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posted by n1 on Thursday October 30 2014, @04:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-personal-responsibility-for-humanities-failings dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday October 30 2014, @11:28PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 30 2014, @11:28PM (#111719) Journal

    I don't know...blaming climate scientists for being too conservative seems about right. You have good arguments as to *why* they are so conservative, but that doesn't defend their being so conservative.

    OTOH, I believe, from the summary, that he's projecting a more drastic change than is reasonable. I occasionally envision all of Antarctica melting (unlikely, but possible) and the consequent rise in sea levels, submerging most of most islands, but I don't consider entire continents being rendered uninhabitable to be plausible. Humans, after all, are tropical apes, and every continent will continue to have a coastline, which won't get much warmer than the ocean. Also, if Antarctica melts, that will open lands for inhabitation that haven't been inhabitable since Gondwanaland broke up.

    What, however, I consider a much more likely scenario is that the stresses of adaptation will lead to a major war, and *that* might well cause a small continent to become uninhabited. Especially if it leads to biological warfare rather than (or in addition to) nuclear.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:52PM (#111864)

    I don't know...blaming climate scientists for being too conservative seems about right.

    1. Climate scientists are not the leading cause for climate change
    2. Climate scientists are not the ones who are ignoring the warnings of climate scientists.

    If you prefer an incorrect car analogy:
    I would love to blame someone else that I don't have a car, but having never bought a car, that's kind of ... wrong.
    Blaming scientists for something you failed to do (heed their warnings) is also kind of ... wrong.

    FakeBeldin (not bothering to reset passwd ;)