And it is a wrong one.
Actually we did. And Turpentine is correct, as in the case of vaccines the success in controlling contamination in places like the USA has put in the mind of a good number of people (mostly on the right of the isle) that somehow the solutions are killing us. There is an agenda when that approach is taken.
Again, the real “based on faith” “religion” and dogma ideas are coming from the ones that are using their beliefs to disparage environmental efforts that were made in the past and what it needs to be done in the future.
Interestingly in this case one should notice that there were a lot of deniers of evolution involved when the DDT problem got worse, IMHO it is not surprising that very religious people and groups ignored the science and we can see that religion is clouding the views of the leaders that are involved right now in the efforts to deal with the issues. (not doing much now, again, thanks to their religion)
One religious aspect is the idea that God gave humans the world to use for our purposes, so we don’t need to care about extinctions or ecosystem stability, and furthermore, the world will end “any day now” and there’s no reason to worry about long term issues like climate change, deforestation or depleting fossil fuels.
On the other side, I do see a Disney-influenced mindset where a lot of people think “Man” is bad for the environment, other animals and basically everything good. Sort of an original sin we all are supposed to put in the hole religious guilt used to fill.
Neither of these perspectives are the majority, though. They do kind of move the Overton window towards the extremes, and I bet many of us characterize the other “side” in one of these ways when we think about our political opponents abstractly.
And you know this how? You have studied it at length and concluded that climate change is a hoax. Or you’ve concluded that the global average temperature will go up a few degrees but we will somehow adjust? That the drought in California is just a random blip? Not saying it couldn’t be, but why can’t you pay attention to the people who have spent their lives studying it?
Since I am an atheist, I could not have transferred any fear from the religious to some other realm. Also, I am too old to suffer any of the predicted effects, but I have grandshildren.
Tell me again how you know it takes things too far.
Indeed, it is not the majority.
And how I wish that would be the case in congress, but a big part of the problem right now is that somehow the extreme deniers of human induced climate change are getting elected. As I have seen in polls more than half of the Republicans and conservatives do want to see the government deal with the environmental issues. But the extreme congress critters are not abstract constructs, they do unfortunately exist. This disconnect has not been deemed important by many but the point is that it should had been and it is bound to make a change if congress continues to go against the EPA and regulations made to deal with the issue.
Part of it is funding, the scarier you make am issue the easier to raise money to fight it. Plus humans seem naturally pessimistic.
From what little I know of it I get the impression climate change will suck but not kill all of us. However I don’t know what happens with the positive feedback loops.
I’m actually optimist in the sense that we humans will survive the coming bottleneck.
As I pointed before, if we plan ahead or we keep the warnings in mind, we can expect just a very inconvenient change that eventually will stabilize and we will only have to worry of the descendants of Putin having a lot of the food and viable territory.
Where I become pessimistic is that to make what it is more likely to happen just an inconvenience, a lot of immigration will have to be allowed. A more free movement of the people from the areas that will be most affected will have to be considered.
Unfortunately the latest examples of xenophobia that I have seen coming from Europe, North America, Australia and many other regions tells me that when the issue becomes more serious a problem that indeed would had a better outcome is more likely to become a disaster thanks to other common human faults.
Michael Crichton felt that environmentalism and religion had a lot in common. here’s a speech he gave in 2003 about it.
Check post #22, Crichton was a good writer, but a very lousy scientist.
As Tim Minchin noticed, the accusation that the basics of the issue were created by a cabal of scientists using dogma is bullshit.
-From “Storm” by Tim Minchin.
I reject the fallacy that concern over increasing human population is “nonsense.”
The earth’s human population is heading toward ten billion, and 3/4 of this increase is in the world’s poorest regions. There already is not enough clean water for the people in these areas. We’re already using non-sustainable farming techniques to fee the billions who are already here.
You’re in a sports car, going real fast…and there’s a brick wall ahead. By a miracle of technology, we managed to move the wall back a half a mile. Your response is to…speed up?
We don’t need to think of it, we can see it in parts of India and places in Africa.
General Anxiety: Fight or Flight and the Human Imagination
Basically, what is more dangerous, to imagine a Tiger in the bushes that is not actually there, or to not notice the Tiger that actually is in the bushes? We have over active imagination and heightened sense of fear to protect us. Also, the same capacity to build bigger and better tools is the same capacity to dream up bigger and better doomsday scenarios. The imagination works in two directions on many different levels. Religion compounds these issues in various ways on top of all of that. I will comment on that later if I get a chance.
Let’s stop right there, shall we? Acid rain was/is real. In the mid 90’s, the Clinton administration proposed fines for emissions of SO2 from coal-fired power plants. The Republicans countered with a new-fanged concept they called “cap and trade,” which was adopted. It worked.
Of course, when cap-and-trade was proposed for curbing CO2 emissions by a Democratic administration, it was roundly ridiculed by the right as unworkable.
No one quite said all animals would die by now, so let’s talk about pollution. Maybe you’re not old enough to remember when nearly every weather report in California or New York had an air quality component. They don’t have them now, and both LA and the Bay Area have nice blue skies.
Did this happen because pollution was just a figment of our imagination which went away? No, it went away for several reasons, one of which was California requiring cleaner cars than the rest of the country and requiring special gas blends. Which means we pay more for gas - but have beaten air pollution. Worth it to me. I think ti is worth it to most of us.
If we didn’t do anything, we might be like China now. Or worse.
Yes, we have made some improvements, but here in the U.S., a lot of that is because the products we love to use and toss are now manufactured in other countries. We each produce more trash than people of past decades and there are more of us, but we are less likely to just chuck it out of our car windows or dump it in the woods.
We sure haven’t “beaten air pollution” and we still dump tons of crap into the water. Point is, the gloom and doom was much like the anti-drug messages: exaggerations and scare tactics distracting from the facts and trying to convince everyone that “good” people recycle, only have half a kid apiece, and think that lighting up a joint will be fatal, while “bad” people drive big cars and drop acid.
I think the “we’re screwing up the Earth” type of rhetoric is a bit screwy and possibly similar to some religious nuttery. We’re not (and we can’t) “screw up the Earth” – the Earth will be fine. Nothing we could do comes close to the kind of damage that natural events (comets, meteors, and volcanic eruptions) can do and have done to the planet.
It’s not the Earth that’s screwed by climate change and environmental damage, it’s us. We should be worried about future humans, not the future of the planet. We’re a blip on the planet – Earth couldn’t care less about us.
I’ll disagree, only mildly. If we went totally apeshit and detonated all of our nuclear weapons over our major cities, the result would be worse than most natural disasters. It wouldn’t equal the Chicxulub event, but it would vastly exceed the Tunguska event.
Meanwhile, if we let global warming continue without addressing it, the results would be pretty nasty. We’re already in the midst of one of the larger extinction events, solely because of habitat destruction. Large-scale climate change could add a lot of nasty leverage to what’s already happening.
The diversion rate for my town is 73%, which means 73% of waste was kept out of landfills. I believe it - I have way less trash than recycling. I know the problems of recycling, but this is pretty good. Yard waste in particular gets composted and I can get two bags of it in the spring. So we are doing better with trash.
How would we “beat” air pollution? There is always going to be some. That we can worry about carbon now instead of poisons makes me think we did pretty well. We don’t drop nearly as much crap in the water as we used to. That river in Cleveland may not be clean enough to drink out of, but I had dinner in a restaurant right on the bank of the river, on a patio looking over it, and it didn’t small at all. Quite pleasant, in fact.
I have lots of sf stories from the early '70s featuring ecological disaster as the standard future. No more. We actually did something about the problem, and it worked.
How timely! A friend who I like a lot but is obsessed with how humans are raping sweet mother earth posted this just now with his sadness expressed.
Environmentalism can indeed become a religion if people are worshiping “Mother Earth”.
You see alot of it in that movie a few years ago “Avatar”, which was basically one big “Save the Rainforests” and “Love Mother Earth” movie.
BTW, what ever happened to the focus on the rainforests?