And from Professor Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand we have more clarifying good sense percolating to the top of the cesspool that is climate science in the New York Times on 31 December 2009; a fitting and thoughtful commentary for the end of the decade published in
the New York Times.
“It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It
... Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.
This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and recycle!”
Self loathing seems to be a symptom of modern ecokookism which must be why its proponents seem so drawn to one Armageddon scenario after another with each being more ludicrous than the previous. The absurdity of discussing the immanent species extinction of home sapien species whilst dining in elegant surroundings at exotic locations seems to escape them. After returning to Bali in October 2009 (it was last there in December 2007), the IPCC circus would have barely had time to unpack before they all flew off to Copenhagen in December 2009.
1 comment:
When I was a child I was told fairy tales - scary ones. Since then scaring children has been banned and the adults who never heard such tales grow up to believe in scary things they can't control. If they knew about the three litlte pigs and the wolf they would not react the way they do.
The really interesting science in global warming (or lack thereof) is psychology. Why are people acting and reacting as they do and why do we edit the input data to match our pre-existing point of view rather than our point of view to match the data?
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