Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change Denialism
A friend sent me this piece on CO2 concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, and writes: FYI just in case you have not seen this.
Yes, that’s interesting. As I may have mentioned, I know a few of these people personally, e.g., Professor Ramanathan (he goes by “Ram”) at the Scripps Institute (pictured below) here in Southern California.
That’s one of the reasons I find climate deniers and their allegations so distasteful. Consider the idea that this extremely learned and unassuming guy (pictured here on the left), who’s been studying this subject since the mid-1970s, is part of a conspiracy to defraud the government in order to receive funding for atmosphere research. It’s outlandish, to put it kindly. You’d have a far easier time convincing me that my mother leads a double life as a spy for the Basque separatists or the Chechenian rebels (pictured above), that thunder comes from Zeus, or whatever.
Mom, you don’t have any secrets you’d like to share, do you?
Seriously, I can understand why people of intelligence, compassion and integrity find this stuff deeply offensive.
When I interviewed Ram for my first book (Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies) as I mentioned that I sympathized with him for being under attack as a climate scientist, and one of the most recognized, at that. He shrugged and replied impassively, “I’m not the one you need to feel sorry for. There are billions of children who are going to have to live through this.”
Climate change deniers are just like the pet store owner in the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch.
The just keep coming up with one thing after another, but they never actually believe any of them themselves.
It’s just excuses.
Craig,
Our contribution to these sensitive issues is to is to begin installing, and commissioning Zero Land Fill-Energy.We are an engineering firm licensed in Plasma-Microwave waste to energy, Power Stations. Please contact me for our upcoming locations internationally.
Gerald Rauch
Recently I read a study that compared climate changed deniers with climate change accepters. It turns out that whether or not people accept climate change depends greatly on their political and economic outlooks and interests. Probably I don’t need to elaborate.
Those of us who are old enough will recall that tobacco companies denied that smoking was hazardous. They had no difficulty finding doctors and scientists who supported their position. History is repeating itself.
From its inception the IPCC has published a series of reports that document its findings and explain the reasons for reaching their conclusions. Those reports are the foundation for whatever conclusions the public (and our governments) may reach. While the IPCC reports may be too detailed for most of us to analyze properly, they provide the means for independent experts to evaluate the conclusions so we are not collectively put into the position of having to put all of our faith in the IPCC group itself.
this extremely learned and unassuming guy (pictured right), Craig, unless my eyes are really much worse than I think they are, this learned and unassuming guy pictured on the right is Pope Francis.
Ha! LOL! Yes, I (stupidly) meant the picture itself is on the right. I just edited it, removing the ambiguity. Thanks.
There has from at least the 1960’s to the present been a shift in education from the broad liberal arts curriculum to a “practical,” focused schooling that attempts to prepare someone for a specific job. Along the way there is less understanding of logic and arguments and a very narrow focus on very individual desires and needs. Concurrently there has been a steady rise in the use of media techniques in all fields but especially in politics and public relations to obfuscate the truth. This is not to say it is a conspiracy or it has been planned, but it has been decades in the making. Therefore, it is not a situation that will be resolved tomorrow and probably not by regulations or legislation at all, but by individuals “waking up to the truth” and sharing that understanding as you are doing here Craig. Thank you.
You are exactly right about the demise of liberal arts education, and the rise of poor thinking. In the absence of people who are able to think and reason logically, we’re doomed. I think you’ve nailed that. What happens from here is really up to young people, more so than people getting on in the years like me. I’m hopeful that the future brings a generation full of young people who care about the future, and are not so hateful and tribal and mean spirited as our culture today seems to be trying so hard to force them to become. Coincidentally, I wrote this yesterday; note the last paragraph: http://2greenenergy.com/2015/02/28/bullish-on-renewable-energy-6/
The state of affairs in thousand words or less…? I’ve been saying for decades, “This isn’t just about our children’s children, this is about our parent’s children… us.”
That was true decades ago and it’s still true now. The impacts of our own individual and collective inaction is growing exponentially for our children, and for every generation for millennia into the future.
Importantly, it’s also not just about humanity alone, but also about the unsung providers of “natural services” that will always be crucial to our health and survival.
Think of the many obvious (and therefore often unseen) resources provided by processes on a vast scale continuing across our biosphere, at once robust and delicate.
Take the renewal of oxygen, without which we die in three minutes, produced mostly by plankton in the upper oceans. These tiny life forms are now vulnerable to rapidly climbing acidity from our colossal flow of prehistoric carbon.
Look at the distillation and delivery of potable water, without which we die in three days, brought to us by cycles in our atmosphere in the form of rain and snow. Those weather patterns now grow less and less predictable as our jet stream wanders far beyond its historic range as the thermal difference between the poles and equator grows less extreme.
Glance down upon the limited expanses of fertile soil, the basis for our food supply, which a lack of three weeks puts us in the grave, but which is a complex web of life only a few inches thick.
The Annenberg foundation reports that only about 3.5 percent of Earth’s surface is suitable for agriculture without any physical constraints. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations observes that only 11 percent of the earth’s soils have no inherent limitations for agriculture. Upon much of those tiny fractions of our globe, modern industrial farming is deeply intensive, highly mechanized and increasingly dependent on petrochemicals as machine fuel, fertilizer and pesticides.
The American Farmland Trust tells us we lose a million acres of fertile land every year in the US alone. Depletion and sterilization of soils are serious and growing concerns, as are soil erosion by wind, the expansion of deserts and the increasing severity of drought. Many people have grown intimately familiar with the record-breaking persistence of drought conditions in the southwestern United States.
The economist Thomas Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Robert Aumann) for his work in game-theory analysis. The Italian politician, historian and author Niccolò Machiavelli is noted (and notable) as one of his main influences. In an interview in 2009, approaching the age of ninety, Schelling said of the potential impact of our disruption of our climate, ““You know, very little of the US economy is susceptible to climate. All of agriculture is less than 3% of our gross product.” It seems he neglected to consider that’s the 3% we won’t last three weeks without.
There is a shrinking, but still increasingly vocal and clamorous segment of human society marked by any number of such dogmatic and distorted views, and it seems predictable that there is considerable overlap across such views. The degree to which these views are incompatible with each other, and with logic, is often breathtaking. Here are some examples:
“’Human Climate Disruption’ must be a hoax by greedy scientists lying to get more grant money, but bribery is Free Speech and it won’t corrupt our ‘Public Servants’ at all.”
“Our Constitution is sacred, but it’s not a problem when our politicians shred big sections of it to keep us “safer” from the terrorists that our militant foreign policy only helps recruit.”
“Making religion into law is dangerous oppression in foreign countries, but it’s a fine idea here at home, as long as it’s my religion.”
“Personal freedom for all humans is the highest ideal, except when it comes to your bedroom, your body and your birth control.”
“Embryos must be protected by the government at all costs, but corporations can do what they like with children.”
“Half of marriages between a man and a woman fail, and homosexuals are too promiscuous, but letting a tenth of the population who are gay marry each other is a huge threat to the entire institution of marriage.”
Sadly, such attitudes are useful to manipulate, divide and conquer the people, and are therefore both subtly and blatantly encouraged by elements among our power elite. The fear tactics these elite employ consistently appeal to the primitive core brain that Edward Bernays (father of PR and nephew of Sigmund Freud) showed often trumps rational thought. At the risk of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” allow me to point out (as was firmly recognized by Teddy Roosevelt, Adam Smith, and many other notables across human history) that “capital organizes.”
The ultra-wealthy interests at the very “top” of our society – and who exert massive and undue influence in all areas of human endeavor – have no interest in a critically thinking and imaginative population over which to rule.
It’s important to remember that economics is not a force of nature (like the ocean or gravity), it’s a collective organization of rules and ideas invented by humans. It’s therefore quite subject to human intervention and manipulation. It’s most definitely not (as is so often preached) the result of some “invisible hand” – unless, of course you regard as “invisible” the “hand” of those ultra-elites who have generally made and enforced the currently dominant rules.
For those inclined to regard that assertion as a “conspiracy theory,” I respond that I will rest comfortably in the firm knowledge that I’m in the company of Theodore Roosevelt, Adam Smith and Andrew Jackson.
I will but wish wisdom, reason and healing upon the apologists who yet zealously cling to Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” mantra. If we are not allowed an alternative, there is no future for human civilization. That’s the inexorable truth.
Hey Craig , you have become a doubting Tomas far to so ! so what is your next request for * POOL GENI * does India need another drink ? what trouble your world today ? P.S. I prove it again