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Living within a living, loving planet
Posts tagged climate change denial
The Climate Change Denial Industry
Jul 30th
The Climate Change Denial Industry
“ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.”
“Last week Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute wrote that the Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity is not fixed. Apparently, we’re living in a magical world that is immune to ecological laws.
As you might imagine, I disagree.
My response to his article was published today in Undark Magazine.
https://undark.org/article/ted-nordhaus-carrying-capacity-ecology/
What warning signs would you expect to see if we humans were pressing at the limits of global carrying capacity? Resource depletion? Check. Pollution? Check. Dying oceans? Check.” Richard Heinberg
Sky: Further – The Breakthrough Institute’s Inconvenient History with Al Gore
April 14, 2014, by Paul D. Thacker
“While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a “progressive think tank.”
https://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/breakthrough-institutes-inconvenient-history-al-gore
NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
May 1st
NY Times hired a hippie puncher to give climate obstructionists cover
Posted on 29 April 2017 by dana1981
https://www.skepticalscience.com/nyt-hired-hippie-puncher.html
I like the analogy below. I also like my analogy in regards to uncertainty. When we go our GP or specialist they are often not certain of the cause of our ailment and thus whether the medicine they prescribe will cure it. They often say, something like, take this and come back in X days if you are not better. We all understand that the body is an incredibly complex organism and most of us accept our physician’s efforts to help us. Well, the Earth systems are complex also and our scientists are limited in their predictive efforts mainly, in my not so humble opinion, because their instruments have been designed to register the outcomes of a machine-like object. Unfortunately, recent scientific research is revealing that Earth “behaves” as if it was a living organism. Earth is a “self-regulating” organism and thus inherently unpredictable. We are caught in the grips of vast greediness supported by our cultural beliefs, economic global order whilst being buried by our mechanistic, capitalistic, materialistic worldview.
“Stephens needs a lesson in risk management
Smoking provides an apt analogy. Each time we smoke, we increase the odds of developing cancer a little bit more. The future outcome is uncertain – we don’t know exactly if or when the disaster of cancer will hit – but we know we’re making it more likely every time we smoke, and the smart move is to mitigate that risk by cutting down on the cigarettes as quickly as possible. With climate change, each time we add more carbon pollution to the atmosphere, we increase the odds of a climate catastrophe a little bit more. The smart move is to mitigate that risk by cutting down on our burning of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Stephens’ piece is akin to criticizing doctors and anti-smoking groups for being too mean to the tobacco industry, and for not focusing on the uncertainty about exactly when the chain-smoking patient will develop cancer.”