Greta Thunberg and Climate Change Mitigation
A reader sent me this “open letter to Greta Thunberg”:
“The apocalyptic world vision you hold has been a strip landing for those who have hated progress throughout history. Your apocalyptic predictions have been made for millennia, and, we’re still here. We will still be here long after you’ve grown up and we have forgiven you for skipping classes, thereby lowering the intelligence quotient (sic) of an entire generation.”
I understand from this and your previous material that you are deeply conservative. That’s fine. But I think your case would be a lot stronger here if Thunberg weren’t speaking for what is essentially the entire scientific community. She’s not protesting against aardvarks or Major League Baseball, but rather against a path that our civilization is taking that our scientists are quite loudly and clearly telling us is in the process of destroying us.
I would add two far more minor points:
• At the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that there hasn’t been a recent apocalypse on the planet doesn’t mean that one isn’t coming.
• The use of “intelligence quotient” here is incorrect; IQ and educational level have only a weak correlation.
We went to college together, though I don’t know if you remember me; I was a physics major in the class of 1977, and I think you were in engineering and a year behind me. In any case, I regard you as a smart guy. I urge you not to join this cult of science denial that seems to be de rigueur for today’s Republicans.
Craig,
Kudos to your sensible reader and his contribution.
Greta Thunberg is a precious little brat, cynically exploited for political and ideological purposes by cunning, disingenuous political strategists and propagandists.
She represents only these advocates and activists. She has no special insight or “vision” and certainly no constructive answers.
To say she speaks for the “entire scientific community’ is an absurd claim, completely false and counter-productive.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that there hasn’t been recent apocalypse on the planet doesn’t mean that one isn’t coming”.
No, that’s quite correct, but it’s equally true to say, “that because there hasn’t been recent apocalypse on the planet doesn’t mean one is likely” !
Both statement are mere conjecture.
The absence of something doesn’t prove it won’t happen, but since not one of the thousands of doomsday predictions made over several millennia prophesying the “End of the World”, has ever occurred, your friend’s batting average is much better than yours and any rational person must conclude his analysis is more likely to be right!