Last week I sent a letter to our local weekly paper: My letter to the editor This week there was an "answer" from a denier:Creating a ‘State of Fear’ about climate change
I find the very idea that facts create a "state of fear" rather amusing since the public is not nearly afraid enough by any measure out there. This writer reflects the way deniers operate in these situations. The sarcasm and cuteness angle is supposed to replace or refute facts. Look at these examples:
O.K., so exactly what would Dr. Mikulecky and the others have us do? Strangle our economy and way of life in a futile effort to halt what is happening naturally? Would returning our nation to the pre-industrial era solve the problem? It mostly worked for 11 million of us then; not likely today.
Possibly the consequences of the reality he denies are not as bad as his hypothetical straw man solution?
It was presciently laid out in Michael Crichton’s 2004 book, “State of Fear,” how governments and the elite must continually invent something to scare the populace so they will turn to those in power to rescue them from the manufactured crises. The public has apparently been insufficiently panicked by the man-caused CO2-driven global warming fraud, so now it has been ratcheted up a few notches. Just hand over more and more control of your lives and we will take care of you and the planet.
Ah yes a fiction writer has the answer. Again it is amusing, in a traqic way, that this anti-government spokesperson sees the government as far more potent than any sign we have when it comes to dealing with this matter.
Read on below and we will look at this "state of fear" idea more closely.
It is ironic that he would cite Crichton's book written in 2004 after the state of fear created by the Bush administration had cost us so heavily in every way imaginable. If this is the kind of government potency he fears he has been lax in resisting it.
Then he demonstrates his lack of understanding of the whole situation:
also take issue with Dr. Mikulecky’s assertion that we are at a “record high temperature on the planet.” There hasn’t been any notable overall temperature rise in 17 years (despite ever-increasing CO2 emissions). Antarctic sea ice has recently set another record. Last year, the Great Lakes were frozen 80 percent through April. Arctic sea ice is the highest measured in a decade.
The global average temperature is at an all time high,so where did he get that nonsense? The misunderstanding about Arctic ice is more common. The easy way to go wrong is to site reports of the suface ice forms over with no regard to the thickness. The
volume of ice has been in a pronounced steady decline.
He was not able to hide his scripting at the end of the letter:
Our sun, assisted by meteor strikes and volcanoes, is, and has been, controlling our planet’s temperature through countless warming and cooling cycles for over a billion years. It amazes me that the “scientists” cannot understand this. I commend to your readers the website junkscience.com.
So there you have it. I have not written to this paper for quite some time for I find this kind of trash is not what I want to deal with. The idea that this letter has "equal weight" with mine is rather funny. But the readers eat this kind of nonsense up.
I wish I could get better advice on how to create a "climate of fear" about Global warming. We need at least the awareness that precedes "fear".
Jim Coffman and I are busy writing a sequel to our book:Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World Here is a summary of the first book:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
We document things carefully and those who have taken time to read it are generally happy with our presentation. We have many reviews including one from Dorion Sagan, Carl's son.
The problem our world faces is the lack of any real capacity to deal with the consequences of our activity on the planet. Fear might be a welcome change compared to the trance so many seem stuck in. Really, we do not need a weatherman to tell which way the winds are blowing.