VitalAccurateThinking

Michael Shermer The Flipping Point

Michael Shermer: The Flipping Point -- How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip

H/T Temporal Apocalypse

This article by someone I respect tremendously, makes a point about demonizing any dissent.

"There is no debate," one spokesperson told me. "We don't want to dignify that book," another said. One leading environmentalist warned me that my reputation would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did.

Environmental groups who cry doom and gloom to keep donations flowing only hurt their credibility. As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I learned (and believed) that by the 1990s overpopulation would lead to worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of key minerals, metals and oil, predictions that failed utterly. Politics polluted the science and made me an environmental skeptic.

I guess that is where I am right now. The more I hear "the debate is over", the more I reflexively pull back from whichever side proclaims such. Shermer makes a point that I just love:

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming.

Exactly! Data trumps politics. Data trumps ideology. Data trumps the left/right divide on the issue.

Show me the evidence. Make the case. So, Shermer provides several sources that changed his mind.
-The movie Inconvenient Truth
and:

Four books eventually brought me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan's The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) explicates how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate. Geographer Jared Diamond's Collapse (Penguin Group, 2005) demonstrates how natural and human-caused environmental catastrophes led to the collapse of civilizations. Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change unmistakably linked to human action. And biologist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide to global warming accumulated in the past decade.

I can be persuaded in both directions. Can you?

posted by Jim VAT @ 11:33 AM