Zach Karabell: Why can’t we all just get along on climate?

“Stopping global warming might be a hopeless cause, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find creative solutions to live with it” — another poor sap who has no idea what the climate war is all about.

“… the only source of progress has been the ability of humans to learn and adapt. While climate change could spell death and harm to low-lying areas around the world as the seas rise, life 30,000 years ago was hardly hospitable. Yet people managed to create viable living conditions anyway. Necessity demanded it, and our ability to create and innovate made it possible.

That approach is imperative not just for climate change but for multiple areas that generate such anxiety about the future. The imbalance of the financial system? Those are only made worse by the false belief that a system could be created where such risks don’t exist; better to find ways to mitigate the risks of a global interconnected financial system than seek, Don Quixote-like, ways to eliminate risk. The dysfunction of Washington? Better to find ways to meet collective needs that don’t depend on the federal government (or any large central bureaucracy) than pile all those needs onto one large, unwieldy and cumbersome institution and hope for the best. Our response to climate change is only one way that we have chosen the path of pessimism instead of a path of innovation. How we meet this challenge will say much about how we meet all of our challenges.” [Atlantic.com]

5 thoughts on “Zach Karabell: Why can’t we all just get along on climate?”

  1. Sounds like one of those body snatcher scifi movies. Actually, it kind of looks like to! Thanks, mitigatedsceptic, for your explanation.
    (I realize you may have not meant it quite that way, but this is one of the only descriptions of AGW followers that made me actually smile.)

  2. Thank you nzrobin for the correction. Yes, of course!
    How can this madness be stopped? In the past, cruel myths about witches, heretics and sinners were selective and minorities were persecuted. Now the sinners are the whole human species – we are all in this together!
    The green control freaks are on a roll and they have captured the high grounds – government, science, education and the bureaucracy. All of these host institutions that now depend on promulgating the myth. A paradigm shift has taken place and it may be that we have to wait for those to adhere to the myths to die off before another shift is possible. Institutionalised people are unable to change their opinions for many reasons. When asked ‘what evidence or argument would persuade you to change your opinion about ‘XXX” the answer boils done to ‘nothing’. The poor souls have to save their faces, their jobs and their heritage (whatever that means). Even their language is fossilised, making change of belief an insurmountable barrier. Institutions emerge from the choral singing of the same hymns and come to colonise their members.

  3. @mitigatedskeptic.
    Not soon. Now. People have died and are dying because of environmental myths. Consider DDT a few years ago and then the millions that died from malaria. Right now with food going into biofuels, not mouths. How about Britain paying money to Indian doctors to carry out involuntary sterilisations in the name of climate change.

  4. The author suggests we adapt instead of pulling the plug on modern society and returning to the stone age. Why has no one else thought of that?
    (/sarc)

  5. The actions being taken to ameliorate the supposedly disastrous consequences of burning fossil fuels are causing energy prices to rise to such levels that economies are crumbling and people are being driven into fuel poverty. Soon people will be dying because of a myth.

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