The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future,” that takes the point of view of an historian in 2393 explaining how “the Great Collapse of 2093” occurred. “Without spoiling the story,” Oreskes said in an interview, “I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings” about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called “carbon combustion complex” that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 30 2014, @09:15PM
I second this "FUCK YOU". Fuck this guy who blames the scientists. It's not the scientists' fault that people are stupid. Scientists are not our society's leaders; they have zero power, and worse, they have to argue against moneyed interests who don't care about long-term problems and only about short-term profits.
The scientists had some good reasons to be conservative, too: they've made other predictions in the past which turned out to be wrong (because the science and technology was not as well developed back then), so to avoid becoming "the boy who cried wolf" and getting ignored altogether, they became more conservative with their predictions. However, at this point, all the scientists are in agreement about climate change. But it doesn't matter, because no one is listening.
The only people who deserve blame are our leaders, the corporations who fund them, and the morons who vote for them.
Fuck you, Naomi Orestes.