Greens fear that optimism will foster complacency and hence undermine activism. But I find the essays of Pinker and Boisvert inspiring, not enervating.
I plan to assign the essays to my students, who have become quite gloomy lately. These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism. —John Horgan, Scientific American, 8 March 2018
“How bad will climate change be? Not very. No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood, and drought will be cataclysmic. Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards.” –Will Boisvert, The Conquest of Climate, 23 February 2018
Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When people use energy, they must increase entropy elsewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution, and other forms of the disorder. A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity. It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs of pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts. –Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Environmentalism, 2017
Debates over climate change are filled with dire estimates of its cost. This many trillions of dollars of damage, that large a share of gross domestic product destroyed, so-and-so many lives lost, etc. Where do such figures come from? Mostly from laughably bad economics. If a projection of climate-change cost ignores adaptation, we can safely ignore it. –Oren Cass, The Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2018
Policy-makers gain plenty of kudos from the fight against climate change. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to contribute to “saving the planet”? But history will judge them a lot less kindly, according to a report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up in 2009 to challenge “misinformation” surrounding the science of man-made climate change and the policy responses to it. —Andrew Forster, Transport Xtra, 5 March 2018
A dwindling gas supply, sheep stuck in the ice, billions of pounds in lost growth, blocked roads, and I didn’t receive my copy of The Spectator! The ‘Beast from the East’ has taken its toll on all of us. These severe occurrences bear witness to the true danger and savagery of the cold. —Harry Wilkinson, The Conservative Woman, 9 March 2018
Dutch science writer Marcel Crok is a prominent advocate of the idea that climate change is not so bad. He is now finding a political hearing in Holland. No, to be invited to address the party congress of a new political party was the last thing, Marcel Crok, climate journalist and long-standing and vocal critic of the established order in climate science, had expected: and that (right-wing) party not even of his primary political preference. –Maarten Keulemans, de Volkskrant
The kids science text boooks written by liberals must be clean full of lies and junk science and poltical actions i read of one science text book which asked the youth to Boycott McDonalds over this Save the Rain Forests popppycock which was a big time rip off the Rain Forest Actions Network and Rain Forest Alliance and their fake programs as w ell as the rest of the Greens and their phonie Eco-Wacko programs and crappy movies like Ferngully
I truly feel sorry for current students . Where are their role models ?
Liberalism is a sentence to serfdom .
This article contains doom and gloom predictions that have been shown to be false. Three is not going to more than a small raise in sea leaves and heat, flood, and drought will be no more than we have always had.
However, the article contains an insight that is rare, humans are very adaptable. It is true that even if the more dire predictions came true, with are ability to adapt, they wouldn’t have that much of an impact.
Even if there had been a full scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the results would have been cataclysmic but not apocalyptic. The survivors would have adapted.
I watched this film about birds one part a Polar Bear is eating gosling until the Arctic Terns and Skuas drive it away