...we tend to become more categorical in our opinions when they serve as markers of belonging to a moral community.
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The Environment
Doctors need to be willing to act boldly, willing to do nothing, and willing to change their minds. Because the health of the patient is what’s important – not a foolish consistency with past opinions....So it should be when the planet is the patient.
Living in the jungle is hard: building nests every evening, extracting the nutritious stuff from thousands of plants. That takes deliberation, reasoning, inference, problem-solving, weighing the pros and the cons.
...many climate change skeptics don’t contest that the climate is warming. That’s rarely the issue. More often, the argument is that the relative contribution to warming of human activity/GHG emissions hasn’t been proven to exceed 50%. Or that the pace or extent of warming is not alarming, so does not require extraordinary measures.
Skeptics aren’t going to be impressed with ‘stories’ and ‘personal experiences’. They want to argue the science.
...plenty of environmentalists include humans in their circle of caring. It's just that their circle includes more than humans. Such caring doesn't need a rationale. It doesn't even need to be rational.
...start with questions, listen, ask follow-up questions, and keep your own opinions to yourself until after you have heard them out. That’s how you show respect.
Being a skeptic doesn’t mean you don’t care about the environment, wildlife, air quality, or water quality. The idea of being less dependent on fossil fuels is appealing regardless of how you feel about climate change. You don’t have to be worried about global warming to be in favor of reducing the cost of fuel through greater efficiencies.
Parry's right: you're not going to get anywhere with doom-and-gloom scenarios. Environmentalists have been predicting imminent catastrophe for decades and they’ve been wrong again and again. Skeptics are well aware of this track record of crying wolf while claiming the support of science.
...hear them out, ask follow-up questions, and avoid knee-jerk rebuttals of their points. If you want to show respect for a person’s position, you ask them what exactly that position is and how they have arrived at it.
Air capture can remove far more CO2 per acre of land than trees. It also has the potential to pay for itself by producing a commercially viable product – low-carbon fuels – from the recycled CO2.
Others don’t want to move forward with SRM research because they consider it a distraction from what our main focus should be: cutting greenhouse gas emissions. These critics want us to embrace the necessity of sacrifice, not rely on the hope that technology will save the planet before disaster strikes. Such hope would reduce the sense of urgency to act now, so we mustn’t feed that particular wolf.
Here we have the themes of impending catastrophe, warfare, and paranoia. Advocates of geoengineering are vilified, their motives suspect. Pragmatic explorations are redefined as ideologies. So what’s the deal?
Most of the individuals I’ve focused on have given some thought to this challenge and formulated basic principles on how to approach the possibility of a changing climate: keep energy cheap, reliable and widely available; focus on adaptation rather than mitigation; and, let the market do the heavy lifting. I submit it is these principles rather than “denying” climate change that elicits so much vilification from environmental activists and the progressive community.
In the past few posts I focused on 11 individuals who have been labeled deniers. As it turns out, only one of these individuals flat-out denies the existence of climate change. The others acknowledge global warming but express uncertainty about the causes, rate, magnitude, or impact of climate change.
Various public figures have been labeled climate change deniers. What are their actual positions on climate change?
Below is a list of 11 public figures described as “prominent climate deniers working actively to mislead the public and delay policy action to address climate change”...
More likely someone will be called a denier if he/she doesn't seem all that concerned about climate change or thinks its effects will be minor and manageable.
I’m guessing significance refers to predicted effects of global warming and what actions must be taken to mitigate or adapt to those effects. Thus, if you think the impact will be harmless or even beneficial, that puts you in the denier camp. If you take a “wait-and-see” attitude to global warming, confident that “a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it, you’re a denier. Ditto anyone who advocates incremental and/or purely market-based approaches to climate change, because these approaches are just too wimpy given the enormity of the threat.
“Denial’ is more interesting. In contemporary usage, it assumes that what is denied is the Truth, as in: Denial: “refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings”.