Dickinson to Durban » Archive
Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Seeds of Doubt in Climate Change Were Sown, and the Consequences We’ve Reaped
Is there strong scientific consensus that human activity is changing the climate? The answer is likely to depend on whether you ask the scientific community or the general public. Why the discrepancy? Because the deliberate efforts of a small few have drastically skewed the public’s perceptions about the science of climate change. The methods involved in generating this misperception are certainly not new. In fact, they bear a striking resemblance to those employed by the tobacco industry to deny and downplay the link between lung cancer and smoking. The strategy used in both cases is a simple one: take scientifically valid facts and give the general public reasons to question their validity; and doing so is not hard given the cautious nature of the scientific method, which rigorously questions facts again … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Summer Reading Responses
Weather, Climate Change, and the Necessity of New Thinking
Climate change poses humanity with the sort of problem it has not evolved to handle. This is the result of several factors in our evolutionary history, deriving from the very different world our pre-historic ancestors inhabited. The early days of our species were fraught with immediate physical perils, such as the scarcity of food sources, constant threats from wild animals, the lack of shelter, and so forth. All of these problems require attention in the present; otherwise, one would starve, be eaten, freeze, etc. So harsh was this early human existence that it left little time for thinking about anything else – like the future, the long run. Hence, focusing on the present at the expense of the future provided a survival advantage. And this short-sightedness was relatively harmless, for … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Summer Reading Responses, Weather
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