Hype
In the 80's it was the bomb and acid rain. In the 90's the UV-rays were going to kill us all because the ozone layer was disappearing. In our decennium it's the GLOBAL WARMING.
I put these last words in big capitals because that's how people talk about it. Sincere, with the same tone you'd talk about some evil god. And that's what I think is wrong with it. The global warming issue starts to go from a well meant set of measures to improve the quality of daily life to a religion. And Al Gore is Jesus.
Of course even I can't deny that the earth is warming up. But let's see first what exactly our place in the universe is. We are living on the earth. The sun and the circulation of our tiny planet around this enormous ball of plasma has the biggest influence on our climate. The sun is 120 times bigger than the earth. The largest known star is 1900 times as big as our sun. See this scary video here to see how small we are. To me, it's absurd and downright arrogant to think that humans are responsible for changes on such large scale. We are small organisms, micro-bacteria. It would be like saying that ants can bring down a skyscraper. Climate change is such a complicated process, to say humans are mainly responsible is just too simple. The universe continues to puzzle even the brightest scientists. But anybody who's seen 'An Inconvenient Truth' thinks he's all of a sudden an expert about global warming.
And climate change has become business. Eco jeans, recycled handbags, eco-tax, bio food, fairtrade, sustainable packaging, energy saving lightbulbs; everybody seems to jump on the bandwagon of global warming. Nowadays it's so easy to be correct. You don't need to donate anymore to the third world, just eat a fair-trade banana. And science seems to be profitable as well. Just say you're going to investigate global warming and you get so much support that you're employed for at least ten years and live like a king.
Could it be that we're just afraid of getting extinct and we hang on to every little thing that still gives us hope? It won't be much different than believing that gods can protect us against natural disasters. Maybe we should let go of the idea that humans are going to be there forever, because that's scientifically impossible. And what did we ever deserve to be there forever? Humans are responsible for wars, torturing animals, the extinction of animals. Oh, and one part of the world is eating a burger sandwich and the other part is starving from hunger. Maybe global warming is just the earth's antibiotics to kill the bacteria that gives him a nasty flu.
But of course humans are survivors. And therefore we think that a climate conference in Copenhagen is going to make a difference. Should we just give up then? No, I think we should know our limits before the hype is going too far. And maybe we should focus on treating all inhabitants of the earth with more respect so that the human race truly deserves to survive.
I put these last words in big capitals because that's how people talk about it. Sincere, with the same tone you'd talk about some evil god. And that's what I think is wrong with it. The global warming issue starts to go from a well meant set of measures to improve the quality of daily life to a religion. And Al Gore is Jesus.
Of course even I can't deny that the earth is warming up. But let's see first what exactly our place in the universe is. We are living on the earth. The sun and the circulation of our tiny planet around this enormous ball of plasma has the biggest influence on our climate. The sun is 120 times bigger than the earth. The largest known star is 1900 times as big as our sun. See this scary video here to see how small we are. To me, it's absurd and downright arrogant to think that humans are responsible for changes on such large scale. We are small organisms, micro-bacteria. It would be like saying that ants can bring down a skyscraper. Climate change is such a complicated process, to say humans are mainly responsible is just too simple. The universe continues to puzzle even the brightest scientists. But anybody who's seen 'An Inconvenient Truth' thinks he's all of a sudden an expert about global warming.
And climate change has become business. Eco jeans, recycled handbags, eco-tax, bio food, fairtrade, sustainable packaging, energy saving lightbulbs; everybody seems to jump on the bandwagon of global warming. Nowadays it's so easy to be correct. You don't need to donate anymore to the third world, just eat a fair-trade banana. And science seems to be profitable as well. Just say you're going to investigate global warming and you get so much support that you're employed for at least ten years and live like a king.
Could it be that we're just afraid of getting extinct and we hang on to every little thing that still gives us hope? It won't be much different than believing that gods can protect us against natural disasters. Maybe we should let go of the idea that humans are going to be there forever, because that's scientifically impossible. And what did we ever deserve to be there forever? Humans are responsible for wars, torturing animals, the extinction of animals. Oh, and one part of the world is eating a burger sandwich and the other part is starving from hunger. Maybe global warming is just the earth's antibiotics to kill the bacteria that gives him a nasty flu.
But of course humans are survivors. And therefore we think that a climate conference in Copenhagen is going to make a difference. Should we just give up then? No, I think we should know our limits before the hype is going too far. And maybe we should focus on treating all inhabitants of the earth with more respect so that the human race truly deserves to survive.
posted by Robin Stam at 11:25 pm
7 Comments:
Agree! There is a big difference between 'environment' and 'climate'. Tsunami's and earthquakes is that something from the last 20 years or do we just live in more dense places where 200 hundred years ago only 10 people would have died?
Very interesting video in my blog post http://tinyurl.com/yhl4wxn
At last!
Great post, Nietzsche would have loved it.
so I ask you: what do you think the next trend of so called "rightful-thinking" will be?
I'm really afraid those same people will turn against man's first visit to mars. Please let them not ruin it!
Ants can bring down a skyscraper ... and us ants are not being just natural ants, it's an other situation since we personally don't do the polluting but let miles and miles of property filled with massive and enormous machines do that for us ever since the industrialization.
We're not influencing the entire big ball of plasma that is planet earth but just it's most outward thin vulnerable layer.
Not being the biggest factor of influence like the course of our planet's rotation or the influence of the sun, doesn't mean we're not decisively influencing.
And yes, we should be more social to the entire of humanity but this does not dismiss us of an even greater responsibility of trying to keep earth in a good shape for every form of life inhabiting it and not just for us.
We have to do both. Not either one of the above. Or one thing first and then the other. Both, here and now.
Maybe just because we as a species are not eternally reigning the planet.
Our planet is small, we are tiny, so it should be easy to keep our small peace in the universe tidy!
That's my two cents, as a contribute to the beauty of us and our lovely little place in space.
And if this is not convincing enough? Let me put it this way...
Earth is our meal. You poison earth, you poison your own meal.
Bon apetit!
Of course Sander, we shouldn't poison the earth. But I think being decent to the environment is enough. And I'm no expert in theoretical physics, but neither is 99% of the population. So everything people heard about the climate change is transferred by somebody else. So it's not unlikely that this caused a collective hysteria about the end of the earth.
My guess for the next panic trend: people will think that an invasion of alien micro-bacteria coming from Mars is heading for earth and will turn us all in mindless zombies.
All right, I have to agree that 99% of us or even more aren't experts in theoretical physics. However, it is possible to spread expert knowledge throughout our entire population coming from 1% of the people that actually do know. This doesn't lead to mass hysteria, but to a mass awareness. All of us gained expert level insights through transferred knowledge.
One disaster could kill billions of us but not all. How lucky we are. Only multiple events, such as pandemic, warfare, global warming-related occurrences and a meteor strike, which occur in relative succession and result in equally destructive domino effects, such as societal breakdowns leading to economic decline and escalated terrorism is what it would take to actually kill us all. And that would be the end of us, not the end of earth. Again, this is transferred knowledge, but does that make it false just because it's impossible for all of us to be experts?
I'd have to say no. Truth's actually can be spoken by non-experts too Robin. Not only physicians know what's good for you, you know that too, without being a physician. So to me it's a cheap way of denying that we cause climate change by saying it's transferred knowledge and all of us are not experts so this equals mass hysteria. And then come up with something that actually is way off like the invasion of Martian human brain-eating bacteria. We don't need them for that, we already have reality TV-shows such as Big Brother, soaps and some blogs on internet that achieve the exact same thing.
To me, it's not mass panic, but proper action that was taken in the nick of time, transferred knowledge implemented by experts to our masses because the masses can actually achieve something an expert can never do alone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeY8oqAGhyA&feature=related
And this one: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_deutsch_on_our_place_in_the_cosmos.html
Sander might be right, I might be right. It's just the lack of skepticism that's bothering me about the current global warming hype. It's subjective and therefore unscientific.
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