From Matt Bors at The Free Press:
Related post:
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In case you can’t make it out, the book beneath the raft is Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Great illustration!
He forgot the 3-eyed fish.
Good stuff.
I wonder how the deniers will spin a completely ice free Arctic ocean sometime before 2020.
Esop… They’ll say, “Eh, it’s happened before… ”
But, I think the general population will start to wake up about that time.
Unfortunately, this is already not too far from the truth.
[sigh]
@ Esop #4:
Easy… they’ll just say that it’s due to natural causes like the sun and orbital cycles. It’s not like they let the truth get in the way of things now.
[double sigh]
How much destruction is enough? How many dead will it take?
Why do we destroy ecosystems which need 100.000 years to grow?
We depend on the environment! Real success comes from within the natural realms. The methods of the fossil industry are no longer good enough – that does include natural (methane) gas!
Stop fucking up the place we live in!
NOW!
This cartoon by Matt Bors is also relevant.
I’ll save that and post it elsewhere every time some denialist’s puddles freeze over in their back garden!
Cheers – John
I did it! Another Cartoon!
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/02/encapsulated-but-utterly-true-account.html
No matter what happens the denialists will deny it. Any catastrophe, no matter how horrendous, can, and will, simply be ignored by the expedient of asserting that ‘It’s all happened before (even if it has not-invention is one of their strengths)’, ‘It’s just natural variability’ and that ‘Al Gore is fat’. I mean we are dealing with tiny intellects, proudly ignorant and infinitely malicious, who see the entire furore through strictly ideological blinkers. Anthropogenic climate disruption is a question of political belief-the Right rejects it because it is an implicit criticism of capitalism and its ethos that ‘Greed is good’, and because they have no innate empathy with life. In fact life terrifies and outrages the Rightist, because his huge ego cannot suffer the realisation that he is a mere speck of dust in time and space, and his hypertrophied self-regard is a cosmic joke. It is the root of their visceral detestation of those who identify with Life and Creation and who submerge their ego in them, and happily swim with the tide, even though they know that is takes them, eventually, back to that great ocean of ego dissolution which we inhabited before our births.
I’m with Mulga.
A climate catastrophe which would at last turn the deniers into acknowledgists does not exist. There is no amount of evidentiary proof that could be furnished to get them to admit the error of their ways and then suddenly accept the scientific method, along with changing their lifestyles.
Many who understand and acknowledge ACC quietly wait for sufficient consequences to accrue that deniers will finally have lost the argument, and that reason will then rule the day.
This day will not come. The same tools and arguments whereby ACC is currently successfully denied will be equally persuasive in an overheated future. I at this point am convinced that some sort of war to disempower these people/institutions will be necessary.
Rob Honeycutt said:
I’ve been thinking about that comment, and I believe that it’s only partially correct. Opinion surveys seem to indicate that a majority of people (even Americans) already seem to agree that AGW is a problem and also support reducing fossil fuel use.
That’s the good news.
The problem (IMO) is that not enough people (especially Americans) are either angry or afraid enough to take the issue as seriously as it needs to be. So far the USA has gotten off relatively easy when it comes to the effects of climate change. Many still seem to see AGW as some distant theoretical threat that “someone else” will fix down the road, rather than demanding that the politicians take action immediately.
Even when the Arctic ice sheet melts completely, since it’s not perceived as an immediate threat, there will be little political reaction to the loss.
Sadly, I don’t see a solution to that problem until the USA’s “luck runs out” and it starts to regularly have disasters with high body counts and economic damage sufficiently close together for people to make a psychological connection to the problem. When enough Americans are afraid of their homes disappearing and their children dying, then we’ll see the necessary momentum for dramatic change as dealing with AGW moves closer to the top of voter concerns. I sincerely hope there will be change before that point, and that the change will be fast enough, but at this point I’m not so optimistic about that.
zander77 #13, I’m afraid that you are correct. Violence and intimidation are the Right’s strength and preference. Already climate scientists here in Australia have been subjected to violent abuse and threats, for telling the truth as they find it. The denialists long ago moved to the insane but inevitable stage of claiming that the scientists are not mistaken, but are actively lying, in a gigantic conspiracy that encompasses the IPCC, all the Academies of Science of the planet and over 90% of climate scientists. Of course as any student of the Rightwing Authoritarian Personality knows, paranoia is the base of their character structure, but rarely more luridly hypertrophied than here. These are incredibly dangerous people, and violence is one of their highest values.
The future of border break down…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2011/02/28/3150255.htm
On its own, that’s true but it is a grave mistake to take it as a sufficient explanation because it is only a part of the story and not even the major one.
Climate change, and the other sustainability crisis that are about to hit us hard – Peak Oil, exhaustion of a long list of other non-renewable mineral resources, soil degradation, aquifer depletion, general ecosystem collapse, etc. – and they are all intimately related to each other are ultimately a product of our inability to see our proper place in the cosmological order. We have been fooling ourselves with the narrative that humans a are a special part of the “Creation” a consequences of this is that we have decided that the rules that apply to other organisms do not apply to us. This makes it possible for us to study the population and ecological dynamics that other species are subjected to in the wild and ignore the obvious truth that those same laws apply to us and we have to modify our behavior accordingly if we don’t want them to catch up with us. And the harsh truth is that this is not just a right/left thing, the left doesn’t get it almost nearly as much as the right doesn’t, it is just that right is ignorant and openly proud of it and the left is only ignorant in a slightly different way. You see that same delusion in the claims that if only we could pass such and such legislation, we will transition to solar and wind energy and all will be fine (no, we won’t because the energy density of these sources is so low and the amount of energy we use so large, that we simply don’t have the resources to build the required infrastructure to make that happen) or that if only we make carbon expensive enough, some other yet to be identified magical technology will appear that will save the day (no, it won’t unless someone finds a way to convert regular matter into anti-matter without a significant energy input, but as far as we can tell, the laws of physics don’t allow that, neither they allow for any other scheme to make a serious difference in the few decades that this civilization has left before it crashes). So the only real solution is organized contraction because contraction is inevitable and we don’t want to be to chaotic as that’s the much worse option. But that’s not what the left stands for, it is just as pro-growth as the right. You will never hear anyone from the left talking about the need to reduce the population of the world as soon as humanely possible (so that it doesn’t get reduced by the forces of nature in the future), to eliminate unnecessary consumption, to invest in education of the poor in the global South and elsewhere and equalize education levels and living standards around the world, and the extremely urgent need to slaughter the most sacred cow of them all, religion, the continued existence of which makes the so much needed realization of the correct place of humans in the cosmological order impossible as it directly preaches the very thing that got us in this mess.
No, you don’t hear any of that from anyone that’s on the left of the far-right. And that’s why making this a right vs. left issue is not only not very useful, but actually highly counterproductive…