguments are primarily rhetorical claims intended to encourage the listener to ‘step back’ and view our climate stabilizing efforts on a geologic or cosmic scale, where they can appear insignificant. I show that this approach results in a self‐defeating argument that cannot justify climate inaction.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.969
Threshold uncertainty score0.402

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.281
GPT teacher head0.444
Teacher spread0.164 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it