Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".