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>I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude. Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!

>I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude. Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history. Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"

mattmaroon 18y ago
This is the first time yet that their screams were backed up by large scale consensus in the scientific community. You can't let previous ones that weren't (like global cooling, which was more of a sensation in the media than it ever was among environmentalists or scientists) ruin your outlook on real potential threats.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction. "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence." Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically. Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased." http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    But again, it's the boy who cried wolf. Even if they claimed the Earth was going to end 100 times, and 100 times they were incorrect, that doesn't mean time number 101 is incorrect too. So even if Lomborg is right about the environmentalists' motives, the issue still needs to be examined and addressed. And it's a lot more than just the environmentalists concerned about global warming. It's reached a broad enough consensus among scientists that it's safe to say it's time to do something about it. Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. No matter what you think about fossil fuels in regards to the environment, the one thing we know for certain is that they won't last forever, and with China and India coming online, they probably won't last much longer. Be it in two decades or a century (and even the most optimistic geologists don't foresee us having oil for much longer than that) we will eventually have no choice but to switch to electric cars and renewable energy. And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      >Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. This is a widespread, but specious, argument. The cost of moving away from fossil fuels is X% of the world's wealth with current technology and Y% of the world's wealth with technology 20 years from now. If we can expect the world to be richer 20 years from now (a reasonable assumption) and technology to be better (again a reasonable assumption) then Y is probably much less than X. It will be a much bigger sacrifice to make the change today than tomorrow. The point is, although our economy will probably naturally convert away from fossil fuel technology in the long run, forcing the process to accelerate entails significant extra costs on a significantly poorer world. It is NOT costless, as the phrase "things we should and/or need to do anyway" seems to imply. The argument is simplistic and involves a narrow view of the problem. I see no valid reason to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources faster than what is already happening in the market.
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
trominos 18y ago
Well, we only all have to die once for it to be a big deal.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  Better stop the Large Hadron Collider, then.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  There would be nobody left to care...

mattmaroon 18y ago

This is the first time yet that their screams were backed up by large scale consensus in the scientific community. You can't let previous ones that weren't (like global cooling, which was more of a sensation in the media than it ever was among environmentalists or scientists) ruin your outlook on real potential threats.

Prrometheus 18y ago
Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction. "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence." Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically. Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased." http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  But again, it's the boy who cried wolf. Even if they claimed the Earth was going to end 100 times, and 100 times they were incorrect, that doesn't mean time number 101 is incorrect too. So even if Lomborg is right about the environmentalists' motives, the issue still needs to be examined and addressed. And it's a lot more than just the environmentalists concerned about global warming. It's reached a broad enough consensus among scientists that it's safe to say it's time to do something about it. Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. No matter what you think about fossil fuels in regards to the environment, the one thing we know for certain is that they won't last forever, and with China and India coming online, they probably won't last much longer. Be it in two decades or a century (and even the most optimistic geologists don't foresee us having oil for much longer than that) we will eventually have no choice but to switch to electric cars and renewable energy. And given that both are currently cost-competitive (or nearing that) and will only get cheaper, now is clearly the time to begin the process.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    >Combating it consists mainly of doing things that, in the long term, we should and/or need to do anyway. This is a widespread, but specious, argument. The cost of moving away from fossil fuels is X% of the world's wealth with current technology and Y% of the world's wealth with technology 20 years from now. If we can expect the world to be richer 20 years from now (a reasonable assumption) and technology to be better (again a reasonable assumption) then Y is probably much less than X. It will be a much bigger sacrifice to make the change today than tomorrow. The point is, although our economy will probably naturally convert away from fossil fuel technology in the long run, forcing the process to accelerate entails significant extra costs on a significantly poorer world. It is NOT costless, as the phrase "things we should and/or need to do anyway" seems to imply. The argument is simplistic and involves a narrow view of the problem. I see no valid reason to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources faster than what is already happening in the market.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago

trominos 18y ago

Well, we only all have to die once for it to be a big deal.

Prrometheus 18y ago
Better stop the Large Hadron Collider, then.
Hexstream 18y ago
There would be nobody left to care...