Thursday, November 26, 2009

Extinction Is Not For The Sane At Heart

Nations become suicidal sometimes when enough people lose a grasp on reality to begin to act like an individual person does when that individual threatens to jump off the bridge.

Take NAZI Germany in the late 1930's as an example. Thankfully Germany fully recovered.

We have a growing problem of suicidal thinking in the United States.

People who are primarily not college graduates, or otherwise educated about ecology and environment, are buying into a notion that humanity can do no permanent or serious damage to the environment, in terms of changing the climate.

Some Russian hackers stole emails from a climate research facility which they interpreted as proof of a vast global conspiracy to deceive the world about climate change.

A NASA scientist was interviewed to get his take on the situation:


Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change ... say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?

No, they have no effect on the science. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

(Newsweek [they "lost" it, so here is the Wayback Machine version]). The Piltdown man scientific fraud, a clear case of scientific fraud, did not mean that all evidence for human evolution was thereby made fraudulent. The hacked email controversy is not a clear case, but even if it was it would not prove the case alleged by the climate change deniers.

It is essential that we learn the tenets of Ecocosmology so that our understanding is expanded to a cosmic understanding.

That is, a broader understanding of what humanity must do, including taking care of the earth, in order to avoid extinction of the human species.

4 comments:

d brockman said...

It all sounds pretty Orwellian to me:
suppression of data
subversion of the peer review process
statistical bumbling
intimidation

It would be amusing if trillions of dollars in infrastructure wasnt involved.

Dredd said...

d brockman,

The largest infrastructure bill in history ("the most expensive public works legislation in US history") was "recently" passed by the republican majority in congress.

"Recently" if you have not become McMemorialized by the leaders of Bullshitistan.

Tony said...

Yes, but the CRU email theft certainly heats up the political calculus in favor of the "deniers" over the "alarmists." Just as Piltdown Man may not have negated the validity of evolution, it certainly aided evolution-deniers to plead their case that "the scientists" were all charlatans.

The difference, of course, is that nothing was really at stake in a general negation of evolution and here we are 150 years after the publication of the Origin of Species and still 45% of the US population believe the earth is 10,000 years old. The negation of climate change supposedly can be disastrous.

Dredd said...

Tony,

Those who believe Obama must prove his citizenship ("birthers") had their day in court because the issue was tried in the courts of the United States, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as a matter of fact.

They were allowed to present evidence and argument, then their position was soundly rejected by the courts, ending up in severe sanctions against some of them.

The same is true of the issues concerning what humanity is doing to the earth. These issues have been tried in the scientific "courts" and the decision is as clear as the decision against the "birthers".

There is no cure for those who cling to madness, there is only a hope of cure for those who reject madness to seek sanity.

This blog will never attempt to make sane those who have rejected sanity because, by definition itself, that is an impossible and therefore useless endeavour.

I do not want the blood of humanity on my hands, so I will advocate that we radically change course to become compliant with the will of the earth expressed in the environment, including climate.

Thank you for your comments, for reading this blog, and good luck on your blogs.