“We know who the active [climate-change] denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices…. They broke the climate.” – Steve Zwick, Forbes, April 19, 2012.
As Chip Knappenberger chronicled earlier this week, there are a number of positive developments in climate science that contradict the doomism and negativity of many climate campaigners. There are benefits, not only costs, to greater carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere.
And so it came as a shock, a chill, to read the above quotation from Steve Zwick, the editor of the Ecosystem Marketplace and a contributor (as I am) to Forbes online.
Mr. Zwick has since backtracked in the face of criticism that his inflammatory (hate?) speech was hurting his cause (Mr. Zwick, meet Mr. Gleick).
But why does such raw emotionalism keep rearing its unsavory head–even to the point that the guilty damage their own sacred cause? Peter Gleick has certainly self-destructed for a moment of relief or joy.
The answer is that the public is not buying climate alarmism, and the window is closing to do anything about it (James Hansen’s 10-year clock is ticking louder and louder.) And in the face of mounting evidence that the ‘uncertain science’ holds good news, some on the other side with so much vested emotional and intellectual baggage on the issue are not ‘sleeping on it’ as much as they should.
Hence bad decisions like the above op-ed by Mr. Zwick….
It is naturally frustrating when the world refuses to live up to one’s expectations and fails to act as anticipated.
Only the most mature thinkers can confront and accommodate the new data by adapting their understanding of Reality. This is the Hallmark of the true Empiricist.
For others the frustration builds into anger or rage. It is for the dogmatist that Truth is most painful.