Perhaps this explains the Fermi Paradox. Stupidity is universal.
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Re: Fermi Paradox
Then again, it could be explained this way:
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
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That’s great. Thanks for pointing it out.
Granted, but I will say that just last week a German professor and entrepreneur with a solar power start-up told me “Regardless of what you think of President Trump, he’s right about the IPCC and climate change.” At some point I’ve just had to try to accept that I live in a world where, for most people, evidence in any amount is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for belief.
@tekna2007 Yeah, it only becomes an extinction-level event when it chains into something else, such as: triggering wars about resources or vast numbers of refugees that lead to large scale nuclear or biological weapons use, really strong versions of the clathrate gun scenario, or ill-advised attempts at geoengineering to mitigate climate effects or manipulate weather or ecosystems. But even without that, it can definitely be bad enough to seriously and maybe permanently curtail the future of global civilization. In the past, civilization collapses meant a dark age, and passing the torch to a new corner of the world. If there is a global collapse today, how do the survivors rebuild in a world with no more easy access to good soil in growing regions, vast forests, and easy to reach ores/coal/oil? How long would it have taken to have the Industrial Revolution if Britain (or whoever) had had to leapfrog straight to electricity rather than steam, or to wind/solar/nuclear/geothermal rather than coal?
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Unfortunately the article has a lot of errors and exaggerations. It can’t survive elementary fact-checking. This is unfortunate because readers could conclude that everything is doomed and we might as well give up, or if they recognize the errors, they could fall in with the fallacy that all climate worries are false. The truth is that even with vigorous efforts to restrict emissions we are in for a great deal of harm, and far more still if we don’t make the effort. Many people will die in heat waves or be forced to migrate from overheated regions – but not as many people as the article claims. Agriculture and the economy will suffer – but not as catastrophically as the article claims. And so forth. The dangers are bad enough without false exaggeration.
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Not surprising. Mann is a scientist, not a “climate activist”.
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Also applies to human professions: e.g. nurses & teachers vs. politician & celebrities
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sure, if you’re changing the subject, why not?!
A third-party response to Mann’s response:
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the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.”
Apart from, y’know, LOADS of science fiction novels, many of them very very good…
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from that article:
Perhaps the biggest single thing individuals can do on their own is to take fewer airplane trips; just one or two fewer plane rides per year can save as much in emissions as all the other actions combined.
damn. between the fucking TSA, tinier and tinier seat that still don’t make the economics work independently of massive subsidies, it’s really starting to look like regular jet travel is a bubble akin to the space shuttle. It seems like a cool idea at the time, but is actually not even the least worst way to go about things.
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I’m not sure I buy it. I don’t think it ever got published, but a flu lab I did some work with in grad school did some behavioral research. And what they found was that there was a sweet spot of disease projection that was conducive to action. Too dire, and people would believe their individual actions couldn’t make a difference (and wouldn’t get the shot). Too mild and people thought it was NBD (and wouldn’t get the flu shot). Just nasty enough and people did the right thing and got the shot.
I’m not aware of other literature on the topic, but I’m sure there is some. But that’s for something cheap (in terms of both money and effort), like getting a flu shot and you personally not being in bed for a week. I can’t imagine that potentially personally something costly but abstract, that the barriers to actions are lower.
One would think that the scarier the news, the higher that climate change would rise on the list of voters’ priorities. It does not seem to be working out that way.
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Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong: Analysis of “The Uninhabitable Earth”, Published in New York Magazine, by David Wallace-Wells on 9 July 2017
10 Keep turning the alarmism dial up
20 Watch the reaction as the most alarmist predictions are not fulfilled
30 Wonder why voters are not demanding climate action
40 GOTO 10
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