[I recently added a page on this topic, under the AGW tab. This post is to bring it to your attention.]
By John Cook, University of Queensland
In a previous article on The Conversation, Stephan Lewandowsky asked, why do people reject science? I’m going to take a slightly different angle and consider how people are able to reject climate science in the face of strong evidence.
While Congress has halted work on federal climate legislation, many U.S. business are stepping up to reduce emissions. What’s driving them?
By Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News
A federal carbon cap-and-trade program is dead for the foreseeable future. So is a once promising national clean energy standard.
With climate policy paralyzed in Washington, a number of leading U.S. corporations are going it alone, squeezing big reductions of climate-changing emissions from their operations and supply chains. With stakeholder criticism and other pressures building, more and more are also releasing rigorous climate data in their financial reports and enlisting third-party firms to make sure it is accurate.
[I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time, and the September issue of Scientific American finally provoked me. They talk about exceeding our evolutionary limits, living beyond 1oo, manipulating ourselves to be smarter (but no mention of wiser), and so on. So, another long essay.]
The term appropriate technology was popularised after E. F. Schumacher’s pivotal work Small is Beautiful. Schumacher argued against the modern economic pathology of endless physical growth, which of course cannot continue on our finite planet. He argued further that some technology only promotes endless growth, or it distracts us from more important things in life, and is therefore not beneficial. Technology that supports a fulfilling life and is compatible with a steady-state or slowly shrinking physical economy he called appropriate technology.
As for technology, so for science. A common assumption by scientists is that if a challenge is there then it is fair game to address it. In fact it is commonly presumed that freedom of enquiry, a central ingredient of an open democratic society, justifies such an attitude. However we need to recognise that such freedom comes with responsibility. This seems to be recognised regarding human cloning, for example, where strong legal and social restrictions have commonly been imposed.
“Story” by Julie Tucker Hughes, indigenous artist, a Kaurna/Narrunga woman, South Australia.
Let me resume this blog with a life-affirming vision. My wish is for our descendants to live fulfilling lives into the indefinite future. What must we accomplish, eventually, for it to be possible? Here is an extract from my draft book Our Place (see My Books tab). The painting is by indigenous artist Julie Tucker Hughes. See more of her story.
I have plugged along with trying to get my message out for many years now. I created this blog over three years ago so my deathless prose wouldn’t just vanish into the aether, and have slowly built a modest following for it, getting occasional pieces published in more public places along the way.
This past week I have had an episode of doubt, including feeling depressed for a day and a longer surge of bodily stress indicators. This was triggered by a confluence of events that I’ll get to. The result is I’m not sure it is worth the effort and aggravation – the effort to provide an alternative to failed mainstream economics, to raise awareness about global warming, and to maintain a voice of informed decency amid the growing cacophony of brutish, ignorant ranting. The aggravation of feeling ground is being lost. Perhaps I should reduce my aggravation level by stepping back and letting things flow for a time.
I am writing this because I don’t mind connecting with you at a personal level, but also to suggest that if you think you see worthwhile things here then perhaps you could help to spread the word, or make serious suggestions to that end. More about that below.
One can write of the decline of the USA, and that has already been noted many times. One can write of the collapse of the USA, and that arguably is in process. But neither characterisation would capture what is now happening to the USA.
The USA is being destroyed before our eyes. The nation with the greatest military defences in history, by far, is being taken over and sacked. Like Singapore in World War II, it’s guns are pointing in the wrong direction. This time the destructive horde is not Japanese soldiers rattling overland on bicycle rims, it is people who claim to be patriotic Americans.
[In my previous post I noted how radical is our far-right compared with a few decades ago, and how savagely they enforce political correctness. Here is Richard Eskow at Campaign for America’s Future explaining the US equivalent. Of course it’s more virulent in the US, and of course we follow where they go.]
A well funded network of right-wing extremists wants to make it socially and politically impossible to express the ideals that made this country great. One of those extremists appeared on their billionaire-funded network this week to attack Elizabeth Warren, and anyone else who isn’t on the far right, as a Communist.
How retro, you may be saying to yourself. They haven’t pulled that trick since the Eisenhower era. That’s the strangest part of all this: They seem to think “Eisenhower era” is a euphemism for “Bolshevik control.”
[Just published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed. It is distilled from The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right.]
What currently passes for political commentary includes excited discussions about whether the Leftist Labor dog is being wagged by a“toxic” Greens tail; why right-wing Labor is in dire straits; whether centrist Labor is resurgent; and whether the extremist Greens are doomed.
Balance, in political commentary, is supposed to lie somewhere between Labor and Tony Abbott, who often seems to be regarded as just a somewhat aggro conservative.
Such commentary reflects remarkably limited perspectives that fail to take into account two major developments over the past five decades. The first is the rise of the radical Right. The second is the manifest failure of radical Right policies.
Australian indigenous people: a Chief of Bathurst Island, and friends, 1939. (Personal photographs of C L A Abbott during his term as Administrator of the Northern Territory. Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve had lies on my mind.
How our governments and politicians lie, and lie, and lie, and how we let them. How much damage that has done. How much damage it still does, day after day.
I’ve been thinking to write about it, but knowing it’s another downer, and we can’t just dwell on what’s wrong because we lose hope and become numb and cynical. It’s cynicism and numbness that creates the space for the liars.
Then a video came along, a video of a man speaking the painful truth about his country, speaking from his head and from his heart.
We know the warming of the Arctic is proceeding apace, but this only occasionally makes the “news” (aka the daily petty hysteria). So here is a clear image of a relatively dramatic finding (because it happened over only four days). There are more dramatic findings, but they developed over years so they don’t trigger our “leopard threat” primate alarms.
The Greenland ice sheet on July 8, left, and four days later on the right. In the image, the areas classified as ‘probable melt’ (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as ‘melt’ (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. Photograph: Nasa
Original article at The Guardian.
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